Chapter 9

We are sorry not to notice in any of the discussions on the subject a more frank and searching examination of the reason why religion does not act more powerfully as a rule of conduct. Until such an examination is made, and its certain results boldly faced by church reformers, the church cannot become any more of a help to right living than it is now, be this little or much. The first thing which such an examination would reveal is a thing which is in everybody's mind and on everybody's tongue in private, but which is apt to be evaded or only slightly alluded to at ecclesiastical synods and conventions--we mean the loss of faith in the dogmatic part of Christianity. People do not believe in the fall, the atonement, the resurrection, and a future state of reward and punishment at all, or do not believe in them with the certainty and vividness which are needed to make faith a constant influence on man's daily life. They do not believe they will be damned for sin with the assurance they once did, and they are consequently indifferent to most of what is said to them of the need of repentance. They do not believe the story of Christ's life and the theory of his character and attributes given in the New Testament, or they regard them as merely a picturesque background to his moral teachings, about which a Christian may avoid coming to any positive conclusion.

No man who keeps himself familiar with the intellectual and scientific movements of the day, however devout a Christian he may be, likes to question himself as to his beliefs about these matters, or would like to have to define accurately where his faith ended and his doubts began. If he is assailed in discussion by a sceptic and his combativeness roused, he will probably proclaim himself an implicit and literal acceptor of the gospel narratives; but he will not be able to maintain this mental attitude alone in his own room. The effort that has been made by Unitarians and others to meet this difficulty by making Christ's influence and authority rest on his moral teachings and example, without the support of a divine nature or mission or sacrifice, has failed. The Christian Church cannot be held together as a great social force by his teaching or example as a moral philosopher. A church organized on this theory speedily becomes a lecture association or a philanthropic club, of about as much aid to conduct as Freemasonry. Christ's sermons need the touch of supernatural authority to make them impressive enough for the work of social regeneration, and his life was too uneventful and the society in which he lived too simple, to give his example real power over the imagination of a modern man who regards him simply as a social reformer.

This decline of faith in Christian dogma and history has not, however, produced by any means a decline in religious sentiment, but it has deprived religion of a good deal of its power as a means of moral discipline. Moral discipline is acquired mainly by the practice of doing what one does not like to do, under the influence of mastering fear or hope. The conquest of one's self, of which Christian moralists speak so much, is simply the acquisition of the power of doing easily things to which one's natural inclinations are opposed; and in this work the mass of mankind are powerfully aided--indeed, we may say, have to be aided--by the prospect of reward or punishment. The wonderful results which are achieved in the army, by military authority, in inspiring coarse and common natures with a spirit of the loftiest devotion, are simply due to the steady application by day and by night of a punishing and rewarding authority. The loss of this, or its great enfeeblement, undoubtedly has deprived the church of a large portion of its means of discipline, and reduced it more nearly to the __rôle_ of a stimulater and gratifier of certain tender emotions. It contains a large body of persons whose religious life consists simply of a succession of sensations not far removed from one's enjoyment of music and poetry; and another large body, to whom it furnishes refuge and consolation of a vague and ill-defined sort in times of sorrow and disappointment. To these persons the church prayers and hymns are not trumpet-calls to the battle-field, but soothing melodies, which give additional zest to home comforts and luxuries, and make the sharper demands of a life of the highest integrity less unbearable. Nay, the case is rather worse than this. We have little doubt that this sentimental religion, as we may call it, in many cases deceives a man as to his own moral condition, and hides from him the true character and direction of the road he is travelling, and furnishes his conscience with a false bottom. The revelations of the last few years as to its value as a guide in the conduct of life have certainly been plain and deplorable.

The evil in some degree suggests the remedy, though we do not mean to say that we know of any complete remedy. Church-membership ought to involve discipline of some kind in order to furnish moral aid. It ought, that is to say, to impose some restraint on people's inclinations, the operation of which will be visible, and enforced by some external sanction. If, in short, Christians are to be regarded as more trustworthy and as living on a higher moral plane than the rest of the world, they must furnish stronger evidence of their sincerity than is now exacted from them, in the shape of plain and open self-denial. The church, in short, must be an organization held together by some stronger ties than enjoyment of weekly music and oratory in a pretty building, and alms-giving which entails no sacrifice and is often only a tickler of social vanity. There is in monasticism a suggestion of the way in which it must retain its power over men's lives, and be enabled to furnish them with a certificate of character. Its members will have to have a good deal of the ascetic about them, but without any withdrawal from the world.

How to attain this without sacrificing the claims of art, and denying the legitimacy of honestly acquired material power, and, in fact, restricting individual freedom to a degree which the habits and social theories of the day would make very odious, is the problem to be solved, and, it is, no doubt, a very tough one. General inculcation of "plain living" will not solve it, as long as "plain living" is not defined and the "self-made man" who has made a great fortune and spends it lavishly is held up to the admiration of every school-boy. The church has been making of late years a gallant effort to provide accommodation for the successful, and enable them to be good Christians without sacrificing any of the good things of this life, and, in fact, without surrendering anything they enjoy, or favoring the outside public with any recognizable proof of their sincerity. We do not say that this is reprehensible, but it is easy to see that it has the seeds of a great crop of scandals in it. Donations in an age of great munificence, and horror of far-off or unattractive sins, like the slaveholding of Southerners and the intemperance of the miserable poor, are not, and ought not to be, accepted as signs of inward and spiritual grace, and of readiness to scale "the toppling crags of duty."

The conversion of the working-classes, too, it is safe to say, will never be accomplished by any ecclesiastical organization which sells cushioned pews at auction, or rents them at high rates, and builds million-dollar churches for the accommodation of one thousand worshippers. The passion for equality has taken too strong hold of the workingman to make it possible to catch him with cheap chapels and assistant pastors. He will not seek salvation _in forma pauperis_, and thinks the best talent in the ministerial market not a whit too good for him. He not unnaturally doubts the sincerity of Christians who are not willing to kneel beside badly dressed persons in prayer on the one day of the week when prayer is public. In fact, to fit the Protestant Church in this country to lay hold of the laboring population a great process of reconstruction would be necessary. The congregational system would have to be abandoned or greatly modified, the common fund made larger and administered in a different way. There would have, in short, to be a close approach to the Roman Catholic organization, and the churches would have to lose the character of social clubs, which now makes them so comfortable and attractive. Well-to-do Christians would have to sacrifice their tastes in a dozen ways, and give up the expectation of aesthetic pleasure in public worship. There cannot be a vast Gothic cathedral for the multitude in every city. The practice of the church would have to be forced up to its own theory of its character and mission, which would involve serious collision with some of the most deeply rooted habits and ideas of modern social and political life. That there is any immediate probability of this we do not believe. Until it is brought about, its members must make up their minds to have religious professions treated by some as but slight guarantees of character, and by others as but cloaks of wrong-doing, hard as this may be for that large majority to whom they are an honest expression of sure hopes and noble aims.

RÔLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS

Mr. Galton, in his work on "Hereditary Genius," has drawn attention in a striking chapter to the effect which the systematic destruction and expatriation, by the Inquisition or the religious intolerance of the government, of the leading men of the nation--its boldest thinkers, most ardent investigators, most prudent and careful and ingenious workers, in generation after generation--had in bringing about the moral and political decline of the three great Latin countries, France, Spain, and Italy--a decline of which, in the case of the two former at least, we have probably not seen the end. The persons killed or banished amounted only to a few thousands every year, but they were--no matter from what rank they came--the flower of the population: the men whose labor and whose influence enabled the State to keep its place in the march of civilization. The picture is very valuable (particularly just now, when there is so great a disposition to revel in the consciousness of vast numbers), as calling attention to the smallness of the area within which, after all, the sources of national greatness and progress are to be sought. The mind which keeps the mass in motion, which saves and glorifies it, would most probably, if we could lay bare the secret of national life, be found in the possession of a very small proportion of the people, though not in any class in particular-- neither among the rich nor the poor, the learned nor simple, capitalists nor laborers; but the abstraction of these few from the sum of national existence, though it would hardly be noticed in the census, would produce a fatal languor, were the nation not constantly receiving fresh blood from other countries.

This element was singled out with considerable accuracy in France and Spain by religious persecution. It would happily be impossible to devise any process of selection one-quarter as efficient in our age or in this country. The one we have been using for the last twenty years, and on which a good deal of popular reliance has been placed, is the accumulation of wealth; and under this "the self-made man"--that is, the man who, starting in life ignorant and poor, has made a large fortune, and got control of a great many railroads and mines and factories--has risen into the front rank of eminence. The events of the last five years, however, have had a damaging effect on his reputation, and he now stands as low as his worst enemies could desire. As he declines, the man of some kind of training naturally rises; and it would be running no great risk to affirm that the popular mind inclines more than it has usually done to the belief that trained men--that is, men who have been prepared for their work by teaching on approved methods--are after all the most valuable possession a country can have, and that a country is well or ill off in proportion as they are numerous or the reverse. One does not need to travel very far from this position to reach the conclusion that there is probably no way in which we could strike so deadly a blow at the happiness and progress of the United States as by sweeping away, by some process of proscription kept up during a few generations, the graduates of the principal colleges. In no other way could we make so great a drain on the reserved force of character, ambition, and mental culture which constitutes so large a portion of the national vitality. They would not be missed at the polls, it is true, and if they were to run a candidate for the Presidency to-morrow their vote would excite great merriment among the politicians; but if they were got rid of regularly for forty or fifty years in the manner we have suggested, and nothing came in from the outside to supply their places, the politicians would somehow find that they themselves had less public money to vote or steal, less national aspiration to trade upon, less national force to direct, less national dignity to maintain or lose, and that, in fact, by some mysterious process, they were getting to be of no more account in the world than their fellows in Guatemala or Costa Rica.

There will come to the colleges of the United States during the next fifty years a larger and larger number of men who either strongly desire training for themselves or are the sons of men who are deeply sensible of its advantages, and therefore are at the head of families which possess and appreciate the traditions of high civilization, and would like to live in them and contribute their share to perpetuating them--and they will not come from any one portion of the country. There are, unhappily, "universities" in all parts of the Union, but there is hardly a doubt that as the means of communication are improved and cheapened, and as the real nature and value of the university education become better understood, the tendency to use the small local institutions passing by this name as, what they really are, high schools, and resort to the half-dozen colleges which can honestly call themselves universities, will increase. The demands which modern culture, owing to the advance of science and research in every field, now makes on a university, in the shape of professors, books, apparatus, are so great that only the largest and wealthiest institutions can pretend to meet them, and in fact there is something very like false pretence in the promise to do so held out to poor students by many of the smaller colleges. These colleges doubtless do a certain amount of work very creditably; but they are uncandid in saying that they give a university education, and in issuing diplomas purporting to be certificates that any such education has either been sought or received. The idea of maintaining a university for the sake of the local glory of it is a form of folly which ought not to be associated with education in any stage. These considerations are now felt to be so powerful in other countries that they threaten the destruction of a whole batch of universities in Italy which have come down famous and honored from the Middle Ages and have sent out twenty generations of students, and they are causing even the very best of the smaller universities in Germany, great and efficient as many of them are, to tremble for their existence.

There is no interest of learning, therefore, which would not be served by the greater concentration of the resources of the country as regards university education, still less is there any interest of society or politics. It is of the last importance that the class of men from all parts of the country whom the universities send out into the world should as far as possible be educated together, and start on their careers with a common stock of traditions, tastes, and associations. Much as steam and the telegraph have done, and will do, to diminish for administrative purposes the size of the Republic, and to simplify the work of government, they cannot prevent the creation of a certain diversity of interests, and even of temperament and manners, through differences of climate and soil and productions. There will never come a time when we shall not have more or less of such folly as the notion that the South and West need more money than the East, because they have less capital, or the struggle of some parts of the country for a close market against other parts which seek an open one. Nothing but a reign of knowledge and wisdom, such as centuries will not bring, will prevent States on the Gulf or on the Pacific from fancying that their interests are not identical with those of the Northern Atlantic, and nothing but profound modifications in the human constitution will ever bring the California wheat-raiser into complete sympathy with the New England shoemaker.

The work of our political system for ages to come will consist largely in keeping these differences in check; and in doing it, it will need all the help it can get from social and educational influences. It ought to be the aim, therefore, of the larger institutions of learning to offer every inducement in their power to students from all parts of the Union, and more especially from the South, as the region which is most seriously threatened by barbarism, and in which the sense of national unity and the hold of national traditions on the popular mind are now feeblest. We at the North owe to the civilized men at the South who are now, no matter what their past faults or delusions may have been, struggling to save a large portion of the Union from descent into heathen darkness and disorder, the utmost help and consideration. We owe them above all a free and generous welcome to a share in whatever means of culture we have at our disposal, and ought to offer it, as far as is consistent with our self-respect, in a shape that will not wound theirs.

The question of the manner of doing this came up incidentally at Harvard the other day, at the dedication of the great hall erected in memory of the graduates of the university who died in the war. The hall is to be used for general college purposes, for examinations, and some of the ceremonial of commencement, as well as for dinner, and a portion of the walls is covered with tablets bearing the names of those to whose memory it is dedicated. The question whether the building would keep alive the remembrance of the civil war in any way in which it is inexpedient to keep it alive, or in any way which would tend to keep Southern students away from the university, has been often asked, and by some answered in the affirmative. General Devens, who presided at the alumni dinner, gave full and sufficient answer to those who find fault with the rendering of honor on the Northern side to those who fell in its cause; but General Bartlett--who perhaps more than any man living is qualified to speak for those who died in the war--uttered, in a burst of unpremeditated eloquence, at the close of the proceedings, the real reason why no Southern man need, and we hope will never, feel hurt by Northern memorials of the valor and constancy of Northern soldiers. It is not altogether the cause which ennobles fighting; it is the spirit in which men fight; and no horror of the objects of the Southern insurrection need prevent anybody from admiring or lamenting the gallant men who honestly, loyally, and from a sense of duty perished in its service. It is not given to the wisest and best man to choose the right side; but the simplest and humblest knows whether it is his conscience which bids him lay down his life. And this test may be applied by each side to all the victims of the late conflict without diminishing by one particle its faith in the justice of its own cause. Moreover, as General Bartlett suggested, the view of the nature of the struggle which is sure to gain ground all over the country as the years roll on is that it was a fierce and passionate but inevitable attempt to settle at any cost a controversy which could be settled in no other way; and that all who shared in it, victors or vanquished, helped to save the country and establish its government on sure and lasting foundations. This feeling cannot grow without bringing forcibly to mind the fact that the country was saved through the war that virtue might increase, that freedom might spread and endure, and that knowledge might rule, and not that politicians might have a treasury to plunder and marble halls to exchange their vituperation in; thus uniting the best elements of Northern and Southern society by the bonds of honest indignation as well as of noble hopes.

THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The _Baltimore American_, discussing the plan of the Hopkins University in that city, says: "The _Nation_ suggests to the Board of Trustees a university that would leave Latin, Greek, mathematics, and the elements of natural science out of its curriculum." This is so great a mistake that we are at a loss to understand how it could have been made. The _Nation_ has never suggested anything of the kind. The university which the _Nation_ has expressed the hope the trustees would found is simply a university with such a high standard for admission on all subjects that the professors would be saved the necessity of teaching the rudiments of either Latin, Greek, mathematics, or natural science; or, in other words, that the country would be saved considerable waste of skilled labor. The reason why we have ventured to expect this of the Hopkins trustees is that they enjoy the all but unprecedented advantage of being left in possession of a very large bequest, with complete liberty, within very wide limits, as to the disposition of it. In other words, they are to found a university with it, but as to the kind of university they may exercise their discretion.

That this is a very exceptional position everybody familiar with the history of American colleges knows. All the older colleges are bound to the state, or to certain religious denominations, by laws or usages or precedents which impose a certain tolerably fixed character either on the subjects or on the mode of teaching them, or on both. They have traditions to uphold, or denominational interests to care for, or political prejudices to satisfy. The newer ones, on the other hand, are apt to have incurred a bondage even worse still, in having to carry out the wishes of a founder who, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, had only a faint notion of the nature and needs of a university, and in endowing one sought rather to erect a monument to his memory than to found a seat of learning. In so far as he was interested in the curriculum, he probably desired that it should be such as would satisfy some want which he himself felt, or thought he felt, in early life, or should diffuse some social or religious or political crotchet on which his fancy had secretly fed during his years of active exertion, and on the success of which he came to think, in the latter part of his life, that the best interests of the community were dependent. The number of these honorably ambitious but ill-informed and somewhat eccentric testators increases every year, as the country grows in wealth and the habit of giving to public objects gains in strength.