its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a
different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of
Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which
natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about
Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of
their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their
interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or
averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have
attained to any agreement about these matters or that history indicates
a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the
onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a
great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in
charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality,
deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In singular
contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of mankind with
the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more exact, and the
influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the greater, the
further back we go in time and the lower the stage of civilisation
submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would seem to
be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge. As
the latter has widened, gained in precision and in trustworthiness, so
has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more
and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into
the region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal
recognition.
Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of
Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress, of
humanity; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life; is a
matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that
the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are growing to be
seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity
which is generally, and I venture to think not unreasonably, regarded as
progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate
elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of
men's thoughts. The question--How far is this process to go?--is in my
apprehension, the Controverted Question of our time.
Controversy on this matter--prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the
weapons of the flesh, as well as with those of the spirit--is no new
thing to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these
five hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to
establish a _modus vivendi_ between the antagonists, some of which have
had a world-wide influence; though, unfortunately, none have proved
universally and permanently satisfactory.
In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was,
whether certain portions of the Supernaturalism of mediæval Christianity
were well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of the problem
which, in the course of the following two hundred years, acquired wide
popularity and vast historical importance: Lollards, Hussites,
Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Socinians, and Anabaptists, whatever
their disagreements, concurred in the proposal to reduce the
Supernaturalism of Christianity within the limits sanctioned by the
Scriptures. None of the chiefs of Protestantism called in question
either the supernatural origin and infallible authority of the Bible, or
the exactitude of the account of the supernatural world given in its
pages. In fact, they could not afford to entertain any doubt about these
points, since the infallible Bible was the fulcrum of the lever with
which they were endeavouring to upset the Chair of St. Peter. The
"freedom of private judgment" which they proclaimed, meant no more, in
practice, than permission to themselves to make free with the public
judgment of the Roman Church, in respect of the canon and of the meaning
to be attached to the words of the canonical books. Private
judgment--that is to say, reason--was (theoretically, at any rate) at
liberty to decide what books were and what were not to take the rank of
"Scripture"; and to determine the sense of any passage in such books.
But this sense, once ascertained to the mind of the sectary, was to be
taken for pure truth--for the very word of God. The controversial
efficiency of the principle of biblical infallibility lay in the fact
that the conservative adversaries of the Reformers were not in a
position to contravene it without entangling themselves in serious
difficulties; while, since both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking
efficient measures to stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these
did not count.
The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the inherent
weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the
infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the
infallibility of the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the
latter may be. If the latter is to be accepted, or rejected, by private
judgment, why not the former? Even if the Bible could be proved anywhere
to assert its own infallibility, the value of that self-assertion to
those who dispute the point is not obvious. On the other hand, if the
infallibility of the Bible was rested on that of a "primitive Church,"
the admission that the "Church" was formerly infallible was awkward in
the extreme for those who denied its present infallibility. Moreover, no
sooner was the Protestant principle applied to practice, than it became
evident that even an infallible text, when manipulated by private
judgment, will impartially countenance contradictory deductions; and
furnish forth creeds and confessions as diverse as the quality and the
information of the intellects which exercise, and the prejudices and
passions which sway, such judgments. Every sect, confident in the
derivative infallibility of its wire-drawing of infallible materials,
was ready to supply its contingent of martyrs; and to enable history,
once more, to illustrate the truth, that steadfastness under persecution
says much for the sincerity and still more for the tenacity, of the
believer, but very little for the objective truth of that which he
believes. No martyrs have sealed their faith with their blood more
steadfastly than the Anabaptists.
Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself
the germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran,
Calvinistic, and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had
reached. Since their creeds were professedly based on the canonical
Scriptures, it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled the canon
defined the creed. If the private judgment of Luther might legitimately
conclude that the epistle of James was contemptible, while the epistles
of Paul contained the very essence of Christianity, it must be
permissible for some other private judgment, on as good or as bad
grounds, to reverse these conclusions; the critical process which
excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any rate by people who
rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its operations to
Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes; nor, having got so far, was it
easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress of
criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not
fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason; and
in the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the
despotism of the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited
monarchy. Treated with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its
practical authority was minimised; and its decrees were valid only so
far as they were countersigned by common sense, the responsible
minister.
The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the Reformation
of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason; but it may be
doubted if their contention has any solid ground; while there is a good
deal of evidence to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom
had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the
Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself,
when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of
meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediæval
Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Münzer, Rothmann,
and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason
free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters.
From being the slave of the Papacy the intellect was to become the serf
of the Bible; or, to speak more accurately, of somebody's interpretation
of the Bible, which, rapidly shifting its attitude from the humility of
a private judgment to the arrogant Cæsaro-papistry of a state-enforced
creed had no more hesitation about forcibly extinguishing opponent
private judgments and judges, than had the old-fashioned
Pontiff-papistry.
It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal system
that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was,
essentially, an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain
practical deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in
principle, acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of
abolishing transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences,
ecclesiastical infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal presence
mystifications, the bibliolatry, the "inner-light" pretensions, and the
demonology, which are fruits of the same supernaturalistic tree,
remained in enjoyment of the spiritual and temporal support of a new
infallibility? One does not free a prisoner by merely scraping away the
rust from his shackles.
It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products
of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under
the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten,
Beza, were they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus,
fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely
deserted it?
From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they
often forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means
convertible terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous
reformers, before, during, and after the birth and growth of
Protestantism, who would have nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the
rejuvenescence of science and of art; the widening of the field of
Nature by geographical and astronomical discovery; the revelation of the
noble ideals of antique literature by the revival of classical learning;
the stir of thought, throughout all classes of society, by the printers'
work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened the hold of mediæval
Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture and of national
welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to anything which
tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the monks, and they
willingly supported every movement in the direction of weakening
ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of a common
enemy was the only real tie between the humanist and the protestant;
their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and, sooner or later,
to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of the humanists,
whether they were aware of it or not, was the attainment of the complete
intellectual freedom of the antique philosopher, than which nothing
could be more abhorrent to a Luther, a Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli.
The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to
lie in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many
weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and
professed himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory
movement which he originally contemplated; and it was impossible he
should have deserted the specifically Protestant reformation in which he
never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom
radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs; or to borrow a still
more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad churchman who
refused to enlist with either the High Church or the Low Church zealots,
and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and traitor, by
both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic remonstrance that
he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr for that in which he
does not believe; and a fair consideration of the circumstances and the
consequences of the Protestant reformation seems to me to go a long way
towards justifying the course he adopted.
Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of
Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual
shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of
Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond
imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to
rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard,
whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and
princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware of
the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from the
profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than from the
anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their oppression.
The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in England, in Italy,
and who counted many of the best and most influential men in each
country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly the
enormous forces which were still at the command of the Papacy. Bad as
the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse; and a person of far
more sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the
future, except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the
Church from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it
from being as beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the
scholar and man of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism,
however genial, of one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow
fanaticism, however learned and logical, of others, and to a cautious
thinker, by whom, whatever his short-comings, the ethical ideal of the
Christian evangel was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question
whether it was worth while to bring about a political and social deluge,
the end of which no mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up
Lutheran, Zwinglian, and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual
claimant to the reversion of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean
fisherman.
Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian
movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to
Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of
Anabaptist communism which opened the apocalypse had succeeded, in
shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England,
with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter
tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long
agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated
France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the
spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead
Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry
triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its
train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his friends
sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought this a
somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more especially,
since no one was in a better position than himself to know how little
the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to bear the
light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw
upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at
heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian";
and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the
precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century
"enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his
"Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism.
In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left
Protestanism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:
while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later. By
this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate
became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked Supernaturalism
in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with
equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism,
and Calvinism were merely three persons of the one "Infâme" which it
was the object of his life to crush. If he hated one more than another,
it was probably the last; while D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the
free-thinking best, were disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and
Pantheism.
The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific
noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but cool
judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later
rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to furnish
permanent resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry. However
worthy of admiration may be the acuteness, the common sense, the wit,
the broad humanity, which abound in the writings of the best of the
free-thinkers; there is rarely much to be said for their work as an
example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult
investigation. I do not think any impartial judge will assert that, from
this point of view, they are much better than their adversaries. It must
be admitted that they share to the full the fatal weakness of _a priori_
philosophising, no less than the moral frivolity common to their age;
while a singular want of appreciation of history, as the record of the
moral and social evolution of the human race, permitted them to resort
to preposterous theories of imposture, in order to account for the
religious phenomena which are natural products of that evolution.
For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the
free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and with
vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one great
Christian Apologist fairly captured the guns of the free-thinking array,
and turned their batteries upon themselves. Speculative "infidelity" of
the eighteenth century type was mortally wounded by the _Analogy_; while
the progress of the historical and psychological sciences brought to
light the important part played by the mythopoeic faculty; and, by
demonstrating the extreme readiness of men to impose upon themselves,
rendered the calling in of sacerdotal co-operation, in most cases, a
superfluity.
Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and
political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_,
who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as
they did to _L'Infâme_, were credited with the responsibility for all
the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much
justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt,
or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our _ancien régime_
was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad
way as in France; it was still capable of being repaired; and our
forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until that operation could
be safely performed, rather than pull it all down about their ears, in
order to build a philosophically planned house on brand-new speculative
foundations. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in
this country, practical men preferred the Gospel of Wesley and Whitfield
to that of Jean Jacques; while enough of the old leaven of Puritanism
remained to ensure the favour and support of a large number of religious
men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the
free-thinking, or the indifference, prevalent among us in the first half
of the eighteenth century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic
reaction, which submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even
seemed, for a time, to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which
that work was an imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four
centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to running underground,
safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface.
My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and
the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the
neighbourhood of Oxford; but when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was
rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God,
the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence,
the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools.
In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my
authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar
tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher,
ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of
theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured
forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against
those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to
"sceptics" and "infidels," I became aware of the existence of people who
trusted in carnal reason; who audaciously doubted that the world was
made in six natural days, or that the deluge was universal; perhaps even
went so far as to question the literal accuracy of the story of Eve's
temptation, or of Balaam's ass; and, from the horror of the tones in
which they were mentioned, I should have been justified in drawing the
conclusion that these rash men belonged to the criminal classes. At the
same time, those who were more directly responsible for providing me
with the knowledge essential to the right guidance of life (and who
sincerely desired to do so), imagined they were discharging that most
sacred duty by impressing upon my childish mind the necessity, on pain
of reprobation in this world and damnation in the next, of accepting, in
the strict and literal sense, every statement contained in the
Protestant Bible. I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt
about any of them was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict.
I suppose that, out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at
least, had their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name
of the God of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of
years later, those who ventured to question the exact historical
accuracy of any part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the
Gospels, had to expect a pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say
nothing of the other disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in
any way, run counter to that chaos of prejudices called public opinion.
My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal
of a remarkable document,[8] signed by as many as thirty-eight out of
the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It does not
appear that the signatories are officially accredited spokesmen of the
ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but I feel bound to
take their word for it that they are "stewards of the Lord who have
received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept this memorial as
evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early days may be deposed
from its place of power, though so many of the colleagues of the
thirty-eight even repudiate the title of Protestants, yet the green bay
tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it did sixty years ago. And, as in
those good old times, whoso refuses to offer incense to the idol is held
to be guilty of "a dishonour to God," imperilling his salvation.