It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to drape
about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God, the
honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth bare, is
constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness. It will be
interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme instability of
absolute negation.
Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who was
a very typical antagonist of all religion. He died only the other day.
He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man almost of the rank
and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin. A decade or more ago he wrote
a book called “The Nature of Man,” in which he set out very plainly a
number of illuminating facts about life. They are facts so illuminating
that presently, in our discussion of sin, they will be referred to
again. But it is not Professor Metchnikoff’s intention to provide
material for a religious discussion. He sets out his facts in order to
overthrow theology as he conceives it. The remarkable thing about his
book, the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no
inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive theology
as he conceives it. The development of his science has destroyed that
right.
He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our ideas
of individuality and species, and how the import of theology is modified
through these changes. When he comes from his own world of modern
biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time. He attacks
religion as he understood it when first he fell out with it fifty years
or more ago.
Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes that
biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the general
scheme and method of our thinking.
The influence of biology upon thought in general consists essentially
in diminishing the importance of the individual and developing the
realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of super-individual, a
modifying and immortal super-individual, maintaining itself against the
outer universe by the birth and death of its constituent individuals.
Natural History, which began by putting individuals into species as if
the latter were mere classificatory divisions, has come to see that
the species has its adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding
in interest and importance the individual adventure. “The Origin of
Species” was for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.
The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be
stated plainly and compactly as follows. A little while ago we current
individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us distributed between
two parents, then between four grandparents, and so on backward, we are
temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an ancestral diffusion; we
stand our trial, and presently our individuality is dispersed and
mixed again with other individualities in an uncertain multitude of
descendants. But the species is not like this; it goes on steadily from
newness to newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual
life is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing
adventure of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble of
life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is still
very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions under
which it lives. The conflict of life is a continual pursuit of
adjustment, and the “ills of life,” of the individual life that is,
are due to its “disharmonies.” Man, acutely aware of himself as an
individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species, finds life
jangling and distressful, finds death frustration. He fails and falls as
a person in what may be the success and triumph of his kind. He does
not apprehend the struggle or the nature of victory, but only his own
gravitation to death and personal extinction.
Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-religious
because to him as to so many Europeans religion is confused with
priest-craft and dogmas, is associated with disagreeable early
impressions of irrational repression and misguidance. How completely he
misconceives the quality of religion, how completely he sees it as an
individual’s affair, his own words may witness:
“Religion is still occupied with the problem of death. The solutions
which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as satisfactory. A future
life has no single argument to support it, and the non-existence of life
after death is in consonance with the whole range of human knowledge. On
the other hand, resignation as preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy
humanity, which has a longing for life, and is overcome by the thought
of the inevitability of death.”
Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death, and by
a future life the prolongation of individuality. But Buddhism does
not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with that, and modern
religious developments are certainly not under that preoccupation with
the narrower self. Buddhism indeed so far from “preaching resignation”
to death, seeks as its greater good a death so complete as to be
absolute release from the individual’s burthen of KARMA. Buddhism seeks
an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY. The deeper one pursues religious
thought the more nearly it approximates to a search for escape from the
self-centred life and over-individuation, and the more it diverges from
Professor Metchnikoff’s assertion of its aims. Salvation is indeed to
lose one’s self. But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied
that this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the
religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if
they were the antithesis of the religious life. His book, when it is
analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape from the
painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is the ultimate
of religion.
At times, indeed, he seems almost wilfully blind to the true solution
round and about which his writing goes. He suggests as his most hopeful
satisfaction for the cravings of the human heart, such a scientific
prolongation of life that the instinct for self-preservation will be at
last extinct. If that is not the very “resignation” he imputes to the
Buddhist I do not know what it is. He believes that an individual which
has lived fully and completely may at last welcome death with the same
instinctive readiness as, in the days of its strength, it shows for the
embraces of its mate. We are to be glutted by living to six score and
ten. We are to rise from the table at last as gladly as we sat down. We
shall go to death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed. Men
are to have a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their
prime, and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a
period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and twenty or
thereabouts) and public service!
(But why, one asks, public service? Why not book-collecting or the
simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists? Metchnikoff
never faces that question. And again, what of the man who is challenged
to die for right at the age of thirty? What does the prolongation
of life do for him? And where are the consolations for accidental
misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost limb?)
But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure
religiosity. The prolongation of life gives place to sheer
self-sacrifice as the fundamental “remedy.” And indeed what other remedy
has ever been conceived for the general evil of life?
“On the other hand,” he writes, “the knowledge that the goal of human
life can be attained only by the development of a high degree of
solidarity amongst men will restrain actual egotism. The mere fact that
the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon (Ecelesiastes
ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will lessen luxury and
the evil that comes from luxury. Conviction that science alone is able
to redress the disharmonies of the human constitution will lead directly
to the improvement of education and to the solidarity of mankind.
* Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine
with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let
thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no
ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all
the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee
under the sun, all the days of thy vanity for that is thy
portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest
under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it
with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor
knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
“In progress towards the goal, nature will have to be consulted
continuously. Already, in the case of the ephemerids, nature has
produced a complete cycle of normal life ending in natural death. In
the problem of his own fate, man must not be content with the gifts of
nature; he must direct them by his own efforts. Just as he has been able
to modify the nature of animals and plants, man must attempt to modify
his own constitution, so as to readjust its disharmonies. . . .
“To modify the human constitution, it will be necessary first, to frame
the ideal, and thereafter to set to work with all the resources of
science.
“If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men in a kind of religion
of the future, this ideal must be founded on scientific principles. And
if it be true, as has been asserted so often, that man can live by faith
alone, the faith must be in the power of science.”
Now this, after all the flat repudiations that have preceded it of
“religion” and “philosophy” as remedies for human ills, is nothing less
than the fundamental proposition of the religious life translated into
terms of materialistic science, the proposition that damnation is really
over-individuation and that salvation is escape from self into the
larger being of life. . . .
What can this “religion of the future” be but that devotion to the
racial adventure under the captaincy of God which we have already found,
like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed away the
confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion? By an inquiry setting
out from a purely religious starting-point we have already reached
conclusions identical with this ultimate refuge of an extreme
materialist.
This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as an altar to our God--an
altar rather indistinctly inscribed.