Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that show any fineness
and generosity of spirit, have this tendency to become as it were the
statement of an anonymous God. Everything is said that a religious
writer would say--except that God is not named. Religious metaphors
abound. It is as if they accepted the living body of religion but denied
the bones that held it together--as they might deny the bones of a
friend. It is true, they would admit, the body moves in a way that
implies bones in its every movement, but--WE HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE
BONES.
The disputes in theory--I do not say the difference in reality--between
the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic--becomes at times almost
as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to students of physics,
whether the scientific “ether” is real or a formula. Every material
phenomenon is consonant with and helps to define this ether, which
permeates and sustains and is all things, which nevertheless is
perceptible to no sense, which is reached only by an intellectual
process. Most minds are disposed to treat this ether as a reality. But
the acutely critical mind insists that what is only so attainable by
inference is not real; it is no more than “a formula that satisfies all
phenomena.”
But if it comes to that, am I anything more than the formula that
satisfies all my forms of consciousness?
Intellectually there is hardly anything more than a certain will to
believe, to divide the religious man who knows God to be utterly real,
from the man who says that God is merely a formula to satisfy moral and
spiritual phenomena. The former has encountered him, the other has as
yet felt only unassigned impulses. One says God’s will is so; the other
that Right is so. One says God moves me to do this or that; the other
the Good Will in me which I share with you and all well-disposed men,
moves me to do this or that. But the former makes an exterior reference
and escapes a risk of self-righteousness.
I have recently been reading a book by Mr. Joseph McCabe called “The
Tyranny of Shams,” in which he displays very typically this curious
tendency to a sort of religion with God “blacked out.” His is an
extremely interesting case. He is a writer who was formerly a Roman
Catholic priest, and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a
resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff’s, to deny that
anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim
in life except happiness, or any guide but “science.” But--and here
immediately he turns east again--he is careful not to say “individual
happiness.” And he says “Pleasure is, as Epicureans insisted, only
a part of a large ideal of happiness.” So he lets the happiness of
devotion and sacrifice creep in. So he opens indefinite possibilities of
getting away from any merely materialistic rule of life. And he writes:
“In every civilised nation the mass of the people are inert and
indifferent. Some even make a pretence of justifying their inertness.
Why, they ask, should we stir at all? Is there such a thing as a duty to
improve the earth? What is the meaning or purpose of life? Or has it a
purpose?
“One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece of
controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness. People tell you
that the conflict of science and religion--it would be better to say,
the conflict of modern culture and ancient traditions--has robbed life
of its plain significance. The men who, like Tolstoi, seriously urge
this point fail to appreciate the modern outlook on life. Certainly
modern culture--science, history, philosophy, and art--finds no purpose
in life: that is to say, no purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered
by man. A great chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine ‘a
series of lucky accidents’--the chance blowing by the wind of certain
chemicals into pools on the primitive earth--accounting for the first
appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the influences
which have lifted those early germs to the level of conscious beings as
a similar series of lucky accidents.
“But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us. If there
is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the development
of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose its own purpose
and set up its own goal; and the most elementary sense of order will
teach us that this choice must be social, not merely individual. In
whatever measure ill-controlled individuals may yield to personal
impulses or attractions, the aim of the race must be a collective aim. I
do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual,
but an adjustment--as genial and generous as possible--of individual
variations for common good. Otherwise life becomes discordant and
futile, and the pain and waste react on each individual. So we raise
again, in the twentieth century, the old question of ‘the greatest
good,’ which men discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves
of Athens, in the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and
the Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar
Khayyam frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages and
the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici.”
And again:
“The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve life, to bring
happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above
all the mists of the day. Through the ruins of creeds and philosophies,
which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our steps toward that
height--just as the Athenians did two thousand years ago. It rests on
no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no disputable tradition--nothing that
scepticism can corrode or advancing knowledge undermine. Its foundations
are the fundamental and unchanging impulses of our nature.”
And again:
“The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our time
is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome of
that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the general
social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor altruistic.
It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an inspiration in the
finer sentiments of our generation, but the glow which chiefly illumines
it is the glow of the great vision of a happier earth. It speaks of
the claims of truth and justice, and assails untruth and injustice,
for these are elemental principles of social life; but it appeals
more confidently to the warmer sympathy which is linking the scattered
children of the race, and it urges all to co-operate in the restriction
of suffering and the creation of happiness. The advance guard of the
race, the men and women in whom mental alertness is associated with fine
feeling, cry that they have reached Pisgah’s slope and in increasing
numbers men and women are pressing on to see if it be really the
Promised Land.”
“Pisgah--the Promised Land!” Mr. McCabe in that passage sounds as if he
were half-way to “Oh! Beulah Land!” and the tambourine.
That “larger spirit,” we maintain, is God; those “impulses” are the
power of God, and Mr. McCabe serves a Master he denies. He has but to
realise fully that God is not necessarily the Triune God of the Catholic
Church, and banish his intense suspicion that he may yet be lured
back to that altar he abandoned, he has but to look up from that
preoccupation, and immediately he will begin to realise the presence of
Divinity.