Much as we may think of the abstract and objective value of the treatise
_De vera religione_, which forms the usual introduction to those _cursus
theologici_ whose multiplication of late has been so remarkable, it can
hardly be denied that its cogency is much diminished for the large
number of those thinkers who repudiate the philosophical presuppositions
upon which that treatise rests. As long as negation halted before that
minimum of religious truth which is in some way accessible to
reason,--before belief in God and in immortality; as long as the
principles and methods of proof by which "natural theology" reached its
conclusion were admitted even by those who denied those conclusions, an
apologetic such as we are speaking of had an undoubted practical
value--not indeed as sufficing to bring conviction to the unwilling or
ill-disposed, not as a cause of faith, but as removing an obstacle which
existed in the supposed incompatibility of revealed truth with these
same rational principles and processes.
Apart from this preparation of the intellect, to which perhaps the name
"apologetic" should be more strictly reserved, a prior and more
important need was the disposing of the will and affections to the
acceptance of the truth. For, in a very real sense, love is the root of
faith; and the wish that a thing should be true, not only stimulates the
mind to inquire and investigate, but also creates a fear of
self-deception and a spirit of incredulity which is the fruitful parent
of intellectual difficulties.
Such an appeal to the affections is really outside the province of
theological science and belongs rather to the rhetorician, the poet, or
the prophet. Yet it was a work at all times needful for the extension
and maintenance of the faith, in even a greater degree than the more
dispensable preparation of the intellect. For the great multitude of men
who are innocent of any really independent thought, who professedly or
unconsciously take all their beliefs from some individual or society,
there is really no need of scientific apologetic--the sole need being to
win or maintain their confidence, their loyalty, their reverence, in
regard to some teacher or leader, to Christ or the Church.
It was only towards the close of last century when scepticism was
beginning to reach the very root from which the Christian apologetic
sprang, and the former philosophic methods had themselves fallen in
disrepute, that the necessity of accommodating the remedy to the disease
began to be recognized here and there, and of framing an argument that
would appeal to the perverse and erratic mind of the day, rather than to
an abstract and perfectly normal mind, which, if it existed, would "need
no repentance." That a given medicine is the best, avails nothing if it
be not also one which the patient is willing to take. If a man has
closed his teeth against everything that savours of scholasticism, we
must either abandon him or else see if there be any among the methods he
will submit to, which may in any wise serve our purpose. And, indeed,
among the jangle of philosophies there is surely in all something that
is a common heritage of the human mind, a unity which a little skill can
detect lurking under that diversity of form which unfortunately it is
the delight of most men to emphasize. To suppose that Christianity is
pledged to more than this common substratum which none deny, except
through verbal confusion, that there is no road to faith but through
what is peculiar to scholasticism, or that my first step in converting a
man to Christ must be to convert him to Aristotle, is about as
intelligent as to suppose that because the Church has adopted Latin as
her official language she means to discredit every other.
It was then with a view of meeting the exigencies of the world as it is,
not as it might or ought to have been, that such a work as the _Génie du
Christianisme_ strove to find an apologetic in what previously had been
regarded as outside the domain of theology and more properly the concern
of the preacher. The beauty, the solace, the adaptation to our higher
needs of Christian teaching had been one thing; its truth, quite
another. By dilating eloquently on the first, men might be won to the
love of such an ideal, to wish that it might be true; and then disposed
to profit by the distinct and independent labours of the apologist whose
theme was, not the utility or beauty of the Catholic religion, but
solely its truth.
But now that the "scholastic" [1] apologetic was in disgrace with all
but those who stood least in need of it, some more acceptable method had
to be sought out, and amongst many others there was that of
Chateaubriand, which strove to find an argument for the intellect in the
very appeal which Christianity made to the will and affections. Because
a religion is fair and much to be desired, because, if true, it would
give unity and meaning to man's higher cravings, and turn human life
from a senseless chaos into an intelligible whole, therefore, and for
this reason, it _is_ true.
It is hardly wonderful that such a method should incur the charge of
sentimentalism. "It would be so nice to believe it, therefore it must be
true," sounds like a shameless abandonment of reasonableness. The fact
that a belief is "consoling," quite independently of its truth or
falsehood, creates a bias towards its acceptance. That it is pleasant to
believe oneself very clever and competent will incline one to that
belief until something important depends, not on our thinking ourselves
so, but on our being so. Before an examination, the wish to succeed will
make me sceptical about my prospects, much as I should like to think
them the brightest; afterwards, when self-deception can only console and
can do no harm, I shall be credulous of any flattery that is offered me.
In one case, my interest depends upon the facts, and therefore the wish
to believe makes me critical and even sceptical; in the other, on my
belief concerning the facts, and the wish to believe, makes me
uncritical and credulous.
It was seemingly a bold and hazardous venture to justify this same
credulity, and to affirm that an argument could be drawn from the wish
to believe in just those cases where its influence would seem most
suspicious; yet this was practically what the new apologetic amounted
to. It was an argument from the utility of beliefs to their truth; from
the fact that certain subjective convictions produced good results, to
the correspondence of such convictions with objective reality. The
advantages to the individual and to society of a firm belief in God the
righteous Judge, in the sanction of eternal reward and penalty, in the
eventual adjustment of all inequalities, in the reversible character of
sin through repentance, in the divine authority of conscience, of
Christianity, of the Catholic Church, are to a great extent independent
of the truth of those beliefs. No amount of hypnotic suggestion will
enable a man to subsist upon cinders, under the belief that they are a
very nutritious diet; for the effect depends upon their actual nature,
and not wholly upon his belief concerning their nature; but the salutary
fear of Hell or hope of Heaven, depends not on the existence of either
state, but on our belief in its existence. The fact that the denial of
these and many similar beliefs would bring chaos into our spiritual and
moral life, that it would extinguish hopes which often alone make life
bearable, that it would issue for society at large in such a grey,
meaningless, uninspired existence as Mr. F. W. Myers prognosticates in
his admirable essay on "The Disillusionment of France," [2] all this and
much more makes it our interest, if not our duty, to cling to such
convictions at all costs. "If these things are not true, it might be
said, then life is chaos; and if life be chaos, what does truth matter?
Why may not such useful illusions and self-deceptions be fostered? If we
are dreaming, let our dreams be the pleasantest possible!"
Nor can it be urged that though some part of our interest thus depends
on the beliefs, rather than on their being true, yet the consequences of
self-deception are so momentous, as to create a spirit of criticism to
balance or over-balance the said bias of credulity. For though the
consequences of denial are disastrous if the beliefs are true, yet if
they are false, the ill-consequences of belief are almost insignificant.
It is sometimes said too hastily that if religion be an illusion, then
religious people lose both this life and the next; and it is assumed
that an unrestrained devotion to pleasure would secure a happiness which
faith requires us to forego. But unless we take a gross, and really
unthinkable view of the homogeneity of all happiness, and reduce its
differences to degree and quantity, the shallowness of the preceding
objection will be apparent. It is only through restraint that the higher
kinds of temporal happiness are reached, and as confusions are cleared
away in process of discussion, it becomes patent that such restraint
finds its motive directly or indirectly in religion. When the religious
influence with which irreligious society is saturated, has exhausted
itself, and idealism is no more, the unrestrained egoistic pursuit of
enjoyment must tend to its steady diminution in quantity, and its
depreciation in kind. The sorrow and pain entailed by fidelity to the
Christian ideal is, on the whole, immeasurably less in the vast majority
of cases than that attendant on the struggles of unqualified
selfishness, while the capacities for the higher happiness are steadily
raised and largely satisfied by hope and even by some degree of present
fruition. Even vice would be in many ways sauceless and insipid in the
absence of faith. Who does not remember the old cynic's testimony (in
the "New Republic") to the piquancy lent by Christianity to many a sin,
otherwise pointless. If the moralist distinguishes between actions that
are evil because they are forbidden, and those that are forbidden
because they are evil, the libertine has a counter-distinction between
those that are forbidden because they are pleasant, and those that are
pleasant because they are forbidden. St. Paul himself is explicit enough
as to this effect of the law.
Look at it how we will, even were religion unfounded our life would on
the whole gain in fulness far more than it would lose, by our believing
in religion. Hence some of our more thoughtful agnostics, however unable
themselves to find support in what they deem an illusion, are quite
willing to acknowledge the part religion has played in the past in the
evolution of rational life, and to look upon it as a necessary factor in
the earlier stages of that process whose place is to be taken hereafter
by some as yet undefined substitute. If indeed Nature thus works by
illusions and justifies the lying means by the benevolent end, it is
hard to believe in a moral government of the universe, or to hope that
an "absolute morality"--righteousness for its own sake--will be the
outcome of such disreputable methods. But till the illusion of "absolute
morality" is strong enough to take care of itself, and has passed from
the professors to the populace, it is plainly for the interest and
happiness of individuals and of society to hold fast to religion.
Undoubtedly then the advantages resulting from a belief in religion,
whether valid or illusory, are such as to incline not only the higher
and more unselfish minds, but even those which are more prudential and
self-regarding, to wish to hold that belief--to be unwilling to hear
arguments against it. But among the former class will be found many
intellectually conscientious and even scrupulous persons, whom the
recognition of this inevitable bias will drive to an extreme of caution.
Not so much because the facts believed-in are of such intense moment,
but rather because the belief itself, whether true or false, is so
consoling and helpful, that there seems to them a danger of
self-deception just proportioned to their wish to believe.
It were then no small rest and relief to such, could it be shown that
what they deem a reason for doubt, is really a reason for belief; that
the welcome which all that is best in them gives to a belief, affords
some sort of philosophical justification thereof.
This particular argument had undoubtedly a more favourable hearing in
the age of Chateaubriand, when unbelief stopped short at the threshold
of what was called "Natural Religion," and the apologist's task was
confined to the establishment of revelation. "It is now pretty generally
admitted," says the author of _Contemporary Evolution_, "with regard to
Christianity and theism that the arguments really telling against the
first, are in their logical consequences fatal also to the second, and
that a _Deus Unus, Remunerator_ once admitted, an antecedent probability
for a revelation must be conceded."
Given an intelligent and benevolent author of the universe, it is not
perhaps very difficult to show that any further religious belief
approximates to the truth in the measure that it satisfies the more
highly developed rational needs of mankind. It is not seriously denied
any longer that religion is an instinct with man, however it may be
lacking in some individuals or dormant in others. We have savages at
both ends of the scale of civilization, but man is none the less a
political creature; nor does the existence of idiots and deaf mutes and
criminals at all affect the fact that he is a reasoning and speaking and
ethical animal. As soon as he wakes to consciousness, he feels that he
is part of a whole, one of a multitude; and that as he is related to his
fellow-parts--equals or inferiors--so also is he related to the Whole
which is above him and greater than all put together. Religion, taken
subjectively, in its loosest sense, is a man's mental and moral attitude
in regard to real or imaginary superhuman beings--a definition which
includes pantheism, polytheism, monotheism; moral, non-moral, and
immoral religions; which prescinds from materialist or spiritualist
conceptions of the universe. And by a religion in the objective sense,
so far as true or false can be predicated of it, we mean a body of
beliefs intended to regulate and correct man's subjective religion. It
is to such systems and their parts that we think the above test of
"adaptability" maybe applied as we have stated it.
We must of course assume that our distinction of higher from lower
states of rational development is valid; that we can really attach some
absolute meaning to the terms "progress" and "decline;" that there is
some vaguely conceived standard of human excellence which such terms
refer to. Else we are flung into the very whirlpool of scepticism.
Measured back from infinity it may be infinitesimal, but measured
forward from zero, the difference of mental and, partly, of moral
culture between ourselves and the aborigines of Australia is
considerable, and is really to our advantage. Now if a given religion or
religious belief suggests itself more readily, or when suggested
commends itself more cordially in the measure that men's spiritual needs
are more highly developed; if, furthermore, it tends to make men still
better and to raise their desires still higher so as to prepare the way
for a yet fuller conception of religious truth, it may be said to be
adapted to human needs; and it is from such adaptability that we argue
its approach to the truth. We say "its approach," for all our ideas of
the Whole, of the superhuman, of those beings with which religion deals,
are necessarily analogous and imperfect. What is admitted by all with
regard to the strict mysteries of the Christian faith is in a great
measure to be extended to the central or fundamental ideas of all
religion. They are at best woefully inadequate, and if the unity between
the parts of an idea be organic and not merely mechanical, they must be
regarded as containing false mingled with true.[3] Still some analogies
are less imperfect, less mingled with fallacy than others, and there is
room for indefinite approximation towards an unattainable exactitude.
For example, assuming theism, as we do in the argument under
consideration, it is evident that man conceives the superhuman object of
his fear and worship more truly as personal than as impersonal; as
spiritual than as embodied; as one or few than as many; as infinite than
as finite; as creator than as maker; as moral than as non-moral or
immoral; as both transcendent and immanent than as either alone. If then
it appears that as man's intelligence and morality develop in due
proportion, he advances from a material polytheistic immoral conception
of the All, to a spiritual and moral monotheism, it may be claimed that
the latter is a less inadequate conception. And similarly with regard to
other dependent religious beliefs which usually radiate from the central
notion. It will be seen that we do not argue from the self-determined
wishes or desires of any individual or class of individuals to their
possible fulfilment,--to the existence in Nature of some supply
answering to that demand; we do not argue that because many men or all
men desire to fly, flying must for that reason alone be possible. We
speak of the needs of man's nature, not of this individual's nature; of
needs consequent on what man is made, and not on what he has made
himself; of those wants and exigencies which if unsatisfied or
insatiable must leave his nature not merely negatively imperfect and
finite, but positively defective and as inexplicable as a lock without a
key--not necessarily, of needs felt at all times by every man, but of
those which manifest themselves naturally and regularly at certain
stages of moral and social development; just as the bodily appetites
assert themselves under certain conditions not always given.
Now there is one form in which this argument from adaptability is
somewhat too hastily applied and which it is well to guard against. Were
we to find a key accommodated to the wards of a most complicated lock,
we should be justified in concluding, with a certainty proportioned to
the complexity of the lock, that both originated with one and the same
mind; and so, it is urged, if a religion, say Christianity, answers to
the needs of human nature, we may conclude that it is from the Author of
human nature with a certainty increasing as it is seen to answer to the
higher and more complex developments of the soul.
Now if, like the key in our illustration, the religion in question were
something given _in rerum natura_ independent of human origination in
any form, this argument would be practically irresistible. That besides
those beliefs which lead man on to an ever fuller understanding of his
better self, and stimulate and direct his moral progress, Christianity
imposes others more principal, of which man as yet has no exigency, and
which hint at some future order of existence that new faculties will
disclose--all this, in no wise makes the argument inapplicable. The
whole system of beliefs is accepted for the sake, and on the credit, of
that part which so admirably unlocks the soul to her own gaze. "Now are
we the sons of God, but it doth not yet appear what we shall be;" if
besides satisfying our present ideal of religion, Christianity hints at
and prepares us for such a transition as that from merely organic to
sensitive life, or from this, to rational life, it rather adds to than
detracts from the force of the argument.
Yet all this supposes that Christianity is something found by man
outside himself, with whose origination he had nothing to do; but, if
this be established, its supernatural origin, and therefore, supposing
theism, its truth, is already proved, and can only receive confirmation
from the argument of adaptability. If the Book of Mormon really came
down from Heaven, my conviction that polygamy is not for the best, would
seem a feeble objection against its claims. That the Judaeo-Christian
religion is supernatural and is from without, not only with respect to
the individual but to the race; that it is an external, God-given rule,
awakening, explaining, developing man's natural religious instinct,
correcting his own clumsy interpretations thereof, is just what gives it
its claim to pre-eminence over all, even the most highly conceived,
man-made interpretations of the same instinct.
Yet though claiming to be a God-made interpretation, it is confessedly
through human agency, through the human mind and lips of the prophets
and of Christ that this revelation has come to us. Moreover, it
involves, though it transcends, all those religious beliefs of which
human nature seems exigent and which are, absolutely speaking,
attainable by what might be called the "natural inspiration" of
religious genius. Viewing the whole revelation in itself, its
adaptability is evident only in respect to that part which might have
originated with those minds through which it was delivered to us. If the
beliefs proposed seem to have anticipated moral and intellectual needs
not felt in the prophet's own age or society, this might be paralleled
from the inspiration of genius in other departments, and could not of
itself be regarded as establishing the _ab extra_ character of the
revelation.
Plainly, then, so far as a religion claims to be from outside, its
adaptability to our religious and moral instincts may confirm but cannot
establish its Divine origin, which, given theism, is equivalent to its
truth. For to show that it is from outside, is to show that it is from
God.
It is only therefore with regard to man-made interpretations of our
spiritual instincts, to the natural inspirations of religious genius, to
the intuitions and even the reasoned inferences of the conscientious and
clean-hearted, that the argument from adaptability can have any
independent value. It is now no longer as one who argues from a
comparison of lock and key to their common authorship; but rather we
have a self-conscious lock, pining to be opened, and from a more or less
imperfect self-knowledge dreaming of some sort of key and arguing that
in the measure that its dream is based on true self-knowledge there must
be a reality corresponding to it--a valid argument enough, supposing the
locksmith to act on the usual lines and not to be indulging in a freak.
Such, in substance, is the argument from adaptability founded on the
assumption of theism and applied to the criticism or establishment of
further religious beliefs. It is indeed somewhat stronger when we
remember that the self-consciousness, with which we fictitiously endowed
the lock, plays chief part in the very design and structure of man; that
his self-knowledge, his moral and religious instincts, his desire and
power of interpreting them, are all from the Author of his nature.
Of this difference Tennyson takes note in applying the argument from
adaptability to the immortality of the soul:
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust;
Thou madest man, he knows not why;
He thinks he was not made to die,
And Thou hast made him, Thou art just.
But so far as the argument presupposes theism it cannot be made to
support or even confirm theism. If, then, we want to make the argument
absolutely universal with regard to religious beliefs--theism included
and not presupposed--and so to make it available for apologetic purposes
in regard to those whose doubt is more deep-seated, we must inquire
whether any basis can be found for it in non-theistic philosophy;
whether, prescinding from Divine governance and from an intelligent
purpose running through nature, the adaptability of a belief to the
higher needs of mankind can be considered in any way to prove its truth.
So far we have only shown that such a conclusion results from a clearer
insight into the theistic conception. Can we show that it springs,
co-ordinately with theism, from some conception prior to both?