Part 43

"The pursuit of truth is easy to a man who has no human sympathies, whose vision is impaired by no fond partialities, whose heart is torn by no divided allegiance. To him the renunciation of error presents few difficulties; for the moment it is recognized as error, its charm ceases. But the case is very different with the Searcher whose affections are strong, whose associations are quick, whose hold upon the Past is clinging and tenacious. He may love Truth with an earnest and paramount devotion; but he loves much else also. He loves errors, which were once the cherished convictions of his soul. He loves dogmas which were once full of strength and beauty to his thoughts, though now perceived to be baseless or fallacious. He loves the Church where he worshipped in his happy childhood; where his friends and his family worship still; where his gray-haired parents await the resurrection of the Just; but where _he_ can worship and await no more. He loves the simple old creed, which was the creed of his earlier and brighter days; which is the creed of his wife and children still; but which inquiry has compelled him to abandon. The past and the familiar have chains and talismans which hold him back in his career, till every fresh step forward becomes an effort and an agony; every fresh error discovered is a fresh bond snapped asunder; every new glimpse of light is like a fresh flood of pain poured in upon the soul. To such a man the pursuit of Truth is a daily martyrdom,--how hard and bitter let the martyr tell. Shame to those who make it doubly so; honor to those who encounter it saddened, weeping, trembling, but unflinching still."--p. xvi.

Our author would snatch from Mr. Greg the right to say, we must not lie to God. Which has the better right to say, "Thou shalt not lie to men"?

The more ingenuously the modern Orthodoxy lays bare its essence, the more evident is it that a profound scepticism not only mingles with it, but constitutes its very inspiration. The dread of losing God, the impression that there is but one patent way, not of duty, but of thought, of meeting him, haunt the minds of men, driving some to Anglicanism to compensate defect of faith by excess of sacrament, some to Rome in quest of the Lord's body, and prompting others to conservative efforts of Bibliolatry, conducted with ever-decreasing reason and declining hope. We have seen, however, no such exemplification of this radical distrust as in the treatise before us. Already has the writer declared that the moral side of the universe sends in, with regard to religion, an empty report. And now he hastens to tell us that, on the physical side, the watchmen from every observatory of nature cry out, "No God." He represents the natural sciences as a huge Titanic, resistless mass of knowledge, perfectly demonstrable, and completely irreligious; descending, like a glacier, from the upper valleys of frozen thought; sure to scrape away the wild pine woods and the green fields of natural religion, yet considerate enough, for some reason unexplained, to spare the foundations of the village church. Designating every faith except his own by such phrases as "theosophic fancies," and "pietistic notions," he assures us that they will all be put "right out of existence" by "our modern physical sciences"; and he borrows from the "Positive Philosophy" (apparently by unconscious sympathy) the following maxim to justify his prediction:--

"In any case, when that which on any ground of proof takes full hold of the understanding, (such, for example, are the most certain of the conclusions of Geology,) stands contiguous to that which, in a logical sense, is of inferior quality, and is indeterminate, and fluctuating, and liable to retrogression,--in any such case there is always going on a silent encroachment of the more solid mass upon the ground of that which is less solid. What is SURE will be pressing upon what is uncertain, whether or not the two are designedly brought into collision or comparison. What is well defined weighs upon, and against, what is ill defined. Nothing stops the continuous involuntary operation of SCIENCE in dislodging OPINION from the minds of those who are conversant with both.

"A very small matter that is indeed determinate, will be able to keep a place for itself against this incessantly encroaching movement; but nothing else can do so. As to any of those theosophic fancies which we may wish to cling to, after we have thrown away the Bible, we might as well suppose that they will resist the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences, as imagine that the lichens of an Alpine gorge will stay the slow descent of a glacier."--p. 97.

Here it is alleged that Science and Opinion cannot coexist,--that the demonstrable will banish the probable. And be it observed, this is to take place, not simply where contradiction arises between the two orders of belief, but in _all cases_, from the mere _distaste_ which quantitative studies produce towards everything which evades their rules. In this allegation there is, we believe, with much exaggeration, a certain small amount of truth,--a truth, however, which, so far from supporting our author's plea against natural religion, offers it a conclusive refutation. It may be admitted that the exact and mixed sciences _do_ disincline their votary to put trust in the processes by which judgments of probability are formed, and alienate him from thinkers who read off the meaning of the universe by another key than his. Accustomed to deal with Number and Space, with Motion and Force alone,--to reason upon them by a Calculus which is helpless beyond their range,--to exercise Faculties involving nothing beyond the interpretation of mensurative signs and the conception of relative magnitudes,--he owes it to something else than his peculiar discipline, if he has either the instruments or the aptitudes for moral and philosophical reflection. He carries into the world, as his sole means of representing and solving its phenomena, the notion of physical necessity and linear sequence, secretly defining the universe to himself as Leibnitz defined an organized being,--"a machine, whose smallest parts are also machines,"--and naturally grows impatient when he finds himself in fields of thought over which this narrow imagination opens no track. With respect, therefore, to a certain class of minds, rendered perhaps increasingly numerous by the long neglect of the moral sciences in England, it may be quite true, that a spirit of utter disbelief towards everything beyond the range of necessary matter may more and more prevail. Let us further grant to our author, for the moment, three things assumed by him, all of them, however, false:--1. That this tendency of the "demonstrable sciences" is their _only_ one having a bearing on "theosophic systems." 2. That it is so _new_, at least in degree, as to give "opinion" a worse chance for the future than it has had in the past. 3. That it is a _good_ tendency, favorable to human knowledge and character. Still we must ask, How is the _oracular authority of the Bible_ to escape the fate predicted for all probabilities? Our author assures us that it _will_ escape; but he gives no faintest hint of a reason for so singular an exception to his own canon. It cannot be contended that the evidences of Christianity and Judaism belong to any of the "demonstrable" or "physical" sciences. It cannot be denied that they lie wholly within the limits of contingent knowledge, and terminate only in "probabilities"; that the authorship, for instance, of the fourth Gospel, the credibility of the introductory chapters of Matthew, the correctness of the prophecies about the second advent, are matters which, "standing contiguous" to the laws of refracted and reflected light, occupy the position of the _less sure_ in relation to the _more sure_; that the _relative_ chronology of the Scripture books is more indeterminate than that of the geologic strata, and their _actual_ dates more uncertain than those of the eclipses fatal to Nicias and to Perseus. What, then, is to exempt these judgments of verisimilitude from being pushed "right out of existence" by the "silent encroachment of the more solid mass" of knowledge beside it? Nothing can be plainer than that all testimonial knowledge whatsoever, all history, criticism, and art, the whole system of moral and political sciences, must fall under our author's fatal sentence; and how the propositions which sustain the infallible authority of the canonical books are to hold their ground against the huge glacier on which Herschel, Airy and De Morgan, Comte and Leverrier, triumphantly ride, it is not easy to conceive. Amid the universal crash of probabilities, may not the Mosaic tables of stone, broken once, be pulverized at last? With the abrasion of all the alluvial soil in which the growths of wonder strike their roots, will the garden of Eden, will the blighted fig-tree, remain to mark a verdant and a barren spot in history? Will these riding philosophers from their cold observatory find Paul's "third heaven"? May not their icy mountain slip into "the abyss" whence all the demons came, and fill it up? These questions, indeed, are answered for us in experience. It is notorious that, whenever an unbounded devotion to science has produced a prevalent tendency to disbelief, Revelation, so far from being spared, has been usually the first object of attack; and, both at the origin of modern science in the sixteenth century, and during its accelerated advance towards the close of the eighteenth, the widening conception of determinate Law was found to threaten nothing so decisively as the faith in supernatural dispensations. The greater scepticism includes the less; and the habit of mind which lets slip all beliefs not legitimated by the canons of natural science, cannot possibly retain Christianity.

But our author has only _half_ described the mental effect of studies purely scientific. They do not, in the nature of things they _cannot_, simply push out of the mind all contingent judgments. Human life and action are one continuous texture of such judgments, with some interweaving, no doubt, of mathematic forms, which could not be picked out without spoiling the symmetry of its pattern; but were you to withdraw the threads of probable opinion, still more, to cut the warp of primitive assumptions that stretches through it, the web would simply fall to pieces. No youth can decide on a profession, no man appoint an agent in his business, no physician prescribe for a patient, no judge pronounce a sentence, no statesman answer a despatch, without a constant resort to "surmises," a reliance on slender indications, often even a deliberate adoption of very doubtful hypotheses. All men are driven from hour to hour into positions demanding combinations of thought which can be borrowed from no natural science; where not the laws of matter and motion, not the equilibrium of forces, not the properties of things, are chiefly concerned, but the feelings and faculties of persons, the action and reaction of human affairs. Mathematicians and natural philosophers, being in no way exempt from these conditions, are obliged to have just as many "opinions" and "guesses" as other men; they cannot, if they are to keep their footing on this world at all, have a smaller stock than their neighbors of this "logically inferior" order of persuasions. They are unable to abdicate the necessity of having these persuasions; and their only peculiarity is, that they sometimes import into contingent affairs the methods with which habit has rendered them familiar in another sphere, and so find the conditions of belief unsatisfied; and at others, from consciousness that their own clew will not serve, yet inaptitude for seizing a better, surrender themselves to the fortuitous guidance of ill-balanced faculties and external solicitations. Hence their judgments are frequently fantastic, frequently sceptical,--not less liable to be too easy from one cause than to be too reluctant from another; and were a history to be written of the most remarkable extravagances, positive as well as negative, by which religion and philosophy have sprung aside from the centre of common sense and feeling, it would contain more names of great repute in the exact sciences than from any other intellectual class whatever. From Pythagoras to Swedenborg, the eccentricities of mathematical and physical imagination have been the chief disturbers of a natural and healthy faith. Harmonic theories of the universe, Ideal Numbers, Geometric Ethics, Rosicrucian fraternities, Vortices and Monads, Apocalyptic studies, New Jerusalems, and Electrobiological Metaphysics, have all borne testimony to the aberrant fancy of eminent proficients in the sciences. It is, therefore, far from being universally true, that disputable theosophies and conjectural systems of the universe are distasteful to minds schooled in the "demonstrable sciences." If to men of this order we owe the successive dislodgement of one such hypothesis after another, to them also do we owe their continual reproduction. Whether the unsoundness of judgment which is contracted in the absence of historical, moral, and metaphysical studies shall show itself in an excessive slowness or an excessive facility of belief, will depend on accidents of personal character and social position. But of this we may be sure;--if the _sceptical_ temper be the direction taken, the Bible will not be spared; if the _credulous_, "theosophic fancies" will be copiously saved.

Can there, after all, be a more paradoxical spectacle than that of a religious writer allying himself with the sceptical propensities of science, in order to get rid of gainsayers of the Bible? It is the counterpart in logic of the Italian game in politics,--the Pope appealing to Parisian swords to drive out the Republic, and save the head of Christendom. Is it possible that our author can _approve_ the agency which he thus invokes? that he can really wish to see it in the intellectual ascendant, and garrisoning every sacred fortress of the world? Does he remember what are the fundamental canons of its logic,--that we know nothing but Phenomena,--that Causation is nothing but phenomenal priority,--or else, that Force is the prior datum of which Thought is a particular and posterior development? And what, on the other hand, are the "theosophic fancies" against which he would plant this barbaric artillery of Fate? They are such as these,--that our faculties give us trustworthy reports, not of phenomena only, but of their abiding ground,--Soul within, God without;--that the moral Law of Obligation in the one is the expression of Holy Will in the other;--that faithfulness in the Human mind to its highest aspirations, brings it into communion with the Divine;--that as the Soul is the free Image, so is Nature the determinate Handiwork of God. If these doctrines, spurned by our author with so rude a flippancy, _were_ to surrender to the hostility on which he relies, is he unaware of the character the conflict would assume, and of the dynasty of thought which would reign undisputed at the close? Fighting by the side of such allies against "theosophic fancies," _he_ may skirmish with the "fancies," but _they_ will bear right down upon the "Theism" in the centre; and when the day is over, the standard they will plant upon the conquered towers will be, not the sacred dove he took into the field, and lost to the defeated foe, but their own blind black eagle of necessity. How strange is the perversion of instinctive sympathies, when a theologian disparages the sciences of reflection and self-knowledge, and takes his stand on the evidence of sense and measurement alone!--when he proposes to sweep out beliefs that trouble him with their neighborhood, by a general crusade against all probabilities,--and when, with this design, he violates the just balance of power among the kingdoms of human knowledge, and flatters, as if it were a virtue, the pretensions of a mental habit, which, out of its own province, is one of the most incapacitating, yet destructive, of intellectual vices! There is, however, a certain secret affinity of feeling between a Religion which exaggerates the functions and overstrains the validity of an external authority, and a Science which deals only with objective facts, perceived or imagined. The point of sympathy is found in a common distrust of everything internal, even of the very faculties (as soon as they are contemplated as such) by which the external is apprehended and received. And between this sort of faith and the mathematics there is another analogy, which may explain so curious a mutual understanding. Both rest upon _hypotheses_, which it is beyond their province to look into, but after the assumption of which, all room for opinion is shut out by a rigid necessity. _Once get_ your infallible book, and (supposing the meaning unambiguous) it settles every matter on which it pronounces; and once allow the first principles and definitions in geometry to express truths and realities, and you can deny nothing afterwards. It is the business of philosophy to go _below_ the mathematics, and determine whether they are _more than hypothetical_ science,--whether their assumptions are a mere play of subjective necessity, or are objectively trustworthy. It is the business of both reflective philosophy and historical criticism to go below "the BOOK," and determine whether it has _more than hypothetical_ infallibility,--whether the conditions, inner and outer, of such a claim, are or are not satisfied. If even the Mathematics, which have little to fear from the investigation of their basis, have not been on the best terms with Metaphysics, it is hardly surprising that a Religion of mere external authority should feel antipathy for the studies which pry into its foundations, with the inevitable effect of showing that what is _certainty_ above ground is _opinion_ below. Nor is it wonderful that both sets of beliefs are fond of forgetting their hypothetical origin, contemplating only their acquired semblance of security, and speaking as if they disowned contingency altogether, and despised the detractors who could suspect such a taint in their blood. Hence the fellow-feeling which occasionally unites a rigid theology, and an exclusive physical and mathematical science. It is founded on their joint antipathy to the sources of _moral_ knowledge,--their common blindness to one half of human culture. Like all alliances resting on antipathy alone, it is neither honorable nor durable. It is the function of Religion to occupy a tranquil seat above the contests of partial pursuits and narrow interests; as, in the world of action, to hold the balance of Right, so, in the world of intellect, to preserve the equities and the equilibrium of Truth; and her trust is betrayed by any one who flings himself, as her representative, into the civil wars of the sciences, and in her name signs away whole provinces of thought, and abandons them to outrage and confiscation as conquered lands. Human faith has nothing to fear from the unity and perfection of all the sciences; but much from the blind ambition of each one. It is from this persuasion alone, and not from any defective appreciation of physical studies, that we have spoken freely of their tendency, when the mind is entirely enclosed within them. The undoubted source of inestimable blessings to mankind, and an indispensable element of culture to the individual, they are mischievous only when they grow dizzy with success, and propound schemes of universal empire. The moment they undertake either to create or destroy a religion, the sign is unmistakable that this intoxicated ambition has begun to work.

The relation of Religion to History our author appears to us to conceive much more correctly than its relation to Science. On this great topic, however, our limits forbid us to enter. One remark only we will make. The author misconceives the objection of Theodore Parker and others to the ordinary doctrine of historical revelation. They do not, as he affirms, "disjoin religion from history," or in the least decline the "travelling back to ages past" on its account. It is not the _presence_ of God in antiquity, but his presence _only_ there,--not his inspiration in Palestine, but his withdrawal from every spot besides,--not even his supreme and unique expression in Jesus of Nazareth, but his absence from every other human medium,--against which these writers protest. They feel that the usual Christian advocate has adopted a narrow and even irreligious ground; that he has not found a satisfactory place in the Divine scheme of human affairs for the great Pagan world; that he has presumptuously branded all history but one as "profane"; that he has not only read it without sympathy and reverence, but has used it chiefly as a foil to show off the beauty of evangelic truth and holiness, and so has dwelt only on the inadequacy of its philosophy, the deformities of its morals, the degenerate features of its social life; that he has forgotten the Divine infinitude when he assumes that Christ's plenitude of the Spirit implies the emptiness of Socrates. In their view, he has rashly undertaken to prove, not _one positive_ fact,--a revelation of divine truth in Galilee,--but an _infinite negative_,--no inspiration anywhere else. To this _negation_, and to this alone, is their remonstrance addressed. They do not deny a _theophany_ in the gift of Christianity; but they deny two very different things, viz.:--1. That this is the _only_ theophany; and, 2. That this is theophany _alone_;--that is, they look for _some_ divine elements elsewhere; and they look for _some_ human here. It is not therefore a smaller, but a larger, religious obligation to history, which they are anxious to establish; and they remain in company with the Christian advocate, so long as his devout and gentle mood continues; and only quit him when he enters on his sceptical antipathies. This, in spite of every resistance from the rigor of the older theology, is an inevitable consequence of the modern historical criticism. Its large and genial apprehension opens for us new admirations, new sympathies, clearer insight into human realities, throughout the nations and ages of the past. It melts away from our ancient moral geography the ideal contrasts of coloring which made the world the scene of an unnatural dualism, and reinstates the great families of man in unity. It is doing for our conception of the moral world what science has already done for our conception of the natural: it is expanding our notion of Divine agency within it. As, in reference to physical nature, we have learned to think that God did not enact creation but once, and cease; so are we beginning to perceive, in relation to the human mind and life, that he did not enter history only once, and quite exceptionally. Whoever opens his heart to this great thought will find in it, not the uneasiness of doubt, but the repose of faith. He will no longer fancy that, in order to keep Christianity as the divinest of all, he must fear to feel aught else divine. He will worship still at the same altar, and sing his hymn to the same strain; only with a richer chorus of consentient voices, and in a wider communion of faithful souls.

FOOTNOTE: