Chapter 11

Again we may say, with no pretense of probing the mystery in its depths, but as gaining a touch of side-light, it is plain that what we look at as the strictly moral forces of mankind--the clear thinking, the definite purpose, the pure aspiration--must be reckoned with as only a part of the volume of force that carries along the individual and the race. Other elements of that force are the physical needs; the push and play of passions ingrained in human nature; the inherited bias; the strength of habits formed before childhood had begun to reflect,--the thousand forces which blend with reason and choice to make up our destiny. Man's noblest aim is to make reason and purpose the rulers in his little republic, but at the best those rulers must deal with a set of very vigorous and often mutinous subjects.

Let us not at least wonder, though for the moment we sigh, that neither did the kingdom of God at once establish itself on earth, as Jesus hoped, nor did the Spirit guide mankind by a brief and sure path into full felicity and holiness, as Paul hoped.

The disappointment is a blank contradiction only for those who assume a superhuman revelation in Scripture or in church, and then have to reconcile this infallibility with that most fallible groping by which alone mankind gets along. Unembarrassed at least by that difficulty, let us note one natural cause of the imperfect progress of Christianity, namely, the substitution of fancy for clear and sound knowledge of nature and man, which was inwrought from the beginning in its creed.

We may recall the piercing question of Socrates, "Can virtue be taught?" Can the best life be so clearly shown and so skillfully inculcated, that it may be transmitted from man to man and from generation to generation as surely and safely as the knowledge of a mechanical art or a physical science? Socrates owned that he knew of no such way to teach virtue,--that while Pericles could teach his son to be a good horseman, he could not so guide him but that he became a bad man,--and Socrates himself found no sure way to guide men into the heroic path he walked himself.

Now Christianity offered a sort of knowledge as the proper training to produce virtue. Its knowledge included certain genuine and precious elements, such as the essential blessedness of purity and love; the trust and peace which flow from duty done; the hope which springs from the grave of a holy man;--ideas not new in substance, but wonderfully vivified and vitalized. But along with this genuine knowledge, Christianity blended in ever-growing volume a pseudo-knowledge. It had a professed explanation of the nature of Deity, the nature of humanity, and their mutual relation, which was so unreal that when applied to the conduct of human life its fruit was often as ashes and the east wind.

To sum up the method by which Christianity wrought: its vital ideas of character were infolded in a triple crust of Authority, Ceremony, Dogma. Its ideas could scarcely have been propagated except under some such incrustation. Pure gold must be mixed with alloy before it can be worked. The new society would have quickly dissolved into chaos if it had not had established laws and usages and discipline and rulers. The craving of the average man for definite symbols fastened eagerly on the cleansing water of baptism and the bread and wine of the love-feast. The thoughtful mind must needs seek to assign to the Master his true place and relation as between God and man. Here were the germs of hierarchy, ceremonial, and dogma. Internal order, self-protection against persecuting emperors and then against barbarian invaders, led to a gradual strengthening and perfecting of the organization. The craving for intellectual consistency and symmetry urged on the elaboration of the creed.

That development of the Christian creed,--in one view, how natural and inevitable a process; yet what enormous waste of intellect, what diversion from sound inquiry! The original hypothesis being pure fancy, all the ingenious deductions are mere excursions into cloudland.

We need not follow in any detail these speculations. A certain purity and loftiness marks their early stages, in which the Greek theologians were occupied in blending a sort of Platonic theory of deity with the historic fact of a noble human personality. With the emergence of the church from persecution to power, we see that the intellectual degeneracy has set in along with the moral. The first great council, that of Nicaea, occupied itself in settling by a majority of votes whether Christ was of _like_ substance with the Father or of the _same_ substance with the Father. The assertion of his full equality was in due time followed by a similar definition of the personality and equality of the Holy Spirit, with the full doctrine of the Trinity; the double nature of Christ; the rank of the Virgin Mary. The authoritative interpretation of human nature had its source in the personal experience and later theorizing of Augustine. Himself emergent after long struggles from the tyranny of evil desire, by a transcendent experience in which he saw the hand of God,--he in effect generalized from this to the inherent and utter depravity of all mankind, and its entire dependence on a divine grace which might with equal justice be given or withheld. The lurid hell which had always shared with a radiant heaven the imagination of the church took from Augustine a grimmer horror: in the fearful thought of men, its foundations were now deep sunk in eternal justice, man being himself from birth a wretch so abominable that hell was his natural destiny, save as mercy might by inscrutable selection deliver some portion of mankind.

Later ages brought their own problems. What was the nature of the atonement,--a compact between God and the Devil, by which Christ was made a ransom for man, the Devil being unexpectedly cheated of his pay? Or was Christ's death simply the transfer of a debt on the books of divine justice? The sacraments, again, what was their precise nature? And so the scheme was worked out in all its details.

The triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit; a hierarchy of angels; the creation of man, his seduction by a revolted and fallen angel, and the exposure of his entire posterity to the just retribution of everlasting misery; an arrangement between the persons of the Trinity by which the incarnation and death of the Son became a ransom for mankind; the establishment by Christ of a visible church, divinely guided to reveal to men the truth, and impart to them the divine grace; the offer of salvation upon condition of faith, repentance, and obedience; sacraments which were channels of divine grace; an endless heaven of bliss for the submissive and obedient, an endless hell of torment for the negligent or rebellious,--this was the universe as it existed to the belief and imagination of the Christian world for many centuries.

Thus Christianity, instead of following a true inquiry into the facts of the moral life,--in place of cultivating that sound knowledge of man in which Socrates led the way, or that knowledge of the natural world in which Aristotle and the Greek physicists had wrought,--instead of such study, the church based its ideals, its appeals, its helps, on a purely fanciful interpretation of the universe. Its refined and ingenious speculations were wasted upon a fantasy.

This want of sound knowledge has for us here a twofold significance. It points to one cause of the imperfect success of the ideals of Jesus and of Paul. And by its defect it points us forward to a fulfillment, when at a later age Virtue and Knowledge should be wed.

But we need to distinguish and to reverence the deep utterances of the human heart which spoke with stammering tongue in these crude symbols.

The Catholic church was a second Roman empire in its extent and power, and with an inspiration loftier than that of the empire. For, judged by what was most essential to it, the Catholic church--human to the core, human in its errors and sins, human in its upward striving--was, at its best, a society for disciplining men in the higher life. And that creed which sounds so strange to our ears, we may best translate thus: _Eternity bids you to goodness_. However much there was of error, of misapplied force, of moral injury, there was a vast, multiform, mighty culture of men in chastity, in charity, in the victories and the joys of the spirit. The church set the Virgin Mother as a heavenly consoler, and showed as the divinest thing a man who died for love of men. Before the imagination of the oppressor, the robber, the licentious, it set a flaming sword of retribution. To the poor, the sorrowful, the broken-hearted, it offered the blessed assurance, _This world and the next are God's_. It opened to them a communion in thought and feeling with holy and blessed souls in the invisible realm. Life was hard and troublous; priests and bishops sometimes made the trouble worse; but there was the sense of a heavenly rule over all, the struggle toward a heavenly attainment.

The whole moral appeal of the church rested on the superterrestrial world which it asserted and pictured. It was a world whose existence was vouched solely by an inward assent of the mind. For outward government, there were bishops and popes, kings and magistrates. But all moral authority, all incitement to holiness, all spiritual joy and hope, rested on this unseen world as accepted by the mind. Disbelieve, and all was lost! And so, of necessity, _belief_ was the fundamental, the essential thing. Obey the church, believe the creed,--that was the supreme double requirement.

That imaginations when believed as these were believed exercised a mighty power is beyond question. That the power was in a degree for good is also clear. But the vast dislocation between the supposed and the real worlds involved enormous failure and waste.

On the one hand, the whole tremendous imagery of the supernal world simply slipped off altogether from a great proportion of the men and women whose time and thought were absorbed in the toils and sorrows and pleasures of the world about them. To make a future heaven and hell take any hold of them at all, the church had to translate its mysteries and sublimities into a very material and crude ceremonial. It brought in penalties of a substantial sort,--penance and excommunication, the rack and the stake. It constantly appealed to fear. And after all, there remained always an enormous amount of stolid and mostly silent indifference and unbelief. The priest said these things were so,--the priests all said so,--and the priest was backed by the bishop, and the bishop by the Pope. Well, perhaps they knew--and perhaps they did n't. The chance that they were right made it worth while to go to church on Sunday, and to confession sometimes; to have one's children baptized; to avoid giving offense to the clergy; and to make sure of their good offices when one came to die. But the belief in their heaven and hell was not strong enough to very much expel the greed, sloth, lust, avarice, pride to which men were prone.

That same silent practical unbelief has been equally prevalent under all the forms of Protestant supernaturalism. Part of it, no doubt, may be referred to the difficulty with which human nature responds to any appeal to look much beyond the immediate present. But in great part too it springs from a suspicion of unreality in that supernatural world which the preacher so fluently and fervently declares.

It may be said that in a more ignorant and credulous age the mass of men did believe unquestioningly in the teachings of the church. But what hardly admits of debate is the misconception which the mediaeval church's doctrine involved as to some of the cardinal facts of life.

This religion dealt with such primary facts of real life as the human body and its laws, the passion of sex, productive industry, the organization of society,--in short, with all the impulses, instincts, and powers of man,--through a cloud of misapprehension.

The central misconception was the idea that this life is only significant as the antechamber to another. Hence its occupations, responsibilities, joys, and troubles are of little account except as they are directly related to the other life. This naturally bred a false attitude toward many of the subjects which both actually and of right do largely engage the attention of men.

The body was regarded as not the servant but the enemy of the spirit. The highest state was celibacy, and marriage was a concession to human weakness.

Study of nature was an unprofitable pursuit. The charter of divine truth was the Bible, and its interpreter was the church. Since this world was only the scene of a brief discipline, and was itself to pass away, it was idle to spend much study on it.

Speculative thought was profitable only so long as it was a mere elucidation of the dogmas of the church. As soon as those dogmas were even remotely questioned, the thinker's soul was in peril. In repressing heretical suggestions by the sternest measures, the church was discharging a plain duty.

Earthly pleasure was dangerous, but in suffering lay medicinal virtue. One mark of the saint was self-inflicted pain. The highest symbol of religion was the cross, emblem of torture and death.

The belief in a hell of endless suffering was the parent of a monstrous and ghastly brood of imaginations. How far the dread thus inspired acted as a wholesome deterrent we can only guess. Too well we know the torture it wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear which mothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind, which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a more unquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts.

Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of the mediaeval churchmen. Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other directions bore noble fruit.

Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.

There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope. Compared with the antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification, his hope.

Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief of men--a terror matched with a glory and tenderness. But in Dante is a force beyond this theologic belief--the spiritual love of a man and woman. It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental. Thirteen hundred years of Christianity had inwrought a new purity. Out of chivalry, half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman. If was truly a "new life."

Through Dante's early story,--the vestibule by which we are led to the "Divina Commedia,"--through this "Vita Nuova," there runs a poignancy which has almost more of pain than pleasure. Under an earthly symbol it is the vision of the ideal--the unattainable--the passion of the soul for what lies beyond its full grasp.

In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology. In reality he lives by the ideal relation with Beatrice. For him the true Purgatory is his self-reproach in her presence. The boundless joy of reunion after a lifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense light of that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch it with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken. The anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is absolutely forgotten. Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its reflection in the eyes of Beatrice.

Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteen centuries of Christianity? He shows evil existing in its worst forms and in wide extent. The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution which seemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him. The sin whose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, an imaginary participation in Adam's trespass, or the mere human shadows against a dazzling ideal of purity. In the men of his own time and in his own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort,--lust, cruelty, treachery. The physical hell he imagines in another world is the counterpart of the moral hell he sees about him in this world. In his Inferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival. Much of it is to the modern reader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination.

In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical and spiritual ideals has been the movement of coarser forces--often seeming to destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement.

In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that of military force. Out of this grew feudalism,--a kind of order, with its own code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of noble sentiment running into fantasy.

Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge. Wealth grew first by the association of craftsmen,--the guilds, the free cities.

Then commerce spread, as in the trade of Italy and the Low Countries with the East.

A succession of discoveries and inventions in the physical world advanced society.

Gunpowder helped to overthrow feudalism.

Printing made the Reformation possible.

The Copernican theory had its practical result in the stimulation of discovery and commerce; its intellectual issue in the weakening of the church's cosmogony, and a discredit of the church's claim to real knowledge.

The growing wealth of the middle class gave freedom to England,--the merchants and cities were the strength of the Puritan and Parliamentary party.

A series of inventions has within the last century multiplied wealth--the use of canals, textile machinery, steam, electricity. This has created a new class of rich. It has improved the condition of the laboring man, not enough to satisfy him, but enough to strengthen him to demand more.

Thus, military force giving strength; its organization as feudalism, giving the chivalric virtues and training an upper class; commerce, discovery, invention, raising first the middle class and then the lower,--these forces, not on the surface ethical, have cooperated to realize the ideal.

Luther led a revolt which in its issue freed half Europe from the Roman court. He made the quarrel on a moral question. No man, he said, could sell a license from God to commit sin. If the Pope said otherwise, the Pope was a liar and no vicegerent of God. So he put in the forefront of the revolting forces a moral idea.

He showed that the spiritual life, with all its aspirations, struggles, and victories, was open to man without help from Pope or priesthood. He gave the German people the Bible in their own tongue. He taught by word and example that marriage was the rightful accompaniment of a life consecrated to God.

He had many of the limitations of the peasant and the priest. He was wholly inadequate to any comprehensive conception of the higher life of humanity. His ideal of character was based on a mystical experience, under the forms of an antiquated theology. He was narrow; he confounded the friends with the foes of progress; he had no clear understanding of the social and political needs of the time; he was full of superstition, and saw the Devil present in every mischief; he was often violent and wrathful. But he had a great and tender heart; he had the soldierly temper which prompted him to strike when more sensitive and reflective men held back; and he won the leadership of the new age when against all the pomp and power of Emperor and Pope he planted himself on the truth as he saw the truth: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me!"

Copernicus died in 1543--two years before Luther. For thirty-six years--all through the Reformation struggle--he was quietly working out his theory. The book containing it he did not venture to publish, till under Paul III. there was a lull in the storm. He was a loyal Catholic, but his teaching was sure to conflict with the church. He kept alive just long enough to see his book come from the printers--dying at the age of seventy. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came later.

The Protestants in the name of religion defied and set aside the Catholic church. They were impelled to do it because they saw that the church, claiming infallibility, was practically fallible and faulty in its morals, as in the matter of the indulgences. They found courage to do it, because men like Luther learned by experience that the sense of pardoned sin, of a divine communion, of peace and joy, of which the church had claimed the exclusive possession, were possible to them wholly without the church's intervention. That was one side of the revolt: the other side was that the civil society, as in England, had grown strong enough, and the monarchical and national temper bold enough, to be impatient of any foreign control.

But the Protestant reformers in an intellectual sense simply remoulded a little the old creed, detaching so much only as was inextricably blended with the authority of the Roman priesthood. Theirs was in no sense an intellectually creative movement. Politically and socially it had great effects. Intellectually it did hardly more than _to set the door open_. Even this it did unconsciously and unwillingly. The early Protestants found themselves face to face with elemental forces of human nature,--with misery, sin, and greed, with passions stimulated by the sense that authority was weakening. They saw no other resource, their own minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience brought no other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernatural world. The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; its spiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught; its insistence on _belief_ no less absolute. The traditional Protestant orthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled. Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to the imagination is less strong.

But for more than three hundred years the whole conception of a supernatural universe has been growing weaker and weaker in its hold on the minds of men. Shakspere paints the most various, active, and passionate world of humanity,--a humanity brilliant with virtues, dark with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet's brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of a hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth, hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of future retribution,--assure him only of success _here_, and

"We 'd jump the life to come."