The paradoxes of one generation are the common-places of the next; what
the savants of to-day whisper in the ear, the Hyde Park orators of
to-morrow will bawl from their platforms. Moreover, it is just when its
limits begin to be felt by the critical, when its pretended
all-sufficingness can no longer be maintained, that a theory or
hypothesis begins to be popular with the uncritical and to work its
irrevocable ill-effects on the general mind. In this, as in many other
matters, the lower orders adopt the abandoned fashions of their betters,
though with less of the well-bred taste which sometimes in the latter
makes even absurdity graceful. In this way it has come to pass that at
the very moment in which a reaction against the irreligious or
anti-religious philosophy of a couple of generations ago is making
itself felt in the study, the spreading pestilence of negation and
unbelief has gained and continues to gain possession of the street. Some
fifty years ago religion and even Christianity, seemed to the sanguine
eyes of Catholics so firmly rooted in England that the recovery of the
country to their faith depended almost entirely on the settlement of the
Anglo-Roman controversy; to which controversy they accordingly devoted,
and, in virtue of the still unexhausted impetus of that effort, do still
devote their energies, almost exclusively. But together with a dawning
consciousness that times and conditions have considerably changed, there
is growing up in certain quarters a feeling that we too shall have to
make some modifications in order to adapt ourselves to the altered
circumstances. It is becoming increasingly evident that even could the
said Anglo-Roman controversy be settled by some argument so irresistibly
evident as to leave no _locus standi_ to the opponents of the Petrine
claims, yet the number of those Anglicans who admit the historical,
critical, philosophical, and theological assumptions upon which the
controversy is based and which are presumed as common ground, is so
small and dwindling that, were they all gained to the Church, we should
be still a "feeble folk" in the face of that tidal wave of unbelief
whose gathering force bids fair to sweep everything before it. Also the
lingering impression left from "Tractarian" days as to the intellectual
pre-eminence of the Catholicizing party in the Anglican Church, which
pre-eminence might make amends for their numerical insignificance, is
gradually giving way to the recognition of the sobering fact that at
present that party in no exclusive sense represents the cultivated
intellect of the country. It is no disrespect to that party to say that
while scholarship and intelligence are therein well represented by
scattered individuals, yet it is cumbered, like most religious movements
after they have streamed some distance from their source, with a
majority of those whose adhesion has little or no pretence to an
intellectual basis; and whose occasional accession to the Catholic
Church is almost entirely their own gain.
To give the last decisive push to those who are already toppling over
the border-line that divides England from Rome, to reap and gather-in
the harvest already ripe for the sickle, is a useful, a necessary, and a
charitable work; one that calls for a certain kind of patient skill not
to be underestimated; but there is a wider and perhaps more fruitful
field whose soil is as yet scarcely broken. It may even be asserted with
only seeming paradox that the best religious intelligence of the country
is to be found in the camp of negation rather than in that of
affirmation; among Broad Churchmen, Nonconformists, Unitarians, and
Positivists, rather than among those who seek rest in the unstable
position of a modified Catholicism. The very instability and difficulty
of that position elicits much ingenuity from its theological defenders,
though it also divides their counsels not a little; nor do we quarrel
with them for affirming instead of denying, but for not affirming
enough. But this attempt at compromise, this midway abortion of the
natural growth of an idea, even were it justifiable as sometimes happens
when legitimate issues are obscured through failure of evidence, repels
the great multitude of religious thinkers who are not otherwise
sufficiently drawn towards Catholicism to care to examine these claims.
To say that there is no logical alternative between Rome and Agnosticism
is a sufficiently shallow though popular sophism. At most it means that
from certain given premisses one or other of those conclusions must
follow syllogistically--a statement that would be more interesting were
the said premisses indisputable and admitted by all the world. Still it
may be allowed that a criticism of these premisses, which is a third
alternative, opens up to religious thought a number of roads, all of
which lead away from, rather than towards the extreme Anglican position,
and hence that the more searching religious intelligence of the country
is as adverse to that position--and for the same reasons--as it is to
our own. And by the "religious intelligence" I mean all that
intelligence that is interested in the religious problem; be that
interest hostile or friendly; be it, in its issue, negative or
constructive. For it must not be forgotten that the enemies of a truth
are as interested in it as its friends; or that the friendliest
interest, the strongest "wish to believe," may at times issue in
reluctant negation. So far then as the great mass of religious
intelligence in this country is not "Anglo-Catholic" in its sympathies;
and so far as it is chiefly on the "Anglo-Catholic" section that we make
any perceptible impression, the conversion of England, for what depends
on our own efforts, does not seem to be as imminent a contingency as it
would appear to be in the eyes of those foreign critics for whom Lord
Halifax is the type of every English Churchman and the English Church
co-extensive with the nation--save for a small irreclaimable residue of
Liberals and Freemasons.
Those who, influenced by such considerations, would have us extend our
efforts from the narrowing circle of Anglo-Catholicism to the
ever-widening circle of doubt and negation, are not always clear about
the practically important distinction to be drawn between the active
leaders of doubt, and those who are passively led; the more or less
independent few, and the more or less dependent many; between the man of
the study and the man of the street--a distinction analogous to that
between the _Ecclesia docens_ and _Ecclesia discens_, and which
permeates every well-established school of belief, whether historical,
ethical, political, or religious.
Dealing first with the latter, that is, with those who are led; we are
becoming more explicitly conscious of the fact that in all departments
of knowledge and opinion the beliefs of the many are not determined by
reasoning from premisses, but by the authority of reputed specialists in
the particular matter, or else by the force of the general consent of
those with whom they dwell. There may be other non-rational causes of
belief, but these are the principal and more universal. And when we say
they are non-rational causes, we do not mean that they are
non-reasonable or unreasonable. They provide such a generally
trustworthy, though occasionally fallible, method of getting at truth,
as is sufficient and possible for the practical needs of life--social,
moral, and religious. There is an inborn instinct to think as the crowd
does and to be swayed by the confident voice of authority. If at times
it fail of its end, as do other instincts, yet it is so trustworthy in
the main that to resist it in ordinary conditions is always imprudent.
That our eyes sometimes deceive us would not justify us in always
distrusting their evidence. If a child is deceived through instinctively
trusting the word of its parents, the blame of its error rests with
them, not with it. And so, whatever error the many are led into by
obeying the instinct of submission to authority or to general consent,
is their misfortune, not their fault. Of course there are higher
criteria by which the general consent and the opinion of experts can be
criticized and modified; but such criticism is not obligatory on the
many who have neither leisure nor competence for the task. For here, as
elsewhere, a certain diversity of gifts results in a natural division of
labour in human society; those who have, giving to those who have not;
some ministering spiritual, others temporal benefits to their
neighbours. Not that a man can save another's soul for him any more than
he can eat his dinner for him, but he can minister to him better food or
worse.
The Mussulman child, then, may be bound, during his intellectual
minority, to accept the religious teaching of its parents, just as is
the Christian child. That one, in obeying this natural but fallible
rule, is led into error, the other into, truth, only verifies the
principle that right faith is a gift of God,--a grace, a bit of good
fortune. None of those who are not professedly teachers of religion and
experts, can be morally bound to a criticism above their competence, or
to more than an obedience to those ordinary causes of assent to whose
influence they are subjected by their circumstances. The ideal of a
Catholic religion is to provide, by means of a divinely guided body of
authorities and experts, an universal, international, inter-racial
consensus regarding truths that are as obscure as they are vital to
individual and social happiness; and thus to afford a means of sure and
easy guidance to those uncritical multitudes whose necessary
preoccupations forbid their engaging in theology and controversy. This
ideal was sufficiently realized for practical purposes in the "ages of
faith," when the whole public opinion of Europe, then believed to be
coterminous with civilization, was Catholic; when dissent needed as much
independence of character, as in so many places, profession does now.
And surely it is a narrow-hearted criticism to prefer the primitive
conditions in which none but those strong enough to face persecution
could reap the benefits of Christianity. The weak and dependent are ever
the majority, and if Christianity had been intended to pass them by or
sift them out, "its province were not large," nor could it claim to be
the religion of humanity. The Christian leaven was never meant to be
kept apart, but to be hidden and lost in that unleavened mass which it
seeks slowly to transform into its own nature. The majority, in respect
to religion and civilization, are like unwilling school-boys who need to
be coerced for their own benefit, to be kept to their work till they
learn (if they ever do) to like it, and to need no more coercion. The
support that Catholic surroundings give to numbers, who else were too
weak to stand alone, cannot be overvalued, although it may weaken a few
who else had exerted themselves more strenuously, or may foster
hypocrisy in secret unbelievers who would like to, but dare not
withstand public opinion.
Now it is the gradual decay of this support--of this non-rational yet
most reasonable cause of belief, that is rendering the religious
condition of the man in the street so increasingly unsatisfactory. Not
only is there no longer an agreement of experts, and a consequent
consensus of nations, touching the broad and fundamental truths of
Christianity, but what is far more to the point, the knowledge of this
Babylonian confusion has become a commonplace with the multitudes. No
doubt there are yet some shaded patches where the dew still struggles
with the desiccating sun--old-world sanctuaries of Catholicism whose
dwellers hardly realize the existence of unbelief or heresy, or who give
at best a lazy, notional assent to the fact. But there are few regions
in so-called Christendom where the least educated are not now quite
aware that Christianity is but one of many religions in a much larger
world than their forefathers were aware of; that the intellect of
modern, unlike that of mediæval Europe, is largely hostile to its
claims; that its defenders are infinitely at variance with one another;
that there is no longer any social disgrace connected with a
non-profession of Christianity; in a word, that the public opinion of
the modern world has ceased to be Christian, and that the once
all-dominating religion which blocked out the serious consideration of
any other claimant, bids fair to be speedily reduced to its primitive
helplessness and insignificance. The disintegrating effect of such
knowledge on the faith of the masses must be, and manifestly is, simply
enormous. Not that there is any rival consensus and authority to take
the place of dethroned Catholicism. Even scepticism is too little
organized and embodied, too chaotic in its infinite variety of
contradictory positions, to create an influential consensus of any
positive kind against faith. Its effect, as far as the unthinking masses
are concerned, is simply to destroy the chief extrinsic support of their
faith and to throw them back on the less regular, less reliable causes
of belief. If in addition it teaches them a few catchwords of
free-thought, a few smart blasphemies and syllogistic impertinences,
this is of less consequence than at first sight appears, since these are
attempted after-justifications, and no real causes of their unbelief.
For they love the parade of formal reason, as they love big words or
technical terms, or a smattering of French or Latin, with all the
delight of a child in the mysterious and unfamiliar; but their pretence
to be ruled by it is mere affectation, and the tenacity with which they
cling to their arguments is rather the tenacity of blind faith in a
dogma, than of clear insight into principles.
And this brings us to the problem which gave birth to the present essay.
The growing infection of the uneducated or slightly educated masses of
the Catholic laity with the virus of prevalent unbelief is arousing the
attention of a few of our clergy to the need of coping with what is to
them a new kind of difficulty. Amongst other kindred suggestions, is
that of providing tracts for the million dealing not as heretofore with
the Protestant, but with the infidel controversy. While the danger was
more limited and remote it was felt that, more harm than good would come
of giving prominence in the popular mind to the fact and existence of so
much unbelief; that in many minds doubts unfelt before would be
awakened; that difficulties lay on the surface and were the progeny of
shallow-mindedness, whereas the solutions lay deeper down than the
vulgar mind could reasonably be expected to go; that on the whole it was
better that the few should suffer, than that the many should be
disturbed. The docile and obedient could be kept away from contagion, or
if infected, could be easily cured by an act of blind confidence in the
Church; while the disobedient would go their own way in any case. Hence
the idea of entering into controversy with those incompetent to deal
with such matters was wisely set aside. But now that the prevalence and
growth of unbelief is as evident as the sun at noon--now that it is no
longer only the recalcitrant and irreligious, but even the religious and
docile-minded who are disturbed by the fact, it seems to some that, a
policy of silence and inactivity may be far more fruitful in evil than
in good, that reverent reserve must be laid aside and the pearls of
truth cast into the trough of popular controversy.
But to this course an almost insuperable objection presents itself at
first seeming. Seeing that, the true cause of doubt and unbelief in the
uncritical, is to be sought for proximately in the decay of a popular
consensus in favour of belief, and ultimately in the disagreements and
negations of those who lead and form public opinion, and in no wise in
the reasons which they allege when they attempt a criticism that is
beyond them; what will it profit to deal with the apparent cause if we
cannot strike at the real cause? In practical matters, the reasons men
give for their conduct, to themselves as well as to others, are often
untrue, never exhaustive. Hence to refute their reasons will not alter
their intentions. To dispel the sophisms assigned by the uneducated as
the basis of their unbelief, is not really to strike at the root of the
matter at all. Besides which, the work is endless; for if they are
released from one snare they will be as easily re-entangled in the next;
and indeed what can such controversy do but foster in them the false
notion that, belief in possession may be dispossessed by every passing
difficulty, and that their faith is to be dependent on an intellectual
completeness of which they are for ever incapable. Indeed the
unavoidable amount of controversy of all kinds, dinned into the ears of
the faithful in a country like this, favours a fallacy of
intellectualism very prejudicial to the repose of a living faith founded
on concrete reasons, more or less experimental.
As far as the many are concerned, much the same difficulty attends the
preservation of their faith in these days, as attended its creation in
the beginnings of Christianity, before the little flock had grown into a
kingdom, when the intellect and power of the world was arrayed against
it, when it had neither the force of a world-wide consensus nor the
voice of public authority in its favour. In those days it was not by the
"persuasive words of human wisdom" that the crowds were gained over to
Christ, but by a certain _ostensio virtutis_, by an experimental and not
merely by a rational proof of the Gospel--a proof which, if it admitted
of any kind of formulation, did not compel them in virtue of the
logicality of its form. Further, when the conditions and helps needed by
the Church in her infancy, gave way to those belonging to her
established strength, it was by her ascendency over the strong, the
wealthy, and the learned, that she secured for the crowd,--for the weak
and the poor and the ignorant,--the most necessary support of a
Christianized, international public opinion, and thereby extended the
benefit of her educative influence to those millions whom disinclination
or weakness would otherwise have deterred from the profession and
practice of the faith.
If the Church of to-day is to retain her hold of the crowd in modernized
or modernizing countries, it must either be by renewing her ascendency
over those who form and modify public opinion, who even in the purest
democracy are ever the few and not the many; or else by a reversion to
the methods of primitive times, by some palpable argument that speaks as
clearly to the simplest as to the subtlest, if only the heart be right.
An outburst of miracle-working and prophecy is hardly to be looked for;
while the argument from the tree's fruits, or from the moral miracle, is
at present weakened by the extent to which non-Christians put in
practice the morality they have learnt from Christ. Other non-rational
causes of belief draw individuals, but they do not draw crowds.
If we cannot see very clearly what is to supply for the support once
given to the faith of the millions by public opinion, still their
incapacity for dealing with the question on rational grounds will not
justify us altogether in silence. For in the first place it is an
incapacity of which they are not aware, or which at least they are very
unwilling to admit. A candidate at the hustings would run a poor chance
of a hearing who, instead of seeming to appeal to the reason of the mob
should, in the truthfulness of his soul, try to convince them of their
utter incompetence to judge the simplest political point. Again, though
unable to decide between cause and cause, yet the rudest can often see
that there is much to be said on both sides--though what, he does not
understand; and if this fact weakens his confidence in the right, it
also weakens it in the wrong; whereas had the right been silent, the
wrong, in his judgment, would thereby have been proved victorious. This
will justify us at times in talking over the heads of our readers and
hearers, and in not sparing sonorous polysyllables, abstruse
technicalities, or even the pompous parade of syllogistic arguments with
all their unsightly joints sticking out for public admiration. Some
hands may be too delicate for this coarse work; but there will always be
those to whom it is easy and congenial; and its utility is too evident
to allow a mere question of taste to stand in the way.
Moreover, it must be remembered that while many of the class referred to
are glad to be free from the pressure of a Christianized public opinion,
and are only too willing to grasp at any semblance of a reason for
unbelief; others, more religiously disposed, are really troubled by
these popular, anti-Christian difficulties, the more so as they are
often infected with the fallacy, fostered by ceaseless controversy,
which makes one's faith dependent on the formal reason one can give for
it.
Though this is not so, yet moral truthfulness forbids us to assent to
what we, however falsely, believe to be untrue. Hence while the virtue
of faith remains untouched, its exercise with regard to particular
points may be inculpably suspended through ignorance, stupidity,
misinformation, and other causes.
In the interest of these well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of
the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts
for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the
present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence
than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or of
a dressmaker fresh from the perusal of "Erbert" Spencer. Face to face
with chaos, one knows not where to begin the work of building up an
orderly mind; nor will the self-taught genius brook a hint of possible
ignorance, or endure the discussion of dull presuppositions, without
much pawing of the ground and champing on the bit: "What I want," he
says, "is a plain answer to a plain question." And when you explain to
him that for an answer he must go back very far and become a little
child again, and must unravel his mind to the very beginning like an
ill-knit stocking, he looks at once incredulous and triumphant as who
should say: "There, I told you so!" Yet the same critical incompetence
that makes these simple folk quite obtuse to the true and adequate
solution of their problems (I am speaking of cases where such solutions
are possible), makes them perfectly ready to accept any sort of
counter-sophistry or paralogism. A most excellent and genuine "convert"
of that class told me that he had stood out for years against the
worship of the Blessed Virgin, till one day it had occurred to him that,
as a cause equals or exceeds its effect, so the Mother must equal the
Son. Another, equally genuine, professed to have been conquered by the
reflection that he had all his life been saying: "I believe in the Holy
Catholic Church," and he could not see the use of believing in it if he
didn't belong to it. If their faith in Catholicism or in any other
religion depended on their logic, men of this widespread class were in a
sorry plight. Like many of their betters, these two men probably
imagined the assigned reasons to be the entire cause of their
conversion, making no account of the many reasonable though non-logical
motives by which the change was really brought about. Hence to have
abruptly and incautiously corrected them, would perhaps but have been to
reduce them to confusion and perplexity, and to "destroy with one's
logic those for whom Christ died."
That we do not sufficiently realize the dialectical incompetence of the
uneducated is partly to be explained by the fact that they often get
bits of reasoning by rote, much as young boys learn their Euclid; and
that they frequently seem to understand principles because they apply
them in the right cases, just as we often quote a proverb appropriately
without the slightest idea of its origin or meaning beyond that it is
the right thing to say in a certain connection. As we ascend in the
scale of education, there is more and more of this reasoning by rote, so
that critical incompetence is more easily concealed and may lurk
unsuspected even in the pulpit and the professorial chair, where logic
alone seems paramount. The "hagnostic" greengrocer, in all the
self-confidence of his ignorance, is but the lower extreme of a class
that runs up much higher in the social scale and spreads out much wider
in every direction.
But when we have realized more adequately how hopelessly incompetent the
multitude must necessarily be in the problems of specialists, we shall
also see that it is only by inadequate and even sophistical reasoning
that most of their intellectual difficulties can be allayed; that the
full truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them.
If, then, _Tracts for the Million_ seem a necessity, they also seem an
impossibility; for what self-respecting man will sit down to weave that
tissue of sophistry, special-pleading, violence, and vulgarity, which
alone will serve the practical purpose with those to whom trenchency is
everything and subtlety nothing? Even though the means involve a
violation of taste rather than of morals, yet can they be justified by
the goodness of the end? Fortunately, however, the difficulty is met by
a particular application of God's universal method in the education of
mankind. In every grade of enlightenment there are found some who are
sufficiently in advance of the rest to be able to help them, and not so
far in advance as practically to speak a different language. What is a
dazzling light for those just emerging from darkness, is darkness for
those in a yet stronger light. A statement may be so much less false
than another, as to be relatively true; so much less true than a third,
as to be relatively false. For a mind wholly unprepared, the full truth
is often a light that blinds and darkness; whereas the tempered
half-truth prepares the way for a fuller disclosure in due time, even as
the law and the prophets prepared the way for the Gospel and Christ, or
as the enigmas of faith school us to bear that light which now no man
can gaze on and live. Thus, though we may never use a lie in the
interest of truth, or bring men from error by arguments we know to be
sophistical, yet we have the warrant of Divine example, both in the
natural and supernatural education of mankind, for the passive
permission of error in the interest of truth, as also of evil in the
interest of good. Since then there will ever be found those who in all
good faith and sincerity can adapt themselves to the popular need and
supply each level of intelligence with the medicine most suited to its
digestion, all we ask is that a variety of standards in controversial
writings be freely recognized; that each who feels called to such
efforts should put forth his very best with a view to helping those
minds which are likest his own; that none should deliberately condescend
to the use of what from his point of view would be sophistries and
vulgarities, remembering at the same time that the superiority of his
own taste and judgment is more relative than absolute, and that in the
eyes of those who come after, he himself may be but a Philistine.
We conclude then that all that can be done in the way of _Tracts for the
Million_ should be done; that seed of every kind should be scattered to
the four winds, hoping that each may find some congenial soil.
But even when all that can be done in this way to save the masses from
the contagion of unbelief has been done, we shall be as far as ever from
having found a substitute for the support which formerly was lent to
their faith by a Christianized public opinion. Can we hope for anything
more than thus to retard the leakage? The answer to this would take us
to the second of our proposed considerations, namely, our attitude
towards those who form and modify that public opinion by which the
masses are influenced for good or for evil. But it is an answer which
for the present must be deferred. [1]
_Nov._ 1900.
Footnotes:
[Footnote 1: The Introduction to the First Series of these essays
attempts to deal with this further question.]