Part 37

The influence of the humanitarian sentiment may be further traced in softening the asperities of some forms of traditional theology, as, for example, the Calvinistic doctrine of election with its alternatives of reprobation or preterition. These certainly have not been the favorite doctrines which have commended themselves to the spirit of the age. The effort has been made to bring the doctrine of the atonement within the limits of human experience. It has been found impossible to present the doctrine of endless punishment after the manner of an earlier age. Many causes have combined to deepen the sense of mystery in which is enveloped the destiny of man, and there has been begotten in consequence an unwillingness to dogmatize where in earlier times such a reluctance was not felt. In this connection may be mentioned two religious bodies, which took their rise about the beginning of the century—Universalism, proclaiming ultimate salvation for all men; and Unitarianism, asserting the dignity of man and his divine endowment. But in all the Churches alike has the same humanizing force been felt, leading to efforts in theological reconstruction in order to make it apparent that the primary truths of Christianity are not merely arbitrary principles or arrangements unrelated to life and to the needs of the soul, but that in their essential quality there is conformity with the larger reason of humanity, with that feeling for the inherent worth of things out of which reason proceeds, and with which its conclusions must conform.

II

Thus far the humanitarian sentiment has been regarded in its combination with Christian faith, and as giving new force and distinction to Christian life and thought. But, on the other hand, it must now be noted that the same force working apart from the Church, and often in opposition to it, has been a limitation to Christian progress. In the French Revolution humanitarianism was associated with a negative, destructive tendency, which overthrew the Church, disowned God and immortality, and set up in the place of deity a so-called Goddess of Reason. This negative tendency has continued to exist and has found influential manifestation. It has attempted the deification of humanity, as though the human race were worthy in itself of being an object of worship. It has exalted man at the expense of God, conceiving of humanity as alone immortal, as competent to steer its own course without supernatural direction. It has weakened the sense of nationality, has injured and endangered family life, has taken away the highest sanctions from morality, and has reduced religion from being a revelation from God to a purely subjective process in the soul of man, worthy of respect, but without authority. It has created an abnormal sensitiveness in many directions. It has swayed socialistic movements aiming at the rights of man and seeking to achieve universal happiness, but with an antagonism sometimes latent, sometimes expressed, to God and Christ and the Christian Church. The prejudice remains which had its birth in the French Revolution, that religion is a creation of priests for their own selfish ends, and the Church an agency for robbing humanity of its rights, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Principles and convictions like these found utterance in the philosophy of Comte (1789–1857), who called himself the “founder of the religion of humanity,” and who proposed the scheme of a humanitarian Church, limited by no national boundaries, whose only deity was man, whose ritual found a place only for great men who had been the benefactors of the race. Theology and metaphysics were discarded as outgrown methods of explaining the phenomena of the universe, and in the place they vacated stood the so-called “Positive philosophy” which rejected all supernatural influence. The Church of humanity had, indeed, no history and was a failure from its birth. But the combination, first seen in Comte, of humanitarianism with the methods and principles of natural science, has been the most formidable opponent against which Christianity was ever called to struggle. It has been represented in England by John Stuart Mill and by Herbert Spencer and many others. To the influential writings of this school of thinkers is due in great measure the widespread, deep-seated scepticism since the middle of the century. To the same cause, by way of reaction, are owing the spiritualistic movement, the so-called “Christian Science” and other kindred tendencies towards a crude supernaturalism.

Those who entered the controversy in behalf of Christianity and against the adherents of the Positive philosophy suffered at first for the lack of any adequate philosophical method on which to rest in the effort to overcome this stupendous alliance between a humanitarianism working for the improvement of social conditions in combination with natural science, whose postulates involved the denial of the miracle, and indeed of all supernatural agency (agnosticism). It seemed for a time as though the philosophy of Hegel would serve the purpose of a stronghold to which Christian warriors might resort while in the stress of a conflict which involved not only the readjustment of Christian doctrines to their new environment, but also the maintenance of the idea of God, of the kingdom of God in this world and of a future life for the immortal soul. In Germany systems of theology were worked out on the basis of Hegelian principles, which, as interpreted by orthodox theologians, stood for a principle of surpassing value if it could be maintained—that the life of humanity, while dependent in the present order on physical conditions, was yet above the life in external nature with which the natural sciences deal; that the very definition of humanity implies the power of rising to the knowledge of God. Nature has no knowledge or consciousness of God, or intimation of immortality. It is in bondage to natural law and without freedom. The life of humanity must not be studied from the point of view of natural science, but is seen in the records of human history. The influence of Hegel deepened the interest in historical inquiry at a moment when the absorption in the natural sciences threatened to gain the ascendency. But the Hegelian philosophy, for reasons which it is not possible here to render, failed to accomplish the service expected from it. It may be that the failure was temporary only, and because it was not fully understood. There arose a school of thinkers—the Hegelian left wing—who, while retaining their interest in history, yet fell under the influence of the presuppositions of the natural sciences. Thus Strauss, in his _Leben Jesu_, conceived of the person of Christ as a casual product of the human imagination, while Feuerbach, in his _Essence of Christianity_, reached the conclusion that religion begins and ends in a subjective process in the soul. Thus, instead of overcoming the Positive philosophy, German thought gravitated to the same result, with this difference perhaps, that it assumed the form of pantheism rather than of atheism. In the Tübingen school, led by F. C. Baur, whose contributions to the study of Church history are yet of high value, there was reserve about the miracle, if not its tacit denial, and a conception of the Christian Church as a product of human origin rather than the purpose of Christ.

But the effect of Strauss was beneficial in that it sent inquirers back to the study of the person of Christ and of His age. Never before was attention so concentrated upon the life of Jesus, as illustrated in a large number of biographical works, too large to be enumerated here. As a result of these studies, the conviction grows that while there is a local aspect of the person of Christ, so that He reflected the peculiar opinions and living interests of His age, and availed Himself of current beliefs, yet He was also infinitely above His time. What He was and did and said in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago must be supplemented by what He has been to the world in subsequent ages, or what He is and is doing in the present age.

While Christian thinkers were struggling with the problems raised by the Positive philosophy, the natural sciences were commanding in an increasing degree the world’s attention, until Darwin made his great discovery of a law of evolution, when it seemed as though natural science had become the arbiter and final tribunal before whose judgments the world must bow. Then there followed the sharp, even bitter conflict between science and theology, when scientific men whose lives had been spent in devotion to the study of natural phenomena were tempted to write expositions of religious history in order to show the fallaciousness of the religious attitude, and theologians, accustomed only to the postulates of the spiritual sphere, ventured into the domain of science to put a spiritual interpretation on its conclusions and discoveries. It was a confusing and painful moment when a subtle scepticism pervaded the Churches and haunted even the minds of Christian believers. Now that the smoke of the battle has cleared away, while many tragedies are disclosed, it does not appear that the Churches have been weakened by the strife or have yielded any essential truth or conviction. The belief in God, and in his creation and government of the world, the incarnation of God in Christ, the miracle for which Christ stands, and pre-eminently the miracle of His resurrection—in a word, the supernatural interpretation of life, remains unshaken. It is unjust to charge, as has sometimes been done, dishonesty and a spirit of evasion against those who, while the fierce battle was in progress, kept silence, unable to defend by cogent argument what yet they cherished still as true.

In the latter part of the century there came efforts at the reconstruction of theology in order to a better adjustment of the increase of knowledge regarding the nature of God and His relation to the world. The doctrine of God as immanent in the world, and not only transcendent or above and apart from it, has proved valuable in reconciling many of the discoveries of history and of natural science with the Christian faith. Efforts have also been made to simplify theology by the reduction of the large and complex, even conflicting, mass of Christian tenets and beliefs, given in history or represented in various Christian sects, to a few simple principles in which all must agree, resting for their confirmation not on metaphysics, but on the genuine Christian instincts as revealed in the New Testament. There has been attained also a better philosophical method for meeting the difficulties and perplexities of the age.

But these attempts at the better interpretation of revealed religion, and the formation of more consistent theological systems, have found a temporary rival in efforts to create, first of all, a better system of “natural theology,” as it may be called, which shall take account of the doctrine of evolution and other discoveries of natural science since Paley’s time and the day of the Bridgewater Treatises. Those who aim at a reconciliation of religion with science treat the idea of evolution as a mediating principle by which the conflict between science and religion may be overcome. This effort is the more significant, in view of the popular interest in evolution—a word which has become almost the watchword of the age. From this point of view the invasion of religious territory by scientific men (Huxley, Tyndale, Haeckel, and others), and the counter-invasion of scientific territory by philosophers and theologians, give promise of some mutual understanding in the future.

III

It remains now to turn to another most potent motive which has affected the fortunes of religion in the nineteenth century. It may be called Nationalism, meaning by the term that higher conception of the life of the state or nation, slowly but most effectively asserting itself throughout the nineteenth century, never apart from religious convictions, always indeed in their support and furtherance. In illustration of this point, we turn again to the French Revolution, as giving the momentum, both directly and by way of reaction, to the conception of the sacredness of the state, as an ultimate fact in God’s government of the world. In that fearful outburst of the French people, their long pent-up indignation was vented no less against the state than against the Church—the one a device of kings and lawgivers for holding mankind in subjection, as the other was a scheme for the same end by a designing priesthood. The humanitarian sentiment received in consequence at this impressive moment a direction of antipathy to nationality as an evil to be overcome, or at least to be kept in subjection to some higher principle, if the rights of man were to be secured. Something even of this negative mood entered into the formation of the American Constitution, where there is to be noted a singular omission of any reference to Deity as the author and preserver of the national life. On the continent of Europe there was the phenomenon of Napoleon building on the ruins of the French Revolution, while yet preserving the destructive motives which inspired it. Napoleon revived the dream of empire, in whose expansive embrace the nations of Europe were to be subordinated, if not suppressed altogether. He proposed to reconstruct the map of Europe, as though nationalities and crowns were purely human artificial arrangements to be disposed of at his sovereign pleasure.

The failure of the French nation, its demonstrated inability to do the proper work of a state, as well as the fact that the career of a Napoleon was possible, indicates inherent weakness in all the nations of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They existed either in repose, and even stagnation, after the long turmoil of the age of the Protestant Reformation, averse to change, distrustful of enthusiasm, or were content to strive for purely selfish aims. In accordance with the principle that the people existed for the state, rulers followed their personal whims, indifferent to moral sanctions, heedless of the growing evils calling aloud for redress. Such in particular was the condition in France. It was better in England, but even there the same tendency existed, manifested in the unnecessary alienation of the American colonies. However this may be, there has been a reaction against nationality during the nineteenth century. The nations have been forced to struggle against this opposition, and through the struggle they have attained their rebirth, their purification.

The subject is connected with the fortunes of religion in many ways. The indifference to nationality, the distrust of the nation as incompetent for the exigencies of life, the placing of an abstract humanity as an ideal above nationality, so that to labor directly for the interests of humanity apart from the well-being of the nation, and even in its defiance, became the motive of reformers—these characteristics, when seen in the religious sphere, have led to a reaction against the various forms of Protestantism, and especially as represented in the state Churches. The Roman Catholic Church, which in all its history has subordinated national distinctions to the higher interests of a common Christendom, had fallen into inefficiency in the eighteenth century, and was no longer reckoned a force worthy of consideration, either by religious thinkers or by statesmen. But in the first third of the nineteenth century there came a change, when the Roman Church arose from its lethargy to meet the demand imposed upon it by the timid fears of statesmen and ecclesiastics, as the safeguard of religion and morality, where national Churches or particular Churches were thought to have failed. The Napoleonic aspiration after universal empire and the frantic effort to realize it by rearranging or suppressing nationalities has its counterpart in the religious world in the effort to restore a Christian empire with the Papacy at its head, as in the Middle Ages. The effect of this ambition may be seen in Germany and other countries, but is most clearly manifest in England, where the Oxford Movement (1833) appears as an unnational, if not anti-national, uprising in behalf of some imperfectly conceived cosmopolitan Church designated as “Catholicity.” The date of the “Movement,” as Newman fixed it, was Keble’s sermon on the “Apostacy of the National Church.” This same feeling, that national existence is inferior in importance to humanitarian reforms or to the expression of religion in some other shape than in any particular or national Church, has been shown in the break with the Established Church in Scotland, or in the difficulties experienced in Germany in consolidating the forms of Protestantism in a strong state Church, or in the aspirations after some universal form of religion to be accomplished by a parliament of religions. Beneath these various schemes there is the common principle that humanity is a worthier object of devotion than the state, and constitutes a higher ideal in whose cause to labor. This conviction, it may be added, has been strengthened vastly by the extraordinary way in which, during the nineteenth century, the whole world has been brought together by the material forces of steam and electricity.

That there is here a great truth no one can deny, but the point to be noticed now is that nationality has been at a disadvantage in the competition with humanity. Out of the necessities of the situation there has been born the spirit of a deeper inquiry into the place and significance of the nation as the indispensable medium by which the highest result can be secured for the world at large. Thus we have the studies in this direction of German students, Hegel and Stahl, Trendelenburg and Bluntschli, Maurice in England, and in America Mulford in his book _The Nation_, all of them combating the motive of Comte and setting forth the essential, even the eternal, significance of nationality. The ancient doctrine is still preserved that the people exist for the state, but it is justified on the ground that the state also exists for the people, for the freedom of the individual man, so that through the state the rights of man are better subserved and more securely guaranteed than by an exclusive one-sided devotion to the cause of an abstract humanity.

As the nineteenth century drew to its close, it became increasingly apparent that the nations had emerged from the depression in which they were found when the century opened. America may be said to have attained the consciousness of nationality in its highest form in consequence of the Civil War, and to have entered from that time upon a new career. In that awful conflict, whose origin dates back to the rise of the anti-slavery movement, may be discerned the issue of the century—humanitarianism, on the one hand, contending for the rights of man, careless, if need be, for the national unity if only a great reform could be secured; and on the other hand, the nation, slowly realizing that slavery was a force hostile to national unity and integrity, and on this ground demanding its suppression. The two attitudes in this instance appear organically related, while yet they spring from distinct and separate motives. In 1870 Germany and Italy took their places in the family of nations. Nor should there be omission to mention Greece, which, after its subsidence for hundreds of years, again attained its national independence.

It has become further apparent that it is to the Protestant nations, America, England, and Germany, that the leading place must be conceded, together with the determination of the world’s fortunes. And to these must be added Russia, which is also outside the pale of Latin Christianity. Those nations remaining in alliance with the Papacy are, for the present at least, in an inferior position.

The triumphant assertion of the spiritual significance of nationality in the latter part of the nineteenth century has made it further apparent that the forces working for religion, and especially for its Protestant forms, were stronger than the forces in opposition. The nation enters the arena of the controversy as a spiritual force, assuming as a first principle the existence of God and His supernatural government of the world. Never was this truth more impressively illustrated than in the experience of Lincoln, who, when he became President of the United States in the supreme crisis of its history, ceased to be indifferent to religion and passed into a devout belief in the mysterious control of the destiny of the nation by a sovereign, omnipotent hand. As the indifference to nationality was among the causes of religious doubt and of the weakness in the Churches in the middle of the century, so the triumphant assertion of nationality has contributed to turn the tide towards theistic belief and the Christian faith.

To give a full exposition of the inner relationship of the nation to religion and the Churches is not possible here, but some remarks may be offered which will tend to illustrate their organic connection.

(1) In any large historical survey the nation appears as guided by religious leaders. Religion is seen to have flourished in proportion as the nation is conscious of its strength and destiny. When the Roman Empire broke down the nationalities and merged them in a large composite unity, it broke down also religious faiths, and its own religion as well, till scepticism was the result and a consequent immorality. All attempts to build up religion on the basis of empire, as distinct from nationality, ended in failure.

(2) The Christian religion tended from the first to break up the empire and to restore nationality. Ultimately it became manifest that the cause which undermined the Roman Empire and accomplished its downfall was the Christian Church. In its Eastern half the empire was resolved into nationalities. In the West a Church, Latin Christendom, rose upon its ruins, but within this Latin Christendom the spirit of nationality began at once to work, forcing its way against the opposition of the Papacy, till, in the age of the Protestant Reformation, when nationality was felt as a conscious motive, it sundered Latin Christendom into fragments.

(3) The Old Testament in its form as a whole is simply the history of a nation from its birth through all its fortunes. Never did religion rise to a diviner and fuller expression than under the realization of the conviction that God was protecting the nation and determining its career. The Hebrew prophets were primarily statesmen, devoted to the nationality, as the incarnation of the divine will, in whose fortunes were revealed the divine purpose. Any nation which has not the similar conviction that it is the chosen people of God, and called to some important task, cannot maintain its independence and integrity, and has no future. This conviction to-day inspires the leading nations of the world.