FREE-THOUGHT

The history of religion during the past century may be described as the

sequel of that dissolution of the mediæval faith which commenced at the

Reformation. The vast process of disintegration proceeds by degrees, is

varied by reactionary effort, and gives birth to new theories in its

course. In our day the completion of the process and a new departure

seem to be at hand. A sharp line cannot be drawn at the beginning of

the last century, the leaders of religious thought in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries having been to a great extent the leaders, and

their works the text-books, of the nineteenth.

At the Reformation Protestantism threw off the yoke of Pope and priest,

priestly control over conscience through the confessional, priestly

absolution for sin, and belief in the magical power of the priest as

consecrator of the Host, besides the worship of the Virgin and the

saints, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, and other incidents of the

mediæval system. Ostensibly, Protestantism was founded on freedom of

conscience and the right of private judgment. In reality, it retained

Church authority over conscience in the shape of dogmatic creeds and

ordination tests. It besides enforced belief in the plenary inspiration

of the Bible, by which the exercise of private judgment was narrowly

confined. Not for some time did it even renounce persecution. In grimly

Calvinistic Scotland a boy was hanged for impugning the doctrine of the

Trinity at the end of the seventeenth century. The Anglican Church,

suspended by the will of the Tudor sovereigns between Catholicism and

Protestantism, oscillated from side to side, producing by one of its

oscillations the great civil war. It burned heretics in the reign of

James I. All the Protestant Churches except the Baptists, who at first

were objects of persecution, fell under the dominion of the state,

which repaid them for their submission and support by endowments,

temporal privileges, and persecution of dissent.

Though Protestantism produced a multitude of sects, especially in

England at the time of the Commonwealth, hardly any of them were

free-thinking or sceptical; those of any importance, at all events,

were in some sense dogmatic and were anchored to the inspiration of the

Bible. Nor is it easy to convict Hobbes, bugbear of the orthodox as he

was, of scepticism or even of heterodoxy. The expression of heterodox

opinions, indeed, would have been a violation of his own principle,

which makes religion absolutely an affair of the state, to be regulated

by a despotic government, and confines liberty to the recesses of

thought. It is true that in making religion a political institution,

variable at a despot’s will, he covertly denied that it was divine.

Under the Restoration religious thought and controversy slept. The

nation was weary of those subjects. The liberty for which men then

struggled was political, though with political liberty was bound up

religious toleration, which achieved a partial triumph under William

III.

The Church of Rome, to meet the storm, reorganized herself at the

Council of Trent on lines practically traced for her by the Jesuit. A

comparison of Suarez with Thomas Aquinas shows the change which took

place in spirit as plainly as a comparison of the Jesuit’s meretricious

fane with the Gothic churches shows the change in religious taste.

Papal autocracy was strengthened at the expense of the episcopate,

and furnished at once with a guard and a propagandist machinery

of extraordinary power in the Order of Loyola. That the plenary

inspiration of the Bible in the Vulgate version, and including the

Apocrypha, should be reaffirmed was a secondary matter, inasmuch as the

Church of Rome holds that it is not she who derives her credentials

from Scripture, but Scripture which depends for the attestation of

its authority upon her. She now allied herself more closely than

before with the Catholic kings, with Philip II., and afterwards with

Louis XIV., who paid her for her support of political absolutism

by sanguinary persecution of heretics. She hereby parted with her

Hildebrandic supremacy over the powers of the world, though she did

not, like the Anglican Church, recognize the divine right of kings.

The liberal and peace-making movements which had been set on foot, or

were afterwards set on foot, within her pale, such as the Oratory of

Divine Love, which held justification by faith and wished to compromise

with the Protestants, were effectually put down. Jansenism, when it

appeared, with its half-Calvinistic theory of Grace, shared the same

fate. Gallicanism afterwards, having nationality to back it, was more

successful. But it brought no freedom of conscience; it was merely a

repartition of the despotic power over conscience between the King and

the Pope.

In Spain, and for the most part in Italy, Rome, by the aid of

the Jesuit and the Inquisition, completely succeeded in killing

free-thought. In France, where there was no Inquisition, her triumph

was not so complete. She succeeded only in driving scepticism into

disguise and subterfuge. The Commonwealth of Holland did France and the

world in general the immense service of affording a printing house for

free-thought which was on the confines of France, but beyond the reach

of the French government. Descartes, without directly assailing the

faith of the Church, planted in her face the standard of thorough-going

reason and entitled himself to a place in the Index. Growing sensuality

and love of pleasure brought with them laxity of belief and impatience

of priestly control. The authority of the clergy was impaired by

their scandalous wealth and vice, which at the same time enhanced the

odium of their persecuting tyranny. At last came Voltaire, Diderot,

the _Encyclopædia_, and Rousseau. With literary cleverness unmatched

and an incomparable genius for subtle attack, combined with a winning

philanthropy, Voltaire converted and drew into the work of demolition,

to them suicidal, the thrones of Louis XV., or rather of the Pompadour,

of Catherine, and Frederick. The influence extended even to Spain,

where Aranda, and to Portugal, where Pombal reigned. The Pope was

constrained to dissolve the Order of Jesus. As Voltaire demolished in

the name of Reason, Rousseau demolished in the name of Nature, taking

an artificial society by storm. Helvétius went to the length of extreme

materialism; but Voltaire, the master-spirit of the movement, remained

a theist, and Rousseau was even for compulsory theism as the foundation

of the state. The Revolution also, when it came, though violently and

profanely anti-Christian, was in the main theist, and in the midst

of the Terror held its Feast of the Supreme Being, with Robespierre

for high priest. Atheism, in the persons of Chaumette and Anacharsis

Clootz, went to the guillotine.

One hardly knows what to say about the _Last Will and Testament_

of Jean Meslier, the priest who after thirty years’ service as a

country curé bequeathed to his parishioners a profession of atheism.

The work appears to have passed through the hands of Voltaire. It

urges the arguments against natural theology in a very forcible as

well as thorough-going way. But it seems, when it appeared, to have

made little impression and can be mentioned historically only as an

indication of the masked ferment of the time.

England had a series of deists, Toland, Tindal, Collins, Chubb,

and the rest, not men of much mark, though seekers of truth after

their measure and in their day. The ecclesiastical polity of England

was comparatively mild, and there was nothing to provoke indignant

resistance to clerical tyranny like that which was provoked by the

cases of Calas and LaBarre. Shaftesbury, a deist of a higher stamp,

was, with his “moral taste,” a philosopher for men of taste, and could

little stir the common world. In defence of orthodoxy came forth

Bishop Butler, with a work which will be memorable forever as a model

of earnest and solemn inquiry into the deepest questions, though

its fundamental assumption is unwarrantable, since we should expect

the difficulties of natural theology not to be reproduced but to be

dispelled by revelation. Butler’s tone in discussion was an effective

rebuke to those who had treated Christianity with levity as an obsolete

interference with the pleasures of the world. His profound analysis of

the moral nature of man in like manner rebuked the shallow and cynical

theories which resolved everything into self-love; though here again

his assumption of the authority of conscience as a divinely implanted

monitor has by modern investigation been disallowed. Butler, however,

with all his piety and his orthodox conclusions, must essentially be

reckoned among rationalists. He frankly admits that the use of our

reason is the only means we have of arriving at truth, never appealing

from it to Church authority. He who recognizes reason as supreme must

be deemed rationalist, let his own reason lead him or mislead him as it

may. This is the vital line of cleavage which runs through the whole

religious history and divides the religious world at the present day.

Butler had a popular shield-bearer in Paley, an extremely acute and

effective though not profound writer. Paley’s supposed proof of the

existence of an intelligent Creator from the design visible in creation

told greatly at the time and long continued to tell; though we now

see that the universe, unlike the watch, presents terrible proofs of

undesign as well as apparent proofs of design; not to mention that in

the case of the universe, though adaptation is visible, the aim is not

revealed. Paley’s _Horae Paulinae_, however, is about the only piece of

historical apologetics which has in any degree survived the destructive

influence of modern criticism.

Warburton hardly calls for mention. In his _Divine Legation_ he is

right enough in saying that Moses did not teach the immortality of the

soul; but the notion that the Mosaic dispensation must have had divine

support because it could afford to dispense with that doctrine would

now only provoke a smile.

Among literary apologists we can scarcely reckon Johnson. Yet he was a

living defence, intellectual as well as moral, of his religion. That

he speculated, we cannot doubt, and we know that he was not satisfied

with the proofs of the immortality of the soul; but he suppressed

doubt in himself and frowned it down in others. He was well justified

in treating with contempt the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, which

have not the slightest force or value beyond their literary form.

Bolingbroke’s scepticism, however, had a certain effect if it inspired

Pope’s _Universal Prayer_.

In Hume, on the other hand, we have the mightiest of all sceptics in

the literal sense of the term, inasmuch as he was purely a doubter

and seems hardly to have felt the desire of arriving at any positive

result. He who has given rise to so much controversy was himself

uncontroversial. His writings, considered as the vehicle of his

opinions, are the perfection of literary art. Over common minds the

teacher who merely suspends judgment, seeming not to be in quest of

positive truth, can never have much influence; but Hume had great

influence over cultivated men of the world. His argument against the

credibility of miracles, though it became as standard on one side

as Paley’s apologue of the watch upon the other, will hardly bear

examination. Assuming the existence of God and His care for man as His

work, which Hume does not openly deny, there is no presumption against

His revelation of Himself in the only conceivable way, which is by

an interruption of the general course of things; there is rather a

presumption that He would so reveal Himself. Nor can it be maintained

that no degree of evidence, say that of a multitude of scientific

men, after providing all possible safeguards against deception, would

satisfy us of the fact.

Gibbon’s great work is instinct with the tendency of men of the world

in the generation of Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and Hume. Its spirit

is identical with that of Hume’s philosophy and history. It is of

first-rate importance in the religious controversy as having opened

the trenches historically against revealed religion in undertaking to

account for the success of Christianity by natural causes. But its

cynical treatment of that which, on any hypothesis, was the prevailing

and formative force is unphilosophical and detracts largely from the

value of the work. He who could imagine that man had been happiest in

the Roman Empire under the Antonines was an apt partisan of Lord North.

Gibbon no doubt imagined himself a rich patrician of his golden era.

Would he have liked to be a Roman slave? Conyers Middleton in his _Free

Inquiry_ into the ecclesiastical miracles glanced at the credibility of

the Gospel miracles and had thus partly paved the way for Gibbon.

Among the disintegrating forces may be counted Unitarianism, which was

growing among thinkers, and probably before very long became the mask

for profounder scepticism in Protestant Europe as it did afterwards in

New England. We find it in England on the eve of the French Revolution,

combined with science in Priestley and with mathematics and philosophy

in Price.

Among the apologetic and defensive forces may be numbered the

practical vindication of Christianity by a certain revival of piety

in the Anglican Church which produced Wilberforce, Cowper, and the

Evangelicals, and still more by the religious crusade of John Wesley.

Wesley’s achievements, however, were among the poor and illiterate, and

were consequently demonstrations of the power of Christianity rather

than of its truth. His Church had the advantage of being born, not like

other Protestant Churches in doctrinal controversy, but in evangelical

reaction against the impiety and vice of the age. It was, however,

not undogmatic; besides what might be called the dogma of sudden

conversion, it implicitly accepted not only the literal inspiration

of Scripture, but the bulk of the Anglican Articles, to which was

afterwards added, as an ordination test, general agreement with the

more important of Wesley’s sermons.

The French Revolution brought on a strong reaction against the

free-thought which had been hideously travestied in the blasphemous

follies, and sullied by the crimes, of the Jacobins. In England the

Tory mob, with true instinct, sacked the library and laboratory of

Priestley. Coleridge, who, like other young men of intellect, had

hailed the revolutionary dawn, shared the reaction, and combining

in a curious way German metaphysic with English orthodoxy and

Establishmentarianism, produced a religious system which perhaps

entitles him to high place among English theologians in the proper

sense of that term, as denoting a philosophic inquirer into the nature

of the Deity and the relations between the Deity and man; though, as

his guiding light was philosophy, not authority or tradition, he may

in that respect be numbered among the promoters of free-thought and

of the results to which it was ultimately to lead. Such free-thinking

as there was naturally took a turn answering in violence to the

repression. Tom Paine assailed orthodoxy, not with freedom only, but

with enmity the most virulent. Though far from an attractive, he is

by no means an unimportant figure. His criticisms of the credibility

and morality of Scripture, unlearned and coarse as they were, went,

not over the heads of the people like the high-flying and metaphysical

speculations, but straight to their understandings and their hearts.

It was difficult for apologetic fencers to parry such home thrusts.

The same sort of effect has been produced by the irreverent frankness

of Ingersoll in our own day. Shelley rushed from the religion of Eldon

into what he took for Satanism; though his Satan is really the power of

good, while the God of Eldon, as viewed by him, is the Devil.

Wrecked, body and soul, by the Thirty Years’ war, and afterwards

stifled under a group of petty despotisms, Germany was for a time lost

to intellectual progress. Her churches and their clergy, the Lutheran

clergy at least, were in a very low condition. When her intellect began

to work again, it was in a recluse and highly speculative way, the

natural consequence of its exclusion from politics and other fields of

action, together with the complete severance of the academical element

from the people. Hence, from Leibnitz and Lessing onward, there was a

train of metaphysical philosophies, each of them professing to find

in our consciousness a key to the mystery of Being and an account of

God, of His counsels, and of the relation between Him and man. In

derision of such speculations it was said that to the French belonged

the land, to the English the sea, to the Germans the air. Essentially

incapable of verification, these theories went on shifting in

nebulous succession and, with the exception of that of Kant, may now

be said to have vanished, leaving scarce a rack behind. Even of the

great Hegel little remains. Leibnitz, with his “best of all possible

worlds,” hardly survived _Candide_. Still, we must speak with respect

and gratitude of these efforts of minds, powerful in their way and

devoted to truth, to solve for us the great mystery. Speculation so

free could not fail to promote general freedom of thought, and the

treatment by these thinkers of the popular and established religion was

as philosophic as possible, though, with the exception of Feuerbach,

they were theists. By Lessing much was done for the recognition of all

religions and the promotion of universal toleration.

Presently, however, came direct criticism of the Bible, the way to

which, long before, had been lighted by Spinoza. It assumed a strange

form in the work of Paulus, who applied to the Gospel miracles a

solvent something like that which Euhemerus had applied to the Pagan

Pantheon, reducing them to natural occurrences turned into miracles by

a devout imagination. The miraculous fish with the coin in its mouth

was a fish which would sell for the coin. The miraculous feeding of the

five thousand was brought within the compass of belief by supposing

that they were not fasting, but had only gone without a regular meal.

Christ’s walking on the water was his holding out a hand from the shore

to Peter who had leaped into the water to ascertain whether it was

really Christ that was walking on the shore.

Far more serious, and a startling blow to orthodoxy, was the _Life

of Jesus_, by Strauss, who undertook to explain the Gospels on the

mythical theory, showing that the reputed incidents of the life of

Jesus and his miracles were mythical fulfilments of Old Testament

prophecies and aspirations. From this, his first theory, Strauss

afterwards partly receded, and in his second _Life of Jesus_,

after a critical examination of the authorities, he comes to the

conclusion that “few great men have existed of whose history we have

so unsatisfactory a knowledge as that we have of Jesus.” The figure

of Socrates, he thinks, though four hundred years older, is beyond

all comparison more distinct. The momentous step, however, had been

taken. Jesus had become the subject of a biography founded on critical

examination of the materials, and Strauss is right in saying, as he

does in his second _Life_, that when the biography was seriously taken

up the doom of the theological conception was sealed. Lives of Christ,

including even the most popular of them, however they may pretend and

struggle to be orthodox, are really, as Strauss says, destructive of

the theological conception, while they do not help to confirm our

loyalty to historical truth. Ferdinand Christian Baur and his Tübingen

school applied historical criticism to the early Christian Church,

showing the conflict in it of the Pauline with the Petrine tendency,

and bringing it altogether, as well as its source, within the pale of

human history. Historical criticism of the Gospels was furthered by

the progress of historical criticism in general, shown by such a work

as Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. Wolf’s treatment of the Homeric poems

had already marked the birth of a critical spirit, which was aided

by historical and archæological discoveries of all kinds, as well as

by the growing influence of science on the methods of religious and

anthropological speculation.

There was an evangelical reaction against rationalism in Germany with

a train of controversialists and commentators reputed as orthodox. Yet

even in these, more or less of a rationalist undertone is perceived.

There is a tendency more or less apparent to minimize the supernatural,

to throw the miracles into the background, and dwell rather on the

spiritual significance of Christ’s character and words. This is very

conspicuous in Neander, the head of the line. An orthodox English

divine such as Mr. Rose might well, after a survey of German theology,

make a rather mournful report.

In Holland, ever the land of free speculation, criticism advanced

without fear, and at last by the pen of Kuenen arraigns the

authenticity, antiquity, and authority of the historical books of

the Old Testament to an extent totally subversive of their character

as records of a primeval history, much more as organs of a divine

revelation.

German philosophy had mingled with English theology through Coleridge.

German criticism of the Bible did not lag much behind. Milman’s

_History of the Jews_, dealing with the subject in the spirit of an

ordinary history, treating patriarchs as Arab sheiks and minimizing

miracles, gave a serious shock to orthodox sentiment in England. Even

what was deemed orthodox in Germany appeared rationalistic to the

Anglican divines. To the evangelicals especially, whose leader was

Simeon, and who occupied many of the fashionable pulpits, anything like

critical treatment of the sacred history seemed impiety. Yet they,

with their inward persuasion of conversion and spiritual union with

the Saviour, as well as the Quaker with his inner light, or the Roman

Catholic with his implicit faith in the Church, were really beyond the

critic’s reach.

A long line of British leaders of thought and controversialists

succeeds. Rationalist and heterodox in different degrees were Thomas

Arnold, Frederick Maurice, Stanley, Jowett, the writers of _Essays

and Reviews_, and Robertson, of Brighton. Decidedly sceptical were

Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, and James Anthony Froude. Reaction on the

High Church side found leaders in Pusey, Newman, and Hurrell Froude.

The evangelical pulpit combated at once rationalism and High Church.

The state Church was awakened from its long torpor, and under

the inspiration of its High Church party strove to reanimate its

Convocation.

Frederick Maurice impressed more by his character than by his writings,

which were fatally obscure. He was rationalist enough to be deprived

of his professorship in an Anglican college. At the same time he could

persuade himself that subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was no

bondage but a security for free thought. To his yoke-fellow, Kingsley,

is to be traced “muscular Christianity,” a rather suspicious adaptation

of the Sermon on the Mount to our times. But the pair exercised more

influence as social missionaries, striving, in conjunction with Thomas

Hughes, to give the labor movement a religious turn, than as religious

philosophers or critics.

Thomas Arnold, the head-master of Rugby, was a man of noble character,

powerful mind, and intense earnestness of purpose. He was a firm

believer in Christianity as a revealed religion. But he held a

most liberal view of the Church. He would have admitted to it all

the sects of dissenters and have identified it as far as possible

with the nation. His theory of the identity of the Church with the

nation probably came to him from his passionate study of the ancient

commonwealths. He forgot that the philosophers of Greece, though they

might sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius, were really outside the state

religion, and that the state religion made the chief of them drink

hemlock. Prince of educators as he was, he sometimes laid too heavy

a strain on his pupils, and prematurely developed their speculative

tendencies. In the case of Clough especially, mental health and vigor

seem to have been impaired by premature development.

With Thomas Arnold may be coupled his friend Whately, who, though, as

Primate of the state Church of Ireland, he held the most equivocal of

prelacies, was, by reason of his strong understanding, his fearless

character, and his shrewd wit, essentially an iconoclast and a rebuker

of ecclesiastical pretensions, as well as a vigorous promoter of

education. His keen sayings flew abroad, but his personal influence was

greater than his influence as a divine. His _Historic Doubts_ was an

apologetic _jeu d’esprit_ which told greatly in its day.

Bishop Connop Thirlwall was a man of first-rate power. At Cambridge

he had set out as a rationalist, translating German theology of a

heterodox cast and Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. But his intellect was

curbed by a bishopric, and though he delivered liberal charges and

personally exerted a liberal influence, he was lost to the direct

service of reason.

Arthur Stanley was Arnold’s best boy, his most devoted adherent, and

his model biographer. He embraced Arnold’s theory of the Church as

coextensive with the nation and carried his theory of the supremacy

of the state so far as to feel a certain sympathy with “Bluidie

Mackenzie” as the defender of a state Church against the independence

of the Covenanters of Scotland. His name was for a time a terror to

all the orthodox, High Church or Low. Yet there was little that was

terrible about him. The sweetness of his character was remarkable. His

liberality of religious sentiment was boundless. But he had little of

the logical or critical faculty, and showed scarcely the desire, still

less the ability, to make his way to definite truth. His passion was

history, and the historical picturesque was his forte. In a haze of

this to the last he floated, coming to no determinate conclusion. His

best works, apart from biography, are not his commentaries or sermons,

but his lectures on the history of the Russian Church and his _Sinai

and Palestine_; although we cannot help smiling when, in his _Sinai and

Palestine_, we see him hunting with passionate interest and implicit

faith for the imaginary scenes of mythical events.

Stanley’s yoke-fellow, Jowett, was a man of a different cast of mind

and of higher calibre, as all the world now knows. But in him also,

though from different causes, there was the same want of inclination

to grasp or capacity for grasping definite truth. These two men were

eminently typical of an age of religious dissolution, when people felt

the ground of faith giving way under their feet and were striving,

by some sort of compromise, to save themselves from falling into the

abyss. That Jowett had drifted very far away, not only from orthodoxy,

but from his belief in Christianity as a miraculous revelation,

and even from belief in our knowledge of the historical character

of Christ, the posthumous publication of his letters has plainly

shown. How he could have reconciled it to his conscience to remain a

clergyman, to hold the clerical headship of an Anglican college, to

perform the service and administer the sacrament, it is not easy to

see. We can only say that the position was found tenable by one of the

most upright and disinterested of mankind. Jowett’s defence probably

was and is the defence of others, and the indication of spreading

doubt. Clergymen are educated men and can hardly be proof against that

which is carrying conviction to other minds.

Robertson, of Brighton, as an eloquent preacher and spiritual leader,

rather on the rationalist side, is not to be forgotten. In his sermons

there is an evident tendency to liberalize Christianity and to present

it ethically as a religion of purity and love rather than as a

miraculous revelation which did not escape the keen scent of alarmed

orthodoxy and exposed the preacher to some social persecution.

By this time a strong current in an opposite direction had begun to

flow. The religious movement was closely connected with the political

movement, especially where there was a state Church. Alarmed by the

progress of liberalism, which had carried the Parliamentary Reform

bill and threatened to withdraw from the Church of England the

support of the state, some of the clergy began to look about for a

new foundation of their authority, and thought that they found it in

apostolical succession and the sacerdotal theory of the sacraments.

The leaders of the movement were Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford;

Henry Newman, a Fellow of Oriel College; and, in its opening, Hurrell

Froude, in whose _Life of Becket_ its spirit and aims are plainly

revealed. It took practically the shape of an attempt to return to

the priestly Middle Ages. Oxford, with its mediæval colleges, the

Fellows of which were then clerical and celibate, formed the natural

scene of such an attempt. Pusey, who, by his academical rank, gave his

name to the movement, was a man of monastic character and mind, with

a piety intense but austere and gloomy enough almost to cling to such

a doctrine as the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin. Henry Newman

was a man of genius, a writer with a most charming and persuasive

style, great personal fascination, and extraordinary subtlety of mind.

What he lacked was the love of truth; system, not truth, was his

aspiration; and as a reasoner he was extremely sophistical, however

honest he might be as a man. In this respect he presented a singular

contrast to his brother, Francis Newman, in whom the love of truth was

the ruling passion, intense and uncompromising, while he was totally

devoid of the gifts of imagination with which Henry was endowed.

Henry Newman’s attempt to revive mediæval doctrines presently landed

him, with his immediate following, in the mediæval Church. Pusey was

illogical enough to refuse the leap. He was also believed to be rather

strongly attached to the leadership and spiritual directorship which,

as a magnate of the Church of England, he enjoyed. He went so near to

the brink as, in his _Irenicon_, to avow that nothing separated him

from Rome but the unmeasured autocracy of the Pope and the excessive

worship of the Virgin, both of them mere questions of degree. Manning

in time followed: an aspiring hierarch who would probably have stayed

in the Church of England if they had made him a bishop. Passing into

the Church of Rome, he became a Cardinal, an active intriguer of the

Vatican, and an extreme Ultramontane, outvying Newman, who, when the

convert’s first ecstasy was over, might be said to be converted rather

than changed.

The mediævalizing movement owed much to the fascinations of mediæval

art. The Gothic churches and cathedrals and the Gothic ruins of abbeys

have been very powerful conservators and propagators of the faith of

their builders. It is curious that this talisman should have been

renounced by the Church of Rome in favor of the heathen style, of which

St. Peter’s is the paragon, magnificent but, in a religious sense,

unimpressive.

By the progress of Tractarianism British Protestantism was alarmed and

incensed. The Oxford Convocation was the scene of a pitched battle

brought on by a bold deliverance of Ward, a disciple of Newman, more

logical and daring than his master, who exultingly proclaimed that

English clergymen were embracing “the whole cycle of Roman doctrine.”

Ward, after a struggle which was a sort of Armageddon of High and Low

Church, was condemned and deprived of his degree. Newman’s conversion

speedily followed. The rationalists, such as Stanley and Jowett, voted

on liberal grounds against the condemnation of Ward.

A storm from the other quarter was raised by _Essays and Reviews_, a

collection of seven essays written by clergymen of the rationalistic

school, having for its object the liberalizing of inquiry in the

Church. The manifesto at the time created an immense sensation,

though in the present advanced state of doctrinal disintegration it

would almost pass unnoticed. One of the essays, the most innocent,

it is true, which nevertheless committed the author to the general

object of the combination, was written by the present Archbishop of

Canterbury, and caused the High Church clergy to protest against his

appointment as a bishop. The glove thus thrown down was taken up by

the High Churchmen. The writers were arraigned for heresy before the

Privy Council, and, as Carlyle said, you had a bench of old British

judges, “like Roman augurs, debating with iron gravity questions of

prevenient grace, supervenient moonshine, and the color of the bishop’s

nightmare if that happened to turn up.” Before the same tribunal was

arraigned Colenso, a missionary bishop of South Africa and an eminent

mathematician, whose arithmetical instincts had led him to examine the

numerical statements of the Pentateuch, with highly heretical results.

Both the essayists and Bishop Colenso escaped conviction. The Committee

of Privy Council, if it was judicial, was also political, and it was

resolved, if possible, to avert a rupture in the state Church. Veteran

lawyers had little difficulty in finding grounds for acquittal when

they did not choose to convict. The language of the impugned writings

was seldom so precise as to defy the power of interpretation. “Either

the passage means what I say, or it has no meaning,” thundered the

counsel for the prosecution. “Is it not possible, Mr. Blank, that the

passage may have no meaning?” was the reply of the judge. The Rev. Mr.

Voysey, however, succeeded in obtaining the honor of a conviction.

Tendered a week to retract, he thanked the court for the opportunity

they had given him of rejecting the offer of repurchasing his once

cherished position in the Established Church by proclaiming himself a

hypocrite.

Hampden, Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, formed another object

of High Church attack. He had been condemned by the university

on account of doctrines alleged to be anti-Trinitarian, and his

appointment by a Whig ministry to a bishopric caused a renewal of the

onslaught, which, however, only served by its failure to emphasize

the fact that the Church of England was in complete subjection to

the state. In this, as in the general commotion, prominently figured

Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, son of the great evangelical and

philanthropist, a man gifted, dexterous, and versatile, who would have

made a first-rate advocate or politician, balancing himself with one

foot on his hereditary Evangelicism, the other on High Churchmanship,

to which, in his heart, as a hierarch, he inclined. A character so

ambiguous could make little impression, however great his abilities

might be.

James Anthony Froude had been a follower and fellow-worker of Newman.

But on Newman’s secession he not only hung back, but violently recoiled

and produced a highly sceptical work, _The Nemesis of Faith_, which

entailed his resignation of a clerical fellowship in an Oxford college.

Then he exemplified the strange variations of the age by coming out as

an historian in the colors of Carlyle.

Carlyle himself is not to be left out of sight in an account of the

progress of religious thought; for his Scotch Calvinism, transmuted

into hero worship, has taken a strong hold, if not on the distinct

convictions, on the sentiment and temper of the nation. If he has

administered wholesome rebuke to the self-complacency of democracy with

its ballot-box, he has also set up a worship of force and kindled a

spirit of violence totally subversive of the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew Arnold, with his silver shafts, was rather a connoisseur in

all lines than a serious philosopher or theologian; but he also,

with his conversion of God into the “not ourselves which makes for

righteousness,” did something in his light but insinuating and

charming way to forward disintegration.

But in 1874–77 appeared _Supernatural Religion_, a searching and

uncompromising inquiry into the historical evidences of supernatural

Christianity. The book, though attacked on secondary points with

perhaps superior learning by Bishop Lightfoot, Bishop Westcott,

and others, cannot be said to have met with any general answer.

Supplemented in some respects by Dr. Martineau’s _Seat of Authority in

Religion_ and other works on the same side, it sets forth the sceptic’s

case against the supernatural.

Miracles, says criticism, belong to an age of ignorance. With the dawn

of knowledge they diminish. In its meridian light they disappear. The

Jews were eminently addicted to belief in miracles. There was Satanic

miracle as well as divine; nor can any distinction be drawn as a matter

of evidence between the two. As little can any distinction be drawn in

point of evidence between the Gospel miracles and the ecclesiastical

miracles, which nevertheless Protestants reject. The miracles of one

sort, the demoniac, are bound up with the Jewish belief in possession

by personal devils, from which all efforts to disentangle them so as

to resolve them into cures of lunacy by moral influence are vain. The

four Gospels and the Acts, which comprise the historic evidences, are

all anonymous, all of uncertain authorship. The first three Gospels

are evident incrustations upon an older document which is lost and

about which nothing is known. In not one of the five cases can the

existence of the book be traced to the time of the events or a time

so near the events as to preclude the growth of fable in a highly

superstitious and totally uncritical age. The presentation of Christ’s

character and teaching in the fourth Gospel, which is Alexandrian, is

far from identical with the presentation in the first three Gospels,

which are Jewish. There are irreconcilable discrepancies between the

Gospels as to matters of fact, notably in regard to the genealogy of

Christ, the length of his mission, the Last Supper, the day of the

Crucifixion, the details of the Resurrection and the Ascension. Such

miracles as the miraculous darkness, the earthquake, the rending of

the veil of the Temple, the opening of the tombs and the apparition

of the dead in the streets of Jerusalem, being totally unconfirmed by

history or by any recorded effect, stagger belief. Such testimony as

St. Paul bears to the Resurrection is second hand, is that of a convert

in the ecstasy of conversion, and is manifestly uncritical. His own

enthusiasm is intelligible on merely human grounds. We may be sure that

had God become incarnate to save man, absolutely conclusive proof of

that fact would have been vouchsafed. But the proof is not sufficient

to establish anything not otherwise perfectly credible, far less to

establish the miraculous Birth, the Resurrection, and the Incarnation.

Such in broad outline is the case of Rationalism against Supernatural

Religion presented by the work just mentioned and its allies. The

effects are visible even in High Church writings. In the writings of

liberals, of course, they are still more visible. Jowett had come to

the conclusion that our sources of knowledge about Christ had been

reduced to a single document, no longer in existence, which formed the

basis of the first three Gospels.

The desire to minimize the supernatural and throw it into the

background, bringing the personal character of Christ and his ethical

teaching into the foreground, is now manifest in English, as it has

long been in German, divines. It is conspicuous in the very popular

and colorably orthodox works of Dr. Farrar. In his _Life of Lives_

the supernatural has little place. There is an evident tendency

throughout to disentangle from it the character and moral teaching.

Responsibility for belief in the Godhead of Christ seems to rest on

the Nicene Council. In the _Life of Christ_ we see reduced to a natural

occurrence the miracle of Gadara, where the devils cast out of the

men enter into the herd of swine. It is needless to say that with the

miraculous element of these occurrences their value as evidence for the

supernatural disappears.

Scotland generally remained fast bound by her Westminster Confession.

There had been a period of liberalism marked by the appearance of

“Jupiter” Carlyle; Robertson, the historian; Dugald Stewart, and

other philosophers and men of mind. But the Church of Scotland being

democratic, its faith was in the keeping of the people, who were

impervious to criticism and naturally opposed to innovation. At last,

however, the thaw came, hastened perhaps by the collision between

the state Church of Scotland and the Free Church. The Westminster

Confession, it seems, has now been tacitly laid aside, and Scotch

theology has had its Robertson Smith, whose critical views on the Old

Testament earned him removal from his professorial chair.

Another book which in its day startled the world and awakened all

the echoes of orthodox alarm was Buckle’s _History of Civilization_,

in which the characters of nations and the progress of humanity were

traced to physical influences, excluding the moral and by implication

the theistic element. Its thesis was supported by an overwhelming

display of learning. Though not expressly, it was in its tenor hostile

to religious belief. Of Buckle’s work less is now heard, but it had an

influence in its day, perhaps more in America than in its native land.

Americans, it seems, were captured both by the boldness of the theory

and by the imposing display of erudition.

In the line of learned and dispassionate research France has produced

Renan, whose _Life of Jesus_ especially made a vast impression on

Europe, and still probably exercises an influence by virtue not only

of the boldness of the speculation and the intense interest of the

subject, but of the extreme beauty of the style. The work, however, is

one in which imagination acts strongly on history. It lacks critical

basis; not that the author fails fully to set out his authorities, but

that in his narrative he fails to discriminate among them. One incident

is treated as real, another as mythical, to suit the requirements of

poetical conception, without reason assigned for the distinction. There

seems no reason, for example, why the miracle of the raising of Lazarus

should be treated as historical, though in the sense of imposture or

illusion, while other miracles are treated as totally unhistoric. Nor

is the portrait free from a French and slightly sensuous cast. From the

whole body of Renan’s histories of Israel, of Christ, and of the early

Church the supernatural is entirely excluded.

The Roman Catholic Church has not suffered from criticism—historical,

literary, or scientific—in the same way as the Protestant Churches,

that is, internally, because it depends not so much on intellectual

conviction as on ecclesiastical organization, and rests comparatively

little on the authority of the Bible. Its priesthood has not been

affected like the clergy of the Church of England or the ministries of

the Protestant Churches. But it has everywhere been losing the educated

classes, or retained a part of them, not so much from conviction—still

less from speculative conviction—as because its alliance is congenial

to political and social reaction. Its inability to come to terms

with science has been shown by the recent case of St. George Mivart,

and scientific eminence among Roman Catholics is rare. In Italy, the

centre of the system, while the poorer classes still flock to the

liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples or the exudation

of the bones of St. Andrew at Amalfi, still climb the Holy Staircase on

their knees or make pilgrimages to the House of Loretto, the general

tone of intelligence is described as sceptical, though aristocratic

families, more especially those of Papal creation, adhere to the Papacy

on political and social rather than on religious grounds. Near to the

shrine of Ignatius Loyola stands the statue of Giordano Bruno, on the

spot of his martyrdom by fire, “dedicated to him by the age which he

foresaw.” Attempts have been made to liberalize the Church of Rome

and enable it to float with the current of the day, but they have

failed. Pio Nono for a time put himself at the head of the popular and

liberal movement in Italy. But he soon found, as Carlyle said, that

it was an alarming undertaking. Lamennais’s attempt at liberalization

ended, after a long intellectual agony, in his own secession. The

combined attempt of Lacordaire to liberalize ecclesiastically, and of

Montalembert to liberalize politically, had a scarcely less melancholy

result; both of them died under the shadow of Papal displeasure or

of that of the Jesuit party, by which the Papacy was controlled.

The defiantly reactionary spirit of Ultramontanism de Maistre has

prevailed. The Jesuit has ruled at the Vatican. Under his guidance the

Papacy has proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope and the Immaculate

Conception of the Virgin, thus breaking completely and finally with

reason and with all who, like the “Old Catholics” in Germany, remained

in some degree within that pale. It has gained in its own despite in

respectability and influence by deprivation of its temporal power,

against which the Prisoner of the Vatican still hopelessly protests.

In France the national religion, abolished and persecuted by the

Jacobins, was restored for a political purpose by Napoleon. The new

Charlemagne was requited with the degradation of the Pope, who came to

Paris to crown him on the morrow of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien

and broke the best traditions of the Holy See by failing to veto the

divorce from Josephine. Identified with political reaction under the

restored Bourbons, the Church nearly suffered wreck in the revolution

by which they were overthrown. She remained the object of intense

and persecuting hatred to the revolutionary and republican party.

Plaintively, when the Orleans monarchy fell, she chanted _Domine salvum

fac populum_. Joyously, when the Empire succeeded, she chanted _Domine

salvum fac Imperatorem_. But the Empire in its turn fell. The Church

has continued to ally herself with political reaction and aristocratic

hostility to the Republic, though she has latterly been receiving hints

from the Vatican that the Republic is strong, that the monarchical

and imperial pretenders both are weak. The consequence is a violence

of hostility on the part of the Radicals and Socialists which assails

not only monastic fraternities, but educational institutions and

even charitable institutions in clerical hands, and has produced an

infidel literature carrying blasphemy to the height almost of frenzy

and culminating in a comic _Life of Christ_. The official world of

France is almost formally infidel, and a religious expression would be

very injurious to a politician. On the other hand, the Church braves

and exasperates public reason with apparitions of the Virgin and the

miracles of Lourdes. Over most of the women, the priest still holds

sway. Of the men, not many are seen in churches. The general attitude

of the educated towards religion seems to be not so much that of

hostility as that of total indifference, a state of estrangement more

hopeless than hostility itself.

There is in France a Protestant Church, of which Guizot was an

eminent member, and which in his time was renewing its life. But

there was a schism in it between an evangelical party and a party

which was entirely rationalist, Guizot belonging to the first, his

son-in-law to the second; and rationalism seems to have prevailed.

With the Protestant party of France was allied an evangelical party

in Switzerland, of which Vinet was the most eloquent divine. But in

Vinet, as in liberal divines generally, we find an inclination to rest

on the spiritual rather than on the supernatural. In the city of Calvin

generally opinions appear to reign more opposed to the religion of

Calvin than those for which he burned Servetus.

But of the disintegrating forces criticism—the Higher Criticism as

it is the fashion to call it—has by no means been the only one.

Another, and perhaps in recent times the more powerful, has been

science, from which Voltaire and the earlier sceptics received little

or no assistance in their attacks; for they were unable to meet even

the supposed testimony of fossils to the Flood. It is curious that

the bearing of the Newtonian astronomy on the Biblical cosmography

should not have been before perceived; most curious that it should

have escaped Newton himself. His system plainly contravened the idea

which made the earth the centre of the universe, with heaven above

and hell below it, and by which the cosmography alike of the Old and

the New Testament is pervaded. Yet the Star of Bethlehem remained

little disturbed as an article of faith. The first destructive blow

from the region of science was perhaps dealt by geology, which showed

that the earth had been gradually formed, not suddenly created, that

its antiquity immeasurably transcended the orthodox chronology, and

that death had come into the world long before man. Geologists, scared

by the echoes of their own teaching, were fain to shelter themselves

under allegorical interpretations of Genesis totally foreign to the

intentions of the writer; making out the “days” of Creation to be æons,

a version which, even if accepted, would not have accounted for the

entrance of death into the world before the creation of man. Those

who attended the lectures of Buckland and other geologists of that

generation well recollect the shifts to which science had recourse in

its efforts to avoid collision with the cosmogony supposed to have

been dictated by the Creator to the reputed author of the Pentateuch.

That the narrative of Genesis could hold its ground so long against

science was due at once to its dignity, which earned for it the praise

of Longinus, and to its approximation to scientific truth in describing

the universe as the work of a single mind. These characteristics

have even in the day of geology and Darwin raised up for it such an

apologist as Mr. Gladstone, whose defence, however, amounts to this,

that the Creator, in giving an account of his own work to Moses, came

remarkably near the truth.

The grand catastrophe, however, was the discovery of Darwin. This

assailed the belief that man was a distinct creation, apart from all

other animals, with an immortal soul specially breathed into him by

the author of his being. It showed that he had been developed by a

natural process out of lower forms of life. It showed that instead of

a fall of man there had been a gradual rise, thus cutting away the

ground of the Redemption and the Incarnation, the fundamental doctrines

of the orthodox creed. For the hypothesis of creation generally was

substituted that of evolution by some unknown but natural force.

Not only to revealed or supernatural but to natural religion a heavy

blow was dealt by the disclosure of wasted æons and abortive species

which seem to preclude the idea of an intelligent and omnipotent

designer.

The chief interpreters of science in its bearing on religion were,

in England, Tyndall and Huxley. Tyndall always declared himself a

materialist, though no one could less deserve the name if it implied

anything like grossness or disregard of the higher sentiments. He

startled the world by his declaration that matter contained the

potentiality of all life, an assertion which, though it has been found

difficult to prove experimentally, there can be less difficulty in

accepting, since we see life in rudimentary forms and in different

stages of development. Huxley wielded a trenchant pen and was an

uncompromising servant of truth. A bitter controversy between him and

Owen arose out of Owen’s tendency to compromise. He came at one time

to the extreme conclusion that man was an automaton, which would have

settled all religious and moral questions out of hand; but in this

he seemed afterwards to feel that he had gone too far. An automaton

automatically reflecting on its automatic character is a being which

seems to defy conception. The connection of action with motive, of

motive with character and circumstance, is what nobody doubts; but the

precise nature of the connection, as it is not subject, like a physical

connection, to our inspection, defies scrutiny, and our consciousness,

which is our only informant, tells us that our agency in some qualified

sense is free.

Materialists or physicists such as Tyndall and Huxley, or their

counterparts on the Continent, would console us for the loss of

religion by substituting the majesty of law. But the idea of law

implies a law-giver or an intelligent and authoritative imponent of

some kind. There is no majesty in a mere sequence, even the most

invariable and on the largest scale, the existence of which alone

physical science can prove.

The all-embracing philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer excludes not only

the supernatural but theism in its ordinary form. Yet theism in a

subtle form may be thought to lurk in it. “By continually seeking,”

he says, “to know, and being continually thrown back with a deepened

conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the

consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty

to regard that through which all things exist as the Unknowable.” In

this and subsequent passages he evidently looks upon the Unknowable as

an object of reverence, otherwise it would hardly be our highest duty

to regard it as that through which all things exist, or to maintain any

particular attitude towards it. But Unknowableness in itself excites

no reverence, even though it be supposed infinite and eternal. Nothing

excites our reverence but a person, or at least a Moral Being. There

lingers in Mr. Spencer’s mind the belief that the present limit of our

knowledge is the veil of the Deity.

Had the Darwinian discoveries been known to Schopenhauer they would

have conspired with the earlier discoveries of science and with his

pitiless survey of the human lot to confirm him in the belief that this

was the worst of all possible worlds. Amid the general distraction

even pessimism has found adherents, and a European version of Buddhism

promising final relief from the miseries of conscious existence has

been accepted as an anodyne by troubled minds.

Positivism, the work of Comte, totally discards belief in God and

treats theism in all its forms as merely a mode of contemplating

phenomena and a step in the course of human progress. Yet the

Positivist feels the need of a religion, and for the worship of God he

substitutes the worship of Humanity. Humanity is an abstraction and

an imperfect abstraction, the course of the human race having not yet

been run. It cannot hear prayer or respond in any way to adoration. The

adherents of Comte’s religion, therefore, are few, though those of his

philosophy are more numerous, and the religious Comtists appear to be

rather enthusiasts of Humanity than worshippers of the abstraction.

A conspicuous though equivocal place among the defenders of revealed

religion in England was held by Mansel, professor of moral and

metaphysical philosophy at Oxford and afterwards dean of St. Paul’s.

Attempting in his Bampton lectures to make philosophy fall on its own

sword, he fell on his own sword in the attempt. He maintained that God,

being absolute, could not be apprehended by the finite intelligence

of man, and that the finite morality of man was not the same as the

absolute morality of God. Hence the passages of the Bible which seemed

to conflict with human morality really transcended it and were moral

miracles. In this Mansel was reviving the theory of Archbishop King

and Bishop Browne, who had maintained that our knowledge of God was

not actual, but merely analogous. The inference was promptly drawn by

Mansel’s opponents that what could not be apprehended could not be

matter of belief, and that he had therefore cut away the possibility

of belief in God. They even contended that he was too anti-theistic,

since he did away with all possibility of reverence for the Unknown. To

deny the identity of human with divine morality and assert that what

was immoral with man was moral with God was to sever the moral relation

between God and man, and, in effect, to destroy morality altogether.

We could conceive of only one morality, and acts ascribed to God which

violated that morality must be to us immoral. “If,” said John Stuart

Mill in the fervor of ethical protest, “an Almighty Being tells me that

I shall call that righteous which is wicked or go to hell, to hell I

will go.”

To meet the inroads of science on Biblical cosmogony and cosmography

recourse was had to allegorical interpretation. But allegorical

interpretation cannot be forced upon a writer when it manifestly is not

in his mind. The writer or writers of Genesis undeniably intended his

or their statements to be taken literally. They meant that the earth

was really created in six days, as the Fourth Commandment assumes; that

the formation of Eve out of a rib of Adam, the temptation of Eve by the

serpent, and all the actions of the anthropomorphic God, who walks in

the garden at evening and makes garments for Adam and Eve, were actual

events. To foist upon them allegorical interpretation is to falsify

their testimony. Besides, instead of having the facts of the creation

revealed to us we are left to interpret allegory at a venture.

Recourse has been had to the theory of partial inspiration, admitting

historical and even moral errors in Scripture, but setting them down

to the human element in the composition, which has to be recognized

without prejudice to that element which remains divine. Such a

collaboration of infallibility with fallibility, both historical and

moral, is a desperate hypothesis, especially when the object was to

reveal vital truths to man. Nor could man distinguish the human element

from the divine without being himself inspired and thus above the

need of revelation. A condescension of the divine to the primitive

shortcomings and aberrations of humanity is a solution surely opposed

to any conceivable purpose of revelation.

Another line of defence has been the hypothesis, which may be called

quasi-inspiration, reducing the inspiration of the Scriptures to a

supreme degree of the same sort of inspiration which we recognize in

a great poet or a great author of any kind. This is mere playing with

the term “inspiration,” and little better than an equivoque. It may be,

and we hope it is, true that the Author of our being manifests Himself

in whatever is morally grand and elevating. But this belief is very

different from a belief in the special inspiration of the Bible.

Evolution, again, which at first was repelled as atheistic, is now

adopted by some as the key to revelation and the solution of all

difficulties connected with it. This would make God in His revelation

of Himself to man, without apparent motive, subject Himself to a

physical or quasi-physical law, the knowledge of which has been

withheld from man till the present time. An imperfect revelation of

the divine character, one for example which should exhibit the justice

of God without His mercy, would be a deception of man instead of a

revelation. Besides, evolution repels finality, and we could have no

assurance that the manifestation of the divine nature in Christ and the

Gospel would be final.

It is needless to say how manifestly all these theories have their

origin in controversial necessity, how totally alien they are to the

view taken hitherto by the Christian Churches of the Scriptures, and

how unlikely it is that God, in revealing Himself to man for the

purpose of human salvation, should have chosen a method such as would

entail inevitable misconstruction for many centuries and postpone the

true interpretation of His character and dealings to an age of human

criticism and science.

The ethics of Christianity have hitherto comparatively escaped

systematic criticism and are still generally and officially professed.

An appeal to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount continues to

command formal respect. But Christ’s view of this world as evil and

his renunciation of it for the Kingdom of God have been practically

laid aside by all but specially religious men. Christ’s moral code

was, in its direct bearing, only personal or social, politics and

commerce not having come within the view of the teacher of Galilee.

In regard to public and international concerns, the abjuration of his

principles is most striking. In that sphere Christian meekness, mercy,

and self-sacrifice are being openly superseded by maxims drawn from

the Darwinian Struggle for Existence and by avowals of the right of

the strong. Even professed ministers of Christ have been pandering

to Imperialism and the lust of war. In truth, by a strange turn of

events, Christian ethics, in questions between nation and nation and in

questions concerning humanity at large, have been passing out of the

hands of the orthodox teachers of supernatural Christianity into those

of men who recognize only the human character and ethical teachings of

life.

Professor Seeley in his earlier days had made a great impression

with his _Ecce Homo_, an attempt to bring the character of Christ

nearer to the heart of humanity. The work was decidedly pietist; yet

a rationalizing tendency was scented in it by the Evangelicals, whose

leader, Lord Shaftesbury, denounced it. Its author promised a theology.

But when, after years of reflection and subjection to the influences

of a moving time, the theology came, under the title of _Natural

Religion_, it was a total disappointment. Religion was reduced by it

to enthusiasm, not exclusively Christian or even theistic, but of any

kind, such as enthusiastic love of country or of art.

Minds of the finer cast have preserved the religious spirit, while

they have thrown off the shackles of creed and even regarded the whole

religious question as matter of doubt and suspense.

“There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

This is the pervading spirit of Tennyson’s poems, and of such a work

as Amiel’s diary, but it must manifestly be confined to a circle of

minds such as those of Tennyson and Amiel. Agnosticism is the condition

into which a large number of educated minds have been more or less

consciously passing or drifting. But while in some of them a religious

spirit still prevails and the hope is cherished of a new religious

dawn, others seem to have finally settled in the conviction that

theological inquiry is hopeless and that our knowledge must forever be

bounded by that which our senses and science tell us about the laws or

forces of our own world.

Reluctance to give up belief in the unseen world and perhaps still

more unwillingness to think that the loved ones who are lost by death

are lost forever have given birth to Spiritualism. It will hardly be

thought necessary to comment on an illusion which has been so often

and so decisively exposed. Its very name is belied when the spirits

have to materialize before they can make their existence known or hold

converse with those who evoke them. The alleged communications from the

spirit world through such a medium as Planchette have been trivial,

almost fatuous. It is now forgotten that the movement began with

table-turning, as though spirits had a special affinity for tables.

Among the anti-theistic, or at least the anti-ecclesiastical,

influences and the solvents of our religious system may be reckoned the

foundation of systems of morality independent of the divine sanction.

Paley’s definition of virtue is “the doing good to mankind in obedience

to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This is

the theistic view. Opposed to it is the Utilitarian system, generally

connected with Bentham’s name, which finds the sole and sufficient

motive and reward of virtue in the promotion of our well-being here.

So long as a system aims at perfection and beauty of character which

transcend temporal happiness there is in the philosophy a theistic

element, patent or latent. But of perfection and beauty of character

the Utilitarian philosophy in its thorough-going form takes no account.

The weakening of religious belief as a social influence on the

conservative side is very marked and excites the fears of statesmen,

some of whom, even if they are Protestants, are inclined to look with

complacency on the Papacy as a bulwark against social revolution. The

drudge rested in dull contentment with his lot while he could believe

that hereafter the parts of Dives and Lazarus would be reversed and

full amends would be made to him for his privations in this life. This

hope having vanished, he is resolved, if he can, to have a share of

the good things of the present world. That this sentiment helps to set

seething the caldron of socialistic and communistic agitation, all who

are familiar with labor literature must be aware. It would probably be

found that anarchism and atheism generally went together.

As the natural consequence of the loosened hold of religion over

the nations, there has been a general tendency in Europe towards

disestablishment. In Italy, the seat of the Papacy, disestablishment

is complete. In Spain, while Catholicism is still recognized as the

exclusive religion of the nation, the immense revenues of the clergy

have been secularized, monasteries have been dissolved, and religion

has been almost reduced to a department of the state. In France the

process has gone still further than in Spain, and religion may almost

be said to be not only a department, but a despised department, of the

state. In Ireland the state Church has been disestablished. A bill

has been brought in for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales,

and in England disestablishment seems to be approaching, its advent

being hastened by the collision of ritualism with the anti-Roman and

anti-sacerdotal spirit of the nation. Popular education has everywhere

been largely secularized, and that process is still going on.

Sunday-schools or other secondary influences can scarcely countervail

the general banishment of religion from the training of the child.

Religion passed from old to New England in the form of a refugee

Protestantism of the most intensely Biblical and the most austere kind.

It had, notably in Connecticut, a code of moral and social law which,

if fully carried into effect, must have fearfully darkened life. It

produced in Jonathan Edwards the philosopher of Calvinism, from the

meshes of whose predestinarian logic it has been found difficult to

escape, though all such reasonings are practically rebutted by our

indefeasible consciousness of freedom of choice and of responsibility

as attendant thereon. New England Puritanism was intolerant, even

persecuting; but the religious founder and prophet of Rhode Island

proclaimed the principles of perfect toleration and of the entire

separation of the Church from the state. The ice of New England

Puritanism was gradually thawed by commerce, non-Puritan immigration

from the old country, and social influences, as much as by the force of

intellectual emancipation; though in founding universities and schools

it had in fact prepared for its own ultimate subversion. Unitarianism

was a half-way house through which Massachusetts passed into

thorough-going liberalism such as we find in Emerson, Thoreau, and the

circle of Brook Farm; and afterwards into the iconoclasm of Ingersoll.

The only Protestant Church of much importance to which the New World

has given birth is the Universalist, a natural offspring of democratic

humanity revolting against the belief in eternal fire. Enthusiasm

unilluminated may still hold its camp-meetings and sing “Rock of Ages”

in the grove under the stars.

The main support of orthodox Protestantism in the United States now

is an off-shoot from the old country. It is Methodism, which, by the

perfection of its organization, combining strong ministerial authority

with a democratic participation of all members in the active service of

the Church, has so far not only held its own but enlarged its borders

and increased its power; its power, perhaps, rather than its spiritual

influence, for the time comes when the fire of enthusiasm grows cold

and class meetings lose their fervor. The membership is mostly drawn

from a class little exposed to the disturbing influences of criticism

or science; nor has the education of the ministers hitherto been

generally such as to bring them into contact with the arguments of the

sceptic.

The character and intensity of the movement in Europe have been greatly

influenced by the existence of state Churches and the degrees of

obnoxious privilege which the state Churches severally have possessed.

Where the yoke of the establishment was heavy, as in France under

the Bourbons, free-thought has been lashed into fury; where, as in

England, the ecclesiastical polity has been comparatively mild, it

has taken the gentler form of evangelical dissent. In the United

States at the beginning of the last century there were faint relics of

state Churches, Churches, that is, recognized and protected, though

not endowed, by the state. But there has been little to irritate

scepticism or provoke it to violence of any kind, and the transition

has accordingly been tranquil. Speculation, however, has now arrived

at a point at which its results in the minds of the more inquiring

clergy come into collision with the dogmatic creeds of their Churches

and their ordination tests. Especially does awakened conscience rebel

against the ironclad Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. Hence

attempts, hitherto baffled, to revise the creeds; hence heresy trials,

scandalous and ineffective.

Who can undertake to say how far religion now influences the inner

life of the American people? Outwardly life in the United States, in

the Eastern States at least, is still religious. Churches are well

maintained, congregations are full, offertories are liberal. It is

still respectable to be a church-goer. Anglicanism, partly from its

connection with the English hierarchy, is fashionable among the wealthy

in cities. We note, however, that in all pulpits there is a tendency

to glide from the spiritual into the social, if not into the material;

to edge away from the pessimistic view of the present world with which

the Gospels are instinct; to attend less exclusively to our future, and

more to our present state. Social reunions, picnics, and side-shows are

growing in importance as parts of the Church system. Jonathan Edwards,

if he could now come among his people, would hardly find himself at

home.

The Catholic Church had come out to America in evil companionship with

Spanish conquest. Together with the Spanish colonies she decayed, and

her history during the past century in South America appears to have

been that of a miserable decline which could add nothing to religious

thought or history. Mexican liberalism, under the presidency of Juarez,

cast off allegiance to her, and a priest dared not show himself in

the dress of his order on the street. In French Canada the Catholic

Church has reigned over a simple peasantry, her own from the beginning,

thoroughly submissive to the priesthood, willing to give freely of its

little store for the building of churches which tower over the hamlet,

and sufficiently firm in its faith to throng to the fane of St. Anne

Beaupré for miracles of healing. She has kept the _habitant_ ignorant

and unprogressive, but made him, after her rule, moral, insisting on

early marriage, on remarriage, controlling his habits and amusements

with an almost Puritan strictness. Probably French Canada has been as

good and as happy as anything the Catholic Church had to show. The

priesthood was of the Gallican school. It lived on good terms with

the state, though in French Canada the state was a conqueror. From

fear of New England Puritanism it had kept its people loyal to Great

Britain during the Revolutionary war. From fear of French atheism it

kept its people loyal to Great Britain during the war with France.

It sang _Te Deum_ for Trafalgar. So things were till the other day.

But then came the Jesuit. He got back, from the subserviency of the

Canadian politicians, the lands which he had lost after the conquest

and the suppression of his Order. He supplanted the Gallicans, captured

the hierarchy and prevailed over the great Sulpician Monastery in

a struggle for the pastorate of Montreal. Other influences have of

late been working for change in a direction neither Gallican nor

Jesuit. Railroads have broken into the rural seclusion which favored

the ascendency of the priest. Popular education has made some way.

Newspapers have increased in number and are more read. The peasant

has been growing restive under the burden of tithe and _fabrique_.

Many of the _habitants_ go into the Northern States of the Union for

work, and return to their own country bringing with them republican

ideas. Americans who have been shunning continental union from dread of

French-Canadian popery may lay aside their fears.

It was a critical moment for the Catholic Church when she undertook to

extend her domain to the American Republic. She had there to encounter

a genius radically opposed to her own. The remnant of Catholic Maryland

could do little to help her on her landing. But she came in force with

the flood of Irish, and afterwards of South German, emigration. How

far she has been successful in holding these her lieges would be a

question difficult to decide, as it would involve a rather impalpable

distinction between formal membership and zealous attachment. That she

loses the zealous attachment of a great part of them in two or three

generations, and that of the South Germans more quickly than that

of the Irish, is what you are commonly told. Conversions of native

Americans flying from the distractions of controversy to the repose

of unity under authority there have been, but the number probably has

not been large. In America, as in England, Ritualism has served Roman

Catholicism as a tender. The critical question was how the religion of

the Middle Ages could succeed in making itself at home under the roof

of a democratic republic, the animating spirit of which was freedom,

intellectual and spiritual as well as political, while the wit of

its people was proverbially keen and their nationality was jealous as

well as strong. The Papacy may call itself universal; in reality, it

is Italian. During its sojourn in the French dominions the Popes were

French; otherwise they have been Italians, native or domiciled, with

the single exception of the Flemish Adrian VI., thrust into the chair

of St. Peter by his pupil, Charles V., and by the Italians treated with

contumely as an alien intruder. The great majority of the Cardinals

always has been and still is Italian. National susceptibilities,

therefore, were pretty sure to be aroused. In meeting the difficulties

of her new situation Rome has shown a certain measure of pliability.

She has not thrust the intolerance and obscurantism of the encyclical

in the face of the disciples of Jefferson. She has paid all due homage

to republican institutions, alien though they are to her own spirit,

as her uniform action in European politics hitherto has proved. She

has made little show of relics. She has abstained from miracles. The

adoration of Mary and the saints, though of course fully maintained,

appears to be less prominent. Compared with the mediæval cathedral and

its multiplicity of side chapels, altars, and images, the cathedral

at New York strikes one as the temple of a somewhat rationalized

version. Against Puritan intolerance of Popery, if any remnant of it

remained, the Catholic vote has been a sufficient safeguard. To part

of the American people, especially to wealthy New York, the purple of

the cardinalate and the pomp of Catholic worship have of late been by

no means uncongenial. Yet between the spirit of American nationality,

even in the most devout Catholic, and that of the Jesuit or the native

liegeman of Rome, there cannot fail to be an opposition more or less

acute, though it may be hidden as far as possible under a decent veil.

This was seen in the case of Father Hecker, who had begun his career as

a Socialist at Brook Farm, and, as a convert to Catholicism, founded

a missionary order, the keynote of which was that “man’s life in the

natural and secular order of things is marching towards freedom and

personal independence.” This he described as a radical change, and a

radical change it undoubtedly was from the sentiments and the system

of Loyola. Condemnation by Rome could not fail to follow. Education

has evidently been the scene of a subterranean conflict between the

Jesuit and the more liberal, or, what is much the same thing, the

more American section. The American and liberal head of a college

has been deposed, under decorous pretences, it is true, but still

deposed. Envoys have come out from Rome to arbitrate and compose.

Some of the Catholic prelates, it appears, are very willing to show

their liberality by co-operating in charitable work with the clergy

of Protestant churches; others decline that association. One prelate,

at all events, is an active politician and a conspicuous worshipper

of the flag. Others strictly confine themselves to the ecclesiastical

sphere. The laity in general seem to take little account of these

variations, regarding them rather as personal peculiarities than as

divisions of the Church. In the American or any other branch of the

Roman Catholic Church freedom of inquiry and advance in thought are of

course impossible. Nothing is possible but immobility, or reaction such

as that of the Syllabus. Dr. Brownson, like Hecker, a convert, showed

after his conversion something of the spirit of free inquiry belonging

to his former state, though rather in the line of philosophy than in

that of theology, properly speaking. But if he ever departed from

orthodoxy he returned to it and made a perfectly edifying end.

In our survey of the religious world we are apt to leave out of sight

a fourth part or more of Christendom. When the Anglican Bishops some

years ago were challenged to say whether they were or were not in

communion with the Eastern Church, that is with the Church of Russia,

their answer was in effect that the Eastern Church was so remote that

they could not tell. The Russian Church has been and is, in truth,

remote from the life, the progress, the thought, and the controversies

of the other members of Christendom. It has passed through no crisis,

undergone no change analogous either to the Reformation or to the Roman

Catholic reaction. Such conflicts or controversies as it has had have

been ceremonial, not doctrinal or spiritual. Its great reformer, if

he can be so called, Nicon, was a thorough-going ceremonialist and

initiated no doctrinal innovation. The movement of its non-conformists,

the Starovers, is not a counterpart of that of Protestant

non-conformists, but a ritualistic reaction. It differs theologically

from the Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches on the article in

the Creed respecting the procession of the Holy Ghost. But its more

practical grounds of difference probably are its abhorrence of images

and of instrumental music and its practice of baptism by immersion.

It is more sacramental than the Roman Catholic Church, administering

the Eucharist as well as baptism to infants. While it abhors images,

it adores pictures, provided they are archaic and not works of art,

having an instinctive perception of the tendency of art to open the

door for humanity. But it is less sacerdotal, compulsory marriage of

the clergy, instead of celibacy, being its rule. Monastic it is, but

its monachism is of the Eastern and eremitic type, not like the active

monachism of the Franciscan, the Dominican, or the Jesuit. The Russian

Church is intensely national, a character stamped upon it by the long

struggle for independence against the Mohammedan Tartars. The head of

the nation is the head of the Church. The Czar is Pope, as the Emperor

practically was of that Byzantine Church of which the Russian Church

is the daughter. He presides over the ecclesiastical councils. The

abolition of the Patriarchate removed the last rival of his power.

Peter the Great, when asked to restore the office, exclaimed, “I am

your Patriarch,” flung down his hunting knife on the table, and said,

“There is your Patriarch.”

Attempts have been made both by Gallicans and Anglicans to negotiate a

union with the Eastern Church as a counterpoise to the Papacy. But they

have been baffled by the intense nationality and antiquated ritualism

rather than by the difference about an article in the Athanasian Creed.

The upshot has been the intellectual immobility of the Russian Church,

whose compartment in the theological history of the last century is a

blank.

Such is the position in which at the close of the last century

Christendom seems to have stood. Outside the pale of reason—of

reason; we do not say of truth—were the Roman Catholic and Eastern

Churches; the Roman Catholic Church resting on tradition, sacerdotal

authority, and belief in present miracles; the Eastern Church supported

by tradition, sacerdotal authority, nationality, and the power of

the Czar. Scepticism had not eaten into a Church, preserved, like

that of Russia, by its isolation and intellectual torpor; though

some wild sects had been generated, and Nihilism, threatening with

destruction the Church as well as the state, had appeared on the scene.

Into the Roman Catholic Church scepticism had eaten deeply, and had

detached from her, or was rapidly detaching, the intellect of educated

nations, while she seemed resolutely to bid defiance to reason by her

Syllabus, her declaration of Papal infallibility, her proclamation of

the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Outside the pale of traditional

authority and amenable to reason stood the Protestant Churches,

urgently pressed by a question as to the sufficiency of the evidences

of supernatural Christianity, above all, of its vital and fundamental

doctrines: the Fall of Man, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.

The Anglican Church, a fabric of policy compounded of Catholicism

without a Pope and Biblical Protestantism, was in the throes of a

struggle between those two elements, largely antiquarian and of little

importance compared with the vital question as to the evidences of

revelation and the divinity of Christ.

In the Protestant churches generally æstheticism had prevailed. Even

the most austere of them had introduced Church art, flowers, and

tasteful music; a tendency which, with the increased craving for

rhetorical novelty in the pulpit, seemed to show that the simple Word

of God and the glad tidings of salvation were losing their power and

that human attractions were needed to bring congregations together.

The last proposal had been that dogma, including the belief in the

divinity of Christ, having become untenable should be abandoned, and

that there should be formed a Christian Church with a ritual and

sacraments, but without the Christian creed, though still looking up

to Christ as its founder and teacher; an organization which, having no

definite object and being held together only by individual fancy, would

not be likely to last long.

The task now imposed on the liegemen of reason seems to be that of

reviewing reverently, but freely and impartially, the evidences both

of supernatural Christianity and of theism, frankly rejecting what

is untenable, and if possible laying new and sounder foundations in

its place. To estimate the gravity of the crisis we have only to

consider to how great an extent our civilization has hitherto rested

on religion. It may be found that after all our being is an insoluble

mystery. If it is, we can only acquiesce and make the best of our

present habitation; but who can say what the advance of knowledge may

bring forth? Effort seems to be the law of our nature, and if continued

it may lead to heights beyond our present ken. In any event, unless

our inmost nature lies to us, to cling to the untenable is worse than

useless; there can be no salvation for us but in truth.