direction to us to quit our Church on account of its incidental
Protestantism, unsatisfactory as it is to have such a note lying against
us. And it is pleasant to believe, that there are symptoms at this time
of our improvement; and we only wish we could see as much hope of a
return to a healthier state in Rome, as is at present visible in our own
communion. There is among us a growing feeling, that to be a mere
Establishment is unworthy of the Catholic Church; and that to be shut
out from the rest of Christendom is not a subject of boasting. We seem
to have embraced the idea of the desirableness of being on a good
understanding with the Greek and Eastern Churches; and we are aiming at
sending out bishops to distant places, where they must come in contact
with foreign communions and though the extreme vagueness, indecision,
and confusion, in which our theological and ecclesiastical notions at
present lie, will be almost sure to involve us in certain mistakes and
extravagances, yet it would be un-thankful to "despise the day of small
things," and not to recognize in these movements a hopeful stirring of
hearts, and a religious yearning after something better than we have.
But not to dwell unduly on these public manifestations of a Catholic
tendency, we should all recollect that a restoration of intercommunion
with other Churches is, in a certain sense, in the power of individuals.
Every one who desires unity, who prays for it, who endeavors to further
it, who witnesses for it, who behaves Christianly toward the members of
Churches alienated from us, who is at amity with them, (saving his duty
to his own communion and to the truth itself,) who tries to edify them,
while he edifies himself and his own people, may surely be considered,
as far as he himself is concerned, as breaking down the middle wall of
the division, and renewing the ancient bonds of unity and concord by the
power of charity. Charity can do all things for us; charity is at once a
spirit of zeal and peace; by charity we shall faithfully protest against
what our private judgment warrants us in condemning in others; and by
charity we have it in our own hands, let all men oppose us, to restore
in our own circle the intercommunion of the Churches.
There is only one quarter from which a cloud can come over us, and
darken and bewilder our course. If, _nefas dictu_, our Church is by any
formal acts rendered schismatical, while Greek and Roman idolatry
remains not of the Church, but in it merely, denounced by Councils,
though admitted by authorities of the day,--if our own communion were to
own itself Protestant, while foreign communions disclaimed the
superstition of which they are too tolerant,--if the profession of
Ancient Truth were to be persecuted in our Church, and its teachings
forbidden,--then doubtless, for a season, Catholic minds among us would
be unable to see their way.
LESLIE STEPHEN.
BORN 1832.
AN APOLOGY FOR PLAINSPEAKING.
BY LESLIE STEPHEN.
All who would govern their intellectual course by no other aim than the
discovery of truth, and who would use their faculty of speech for no
other purpose than open communications of their real opinions to others,
are met by protests from various quarters. Such protests, so far as they
imply cowardice or dishonesty, must of course be disregarded, but it
would be most erroneous to confound all protests in the same summary
condemnation. Reverent and kindly minds shrink from giving an
unnecessary shock to the faith which comforts many sorely tried souls;
and even the most genuine lovers of truth may doubt whether the time has
come at which the decayed scaffolding can be swept away without injuring
the foundations of the edifice. Some reserve, they think, is necessary,
though reserve, as they must admit, passes but too easily into
insincerity.
And thus, it is often said by one class of thinkers, Why attack a system
of beliefs which is crumbling away quite fast enough without your help?
Why, says another class, try to shake beliefs which, whether true or
false, are infinitely consoling to the weaker brethren? I will endeavor
to conclude these essays, in which I have possibly made myself liable to
some such remonstrances, by explaining why I should think it wrong to be
bound by them; I will, however, begin by admitting frankly that I
recognize their force so far as this; namely, that I have no desire to
attack wantonly any sincere beliefs in minds unprepared for the
reception of more complete truths. This book, perhaps, would be
unjustifiable if it were likely to become a text-book for school-girls
in remote country parsonages. But it is not very probable that it will
penetrate to such quarters; nor do I flatter myself that I have brought
forward a single argument which is not already familiar to educated men.
Whatever force there may be in its pages is only the force of an appeal
to people who already agree in my conclusions to state their agreement
in plain terms; and, having said this much, I will answer the questions
suggested as distinctly as I am able.
To the first question, why trouble the last moments of a dying creed, my
reply would be in brief that I do not desire to quench the lingering
vitality of the dying so much as to lay the phantoms of the dead. I
believe that one of the greatest dangers of the present day is the
general atmosphere of insincerity in such matters, which is fast
producing a scepticism not as to any or all theologies, but as to the
very existence of intellectual good faith. Destroy credit, and you ruin
commerce; destroy all faith in religious honesty and you ruin something
of infinitely more importance than commerce; ideas should surely be
preserved as carefully as cotton from the poisonous influence of a
varnish intended to fit them for public consumption. "The time is come,"
says Mr. Mill in his autobiography, "in which it is the duty of all
qualified persons to speak their minds about popular religious beliefs."
The reason which he assigns is that they would thus destroy the "vulgar
prejudice" that unbelief is connected with bad qualities of head and
heart. It is, I venture to remark, still more important to destroy the
belief of sceptics themselves that in these matters a system of pious
frauds is creditable or safe. Effeminating and corrupting as all
equivocation comes to be in the long run, there are other evils behind.
Who can see without impatience the fearful waste of good purpose and
noble aspiration caused by our reticence at a time when it is of primary
importance to turn to account all the forces which make for the
elevation of mankind? How much intellect and zeal runs to waste in the
spasmodic effort of good men to cling _to_ the last fragments of
decaying systems, to galvanize dead formulæ into some dim semblance of
life! Society will not improve as it might when those who should be
leaders of progress are staggering backward and forward with their eyes
passionately reverted to the past. Nay, we shall never be duly sensitive
to the miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture
for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to
look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in
cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much of our
popular religion seems to be expressly directed to deaden our sympathies
with our fellow-men by encouraging an indolent optimism; our thoughts of
the other world are used in many forms as an opiate to drug our minds
with indifference to the evils of this; and the last word of half our
preachers is, dream rather than work.
To the other question, Why deprive men of their religious consolations?
I must make a rather longer reply. In the first place, I must observe
that the burden of proof does not rest with me. If any one should tell
me explicitly, a certain dogma is false, but it is better not to destroy
it, I would not reply summarily that he is preaching grossly immoral
doctrine; but I would only refrain from the reply because I should think
that he does not quite mean what he says. His real intention, I should
suppose, would be to say that every dogma includes some truth, or is
inseparably associated with true statements, and that I ought to be
careful not to destroy the wheat with the tares. The presumption
remains, at any rate, that a false doctrine is so far mischievous; and
its would-be protector is bound to show that it is impossible to assail
it without striking through its sides at something beyond. If Christ is
not God, the man who denies him to be God is certainly _primâ facie_
right, though it may perhaps be possible to show that such a denial
cannot be made in practice without attacking a belief in morality. We
may, or it is possible to assert that we may, be under this miserable
necessity, that we cannot speak undiluted truth; truth and falsehood
are, it is perhaps maintainable, so intricately blended in the world
that discrimination is impossible. Still the man who argues thus is
bound to assign some grounds for his melancholy scepticism; and to show
further that the destruction of the figment is too dearly bought by the
assertion of the truth. Therefore, I might be content to say that, in
such cases, the innocence of the plain speaker ought to be assumed until
his guilt is demonstrated. If we had always waited to clear away shams
till we were certain that our action would produce absolutely unmixed
benefits, we should still be worshipping Mumbo-Jumbo.
But, whilst claiming the advantage of this presumption, I am ready to
meet the objector on his own ground, and to indicate, simply and
inefficiently enough, the general nature of the reasons which convince
me that the objection could not be sustained. To what degree, in fact,
are these sham beliefs, which undoubtedly prevail so widely, a real
comfort to any intelligent person? Many believers have described the
terrible agony with which they had at one period of their lives
listened to the first whisperings of scepticism. The horror with which
they speak of the gulf after managing to struggle back to the right side
is supposed to illustrate the cruelty of encouraging others to take the
plunge. That such sufferings are at times very real and very acute, is
undeniable; and yet I imagine that few who have undergone them would
willingly have missed the experience. I venture even to think that the
recollection is one of unmixed pain only in those cases in which the
sufferer has a half-consciousness that he has not escaped by legitimate
means. If in his despair he has clutched at a lie in order to extricate
himself as quickly as possible and at any price, it is no wonder that he
looks back with a shudder. When the disease has been driven inward by
throwing in abundant doses of Paley, Butler, with perhaps an oblique
reference to preferment and respectability, it continues to give many
severe twinges, and perhaps it may permanently injure the constitution.
But, if it has been allowed to run its natural course, and the sufferer
has resolutely rejected every remedy except fair and honest argument, I
think that the recovery is generally cheering. A man looks back with
something of honest pride at the obstacles through which he has forced
his way to a purer and healthier atmosphere. But, whatever the nature of
such crises generally, there is an obvious reason why, at the present
day, the process is seldom really painful. The change which takes place
is not, in fact, an abandonment of beliefs seriously held and firmly
implanted in the mind, but a gradual recognition of the truth that you
never really held them. The old husk drops off because it has long been
withered, and you discover that beneath is a sound and vigorous growth
of genuine conviction. Theologians have been assuring you that the world
would be intolerably hideous if you did not look through their
spectacles. With infinite pains you have turned away your eyes from the
external light. It is with relief, not regret, that you discover that
the sun shines, and that the world is beautiful without the help of
these optical devices which you had been taught to regard as essential.
This, of course, is vehemently denied by all orthodox persons; and the
hesitation with which the heterodox impugn their assumption seems to
testify to its correctness. "After all," the believer may say, with much
appearance of truth, "you don't really believe that I can walk by
myself, if you are so tender of removing my crutches." The taunt is fair
enough, and should be fairly met. Cynicism and infidelity are supposed
to be inseparably connected; it is assumed that nobody can attack the
orthodox creed unless he is incapable of sympathizing with the noblest
emotions of our nature. The adversary on purely intellectual grounds
would be awed into silence by its moral beauty, unless he were deficient
in reverence, purity, and love. It must therefore be said, distinctly,
although it cannot be argued at length, that this ground also appears to
me to be utterly untenable. I deny that it is impossible to speak the
truth without implying a falsehood; and I deny equally that it is
impossible to speak the truth without drying up the sources of our
holiest feelings. Those who maintain the affirmative of those
propositions appear to me to be the worst of sceptics, and they would
certainly reduce us to the most lamentable of dilemmas. If we cannot
develop our intellects but at the price of our moral nature, the case is
truly hard. Some such conclusion is hinted by Roman Catholics, but I do
not understand how any one raised under Protestant teaching should
regard it as any thing but cowardly and false. Let me endeavor in the
briefest possible compass to say why, as a matter of fact, the dilemma
seems to me to be illusory. What is it that Christian theology can now
do for us; and in what way does it differ from the teaching of free
thought?
The world, so far as our vision extends, is full of evil. Life is a sore
burden to many, and a scene of unmixed happiness to none. It is useless
to inquire whether on the whole the good or the evil is the more
abundant, or to decide whether to make such an inquiry be any thing else
than to ask whether the world has been, on the whole, arranged to suit
our tastes. The problem thus presented is utterly inscrutable on every
hypothesis. Theology is as impotent in presence of it as science.
Science, indeed, withdraws at once from such questions; whilst theology
asks us to believe that this "sorry scheme of things" is the work of
omnipotence guided by infinite benevolence. This certainly makes the
matter no clearer, if it does not raise additional difficulties; and,
accordingly, we are told that the existence of evil is a mystery. In any
case, we are brought to a stand: and the only moral which either science
or theology can give is that we should make the best of our position.
Theology, however, though it cannot explain, or can only give verbal
explanations, can offer a consolation. This world, we are told, is not
all; there is a beyond and a hereafter; we may hope for an eternal life
under conditions utterly inconceivable, though popular theology has made
a good many attempts to conceive them. If it were further asserted that
this existence would be one of unmixed happiness, there would be at
least a show of compensation. But, of course, that is what no theologian
can venture to say. It is needless to call the Puritan divine, with his
babes of a span long now lying in hell, or that Romanist priest who
revels in describing the most fiendish torture inflicted upon children
by the merciful Creator who made them and exposed them to evil, or any
other of the wild and hideous phantasms that have been evoked by the
imagination of mankind running riot in the world of arbitrary figments.
Nor need we dwell upon the fact, that where theology is really vigorous
it produces such nightmares by an inevitable law; inasmuch as the next
world can be nothing but the intensified reflection of this. It is
enough to say that, if the revelation of a future state be really the
great claim of Christianity upon our attentions, the use which it has
made of that state has been one main cause of its decay. "St. Lewis the
king, having sent Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, on an embassy, the bishop met
a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantastic, and melancholic; with fire in
one hand and water in the other. He asked what those symbols meant. She
answered, 'My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water
to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the
incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God.'" "The
woman," adds Jeremy Taylor, "began at the wrong end." Is that so clear?
The attempts of priests to make use of the keys of heaven and hell
brought about the moral revolt of the Reformation; and, at the present
day, the disgust excited by the doctrine of everlasting damnation is
amongst the strongest motives to popular infidelity; all able apologists
feel the strain. Some reasoners quibble about everlasting and eternal;
and the great Catholic logician "submits the whole subject to the
theological school," a process which I do not quite understand, though I
assume it to be consolatory. The doctrine, in short, can hardly be made
tangible without shocking men's consciences and understandings. It
ought, it may be, to be attractive, but when firmly grasped, it becomes
incredible and revolting.
The difficulty is evaded in two ways. Some amiable and heterodox sects
retain heaven and abolish hell. A kingdom in the clouds may, of course,
be portioned off according to pleasure. The doctrine, however, is
interesting in an intellectual point of view only as illustrating in the
naïvest fashion the common fallacy of confounding our wishes with our
beliefs. The argument that because evil and good are mixed wherever we
can observe, therefore there is elsewhere unmixed good, does not obey
any recognized canons of induction. It would certainly be pleasant to
believe that everybody was going to be happy forever, but whether such a
belief would be favorable to that stern sense of evil which should fit
us to fight the hard battle of this life is a question too easily
answered. Thinkers of a high order do not have recourse to these simple
devices. They retain the doctrine as a protest against materialism, but
purposely retain it in the vaguest possible shape. They say that this
life is not all; if it were all, they argue, we should be rightly ruled
by our stomachs; but they scrupulously decline to give form and
substance to their anticipations. We must, they think, have avowedly a
heavenly background to the world, but our gaze should be restricted
habitually within the visible horizon. The future life is to tinge the
general atmosphere, but not to be offered as a definite goal of action
or a distinct object of contemplation.
The persons against whom, so far as I know, the charge of materialism
can be brought with the greatest plausibility at the present day are
those who still force themselves to bow before the most grossly material
symbols, and give a physical interpretation to the articles of her
creed. A man who proposes to look for God in this miserable world and
finds Him visiting the diseased imagination of a sickly nun, may perhaps
be in some sense called a materialist, and there is more materialism of
this variety in popular sentimentalisms about the "blood of Jesus" than
in all the writings of the profane men of science. But in a
philosophical sense the charge rests on a pure misunderstanding.
The man of science or, in other words, the man who most rigidly confines
his imagination within the bounds of the knowable, is every whit as
ready to protest against "materialism" as his antagonist. Those who
distinguish man into two parts, and give the higher qualities to the
soul and the sensual to the body, assume that all who reject their
distinction abolish the soul, and with it abolish all that is not
sensual. Yet every genuine scientific thinker believes in the existence
of love and reverence as he believes in any other facts, and is likely
to set just as high a value upon them as his opponent. He believes
equally with his opponent, that to cultivate the higher emotions, man
must habitually attach himself to objects outside the narrow sphere of
his own personal experience. The difference is that whereas one set of
thinkers would tell us to fix our affections on a state entirely
disparate from that in which we are actually placed, the other would
concentrate them upon objects which form part of the series of events
amongst which we are moving. Which is the more likely to stimulate our
best feelings? We must reply by asking whether the vastness or the
distinctness of a prospect has the greater effect upon the imagination.
Does a man take the greater interest in a future which he can definitely
interpret to himself, or upon one which is admittedly so inconceivable
that it is wrong to dwell upon it, but which allows of indefinite
expansion? Putting aside our own personal interest, do we care more for
the fate of our grandchildren whom we shall never see, or for the
condition of spiritual beings the conditions of whose existence are
utterly unintelligible to us? If sacrifice of our lower pleasures be
demanded, should we be more willing to make them in order that a coming
generation may be emancipated from war and pauperism, or in order that
some indefinite and indefinable change may be worked in a world utterly
inscrutable to our imaginations? The man who has learned to transfer his
aspirations from the next world to this, to look forward to the
diminution of disease and vice here, rather than to the annihilation of
all physical conditions, has, it is hardly rash to assert, gained more
in the distinctness of his aims than he has lost (if, indeed, he has
lost any thing) in their elevation.
Were it necessary to hunt out every possible combination of opinion, I
should have to inquire whether the doctrine of another world might not
be understood in such a sense as to involve no distortion of our views.
The future world may be so arranged that the effect of the two sets of
motives upon our minds may be always coincident. Our interest in our
descendants might be strengthened without being distracted by a belief
in our own future existence. Of such a theory I have now only space to
say that it is not that which really occurs in practice: and that the
instincts which make us cling to a vivid belief in the future always
spring from a vehement revolt against the present. Meanwhile, however,
the answers generally given to sceptics are apparently contradictory. To
limit our hopes to this world, it is sometimes said, is to encourage
mere grovelling materialism; in the same breath it is added that to ask
for an interest in the fate of our fellow-creatures here, instead of
ourselves hereafter, is to make excessive demands upon human
selfishness. The doctrine it seems is at once too elevated and too
grovelling.