Chapter 16

The ennobling element of the belief in a future life is beyond the attack, or rather is strengthened by the aid, of science. Science, like theology, bids us look beyond our petty personal interests, and cultivate faculties other than the digestive. Theology aims at stimulating the same instincts, but provides them with an object in some shifting cloud-land of the imagination instead of the definite _terra firma_ of this tangible earth. The imagination, bound by no external laws, may form what rules it pleases, and may therefore lend itself to a refined selfishness, or to dreamy sentimentalism. When we rise beyond ourselves we are most in need of some definite guidance, and in the greatest danger of following some delusive phantom. The process illustrated by this case is operative throughout the whole sphere of religious thought. The essence of theology, as popularly understood, is the division of the universe into two utterly disparate elements. God is conceived as a ruler external to the ordinary series of phenomena, but intervening at more or less frequent intervals; between the natural and the supernatural, the human and the divine element, there can be no proper comparison. Man must be vile that God may be exalted; reason must be folly when put beside revelation; the force of man must be weakness when it encounters Providence. Wherever, in short, we recognize the Divine hand, we can but prostrate ourselves in humble adoration. In franker times, when people meant what they said, this creed was followed to its logical results. The dogmas of the literal inspiration of the Scripture, or of the infallibility of the Church, recognized the presence of a flawless perfection in the midst of utter weakness. The corruption of human nature, the irresistible power of Divine grace, the magical efficacy of the Sacraments are corollaries from the same theory. In the phraseology popular with a modern school we are told that the essence of Christianity is the belief in the fatherhood of God. That doctrine is intelligible and may be beautiful so long as we retain a sufficient degree of anthropomorphism. But as our conceptions of the universe and, therefore, of its Ruler are elevated, we too often feel that the use of the word "father" does not prevent the weight of His hand from crushing us. If noble souls can convert even suffering into useful discipline, it is but a flimsy optimism which covers all suffering by the name of paternal chastisement. The universe partitioned between infinite power and infinite weakness becomes a hopeless chaos; and when we proceed farther, and try to identify the Divine and the human elements amidst this intricate blending of good and evil we are in danger of vital error at every step. What, in fact, can be more disastrous, and yet more inevitable, than to mistake our corrupt instincts for the voice of God, or, on the other hand, to condemn the Divine intimations as sinful? How can we avoid at every instant committing the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the ineffable Holiness? And if, indeed, the distinction be groundless, are we not of necessity dislocating our conceptions of the universe, and hopelessly perplexing our sense of duty?

Take, for instance, one common topic which is typical of the general process. Divines never tire of holding up to us the example of Christ. If Christ were indeed a man like ourselves, his example may be fairly quoted. We willingly place him in the very front rank of the heroes who have died for the good of our race. But if Christ were in any true sense God or inseparably united to God, the example disappears. We honor him because he endured agonies and triumphed over doubts and weaknesses that would have paralyzed a less noble soul. The agonies and the doubts and the weakness are unintelligible on the hypothesis of an incarnate God. Theologians escape by the old loophole of mystery, ordinary believers by thinking of Christ as man and God alternately. We can doubtless deceive ourselves by such juggling, but we cannot honestly escape from the inevitable dilemma. In paying a blasphemous reverence to Christ, theologians have either placed him beyond the reach of our sympathies, or have lowered God to the standard of humanity. Let us, if possible, dwell with an emotion of brotherly love on the sufferings of every martyr in the cause of humanity, but you sever the very root of our sympathy when you single out one as divine and raise him to the skies. Why stand we gazing into heaven when we have but to look round to catch the contagion of noble enthusiasm from men of our own race? The ideal becomes meaningless when it is made supernatural.

The same perplexity meets us at every step; we are to follow Christ's example. Be humble, it is said, as Christ was humble. Theology indeed would prescribe annihilation rather than humiliation. Man in presence of the Infinite is absolutely nothing. Science, according to a glib commonplace of popular writers, agrees with theology in prescribing humility. But that very ambiguous word has a totally different meaning in the two cases. Science bids us recognize the inevitable limitation of our powers, and the feebleness of any individual as compared with the mass. We can do but little: and at every step we are dependent upon the co-operation of countless millions of our race and an indefinite series of past generations. We are like the coral insects, who can add but a hair's breadth to the structure which has been raised by their predecessors. Yet the little which we can do is something; and we will neither degrade ourselves nor our race. As measured by an absolute standard, man may be infinitesimal, but the absolute is beyond our powers. Science tells us that our little individuality might be swept out of existence without appreciable injury to the world; but it adds that the world is built up of infinitesimal atoms, and that each must co-operate in the general result. Theology crushes us into nothingness by placing us in the presence of the infinite God; and then compensates by making us divine ourselves. Man is a mere worm, but he can by priestly magic bring God to earth; he is hopelessly ignorant, but set on a throne and properly manipulated he becomes an infallible vice-God; he is a helpless creature, and yet this creature can define with more than scientific accuracy the precise nature of his inconceivable Creator; he grovels on the ground as a miserable sinner and stands up to declare that he is the channel of Divine inspiration; all his wisdom is ignorance, but he has written one book of which every line is absolutely perfect: and meanwhile that which one man singles out as the Divine element is to another the diabolical, so strangely dim is our vision, and so imperceptible is the difference between the Infinite and the infinitesimal.

Or, again, we are to deny ourselves as Christ denied himself. But what are the limits and the purpose of this self-denial? Am I to carry on an indefinite warfare against the body, which you say that God has given me, and to crush the physical for the sake of the spiritual element? What is the line between the spirit which is of God, and the body which is hopelessly corrupt? All sound reasoning prescribes a training with the given purpose of bringing the instincts of the individual into harmony with the interests of the whole social organism. Theology trying to lay down an absolute law sometimes encourages the extremes of asceticism, sometimes it inclines to antinomianism; and sometimes sanctions the condonation of sin in consideration of acts of humiliation.

We are to resign ourselves to God's will, say theologians, but what is God's will? If it is the inevitable, then theology falls in with free reason. But if God's will be, as theologians maintain, something which we are at liberty to resist or to obey, then resignation implies our ignoble yielding to evils which might be extirpated. Theology deifies the force of circumstances, when our life should be a victory over circumstances, and encourages us to repine over misfortunes, where all repining is useless.

Christ, you say, died for us; and Butler, in the book which still receives more praise than any other attempt at reconciling philosophy and theology, tries to show that here, at least, the two doctrines are in harmony. He has probably produced, in men of powerful intellects, more atheism than he has cured; for he tries to demonstrate explicitly what is tacitly assumed by most theologians--the injustice of God. The doctrine may be horrible, but he says that facts prove it to be true. His whole logic consists in simply begging the question by calling suffering punishment. That the potter should be angry with his pots is certainly inconceivable; but when you once attempt to trace the supernatural in life, it undoubtedly follows that God is not only weak with the creatures he has made, but punishes the innocent for the guilty. Theologians may rest complacently in such a conclusion; to unprejudiced persons, it appears to be the clearest illustration of the futility of their theories. Free thought declines to call suffering a punishment; but it admits and turns to account the undoubted fact, that men are so closely connected, that every injury inflicted upon one is inevitably propagated to others. If morality be the science of minimizing human misery, to say that sin brings suffering, is merely to express an identical proposition. The lesson, however, remains for us that we should look beyond our petty, personal interests, because no act can be merely personal. The stone which we throw spreads widening circles to all eternity, and to realize that fact is to intensify the sense of responsibility; but the same doctrine translated into the theological dialect becomes shocking or "mysterious."

Finally, we are to love our brothers as Christ loved us. That, truly, is an excellent doctrine, but translated into the theological, does it not lose half its efficacy? Love them that are of the household is the more natural corollary from the Christian tenets than love all mankind. People sometimes express surprise that the mild doctrines of Christianity should be pressed into the service of persecution. What more natural? "We love you," says the theologian to the heathen, "but still you are children of the devil. We love men, but the human heart is desperately wicked. We love your souls, but we hate your bodies. We love you as brothers; but then God, who so loved the world as to give His Son to die for it, has left the vast majority to follow their own road to perdition, and given to us a monopoly of truth and grace. We can only follow His example, and adore the mysterious dispensations of Providence."

"Ah!" replies a different school, "that is indeed a blasphemous and hideous doctrine. We will not presume to divide the human from the divine. God is the father of all men; His grace is confined to no sect or creed. His revelation is made to the universal human heart as well as to a select number of prophets and apostles. He is known in the order of nature as well as by miracles. The body has been created by Him as well as the soul, and all instincts are of heavenly origin and require cultivation not extirpation."

Whether this doctrine is reconcilable with Christianity is a question not to be discussed here. It certainly does not imply those flat contradictions of the lessons of experience which emerge from the other method of thought. It asks us to believe no miracles. It involves no supernaturalism. Whatever is, is natural, and is at the same time divine. Stated, indeed, as a bare logical formula, the doctrine seems to elude our grasp. It is intelligible to say that Christ was divine and Mahomet human, for the statement implies a comparison between two different terms; but if you say that Christ and Mahomet are both of the same class, what does it matter whether you call them both divine or both human? Every logical statement implies an exclusion as well as inclusion. To say that A is B is meaningless if you add that every other conceivable letter is also B. You attempt to make everybody rich by reckoning their property in pence instead of pounds, and the process, though at first sight attractive, is unsatisfactory. In fact, this phase of opinion generally slips back into the preceding. We find that exceptions are insensibly made, and that after pronouncing nature to be divine, it is tacitly assumed there is an indefinite region which is somehow outside nature. Few people have the reasoning tendency sufficiently developed to follow out this view to its logical result in Pantheism. Yet short of that, there is no really stable resting-place.

Let us glance, however, for a moment at the ordinary application of the doctrine. The theologian agrees with the man of science in admitting that we are governed by unalterable laws, or, as the man of science prefers to say, that the world shows nothing but a series of invariable sequences and co-existences. The difference is, in other words, that the theologian puts a legislator behind the laws, whilst the man of science sees nothing behind them but impenetrable mystery. The difference, so far as any practical conclusions are concerned, is obviously nothing. The laws of Nature, you tell us, are the work of infinite goodness and wisdom. But we are utterly unable to say what infinite goodness and wisdom would do, except by showing what it has done. Therefore, the ultimate appeal of the theologian, is as unequivocally to the laws as the primary appeal of the man of science. He has made a show of going to a higher court only to be referred back again to the original tribunal. History, for example, shows that mankind blunders by degrees into an improved condition and calls the process progress. Theology can give no additional guaranty for progress, for a state of things once compatible may, for any thing we can say, always remain compatible with infinite wisdom and goodness. As a matter of historical fact, theology only suggested the dogma of man's utter vileness, and all genuine theologians are marked by their readiness to believe in deterioration instead of progress. They look forward to a future world instead of this. But what reason have they to believe in this future of blessedness? God's love for His creatures? But the most prominent fact written on the whole surface of the world is what we cannot help calling the reckless and profuse waste of life. If every thing we see teaches us that millions of individuals are crushed at every step by the progress of the race, and if that process is, as it must be, compatible with infinite goodness, why suppose that infinite goodness will act differently in future? It is an ever-recurring but utterly fruitless sophistry which first infers God from nature, and then pronounces God to be different from nature.

The only meaning, indeed, which can be given to the theological statement when thus interpreted is that we should accustom ourselves to look with reverence and love upon the universe. That love and reverence are emotions which deserve our most strenuous efforts at cultivation; that we should be profoundly impressed by the vast system of which we form an infinitesimal part; that we should habitually think of ourselves in relation to the long perspective of events which stretches far away from us to the dim distance and toward the invisible future, are indeed lessons which all sound reasoning tends to confirm. But when we are invited to love and wonder at the world, as the work of God, we must guard against the old trick of substitution which is constantly played upon us. Once more, the God of nature is turned into the God of a part of nature. Theology of the old stamp, so far from encouraging us to love nature, teaches us that it is under a curse. It teaches us to look upon the animal creation with shuddering disgust; upon the whole race of man, outside our narrow sect, as delivered over to the devil; and upon the laws of nature at large as a temporary mechanism, in which we have been caught, but from which we are to anticipate a joyful deliverance. It is science, not theology, which has changed all this; it is the atheists, infidels, and rationalists, as they are kindly called, who have taught us to take fresh interest in our poor fellow denizens of the world, and not to despise them because Almighty benevolence could not be expected to admit them to heaven; to the same teaching we owe the recognition of the noble aspirations embodied in every form of religion, and the destruction of the ancient monopoly of Divine influences; and it is science again that has taught us to accommodate ourselves to the laws in which we are placed, instead of fruitlessly struggling against them and invoking miraculous interference to conquer them. The theology of which I am now speaking differs, indeed, radically from the old, so radically that one is at times surprised that the agreement, to use a common word, should reconcile vital differences in faith. But it often tends to the same end by a different path. It attempts to deny the existence of evils, instead of proclaiming their ultimate destruction. Every thing comes from a paternal hand; why struggle against it? Disease and starvation and nakedness are, somehow or other, parts of a divine system which is somehow or other deserving of our sincerest adoration. If anybody who is in fact naked or sick or starving takes that phrase in the sense that he had better submit cheerfully to evils which he cannot help, there is little to be said against it. If the doctrine of the Divine origin of all things is compatible with the belief that a vast number of things are utterly hateful, that we ought to spend our whole energy in eradicating them, and to protest against them with our latest breath, then the doctrine is certainly innocuous. But whether there is much use in language thus employed seems a little questionable; and, in any case, it is clear that it really adds nothing, except words, to the teaching of science.

Here again people cling passionately to the old formulæ because they appear to sanction a soothing optimism. We cannot be happy, it is said, unless we believe that our wishes will be fulfilled; and we endeavor to convert our wishes into a guaranty for their own fulfilment. If we cannot make up our minds to say "never," neither can we resolve to admit that there is really evil. We passionately assert that the past will come back and that pain will turn out to be an illusion. The argument against the infidel comes essentially to this; you tell me that my hopes will not be realized, and therefore you make me necessarily and needlessly miserable. For God's sake, do not disperse my dreams. People are not satisfied with the answer that the nightmare has gone as well as the vision of bliss, and that fears are destroyed as much as hopes; because, as a matter of fact, they can contrive to dwell upon that part of the doctrine which is comfortable for the moment. We have power over our dreams though we conceal its exercise from ourselves. But the argument itself involves the fundamental fallacy. To destroy a groundless hope is not to destroy a man's happiness. The instantaneous effort may be painful: but it is the price which we have to pay for a cure of deep-seated complaints. The infidel's reply is substantially this: I may destroy your hopes; but I do not destroy your power of hoping. I bid you no longer fix your mind on a chimera but on tangible and realizable prospects. I warn you that efforts to soar above the atmosphere can only lead to disappointment, and that time spent in squaring the circle is simply time spent. Apply your strength and your intellect on matters which lie at hand and on problems which admit of a solution. The happiest man is not the man who has the grandest dreams, but the man whose aspirations are best fitted to guide his talents: the most efficient worker is not the one who mistakes his own fancies for an external support, but he who has most accurately gauged the conditions under which he is laboring. Trust in Providence may lead you to pass successfully through dangers which would have repelled an unbeliever, or it may lead you to break your neck in pursuing a dream. It makes heroes and cowards, patriots and assassins, saints and bigots who each mistake their wisdom or their folly for divine intimations. Providence for us can only be that aggregate of external forces to which willingly or unwillingly we must adapt ourselves. We should calmly calculate by all available means the conditions of our life, and then dare, without ignoring, the dangers that are inevitable. Through all human affairs there runs an element of uncertainty which cannot be suppressed, and we seek in vain to disguise it under names consecrated by old associations; there are evils which are only made more poignant by our efforts to explain them away; and to each of us will very speedily come an end of his labors in the world. We can best fortify ourselves by recognizing and submitting to the inevitable and by anchoring our minds on the firmest holding ground. Science will tell us that by working with the great forces that move the world, we may contribute some fragment to an edifice which will not be broken down; that to think for others instead of limiting our hopes to our petty interests is the best remedy for unavailing regret. We can take our part in the long warfare of man against the world, which is nothing else but the gradual accommodation of the race to the conditions of its dwelling-place. By so disciplining our thoughts that we may fight eagerly and hopefully, we have the best security for happiness, and not in encouraging an idle dwelling upon visions which can never be verified, and which are apt to become most ghastly when we most wish for consolation.

To the question, then, from which I started, it seems that an unequivocal reply can be given. Why help to destroy the old faith from which people derive, or believe themselves to derive, so much spiritual solace? The answer is, that the loss is overbalanced by the gain. We lose nothing that ought to be really comforting in the ancient creeds; we are relieved from much that is burdensome to the imagination and to the intellect. Those creeds were indeed in great part the work of the best and ablest of our forefathers; they therefore provide some expression for the highest emotions of which our nature is capable; but, to say nothing of the lower elements which have intruded, of the concessions made to bad passions, and to the wants of a ruder form of society, they are at best the approximations to the truth of men who entertained a radically erroneous conception of the universe. Astronomers who went on the Ptolemaic theory managed to provide a very fair description of the actual phenomena of the heavens; but the solid result of their labors was not lost when the Copernican system took its place; and incalculable advantages followed from casting aside the old cumbrous machinery of cycles and epicycles in favor of the simpler conceptions of the new doctrine. A similar change follows when man is placed at the centre of the religious and moral system. We still retain the faiths at which theologians arrived by a complex machinery of arbitrary contrivances destined to compensate one set of dogmas by another. The justice of God the Father is tempered by the mercy of God the Son, as the planet wheeled too far forward by the cycle is brought back to its place by the epicycle. When we strike out the elaborate arrangements, the truths which they aim at expressing are capable of far simpler statements; infinite error and distortion disappear, and the road is open for conceptions impossible under the old circuitous and erroneous methods.