Chapter 32

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION

The So-called Anglican Crisis--_Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_--Three Novels: _A Human Document_, _The Heart of Life_, _The Individualist_--Three Works on the Philosophy of Religion: _Religion as a Creditable Doctrine_, _The Veil of the Temple_, _The Reconstruction of Belief_--Passages from The _Veil of the Temple_.

A year or so after the publication of _Aristocracy and Evolution_ I found myself taking by accident quite a new departure. I was offered and accepted a place on the board of a small company, and was thus abruptly summoned from the world of economic philosophy to that of practical action. The object of the company was to perfect and introduce an invention which, had it been properly developed as a mechanism and skillfully dealt with otherwise, might well have become popular. The general idea was certainly sound enough. With regard to this all concerned were unanimous. But as soon as the project assumed a minutely practical form all sorts of difficulties arose. The mechanism was one which might be constructed in a number of alternative ways, and, according to the way chosen, the cost of manufacture would vary very considerably, and its use to the general public would vary to a degree still greater. Since the board comprised several engineers, a successful manufacturer of pianos, and a lawyer highly respected in the domain of local government, I imagined that these preliminary difficulties would very soon be solved. I was, however, much mistaken. Each director had some idea of his own, which clashed with the ideas of others, not indeed as to fundamentals, but purely as to incidental details. This rendered concerted action as impossible as it would have been had the differences related not to means, but to ends; and nobody united in himself sufficient technical knowledge with sufficient moral initiative to harmonize these conflicting elements, and thus to render concerted action practicable. The enterprise, in consequence, soon came to an end, certain of the directors bearing most of the loss. But I, at all events, got something for my money in the way of an instructive experience. It was an experience which illustrated by fact what I had previously insisted on as a matter of general theory--namely, that no enterprise undertaken by a number of persons can possibly succeed unless it has some man of exceptional strength at the head of it, who will use the wits of others according to his own judgment; and, further, that this man's strength must be of a very peculiar kind, which has nothing to do with the qualities, moral or intellectual, which make their possessors illustrious in other domains of life.

This taste of business experience did not heighten my appreciation of the mental leisure which otherwise I now enjoyed. It was a leisure, however, which before very long took the form of activity in a new direction.

The more important questions which agitate the mind of an age, just like those which agitate the mind of an individual, engross and affect it, not simultaneously, but in alternation. One actor recedes for the moment and makes way for another, and the newcomer is an old actor returning. About the time of which I am now speaking there was--on the surface, at all events--a lull in social controversy, and a new outbreak of religious. An illustration of this fact may be found in the extraordinary popularity achieved by a novel purely religious in interest, its name being _Robert Elsmere_, and its authoress Mrs. Humphry Ward. Its religious interest is of a highly specialized kind. It is the story of an Anglican clergyman who starts as an earnest and absolutely untroubled believer in the traditional dogmas which the Church of England inculcates. He is thus at peace with himself till he gradually becomes intimate with a certain distinguished scholar. This scholar, who is the squire of his parish, is the possessor of an enormous library, rich in the writings of continental and especially of German skeptics. Having suggested to Robert Elsmere sundry disquieting arguments, he turns him loose in his library, begging him to use it as his own. The clergyman accepts the invitation. He soon is absorbed in the works of such writers as Strauss and Renan; and little by little their spirit becomes his own. Their eyes become his. Everything which orthodoxy demands in the way of the supernatural disappears. The sacraments become mummeries. Even Christ, in the ordinary sense, no longer lives. The clergyman is left in desolation. How, he asks, can the Church (by which he means the Anglican Church) help him? What evidence, what shred even of probability, have its ministers to support their teaching? They hardly, if closely pressed, know what they mean themselves, and the supernatural teaching of one section of Anglicans contradicts that of the others. The one moral which her hero draws from his studies resolves itself into the words, "Miracles do not happen."

Mrs. Ward's novel was particularly appropriate to the time at which it was published. The question of what a man, as a minister of the English Church, might or might not teach without surrendering his office or without abjuring his honesty was being hotly debated in reviews, in Convocation, and at countless clerical Congresses; but these resulted in no unanimous answer. The English Church, indeed, as a teaching body, was held by many people to be on the very verge of disruption. The situation was precisely similar to that which in my book, _Is Life Worth Living?_ I had myself predicted ten years before as inevitable. If Christianity means anything definite--anything more than a mood of precarious sentiment--the only logical form of it is that represented by the Oecumenical Church of Rome. This had been my previous argument, and, stimulated by current events, I felt impelled to restate it in greater detail and with more pungent illustrations. I found particular satisfaction in analyzing the utterances of dignitaries of the Broad-Church party, such as Farrar and Wilberforce, whose plan for rejuvenating the coherence of the Anglican Church was to reduce all its doctrine which savored of the supernatural to symbols. One of them proposed, for example, to salvage the doctrine of the Ascension by maintaining that its true meaning is, not that Christ rose from the earth vertically (which would indeed be absurd), but that he disappeared, as it were, laterally, by withdrawing himself somehow or other into the fourth dimension of space. According to another, the statement that Christ on a specified day ascended was merely a symbolical way of saying that about the time in question his work on earth was finished, and that he had, like Sir Peter Teazle, taken leave of his disciples with the words, "Gentlemen, I leave my character in your hands." On the basis of such an exegesis they managed to raise a superstructure of sentiment which had, until it was touched, some likeness to the old fabric, but which a breath of air would dissipate, and unmask the ruins within. Canon Farrar's _Life of Christ_ was a work of this description. The work had an enormous sale, and the author, at an Oxford dinner, confided somewhat ruefully to a neighbor that all he got for it himself was not more than three hundred pounds. Another neighbor, overhearing this remark, murmured to somebody else, "He forgets that in the good old days the same job was done for thirty pieces of silver."

A criticism of the clerical rationalists, not dissimilar in its purport, was administered to Jowett by a certain Russian thinker, who knew little as to Jowett's opinions, and had no intention of rebuking them. He was describing, as an interesting event, the development of a religion in Russia which claimed to be Christian and at the same time purely rational. "Was it a good religion?" asked Jowett, with a somewhat curt civility. "No," said the Russian, reflectively, "it was not a good religion. It was schlim-schlam. It was veesh-vash. It was vot you call 'Broad Church.'"

Mrs. Ward, who may fairly be described as the best educated woman novelist of her generation, endeavored, in the disguise of her hero, to found a rationalized Christianity on her own account, and her distinction as a scholar and a reasoner makes this experiment interesting. But the kind of Christianity in which Robert Elsmere takes refuge, and of which he officiates as the self-appointed primate, has no foundation but sentiment and certain _tours de force_ of the imagination. As soon as it resolves itself into any definite propositions with regard to objective fact it is evident that these have no authority at the back of them. Without some authority at the back of it, unified by a coherent logic, no religion can guide or curb mankind or provide them with any hopes that the enlightened intellect can accept. It is precisely this sort of authority which, for those who can accept its doctrines, the Church of Rome possesses, and is possessed by that Church alone. Here is the argument in which _Is Life Worth Living?_ culminated. The detailed processes by which the authority and the teaching of Rome have developed themselves I had cited in _Aristocracy and Evolution_ as an example of evolution in general. In a new volume, _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_, I dealt with it once again, having before me the example of what was then being called "The Great Anglican Crisis." That this book was not written wholly in vain I have sufficient reason to know, for a variety of correspondents assured me that it put into clear form what had long been their unexpressed convictions--certain of these persons--serious Anglicans--having joined, since then, the Church of Rome in consequence.

But the thoughts of which this work was the result were not appeased by its publication. They began to germinate afresh in a kindred, but in a different form. _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_ had for its immediate subject a position which was mainly insular--that is to say, the position, not of religion in general, but of the formal interpretations of Christianity which were at that time colliding with complete unbelief in England. But I had from the first--from the days when I was planning _The New Republic_ onward--urged that all doctrines pertaining to particular forms of Christianity were merely parts of a wider question--namely, that of the credibility of supernatural religion of any kind, and that this credibility must be tested, not by an examination of religious doctrines as such, or even of religious emotion in the purer and more direct manifestations of it, but in the indirect effects produced by it on the quality of life generally. Thus merely in the capacity of a thinker I felt myself presently impelled to a reconsideration of the contents of the life of the individual; and this impulsion was aggravated by certain domestic dramas which, in one way or another, came to my own knowledge.

In describing my visit to Hungary I mentioned a young and extremely engaging lady, who looked as though she were made for happiness, but whose life, though prematurely ended, had had time since then to become entangled in tragedy. I had often, since I left Hungary, wondered what had become of her; but not till some years later did I learn, quite accidentally, what her story and her end had been. I was told few details, but these sufficed to enable me, by a mere use of the imagination, to reconstruct it, and see in it certain general meanings. Of this reconstructive process the result was my novel, _A Human Document_. It was not, indeed, due to the stimulus of this story alone, and of the philosophic meanings which I read either in or into it. It was partly due, I must confess, to the effects which Hungarian life had on my imagination generally--effects with which the affairs of this lady had nothing at all to do--and to an impulse to reproduce these in some sort of literary form. The castles, the armor, the shepherds playing to their flocks, the wild gypsy music, the obeisances of the peasants, the mysteries of the great forests--all these things, like an artist when he paints a landscape, I longed to reproduce for the mere pleasure of reproducing them. Such being the case, the heroine of my novel and her experiences became unified with the scenes among which I had actually known her.

For this work, as a picture of Hungary and Hungarian life, I am well supported in claiming one merit, at all events. Count Deym, who at that time was Austrian Ambassador in London, told a friend of mine that my picture in these respects could not have been more accurate had I known Hungary for a lifetime. Of its merits as a study of human nature, and an essay on the philosophy of life, it is not my province to speak. I merely indicate the conclusion to which, as an attempt at philosophic analysis, it leads. It leads, although by a quite different route, to the same conclusion as that suggested in _The Old Order Changes_ and in _A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_--namely, that in all the higher forms of affection a religious belief is implicit, which connects the lovers with the All, and establishes between them and It some conscious and veritable communion.

The hero gives expression to this conclusion thus: On the evening after that on which the heroine had made herself wholly his the two are together in a boat on a forest lake. She does not regard her surrender as the subject of ordinary repentance. On the contrary, she regards it as justified by the cruelty and neglect of her husband, and yet she is beset by a sense that, nevertheless, she may have outraged something which for some reason or other she ought to have held sacred. Her companion divines this mood, and does what he can to reassure her. "See," he says, "the depths above us, and the depths reflected under us, holding endless space and all the endless ages, and ourselves like a ball of thistledown floating between two eternities. From some of these stars the arrows of light that reach us started on their vibrating way before Eve's foot was in Eden. Where that milky light is new universes are forming themselves. The book of their genesis yet remains to be written. Think of the worlds forming themselves. Think of the worlds shining, and the darkened suns and systems mute in the night of time. To us--to us--what does it all say more than the sea says to the rainbow in one tossed bubble of foam? And yet to us it must say something, seeing that we are born of it, and how can we be out of tune with it, seeing that it speaks to us now?"

The moral of this mysticism is that no affection is complete unless it is in harmony with some cosmic will which takes cognizance of the doings of the individual, and gives to them individually something of its own eternity; but that, in so far as the two are at variance, the individual must pay the price. In _A Human Document_ this price is paid deliberately by the man, and ultimately the woman shares in it, like a character in a Greek tragedy.

This novel was followed by another, _The Heart of Life_, which was more or less constructed on the same lines, and also in response to a similar dual impulse. The scenery and the setting were those of my own early days in Devonshire. The home of the principal actors, as there depicted, is a compound of Glenthorne--I have mentioned its situation already, on the seaward borders of Exmoor--and of Denbury. Several of the characters are clergymen with whom I was once familiar. Mixed with these elements are certain scenes of fashionable life. All these accessories are almost photographically accurate; and the mere pleasure of reproducing them--or, as boys would say, the mere fun of reproducing them--was one of the motives which actuated me in writing this novel and rewriting it--for most of it was written over and over again. The main action, as in _A Human Document_, turned on the nature of the affections and the pangs of unhappy matrimony, these last conducting the two principal personages to a rest in which the heart of life, self-purified, is hardly distinguishable from the content of a Christian child's prayer.

A third novel followed. This novel was _The Individualist_, of which the underlying subject was still the relation of religion to life, but the subject was handled in a spirit less of emotion than of pure social comedy. It was suggested by the movement, then beginning to effervesce, in favor of the rights of women, and by the semi-Socialist hysteria with which some of its leaders associated it, and in which many of them thought that they had discovered the foundations of a new faith. The most prominent character, though she is not in the ordinary sense the heroine, is Mrs. Norham, an ornament of intellectual Bloomsbury. Having certain independent means, she is far from being an opponent of private property as such. Her _bête noire_ is the fashionable or aristocratic classes, these being the true Antichrist; and she has founded a church whose main spiritual mission is to instigate an _élite_ of the obscure and earnest to despise them. By and by she meets some members of this despicable class herself. Among them is a Tory Prime Minister, who joins with his sister, an exceedingly fine lady, in expressing a respectful and profound admiration of her intellect. Mrs. Norham's philosophy of social religion hereupon undergoes such an appreciable change that she ultimately finds salvation in winding wool for a peeress, the only surviving thorns in her original crown of martyrdom being the loss of some money in a company formed for the production of a perpetual motion, and her discovery that a certain dinner party to which she has been asked is not sufficiently fashionable. This book, though in many respects a mere comedy of manners and characters--among the characters was a South African millionaire and his wife--was under the surface permeated by a serious meaning, being in effect an exhibition of the "fantastic tricks" which those who reject the supernatural are driven to play in their attempts to provide the world with a substitute.

But every general event must have a general cause, for which individuals are not alone responsible; and the fantastic tricks of the people who try to make religions for themselves cannot be due merely to the idiosyncrasies of exceptionally foolish persons. There must be causes at the back of them of a deeper and a wider kind. The first of these causes is obviously the fact that, for some reason or other, multitudes who know nothing of one another are independently coming to the conclusion that supernaturalism, which was once accepted without question as the main content or substratum of human life, rests on postulates which to them are no longer credible. Why is this the case to-day, when it was not the case yesterday? Of these necessary postulates two are the same for all men--namely, an individual life which survives, the individual body, and the moral responsibility of the individual, or his possession of a free will. A third postulate, which is the same for all orthodox Christians, is the miraculous inspiration of the Bible, whatever the precise nature of this inspiration may be. Of these three postulates the last has been discredited all over the world by biblical criticism and scientific comparisons of one religion with another. The first and the second have been discredited by advances in the science of biological physics which has, with increasing precision, exhibited human life and thought as mere functions of the physical organism, the organism itself being, in turn, a part of the cosmic process. If this be the case, what religious significance can attach to the individual as such? His thoughts, his emotions, his actions, are no more his own than the action of a windmill's sails or the antics of scraps of paper gyrating at a windy corner.[3] The first license to men to construct a religion is a license given them by reason to admit the proposition that the individual will is free. The primary obstacle to religious belief to-day is the difficulty of finding in this universe a rational place for freedom--a "_voluntas avolsa fatis_." How is this obstacle to be surmounted?

To this question I attempted an answer in a new philosophical book, _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, of which the general contention is as follows. If we trust solely to science and objective evidence, the difficulty in question is insuperable. There is no place for individual freedom in the universe, and apologists who attempt to find one are no better than clowns tumbling in the dust of a circus. If they try to smuggle it in through some chink in the _moenia mundi_, these ageless walls are impregnable, or if here and there some semblance of a gate presents itself, each gate is guarded, like Eden, by science with its flaming swords.

The argument of this book, then, is in the main negative. But in dealing with the problem thus it is not negative in its tendency, for it carries the reader to the verge of the only possible solution. For pure reason, as enlightened by modern knowledge, human freedom is unthinkable, and yet for any religion by which the pure reason and the practical reason can be satisfied the first necessity is that men should accept such freedom as a fact. But this argument does not apply to the belief in human freedom only. It applies to all the primary conceptions which men assume, and are bound to assume, in order to make life practicable. If we follow pure reason far enough--if we follow it as far as it will go--not only freedom is unthinkable, but so are other things as well. Space is unthinkable, time is unthinkable, and so (as Herbert Spencer elaborately argued) is motion. In each of these is involved some self-contradiction, some gap which reason cannot span; and yet, as Kant said, unless we do assume them, rational action, and even thought itself, are impossible. If the difficulty, then, of conceiving human freedom is the only difficulty which religious belief encounters, we may trust that in time such belief will reassert itself, and a definite religion of some sort acquire new life along with it.

But religion does not logically depend on the postulate of freedom alone. Moral freedom, in a religious sense, requires, not the postulate of individual freedom only, but also of a Supreme or Cosmic Being, to whose will it is the duty of the individual will to attune itself, and it further requires the postulate that this Being is good in respect of its relations to all individuals equally--that it represents, in short, a multitude of individual benevolences. Nor does the matter end here. Any definite religion postulates some recognized means by which the will of this Being may be made known. I had hardly completed _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_ before questions such as these, which there had been hardly touched, began to impress themselves with new emphasis on my mind. My desire was to take these questions in combination, and it seemed to me that this could best be done by adopting a method less formal than that which I had just pursued. I returned accordingly to the methods of _The New Republic_.

In this new work, called _The Veil of the Temple_, the action begins at a party in a great London house, where Rupert Glanville, a politician who has just returned from the East, invites some friends to cut their London dissipations short and pay him a visit at a curious marine residence which a Protestant bishop, his ancestor, had constructed in classical taste on the remotest coast of Ireland. A party is got together, including a bishop of to-day and two ornaments of the Jockey Club, together with some fashionable ladies and a Hegelian philosopher educated at Glasgow and Oxford.

The intellectual argument of the book takes up the threads where _Religion as a Credible Doctrine_ dropped them. It begins at the dinner table, where a well-known case of cheating at cards is discussed, and the issue is raised of whether, or how far, a rich man who cheats at cards is the master of his own actions or the pathological victim of kleptomania. One of the lights of the Jockey Club is indignant at the idea that the matter can be open to doubt. "If a gentleman," he says, "is not free to abstain from cheating, what would become of the turf? Eh, bishop--what would become of the Church? What would become of anything?" Thus the question of free will is once again in the air, and the more serious of the guests, as soon as the others depart, set themselves to discuss both this and other questions kindred to it.

Of such other questions the most obvious is this: "How far do educated persons, who are nominally 'professing Christians,' really believe in doctrines of Christian orthodoxy, and more particularly in the authority and supernatural inspiration of the Bible?" Most of them are obliged to confess that at best they are in a state of doubt. On Sunday three Anglican clergymen are imported on a steam launch from a watering place some ten miles off, where they are attending a clerical Congress--an Evangelical, a Broad Churchman, and a Ritualist; and they administer to the company three competitive sermons.

These performances leave confusion worse confounded; and the guests during the following days set themselves to pick their own beliefs to pieces. At last they come back to the question of free will, especially as related to science and what is called scientific materialism. Then the question arises of "What do we mean by matter?" and then the question of the possible goodness of a God who, if he is really the power behind evolution, is constantly sacrificing the unit to the development of the race or species. This last difficulty is expressed by one of the disputants in a poem which had been written many years ago, and which, by request of the company, he recites. In this poem the man, who is vowed to abandon every belief for which science can make no room, is represented by a wanderer who finds himself at last conducted to a bare region where no living thing is discernible, but one shining apparition standing on the brink of a promontory which juts into a sailless sea. He approaches, and addresses it thus:

"Oh, angel of the heavenly glow, Behold I take thine hands and kneel. But what is this? Thy brows are snow, Thy hands are stone, thy wings are steel.

"The radiant pureness of thy face Has not the peace of Paradise, Those wings within the all-holy place Were never folded o'er thine eyes.

"And in thine eyes I see no bliss, Nor even the tenderness of tears. I see the blueness of the abyss, I see the icebergs and the spheres.

"Angel whose hand is cold in mine, Whose seaward eyes are not for me, Why do I cry for wings like thine? I would leave all and follow thee."

To this the apparition, who is the Spirit of Science, replies:

"Ah, rash one, pause and learn my name. I know not love, nor hate, nor ruth. I am that heart of frost and flame That knows but one desire--the Truth.

"Thou shalt indeed be lifted up On wings like mine, 'twixt seas and sky. But can'st thou drink with me my cup, And can'st thou be baptized as I?

"The cup I drink of does but rouse The thirst it slakes not, like the sea; And lo, my own baptismal brows Must be their own Gethsemane.

"Across the paths where I must go The shuttles of the lightning fly From pole to pole, and strike, nor know If Christs and kingdoms live or die.

"How wilt thou bear the worlds of fire, The worlds of snow, or dare to mark On each some ratlike race expire That cannot leave its foundering bark?

"Oh, you, for whom my robes are bright, For whom my clear eyes in the gloom Are lamps--you who would share my flight, Be warned in time. I know my doom.

"I shall become the painless pain, The soundless sound, as, deaf and dumb, The whole creation strives in vain To sing the song that will not come.

"Till maimed and weary, burnt and blind, I am made one with God, and feel The tumult of the mindless mind Torn on its own eternal wheel."

The suppliant replies that he knows from his own experience what such a counsel means, but has found it himself to be no longer practicable. There was a time, he says, when he found the perfect peace in kneeling before the Christian altar, but what is the Eucharist for him who can no longer believe in it? He still is prepared to follow the Spirit of Truth at all costs. "For me," he says:

"For me the kneeling knees are vain, In vain for me the sacred dew. I will not drink that wine again Unless with thee I drink it new.

"Give me thy wings, thy wings of steel, And I with thee will cleave the skies, And broken on the eternal wheel My God may take his sacrifice."

"And yet," he says in conclusion, "Truth, to those who follow it, may at last bring its own reward."

"Though storms may blow, though waves may roar, It may be, ere the day is done, Mine eyes shall turn to thine once more, And learn that thine and his are one."

_The Veil of the Temple_ winds up, in short, with the indication that, if both are completely thought out, the gospel of Faith is no more irrational than the gospel of scientific negation, and that the former can be a guide to action, whereas, if thought out completely, this is precisely what the latter cannot be.

_The Reconstruction of Belief_ is a synthesis of the main arguments urged or suggested in these two preceding volumes. The necessity of religious belief as a practical basis of civilization is restated. The absurdity of all current attempts on the part of clerical apologists to revindicate it by scientific reason is set forth in detail. The true vindication is shown to reside in the fact that religious belief works, and that scientific negation does not work, and that here we have the practical test by which the validity of the former is to be established, though the process by which this fact will be apprehended by the modern world may be slow.

[3] In an early chapter of _The Veil of the Temple_ one of the characters describes the situation as follows:

"(For a long time after the death of Hegel) these separate living species seemed radically separated from one another, or connected only as contrivances of the same deity. Thus the different kinds of life--in especial the life of man--seemed to stand up alone above the waters of science, like island peaks above the sea, the objects of a separate knowledge. But all this while the waters of science were rising slowly like a flood, and were signalizing their rise by engulfing from time to time some stake or landmark that a moment before was protruding from them, or by suddenly pouring over a barrier and submerging some new area. No doubt even by this process many people were frightened, but there was no more general panic than there was in the days of Noah. Men from their superior status watched the tide in security. They ate, they drank at their old sacramental altars. They were married before them and given in marriage. But one fine day--as we look back on it now it seems the work of a moment--something happened which, as I often amused myself by thinking, would have been for a transhuman spectator the finest stage effect in the world. The gradual rise of the waters gave place to a cataclysm. The fountains of the great deep were broken up when Darwin struck the rock, and an enormous wave washed over the body of man, covering him up to his chin, leaving only his head visible, while his limbs jostled below against the carcasses of the drowned animals. His head, however, was visible still, and in his head was his mind--that mind antecedent to the universe--that redoubtable, separate entity--staring out of his eyes over the deluge, like a sailor on a sinking ship. Then came one crisis more. The waters rose an inch or two higher, and all at once, like a sponge, the substance of his head had begun to suck them up--suck them up into the very home of life and thought; and the mind, sodden all through, was presently below the surface, sharing the doom of limpets, and weeds, and worlds."