consisted in a psychological analysis of the human consciousness, which
led him to believe, that spiritual truth is revealed to the reason, or
intuitional and impersonal power, apart from the limitations of sense, or
of the ordinary critical faculties; that the true, the beautiful, and the
good, are perceived by it in their absolute, unlimited essence; and that
the revelation of the infinite is the basis of all intellectual truth, of
all moral obligation, and offers the clue to the criticism of religion,
the solution of the problems of history, and the construction of a
philosophy of the universe. Its chief effect on literature, the permanent
contribution which it has made to human improvement, is to encourage the
historic study of every branch of phenomena, and especially to exemplify
it in the history of thought. Asserting that human society is a gradual
progress of development and of improvement, it regards every age as
manifesting some phase of truth, or of error, and contributing its portion
of knowledge to the student. Humanity is regarded as a divine revelation:
its social and intellectual changes as manifestations of the Eternal.
From this account, brief though it be, the relation will be evident which
such a philosophy and the historic method of eclectic discovery would have
towards religion.
As a system of psychology it is potent, as a means of reasserting the
dignity of human nature against the material and selfish ethics of a
preceding age, and of reconstructing the basis of ethics and natural
religion: but as an ontology, it is in danger of unconscious pantheism; of
identifying God with the universe, and regarding Him merely as a name to
describe a process, instead of a person. As a philosophy of humanity, it
identifies the natural revelation in history with the supernatural; finds
in the psychological faculty of intuition, not merely the basis for, but
the explanation of, the phenomenon of inspiration;(883) and in its view of
religion is essentially antidogmatic, regarding religion as imperfect and
progressive; the idea universal, the symbol transient; and allows the
psychological truthfulness of all creeds; and regards Christianity as only
the most refined species of them, as one of the transient forms that the
religious sentiment has adopted, and as destined to give place to
philosophy; beneficial to humanity, but not constituting it.
This philosophy therefore, though containing so many noble elements, ended
in the view which we have already seen to exist in the Gnostic and German
rationalism, that Christianity was not to be final, the one solitary and
final religious utterance of God to man.(884)
The three schools illustrate the principal tendencies in which unbelief
manifested itself in France previous to the establishment of the
empire;(885) and show clearly the intimate relation of particular kinds of
sceptical views to particular systems of metaphysical philosophy.(886)
In the latter years of Napoleon I. the struggle first commenced between
the Voltairian party and the church; a middle course being taken by the
eclectics. The constitutional tendency of this last school gave them the
moral victory during the restoration, over the democratic tendency of the
one and the reactionist of the other. After the revolution of 1830, the
socialist struggle was superadded; which, when mixed with the old
ideology, produced Positivism.
The catholic church had sought to restore faith in Christianity, partly by
the establishment of _Conférences_,(887) lectures to reply to the systems
now described; and partly by trying to satisfy the reason by establishing
a rival philosophy, and stating philosophically the grounds of faith. (45)
This philosophy, though noble in its aim, and taught by many pious minds,
is visionary. It was based on the principle first evolved by Huet; the
weakness of human reason, and the supposed necessity of submission to
authority. In De Maistre, its founder, who carried out in philosophy what
Chateaubriand did in literature, it was the suggestion of an abject
submission to the papacy, as the living authority on earth; accompanied by
a sceptical disbelief of the value of inductive science. It has expressed
itself in different forms; but in all it has been an attempt to find a
solution for difficulties by means of religion instead of philosophy; an
attempt analogous to that in other lands, not merely to restrain the human
reason in matters of religion, but to inculcate distrust of it; falling
into the very error which Plato made his master describe, of those who,
baffled in the search for truth, blame not their own unskilfulness, but
reason itself; and pass the rest of their lives in contempt of it; and
thus are deprived of the knowledge that they seek.
The history of thought in France, thus studied, exhibits a general
resemblance to that of Germany in its forms and tendency. In both alike
there has been a contest, between the school which seeks to absorb
Christianity in philosophy, and that which extinguishes philosophy by
Christianity. There is an absence indeed in France of the spiritual return
to a living Christian faith, the union of science and piety, which is
observable in the latter country. But within the sphere of natural
religion, in reference to the belief in a spiritual world, an advance is
perceptible, if the present condition of France be measured against that
which was observable at the period when the philosophic unbelief of the
last century predominated.
Since the re-establishment of the empire, some of the forms of philosophy
which have been described have almost disappeared. The socialist
philosophy has become extinct as a direct movement; the eclectic school
has gradually passed from philosophy to literature; and the chief
tendencies, so far as mere materialism does not, as in most reactions,
extinguish thought, are toward a modification of eclecticism on the one
hand, and to ultramontism on the other.(888)
The difference of this new eclecticism from the former kind seen in
Cousin, lies in the fact that while that was chiefly derived from
Schelling’s philosophy, this is an offshoot from Hegel. The one considered
that the mind, by its intuitions, can find absolute truth, and by the
light of these absolute ideas can criticise history, and prejudge the end
toward which society is moving. This denies the possibility of attaining
absolute truth. All being is a state of flux: all knowledge is relative to
its age. Philosophy expires in historical criticism; in the history of the
soul of man under its various manifestations. It rests in what is; it
judges only from fact. The absolute is displaced by the relative; being by
becoming.(889) Though not positivism in its aspects, this system is so in
its scientific results.(890)
The unbelief is critical, not aggressive. The grand idea of an historical
progress, of tracing especially the historic growth of ideas, of culture,
of the great unfolding of humanity, presides over religious speculations,
and lends its fascinating power and its danger. The necessity is
recognised for solving the nature of the religious consciousness, and
satisfying its wants; but the remedy is sought in other means than in
Christianity. While this is the condition of the philosophy just
described, positivism, so far as it prevails, is wholly antichristian, and
regards religion as the product of an unscientific age, for which a belief
in nature’s laws and science is a sufficient substitute. Christianity,
though the ripest of religious forms, is only symbolical of a higher truth
towards which humanity is tending.
We may select the name of a writer who stands pre-eminent in critical
investigations connected with religion, as the best representative of the
tone assumed in reference to the Christian faith by the most highly
educated younger spirits of the French nation, of whose literature he is
one of the brightest living ornaments,—Ernest Renan.(891) Exhibiting a
mind of the rarest delicacy, and bearing traces of the collective
cultivation which arises from detailed acquaintance with most varied
branches of human culture, he has brought his vast acquaintance with the
Semitic tongues to bear on the historical criticism of portions of the
Hebrew literature; and has sketched with the hand of a master the great
passages in the history of religion,—the symbolism of mythology; the
monotheistic systems, Jewish, Christian, and Mahometan; the four chief
phases of Christianity, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Socinian, the
rationalist;(892) and has speculated on the future religious tendencies of
the age, in essays, which those who feel most deeply pained with the views
presented must acknowledge to be marked by rare power and freshness.
Possessing a delicate appreciation of the past, and a cheerful confidence
in the future; loving the advance of the knowledge of physical nature, yet
protesting against the tendency to materialism; dreading the democracy of
opinion, which threatens to suppress independence of inquiry by a power
analogous to centralization in the state; the artist no less than the
critic, imaginative as well as reflective, he may be studied as in all
respects the contrast to the French philosopher of the last century, and
as the type of the cultivated minds on whom Christianity has made its
impression. His view of philosophy is the one recently explained: his view
of religion and of Christianity, so far as we can gather it indirectly
from his criticisms, seems to mark a belief in the religious sentiment as
a subjective feeling, rather than in the reality of its external object of
worship. Its objective side seems to him to be a symbolism, and Christian
dogma to be an obsolete form of religious philosophy; inspiration a form
of natural consciousness; and even its highest expression to be but the
poetry, the art, of the imaginative faculties. There is audible at times
an undertone of despondency, as the sigh of one who has searched for truth
and not found it;(893) and who, in despair of discovering it on the
intellectual side, has taken refuge in the moral. Religion, vain
speculatively, is resolved by him into ethics. Faith expires in
conscience; dogma in morality. And this interesting writer closes his
speculations with the regret, that he feels himself isolated from those
Christian saints whose characters he regards as the purest in the
world.(894) Such may probably be regarded as the type of thought of the
most educated thinkers of France; a feeling of partial belief, partial
doubt; a keen appreciation of the beauty of the character of the great
Founder of Christianity, and of the type of Christian morality, yet mixed
with an entire distrust in the reality of all doctrines respecting the
object of faith, from belief in which alone, as we contend, this morality
is the product.
Doubts always suggest replies; and there are not wanting minds in the
Protestant church of France (46) that fully appreciate the doubts of
educated minds such as these, and try to meet them by a more persuasive
method than that by which the Catholic school sought to meet the doubters
of the earlier part of the century. By the improper concessions however
which they have made to save the vital part of religion, they have
themselves incurred the charge of sharing the rationalism of the country
with whose literature they are acquainted. Assuming a position somewhat
like Schleiermacher’s, they are careful to distinguish between critical
theology and doctrinal, and endeavour to propagate the latter rather than
the former. Yet in the branch of doctrinal theology, it must be feared
that they have either conceded some of the mysteries of Christianity as
obsolete, or at least have improperly concealed them as likely to repel
doubters. Though we must indeed be careful wisely to divide the word of
life, and not to quench the quivering flame of faith by creating an
unnecessary repugnance; yet, if Christianity be a supernatural revelation
from God, our plain course is to present the truth as it is in Jesus,
unmutilated in the mystery of its difficulties, and leave the result with
God.
There is one feature however, in which these writers are a pattern worthy
of imitation by all Christian apologists. They preach to doubters not
Christian dogmas, but Christ. If the doubters can be brought to appreciate
Christ; to meditate on his life; to think of him as one who tasted of
human suffering, and knew the poignancy of human temptation; and whose
heart of tender pity was ever open to the petition of the needy; they will
first admire, then believe, then trust: and when they have learned to love
him as a Man of pity, it is to be hoped that they may be brought, by the
drawings of the Holy Spirit, to worship and adore him as a God of love.
Beginning, not with history, but with feeling; starting with a religion
based on the intuitive consciousness of needing Divine help; we may hope
to prepare them for receiving the historic testimony which tells of the
Divine plan for human redemption: leading them from the sense of sin to
Him who saves from sin; from the inward to the outward; from Christ to
Christianity; from Christian doctrine to the perfectness of Christian
faith.
LECTURE VIII. FREE THOUGHT IN ENGLAND IN THE PRESENT CENTURY; SUMMARY OF
THE COURSE OF LECTURES; INFERENCES IN REFERENCE TO PRESENT DANGERS AND
DUTIES.
ECCLES. xii, 13.
_Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and
keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man._
In the last lecture we brought the history of unbelief on the continent
down to the present time. In this, the concluding one of the series, we
shall complete the history of it in our own country or language during
this century; and afterwards deduce the moral of our whole historical
sketch, and suggest practical inferences.
In the account of unbelief in England, given in a previous lecture,(895)
we hardly entered upon the present century, except so far as to observe
the influence of the philosophy of the last on works of literature, such
as those of Shelley; or on political speculations, such as those of Owen.
Yet even here we were already made to feel the presence of the new
influences, which have completely altered the tone of unbelief. Even
Shelley’s later works, though marked by the outbursts of bitter passion
against religion, contain more of the spiritual perception which is the
characteristic of present thought:(896) and the oblivion into which Owen’s
system soon fell, save as it has been resuscitated in moments of political
disaffection, together with its failure to leave a permanent impression,
like the socialist systems of France, arose from the circumstance that the
one-sided survey of man’s nature, on which it was based, could not deceive
an age which was characterised by an increasing depth in its moral
perceptions.
The unbelief of the present day differs from that of the last century in
tone and character; and in many respects shares the traits already noticed
in the modern intellectualism of Germany, and the eclecticism of France.
It is not disgraced by ribaldry; hardly at all by political agitation
against the religion which it disbelieves: it is marked by a show of
fairness, and professes a wish not to ignore facts, nor to leave them
unexplained. Conceding the existence of spiritual and religious elements
in human nature, it admits that their subjective existence as facts of
consciousness, no less than their objective expression in the history of
religion, demands explanation, and cannot be hastily set aside, as was
thought in the last century in France, by the vulgar theory that the one
is factitious, and the other the result of priestly contrivance. The
writers are men whose characters and lives forbid the idea that their
unbelief is intended as an excuse for licentiousness. Denying revealed
religion, they cling the more tenaciously to the moral instincts: their
tone is one of earnestness; their inquiries are marked by a profound
conviction of the possibility of finding truth: not content with
destroying, their aim is to reconstruct. Their opinions are variously
manifested. Some of them appear in treatises of philosophy; others
insinuate themselves indirectly in literature: some of them relate to
Christian doctrines; others to the criticism of scripture documents: but
in all cases their authors either leave a residuum which they profess will
satisfy the longings of human nature, or confess with deep pain that their
conclusions are in direct conflict with human aspirations; and, instead of
revelling in the ruin which they have made, deplore with a tone of sadness
the impossibility of solving the great enigma.
It is clear that writers like these offer a wholly different appearance
from those of the last century. The deeper appreciation manifested by them
of the systems which they disbelieve, and the more delicate learning of
which they are able to avail themselves, constitute features formerly
lacking in the works of even the most serious-minded deists,(897) and
require a difference in the spirit, if not in the mode, in which
Christians must seek to refute them.
The solution of this remarkable phenomenon is to be found in the universal
change which has passed over every department of mental activity in
England in the present century. The peculiar feature of it may be
described by the word _spirituality_, if that word be used to imply, in
contrast to the utilitarian and materialist tendencies of the last
century, the consciousness in ourselves, and appreciation in others, of
the operation of the human spirit, its rights, its powers, and its
effects. This conviction stimulates in one the vivid consciousness of duty
and moral earnestness; in another it hallows human labour, and throws a
blessedness around the struggles of industry; in another it kindles the
inspiration of art, breaking up conventionalities of style, or expresses
itself in poetry, in soliloquies on the inner feelings or in meditations
on life, as a set of problems to be explained by the heart. Elsewhere it
lifts the man of science above the grovelling idea that discoveries must
be sought solely for the purpose of utility. Again, transferring its
perception of the operation of spirit to the world of nature, it not
unfrequently attributes a soul thereto, and induces a subtle pantheism.
Sometimes too by a singular reaction it has a tendency, by the moral
earnestness which it stimulates, to depress intellectual speculation, and
to wear the appearance of fostering the utilitarianism which it combats.
Such is the central principle which characterises our literature, and
which, through the diffusion of reading, has moulded the public judgment,
and, operating in every department of educated thought, has even altered
the form in which unbelief expresses itself.
Probably the successive steps of the growth of this subjective tendency in
literature might admit of easy statement. The meditative school of poetry,
which flourished early in the century(898) among a few refined minds at
the English lakes; which loved to ponder mystically on nature or on the
spiritual world, or to catch the thought excited in the mind by nature,
and follow the series of thoughts which the law of mental association
suggested,(899) was one means of creating a subjective and spiritual taste
among the youth of the generation which succeeded.
Another cause was found in the philosophy which arose. The years following
the general declaration of peace, while the public attention was directed
to the political reforms which were consummated in the Reform act, were
marked by the thorough investigation of the first principles of every
branch of knowledge. Two minds of that period have, more than any other,
affected the succeeding generation; the one a utilitarian philosopher, the
other an intuitional.
Both alike carried out the system which Descartes and Bacon had
inaugurated, of finding the standard of truth in the analysis of the
powers of the human understanding. But Bentham criticised to destroy the
past; Coleridge to rebuild it. The one asked, Is a doctrine true? The
other asked, what men had meant by it who had thought it so?(900) The one
overlooked the truth previously known; the other too boldly strove to
rebuild it from his own consciousness, after surrendering the old proofs
of it. The one, with the practical spirit of the Englishman, looked upon
an opposing opinion only as an object suited for attack; the other, with a
spirit caught from Germany, felt that there was some truth everywhere
latent. But both were reformers; both stimulated the revolt against the
cold spirit of the last century; both contributed to create, the one
indirectly, the other intentionally, a subjective spirit by their
psychological analysis.
Even movements which at first sight seem most alien to this spirit in
character, have really been affected unconsciously by it.(901) The
ecclesiastical reaction which sprang up about a quarter of a century ago,
though seemingly most objective in its nature, witnessed not less than the
very opposite, or rationalistic tendency, to the presence of this
influence. For both alike were founded on the idea that religion lacked a
philosophical groundwork: both sought a new ground of faith different from
that of the last century; the one in those utterances of consciousness
which created a reverence for historic tradition; the other in those
intuitions which were supposed to rise above scripture and tradition, and
to form the basis and measure of both.
The causes just named in literature and philosophy respectively, are some
of those which have contributed to create or to foster the change in the
character of the literature, and in the spirit of the age, which has
produced the alteration of tone which exists in the modern sceptical
literature.
In passing from these remarks on the peculiarly subjective tone of modern
unbelief, and the literary influences which have produced the general
change in the public taste, of which it is only one example, to an
enumeration of the authors who have given expression to doubt, and of the
specific forms of doubt now existing, we encounter a difficulty of
classification.
The most obvious arrangement would be to place the writers in groups,
according as they manifest a tendency toward atheism, pantheism, deism, or
rationalism,(902) respectively; but the mode which more nearly accords
with our general purpose would be to adopt a philosophical rather than a
theological classification, and arrange them according to the variety in
the tests of truth employed by them, and the sources from which their
arguments start, rather than the conclusions at which they arrive. Perhaps
the advantage of both plans will be in a great degree combined, if we
classify them according to the branch of science, physical, mental, or
critical, from which the doubts take their rise.
We shall commence with those writers who make sensation to be the last
appeal in belief, or whose doubts arise either from the methods or the
results of physical science. This class of opinions varies from positive
disbelief of the supernatural, generated by the fixed belief in the
stability of nature and disbelief of miraculous interference, to merely
isolated objections suggested by the conflict between the discoveries of
natural science and the statements of holy scripture.
The name which most fitly describes the extreme form of unbelief is
Positivism.(903) This system of philosophy, already stated to have been
invented by Comte, is silent about the existence of a Deity. It inculcates
the belief in general laws, and acknowledges the order in Nature, which we
are accustomed to regard as the result of mind; but declines to argue to
the existence of a designing mind, where the evidence cannot be verified
by proof referable to sensation. Nature’s laws are in its view the only
Providence; obedience to them the only piety. A few minds may be found,
which not only accept the positive philosophy, but even receive the
religion taught in the positivist catechism.(904) Unable to satisfy the
longings of their heart by this system of Cosmism, they receive the
extravagant idea of the worship of humanity, which Comte invented in his
later days.