called Secularism,(905) is actively propagated among the lower orders.
Replacing the sensuous philosophy and political antipathies of Owen, it is
taught, unconnected with the political agitation which marked his views,
as a philosophy of life, and a substitute for religion. It asserts three
great principles:—first, that nature is the only subject of knowledge; the
existence of a personal God being regarded as uncertain: secondly, that
science is the only Providence: and thirdly, that the great business of
man is, as the name, secularism, implies, to attend to the affairs of the
present world, which is certain, rather than of a future, which is
uncertain. Not content however with this negative position, the writers of
this class, as was to be expected, have directed positive attacks against
the special doctrines of Christianity, and regard the Bible to be the
enemy of progress.(906)
It is impossible to estimate the extent to which these views are diffused.
The statistics of the sale of secularist tracts would doubtless give an
exaggerated idea of it. The high standard of morality advocated in them,
so likely to attract rather than repel, the clear writing, and the
agreement of the views with the experience afforded by the daily life of
working men, give them power among the lower orders. The absorbing
character of labour has a tendency, especially in an advanced state of
civilization, to depress the sense of the supernatural in man, and fix his
thoughts on the present world: and it is generally the sense of trouble
alone which can lift men out of themselves, and recall to their
remembrance the presence of a God on whom the sorrowing heart may lean for
help.
Opinions derived from positivism, or at least from physical science, enter
into other spheres of thought than those just named; and both affect
writers who hardly touch upon the subject of religion; and create
difficulties in the minds of Christians themselves, either in reference to
prime doctrines of religion, or the particular teaching on physical
questions implied in the sacred books.
The diffusion of the fundamental conception of the perpetuity of nature’s
laws, has a tendency to create in literature a mode of viewing the world
alien to the providential view of the divine government implied in
religion. The application of statistics in social philosophy for the
discovery of the general laws which regulate society and create
civilization, not unfrequently leaves an impression that man as well as
matter depends upon fixed laws; which is irreconcileable with belief in
human freedom or in divine interference, and sometimes causes religion to
be regarded as a conservative force, which in its nature is alien to
civilization.(907)
Nor is the danger confined to the various branches of secular literature:
the views of even religious men are not unfrequently modified by it, or
painful doubts are created where the head contradicts the heart. In
proportion as phenomena are shown not to depend on chance, the misgiving
is felt as to the reality of special providence and the value of prayer,
in reference to temporal affairs. The sphere for confiding petitions is
felt to be narrowed; and miracles, instead of becoming an evidence for
religion, become a difficulty. Even where fundamental difficulties, such
as these, do not sap the religious life, the belief that the inspiration
of the sacred books guarantees the truth of the views of physical science,
the cosmogony, physiology, ethnology, and chronology, contained therein,
creates a further body of difficulties,(908) less fundamental but more
painful, because founded on the apparent want of harmony of scripture with
the progressive discoveries of natural science.
While these are the species of temptations to unbelief which appertain to
one source of opinions, viz. that which relies upon sensation as the
ultimate test of truth; doubts similar in character, though different in
cause, manifest themselves in that portion of our literature which appeals
for its proof to the faculty of insight, and which believes in mental
sources of information which are independent of sensation. If the one
tends towards atheism, or to a deism in which the world is viewed as a
machine; the other tends towards pantheism or to naturalism, wherein no
opportunity for interposition by miraculous revelation is retained, but
the inner consciousness of man is regarded as able to create a religion.
The former class of views belongs to minds accustomed to experimental
science; this to those which are conversant with spiritual or æsthetic
subjects: the former expresses itself in the region of science, and tempts
men of thought; the latter expresses itself rather in the region of
literature, and tempts men of sentiment.
One writer, a prince in the region of letters,(909) may be adduced, many
of whose works imply, directly or indirectly, a mode of viewing the world
and society contrary to that which is taught in Christianity. He is the
highest type of the antagonist position which literature now assumes in
reference to the Christian faith, and which finds some parallel in the
contest which occurred in Julian’s time, and at the Renaissance.
Though possessing too much originality to borrow consciously from the
literature of Germany, yet it is easy to discover that the fire of his
imagination has been kindled in contact with the marvellous insight of
Goethe, the pathos of Jean Paul, and the faith in eternal truth which
marked Jacobi. Their rival rather than disciple, he hails the philosophy
of his own country as a first approximation to truth; but regards the
German mind as having seen more deeply than any other of modern times into
the mysteries of existence. Though not formal enough to throw his
philosophy into a system, he has left an impress on the English literature
of this century. In every branch of literature which he has surveyed, he
has made it his mission to expose the hollow formalism, the cold
materialism, which he considers that utilitarian philosophy had produced.
“Self in the sense of selfishness, and God as the artificial property of a
party;” these have been said to be the two faults which he sees in
politics, in science, in law, in literature, in religion: and, to oppose
this inrush of objective knowledge; to call man to a recognition of his
better self, to the unaltering spiritual laws stamped in the structure of
the human consciousness, and to God as the eternal, infinite Divinity,
whose presence fills creation; this is the mission which he has striven to
effect.
Yet can there be no doubt that the victory of this great truth is won at
the sacrifice of others; and that in the general tone of his writings, and
above all in his memoir of the doubter Sterling,(910) he occupies a
position opposed to the particular forms of religious truth taught by
Christianity, and one which a philosopher of tastes cognate to his own,
Coleridge, forming himself under the psychological rather than the
literary influence of German thought, strove to retain. In elevating the
doctrine of the revelation in the soul, he regards as unnecessary the
revelation in the book:(911) his teaching tends to inculcate a worship of
earnestness, and to ignore all consideration of the object toward which
the earnestness is directed. In asserting the reality of spiritual laws in
the soul, he has implied the veracity of all religions, caring only for
the subjective zeal of the believer, not for the objects of his
belief.(912) In opposing the mechanical view of the universe, he is so
overwhelmed with the mystery which belongs to it, that the soul recoils in
the hopelessness of speculation, to rest content with work rather than
belief. And his readers, attracted by his power of satire and depth of
insight, expressed in a style full of force by reason of its peculiarity,
return to their daily life after imbibing his teaching, excited to greater
earnestness and faithfulness, but filled, it is to be feared, with a
contempt for objective systems, for dogmatic truth, and for the Christian
creed.(913)
In the master the strong and deep sense of personality and of freedom
obliterates the tendency to absorb human individuality in the overpowering
mystery of the universe; but this tendency is developed in the early works
of an American writer,(914) who has drawn from some of the same sources as
the author just described, but who also owes much directly to him. In him
philosophy seems to degenerate into pantheism. Nature is a vast whole, in
which we are parts, vibrations of a chord, radiations of the eternal
light.(915) Starting from a unitarian point of view, Christianity appears
to be resolved into natural religion; and the historic view of
Christianity, and the habit of considering the revelation as something
long ago given, are regarded as being at the bottom of the decay of
religion. In his admiration of genius, he seems to imply an idolatry of
mere intellect; and developes that tendency which has been always
observable in pantheism to unite the worlds of good and evil, and teach
that evil is “good in the making.” The universe is God; evil and good are
equally essential parts of it.
This peculiar tendency to narrow the barrier between the two worlds is
observable, not merely in direct admissions of writers like the one just
adduced, but lurks as a peculiar danger in the modern literature of
fiction. The danger in fiction, as in all art, can arise only from the
character of the subject portrayed, or the manner employed in producing
the copy. In the present day the evil arises specially from the latter
cause. The subjective spirit, causing a perception of the duty of
exactness, has contributed to foster a realistic taste in art, which
requires such minuteness of treatment, that a work of fiction so
constructed, while preserving the freshness of nature, may violate moral
perspective, and leave the impression that good and evil are inseparably
intermixed in each character or in nature itself. The very photographic
exactness of the modern novel copies the features without selection or
discrimination, and presents each moral character as a mixed one, and
makes evil pass into good, and good into evil. Though it is quite true
that no character is unmixed, yet it ought not to be forgotten that the
evil is present as a disease, the good as the normal state. If approached
from the philosophical side, the presence of evil as well as its origin is
inexplicable, save by the pantheistic hypothesis; if approached however
from the moral, our own instincts tell us that it is diametrically opposed
to good; and it is important to be on our guard against the influence of
modern literature, which in any way implies the contrary.
We have hitherto exhibited the systems in the present day, which by their
influence, direct or indirect, assume a position antagonistic to
Christianity. Commencing with positivism, we explained the doubts which,
being built on a sensationalist basis, reject the possibility of
revelation; or, on an ideal, reject its necessity. We now proceed to
describe the works written as direct attacks upon Christianity, founded
indeed on an idealist basis, but in which the philosophy is in the main
subordinate to the critical investigation. Marked by the improved tone
which was before described, and enriched with the fruits of the researches
of German theologians, they form at once the books which are likely to
meet us in daily life; and equal those of past generations in subtlety and
danger. We shall commence with those which are most openly infidel, and
gradually pass onward to those which shade off almost into unitarianism,
until we reach the critical difficulties which in the writings of avowedly
Christian professors have given ground for the charge of rationalism.
The first writer to be named(916) is one who in two works, the one “a
Comparison of the Intellectual Progress of Hebrews and Greeks in their
religious development,” the other on “the Origin of Christianity,” has
made a daring attempt, not to refute Christianity directly, but to grapple
with the historic problem of the origin of revealed religions; and
endeavoured to explain them by regular historic and psychical
considerations. In making this attempt he has availed himself of the
modern investigations into mythology, and the relation which it bears at
once to the soul, to philosophy, and to religion. In the last century
mythology was either derided in a Lucian-like spirit, or else regarded as
the relic of primitive traditions. In the present these views have mostly
disappeared; and the theories which exist in reference to it are chiefly
two, in the one of which myths are explained by nature-worship, and sacred
mysteries, and are regarded as parables descriptive of natural processes;
in the other they are regarded as being connected with the origin of
language, and the transfer of names from one object to another. (47) It is
the former view which this writer has employed. Commencing with the Hebrew
Cosmogony,(917) he traces the origin of the metaphysical notion of
God(918) through personification and polytheism, up to theism; and next
the origin of the moral notion of God,(919) regarding the notion of a fall
to be a hypothesis to account for sin; and explains away the idea of
mediation by the absurd theory of supposing it to be made up of the two
notions, of emanation, and of a waning deity derived from the
personification of natural processes.(920) Having thus used mythology, in
the manner of Volney, to illustrate the rise of these conceptions among
the Greeks and Hebrews respectively, he enters(921) upon the religious
history of the Hebrew people, and attempts to show that the idea of the
theocracy with temporary rewards suggested the two correlative ideas of
temporary reverse, and eventual restoration; and thus, by the
personification of the people’s suffering, led to the idea of a suffering
Messiah.(922) Discussing the complex Messianic conception, he tries to
explain its origin by natural causes, by resolving it(923) into a
combination of the different types of thought, presented in the earlier
history. Approaching the subject of Christianity, he considers it to be
one of the Jewish sects, a lawful continuation of the prophetic
reforms;(924) therein anticipating the idea which he has developed in the
second work above named, concerning the rise and progress of Christianity;
in which he has adopted the views of the historical criticism of the
school of Tübingen. Regarding Christianity to be a reform of Judaism mixed
with Greek dogmas,(925) he attributes to St. Paul, in contrast to the
Jewish apostles, the idea of giving it universality; and to the early
Roman church the idea of giving it unity;(926) illustrating by natural
causes the gradual origin of the church,(927) and the pretended concretion
of dogmas(928) by mixture with Alexandrian philosophy.
These works, too recondite to be popular, and too unsatisfactory to be
dangerous, do not appear likely to affect largely the English inquirer;
but the case is different with the work which next meets us by another
author, “the Creed of Christendom,”(929) which, on account of its
clearness of statement and variety of material, is the most dangerous work
of unbelief of this age.
In the first part of the work the writer attacks the idea of
inspiration,(930) with all modifications of the notion, as a gratuitous
assumption; and tries to disprove it by recapitulating the controversy
respecting the authorship of the Pentateuch, and the authority of the Old
Testament canon,(931) as well as by the pretended non-fulfilment of the
prophetic writings,(932) and the gradually progressive development of the
Theism of the Jews.(933) Applying a similar process to the Gospels, he
states the difficulties which attend the literary question of their
origin(934) and fidelity of the narrative;(935) trying to show that the
apostles differed from each other, and held views differing from those
taught by the Saviour, as recorded in the first three Gospels.(936)
Approaching the subject of the use of miracles as an evidence, he contends
that they cannot prove a doctrine, and that their existence cannot be
proved by documents.(937) In the examination of Christianity he holds only
the humanity of Christ,(938) and regards Christianity not to be
superhuman, but an eclecticism from the Jewish religion; a conception, not
a revelation.(939) Successively attacking(940) the most sacred doctrines
of our faith,—prayer, pardon, sin,—he is at last landed in the doubt of a
future life, save so far as the intuitions seem to suggest it;(941) and in
conclusion he contents himself with the religion which consists in
obedience to the physical, moral, intellectual, and social laws;
confessing however that the heart dictates to prayer and religion, but
maintaining that the idea of general laws forbids the possibility of their
reality.(942)
The next writer whom we must name,(943) has not rested content with a
literary examination of existing religious forms, but has shown the
consummation to which the modern criticism of religion leads. The work,
“Thoughts in aid of Faith,” that is, hints to advise those who have given
up all other faith, is too characteristic of a certain type of thought to
be omitted. It is an instance where the final result, to which
philosophical investigation has conducted, bears a resemblance to that
reached by Feuerbach in Germany.(944) In the treatment of the subject, the
tenderness of human character has not disappeared; and belief in the
teaching of religion is surrendered with painful sadness. Starting at
first from the unitarian point of view, this writer has gradually
advanced, by the aid of the modern philosophy, to the very pantheism at
which philosophy stood in the early ages of oriental speculation. In a
review of the historical and psychical(945) origin of religion and
Christianity, the idea of a divine Being is regarded as merely the giving
existence to an abstraction, the objectifying of the subjective; and
Christianity, as the form in which the notion of a personal God
necessarily clothes itself: so that the idea of God becomes a fiction
created by the mind; Christianity a fiction created by the heart. Though
an appreciation is shown of ancient forms of religion,(946) all are
regarded as visionary; and, in looking forward to the future, philosophy
affords no cheering hope: nothing remains, save the annihilation taught by
the ancient Buddhists.(947)
The course of the history now brings before us two writers, who stand
distinguished from the last group by their firm theism, and strong protest
against pantheism in every form. One of them was an American;(948) the
other an alumnus of this university.(949)
The life and work of the former, so far as they relate to our inquiries,
may soon be told.(950) In early life a unitarian minister, he caught the
spirit of intellectual inquiry and reconsideration which Channing had
excited; and devoted himself with indefatigable industry to study the
modern philosophy and criticism of Germany, until he became one of the
most learned men of the American continent. In his own country his
fearless and uncompromising denunciation of slavery, as well as of
political and commercial hollowness, caused him to be viewed as a social
reformer rather than a theological teacher. In ours he is viewed as a
teacher of deism. The cause of his power is obvious. Feeling that his
mission was not merely to pull down, but to build up, he spoke with the
vigour of a dogmatist, not with the coldness of a critic. To a burning
eloquence and native wit he united the picturesque power of the novelist
or the artist. But his vigour of style was deformed by a power of sarcasm
which often invested the most sacred subjects with caricature and
vulgarity; a boundless malignity against supposed errors. How different is
the tone of his satire from the delicate touches of the modern French
critic(951) who was named in the last lecture! and yet, on the other hand,
how changed from that of the infidel writers of the last century. Though
he equals Paine in vulgarity, and Voltaire in sarcasm, his spirit and
moral tone are higher. They wrote, actuated by a bitter spirit against the
Christian religion, without earnestness, without religious aspirations,
with the coldness of unbelievers: he, with the earnestness of a preacher
touched with the deepest feelings; and though the Christian writer will
shudder at his remarks as much as at theirs, yet he sees them modified by
passages of pathetic sentiment, in which, in words unrivalled in sceptical
literature, admiration is expressed of Christ, of Christianity, and of
scripture.(952)
Such was the man as a teacher. What was his doctrine? He sought and found
in the human faculties the test of truth, not dwelling, like Strauss, on
their tendency to deceive; but, like Schelling, on their certitude. He
placed the ground of religion on the emotional side of the soul, in the
feeling of dependence;(953) and correctively, on the intellectual side, in
the intuitions of God, the moral law, and immortal life.
Assuming, on the principle of spiritual supply and demand, that capacity
proves object, (the natural realism which we attribute to the senses being
thus applied to the intellectual instincts,) he regarded the intuitions to
be real, and traced the mode in which reasoning and experience develope
them into conceptions.(954) But, afraid of giving too anthropomorphic a
form to his conception of deity, he fell almost into the abstract
conception of the English deists; and in the notion of God’s general
providence, lost the fatherlike conception of the divine Being with which
the human analogy invests Him. Few nobler attacks however on atheism,(955)
or defences of the benevolent character of the divine Being,(956) exist,
than those which he has supplied. But at this point the Christian must
altogether part company with him; for he next proceeded to argue against
the possibility of miracle or special providence; identifying
inspiration(957) with the utterance of human genius, and regarding
Christianity merely as the best exponent of man’s moral nature; as one
form of religion, but not the final one. The Bible, which as a collection
of literary works, the religious literature of a Semitic people, he
appreciated with enthusiastic admiration,(958) was degraded from its
position of a final authoritative utterance of religious truth, and was
regarded as the embodiment of the thoughts of spiritual men of old time
who were striving after truth, and spoke according to the light which they
possessed. The religion which he taught was called by him “the absolute
religion.” It was merely deism, built on a sounder basis, and
spiritualized by contact with a truer philosophy.
The other writer(959) to whom allusion has been made, though superior to
the one just described in refinement and acuteness, resembles him in
possessing deep aspirations and serious research, and in standing apart
from the unbelief of the last century, which manifested no loftiness of
aim, nor earnest conviction. He stands forth too in a more interesting
position, from the circumstance that his starting-point was not
unitarianism, but the creed of our own church; and that he has given a
psychological autobiography, a painful and thrilling
self-portraiture;(960) in which he traces step by step his surrender of
his early opinions, from the time of his first doubts, when he was a
student in this university, to his fully developed deism.