because they have not the courage to declare themselves "Infidels." It has
been insinuated that they have adopted a new name in order to escape the
unpleasantness which attaches to their proper denomination. To this wholly
erroneous imputation, I have replied by showing that the term "Agnostic"
did, as a matter of fact, arise in a manner which negatives it; and my
statement has not been, and cannot be, refuted. Moreover, speaking for
myself, and without impugning the right of any other person to use the term
in another sense, I further say that Agnosticism {450} is not properly
described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except
in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle,
which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in
various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to
say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he
can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what
Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to
Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the
contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe,
without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to
attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported
propositions. The justification of the Agnostic principle lies in the
success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of
natural, or in that of civil, history; and in the fact that, so far as
these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.
Still speaking for myself, I add, that though Agnosticism is not, and
cannot be, a creed, except in so far as its general principle is concerned;
yet that the application of that principle results in the denial of, or the
suspension of judgment concerning, a number of propositions respecting
which our contemporary ecclesiastical "gnostics" profess entire certainty.
And, in so far as these ecclesiastical persons can be justified in their
old-established {451} custom (which many nowadays think more honoured in
the breach than the observance) of using opprobrious names to those who
differ from them, I fully admit their right to call me and those who think
with me "Infidels:" all I have ventured to urge is that they must not
expect us to speak of ourselves by that title.
The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the
investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according
to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual Agnostic. I
do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable." What I am sure
about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which,
so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these
things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which
is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to
the probabilities of the case. Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that
the region of uncertainty--the nebulous country in which words play the
part of realities--is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and
Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality or
immortality--appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of
Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming to
life again in a metaphysical "Nifelheim." It is getting on for twenty-five
centuries, at least, since mankind began seriously to give their minds to
these topics. {452} Generation after generation, philosophy has been doomed
to roll the stone uphill; and, just as all the world swore it was at the
top, down it has rolled to the bottom again. All this is written in
innumerable books; and he who will toil through them will discover that the
stone is just where it was when the work began. Hume saw this; Kant saw it;
since their time, more and more eyes have been cleansed of the films which
prevented them from seeing it; until now the weight and number of those who
refuse to be the prey of verbal mystifications has begun to tell in
practical life.
It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between Agnosticism and
Theology; or rather, I ought to say, between Agnosticism and
Ecclesiasticism. For Theology, the science, is one thing; and
Ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion[124] as to the
truth of a particular form of Theology, is another. With scientific
Theology, Agnosticism has no quarrel. On the contrary, the Agnostic,
knowing too well the influence of prejudice and idiosyncrasy, even on those
who desire most earnestly to be impartial, can wish for nothing more
urgently than that the scientific theologian should not only be at perfect
liberty to thresh out the matter in his own fashion; but that he should, if
he can, find flaws in the Agnostic position; and, even if demonstration is
not to be had, that he should put, in their full force, the grounds of the
conclusions he thinks probable. The {453} scientific theologian admits the
Agnostic principle, however widely his results may differ from those
reached by the majority of Agnostics.
But, as between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours
across the Channel call it, Clericalism, there can be neither peace nor
truce. The Cleric asserts that it is morally wrong not to believe certain
propositions, whatever the results of a strict scientific investigation of
the evidence of these propositions. He tells us "that religious error is,
in itself, of an immoral nature."[125] He declares that he has prejudged
certain conclusions, and looks upon those who show cause for arrest of
judgment as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily follows that, for him, the
attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of truth, is the highest aim of
mental life. And, on careful analysis of the nature of this faith, it will
too often be found to be, not the mystic process of unity with the Divine,
understood by the religious enthusiast--but that which the candid
simplicity of a Sunday scholar once defined it to be. "Faith," said this
unconscious plagiarist of Tertullian, "is the power of saying you believe
things which are incredible."
Now I, and many other Agnostics, believe that faith, in this sense, is an
abomination; and though we do not indulge in the luxury of
self-righteousness so far as to call those who are not of our way of
thinking hard names, we do feel that the disagreement between ourselves and
those who hold this {454} doctrine is even more moral than intellectual. It
is desirable there should be an end of any mistakes on this topic. If our
clerical opponents were clearly aware of the real state of the case, there
would be an end of the curious delusion, which often appears between the
lines of their writings, that those whom they are so fond of calling
"Infidels" are people who not only ought to be, but in their hearts are,
ashamed of themselves. It would be discourteous to do more than hint the
antipodal opposition of this pleasant dream of theirs to facts.
The clerics and their lay allies commonly tell us, that if we refuse to
admit that there is good ground for expressing definite convictions about
certain topics, the bonds of human society will dissolve and mankind lapse
into savagery. There are several answers to this assertion. One is that the
bonds of human society were formed without the aid of their theology; and,
in the opinion of not a few competent judges, have been weakened rather
than strengthened by a good deal of it. Greek science, Greek art, the
ethics of old Israel, the social organisation of old Rome, contrived to
come into being without the help of any one who believed in a single
distinctive article of the simplest of the Christian creeds. The science,
the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the
modern world have grown out of those of Greece and Rome--not by favour of,
but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to
which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this
world, were alike despicable. {455}
Again, all that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far as it
has not grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the direct
development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of legislation,
ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so tender to the weak
and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels are to be trusted, Jesus
of Nazareth himself declared that he taught nothing but that which lay
implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious and ethical system of his
people.
And the scribe said unto him, Of a truth, Teacher, thou hast well said
that He is one; and there is none other but He and to love Him with all
the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,
and to love his neighbour as himself, is much more than all whole burnt
offerings and sacrifices. (Mark xii. 32, 33).
Here is the briefest of summaries of the teaching of the prophets of Israel
of the eighth century; does the Teacher, whose doctrine is thus set forth
in his presence, repudiate the exposition? Nay; we are told, on the
contrary, that Jesus saw that he "answered discreetly," and replied, "Thou
art not far from the Kingdom of God."
So that I think that even if the creeds, from the so-called "Apostles'" to
the so-called "Athanasian," were swept into oblivion; and even if the human
race should arrive at the conclusion that, whether a bishop washes a cup or
leaves it unwashed, is not a matter of the least consequence, it will get
on very well. The causes which have led to the development of morality in
mankind, which have guided or {456} impelled us all the way from the savage
to the civilised state, will not cease to operate because a number of
ecclesiastical hypotheses turn out to be baseless. And, even if the absurd
notion that morality is more the child of speculation than of practical
necessity and inherited instinct, had any foundation; if all the world is
going to thieve, murder, and otherwise misconduct itself as soon as it
discovers that certain portions of ancient history are mythical; what is
the relevance of such arguments to any one who holds by the Agnostic
principle?
Surely, the attempt to cast out Beelzebub by the aid of Beelzebub is a
hopeful procedure as compared to that of preserving morality by the aid of
immorality. For I suppose it is admitted that an Agnostic may be perfectly
sincere, may be competent, and may have studied the question at issue with
as much care as his clerical opponents. But, if the Agnostic really
believes what he says, the "dreadful consequence" argufier (consistently, I
admit, with his own principles) virtually asks him to abstain from telling
the truth, or to say what he believes to be untrue, because of the supposed
injurious consequences to morality. "Beloved brethren, that we may be
spotlessly moral, before all things let us lie," is the sum total of many
an exhortation addressed to the "Infidel." Now, as I have already pointed
out, we cannot oblige our exhorters. We leave the practical application of
the convenient doctrines of "Reserve" and "Non-natural interpretation" to
those who invented them. {457}
I trust that I have now made amends for any ambiguity, or want of fulness,
in my previous exposition of that which I hold to be the essence of the
Agnostic doctrine. Henceforward, I might hope to hear no more of the
assertion that we are necessarily Materialists, Idealists, Atheists,
Theists, or any other _ists_, if experience had led me to think that the
proved falsity of a statement was any guarantee against its repetition. And
those who appreciate the nature of our position will see, at once, that
when Ecclesiasticism declares that we ought to believe this, that, and the
other, and are very wicked if we don't, it is impossible for us to give any
answer but this: We have not the slightest objection to believe anything
you like, if you will give us good grounds for belief; but, if you cannot,
we must respectfully refuse, even if that refusal should wreck morality and
insure our own damnation several times over. We are quite content to leave
that to the decision of the future. The course of the past has impressed us
with the firm conviction that no good ever comes of falsehood, and we feel
warranted in refusing even to experiment in that direction.
In the course of the present discussion it has been asserted that the
"Sermon on the Mount" and the "Lord's Prayer" furnish a summary and
condensed view of the essentials of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, set
forth by himself. Now this supposed _Summa_ of Nazarene theology distinctly
affirms the existence of a spiritual world, of a Heaven, and of a {458}
Hell of fire; it teaches the Fatherhood of God and the malignity of the
Devil; it declares the superintending providence of the former and our need
of deliverance from the machinations of the latter; it affirms the fact of
demoniac possession and the power of casting out devils by the faithful.
And, from these premises, the conclusion is drawn, that those Agnostics who
deny that there is any evidence of such a character as to justify
certainty, respecting the existence and the nature of the spiritual world,
contradict the express declarations of Jesus. I have replied to this
argumentation by showing that there is strong reason to doubt the
historical accuracy of the attribution to Jesus of either the "Sermon on
the Mount" or the "Lord's Prayer"; and, therefore, that the conclusion in
question is not warranted, at any rate on the grounds set forth.
But, whether the Gospels contain trustworthy statements about this and
other alleged historical facts or not, it is quite certain that from them,
taken together with the other books of the New Testament, we may collect a
pretty complete exposition of that theory of the spiritual world which was
held by both Nazarenes and Christians; and which was undoubtedly supposed
by them to be fully sanctioned by Jesus, though it is just as clear that
they did not imagine it contained any revelation by him of something
heretofore unknown. If the pneumatological doctrine which pervades the
whole New Testament is nowhere systematically stated, it is everywhere
assumed. The writers of {459} the Gospels and of the Acts take it for
granted, as a matter of common knowledge; and it is easy to gather from
these sources a series of propositions, which only need arrangement to form
a complete system.
In this system, Man is considered to be a duality formed of a spiritual
element, the soul; and a corporeal[126] element, the body. And this duality
is repeated in the Universe, which consists of a corporeal world embraced
and interpenetrated by a spiritual world. The former consists of the earth,
as its principal and central constituent, with the subsidiary sun, planets,
and stars. Above the earth is the air, and below it the watery abyss.
Whether the heaven, which is conceived to be above the air, and the hell
in, or below, the subterranean deeps, are to be taken as corporeal or
incorporeal is not clear. However this may be, the heaven and the air, the
earth and the abyss, are peopled by innumerable beings analogous in nature
to the spiritual element in man, and these spirits are of two kinds, good
and bad. The chief of the good spirits, infinitely superior to all the
others, and their creator, as well as the creator of the corporeal world
and of the bad spirits, is God. His residence is heaven, where he is {460}
surrounded by the ordered hosts of good spirits; his angels, or messengers,
and the executors of his will throughout the universe.
On the other hand, the chief of the bad spirits is Satan, _the_ devil _par
excellence_. He and his company of demons are free to roam through all
parts of the universe, except the heaven. These bad spirits are far
superior to man in power and subtlety, and their whole energies are devoted
to bringing physical and moral evils upon him, and to thwarting, so far as
their power goes, the benevolent intentions of the Supreme Being. In fact,
the souls and bodies of men form both the theatre and the prize of an
incessant warfare between the good and the evil spirits--the powers of
light and the powers of darkness. By leading Eve astray, Satan brought sin
and death upon mankind. As the gods of the heathen, the demons are the
founders and maintainers of idolatry; as the "powers of the air" they
afflict mankind with pestilence and famine; as "unclean spirits" they cause
disease of mind and body.
The significance of the appearance of Jesus, in the capacity of the Messiah
or Christ, is the reversal of the satanic work by putting an end to both
sin and death. He announces that the kingdom of God is at hand, when the
"Prince of this world" shall be finally "cast out" (John xii. 31) from the
cosmos, as Jesus, during his earthly career, cast him out from individuals.
Then will Satan and all his devilry, along with the wicked whom they have
seduced to their destruction, be hurled into the abyss of {461}
unquenchable fire--there to endure continual torture, without a hope of
winning pardon from the merciful God, their Father; or of moving the
glorified Messiah to one more act of pitiful intercession; or even of
interrupting, by a momentary sympathy with their wretchedness, the
harmonious psalmody of their brother angels and men, eternally lapped in
bliss unspeakable.
The straitest Protestant, who refuses to admit the existence of any source
of Divine truth, except the Bible, will not deny that every point of the
pneumatological theory here set forth has ample scriptural warranty. The
Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse assert the existence of
the devil, of his demons and of Hell, as plainly as they do that of God and
his angels and Heaven. It is plain that the Messianic and the Satanic
conceptions of the writers of these books are the obverse and the reverse
of the same intellectual coinage. If we turn from Scripture to the
traditions of the Fathers and the confessions of the Churches, it will
appear that, in this one particular, at any rate, time has brought about no
important deviation from primitive belief. From Justin onwards, it may
often be a fair question whether God, or the devil, occupies a larger share
of the attention of the Fathers. It is the devil who instigates the Roman
authorities to persecute; the gods and goddesses of paganism are devils,
and idolatry itself is an invention of Satan; if a saint falls away from
grace, it is by the seduction of the demon; if heresy arises, the devil has
suggested it; {462} and some of the Fathers[127] go so far as to challenge
the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way of testing the truth of
Christianity. Mediaeval Christianity is at one with patristic on this head.
The masses, the clergy, the theologians, and the philosophers alike, live
and move and have their being in a world full of demons, in which sorcery
and possession are everyday occurrences. Nor did the Reformation make any
difference. Whatever else Luther assailed, he left the traditional
demonology untouched; nor could any one have entertained a more hearty and
uncompromising belief in the devil, than he and, at a later period, the
Calvinistic fanatics of New England did. Finally, in these last years of
the nineteenth century, the demonological hypotheses of the first century
are, explicitly or implicitly, held and occasionally acted upon by the
immense majority of Christians of all confessions.
Only here and there has the progress of scientific thought, outside the
ecclesiastical world, so far affected Christians, that they and their
teachers fight shy of the demonology of their creed. They are fain to
conceal their real disbelief in one half of Christian doctrine by judicious
silence about it; or by flight to those refuges for the logically
destitute, accommodation or allegory. But the faithful who fly to allegory
in order to escape absurdity resemble nothing so {463} much as the sheep in
the fable who--to save their lives--jumped into the pit. The allegory pit
is too commodious, is ready to swallow up so much more than one wants to
put into it. If the story of the temptation is an allegory; if the early
recognition of Jesus as the Son of God by the demons is an allegory; if the
plain declaration of the writer of the first Epistle of John (iii. 8), "To
this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of
the devil," is allegorical, then the Pauline version of the Fall may be
allegorical, and still more the words of consecration of the Eucharist, or
the promise of the second coming; in fact, there is not a dogma of
ecclesiastical Christianity the scriptural basis of which may not be
whittled away by a similar process.
As to accommodation, let any honest man who can read the New Testament ask
himself whether Jesus and his immediate friends and disciples can be
dishonoured more grossly than by the supposition that they said and did
that which is attributed to them; while, in reality, they disbelieved in
Satan and his demons, in possession and in exorcism?[128]
An eminent theologian has justly observed that we have no right to look at
the propositions of the Christian faith with one eye open and the other
shut. (Tract 85, p. 29.) It really is not permissible to see, with one eye,
that Jesus is affirmed to declare the personality and the Fatherhood of
God, His loving providence and His accessibility to prayer; and to {464}
shut the other to the no less definite teaching ascribed to Jesus in regard
to the personality and the misanthropy of the devil, his malignant
watchfulness, and his subjection to exorcistic formulae and rites. Jesus is
made to say that the devil "was a murderer from the beginning" (John viii.
44) by the same authority as that upon which we depend for his asserted
declaration that "God is a spirit" (John iv. 24).
To those who admit the authority of the famous Vincentian dictum that the
doctrine which has been held "always, everywhere, and by all" is to be
received as authoritative, the demonology must possess a higher sanction
than any other Christian dogma, except, perhaps, those of the Resurrection
and of the Messiahship of Jesus; for it would be difficult to name any
other points of doctrine on which the Nazarene does not differ from the
Christian, and the different historical stages and contemporary
subdivisions of Christianity from one another. And, if the demonology is
accepted, there can be no reason for rejecting all those miracles in which
demons play a part. The Gadarene story fits into the general scheme of
Christianity; and the evidence for "Legion" and their doings is just as
good as any other in the New Testament for the doctrine which the story
illustrates.
It was with the purpose of bringing this great fact into prominence; of
getting people to open both their eyes when they look at Ecclesiasticism;
that I devoted so much space to that miraculous story which happens to be
one of the best types of its class. And {465} I could not wish for a better
justification of the course I have adopted, than the fact that my
heroically consistent adversary has declared his implicit belief in the
Gadarene story and (by necessary consequence) in the Christian demonology
as a whole. It must be obvious, by this time, that, if the account of the
spiritual world given in the New Testament, professedly on the authority of
Jesus, is true, then the demonological half of that account must be just as
true as the other half. And, therefore, those who question the demonology,
or try to explain it away, deny the truth of what Jesus said, and are, in
ecclesiastical terminology, "Infidels" just as much as those who deny the
spirituality of God. This is as plain as anything can well be, and the
dilemma for my opponent was either to assert that the Gadarene
pig-bedevilment actually occurred, or to write himself down an "Infidel."
As was to be expected, he chose the former alternative; and I may express
my great satisfaction at finding that there is one spot of common ground on
which both he and I stand. So far as I can judge, we are agreed to state
one of the broad issues between the consequences of agnostic principles (as
I draw them), and the consequences of ecclesiastical dogmatism (as he
accepts it), as follows.
Ecclesiasticism says: The demonology of the Gospels is an essential part of
that account of that spiritual world, the truth of which it declares to be
certified by Jesus.
Agnosticism (_me judice_) says: There is no good {466} evidence of the
existence of a demonic spiritual world, and much reason for doubting it.