Part 43

Hampden, Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, formed another object of High Church attack. He had been condemned by the university on account of doctrines alleged to be anti-Trinitarian, and his appointment by a Whig ministry to a bishopric caused a renewal of the onslaught, which, however, only served by its failure to emphasize the fact that the Church of England was in complete subjection to the state. In this, as in the general commotion, prominently figured Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, son of the great evangelical and philanthropist, a man gifted, dexterous, and versatile, who would have made a first-rate advocate or politician, balancing himself with one foot on his hereditary Evangelicism, the other on High Churchmanship, to which, in his heart, as a hierarch, he inclined. A character so ambiguous could make little impression, however great his abilities might be.

James Anthony Froude had been a follower and fellow-worker of Newman. But on Newman’s secession he not only hung back, but violently recoiled and produced a highly sceptical work, _The Nemesis of Faith_, which entailed his resignation of a clerical fellowship in an Oxford college. Then he exemplified the strange variations of the age by coming out as an historian in the colors of Carlyle.

Carlyle himself is not to be left out of sight in an account of the progress of religious thought; for his Scotch Calvinism, transmuted into hero worship, has taken a strong hold, if not on the distinct convictions, on the sentiment and temper of the nation. If he has administered wholesome rebuke to the self-complacency of democracy with its ballot-box, he has also set up a worship of force and kindled a spirit of violence totally subversive of the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew Arnold, with his silver shafts, was rather a connoisseur in all lines than a serious philosopher or theologian; but he also, with his conversion of God into the “not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” did something in his light but insinuating and charming way to forward disintegration.

But in 1874–77 appeared _Supernatural Religion_, a searching and uncompromising inquiry into the historical evidences of supernatural Christianity. The book, though attacked on secondary points with perhaps superior learning by Bishop Lightfoot, Bishop Westcott, and others, cannot be said to have met with any general answer. Supplemented in some respects by Dr. Martineau’s _Seat of Authority in Religion_ and other works on the same side, it sets forth the sceptic’s case against the supernatural.

Miracles, says criticism, belong to an age of ignorance. With the dawn of knowledge they diminish. In its meridian light they disappear. The Jews were eminently addicted to belief in miracles. There was Satanic miracle as well as divine; nor can any distinction be drawn as a matter of evidence between the two. As little can any distinction be drawn in point of evidence between the Gospel miracles and the ecclesiastical miracles, which nevertheless Protestants reject. The miracles of one sort, the demoniac, are bound up with the Jewish belief in possession by personal devils, from which all efforts to disentangle them so as to resolve them into cures of lunacy by moral influence are vain. The four Gospels and the Acts, which comprise the historic evidences, are all anonymous, all of uncertain authorship. The first three Gospels are evident incrustations upon an older document which is lost and about which nothing is known. In not one of the five cases can the existence of the book be traced to the time of the events or a time so near the events as to preclude the growth of fable in a highly superstitious and totally uncritical age. The presentation of Christ’s character and teaching in the fourth Gospel, which is Alexandrian, is far from identical with the presentation in the first three Gospels, which are Jewish. There are irreconcilable discrepancies between the Gospels as to matters of fact, notably in regard to the genealogy of Christ, the length of his mission, the Last Supper, the day of the Crucifixion, the details of the Resurrection and the Ascension. Such miracles as the miraculous darkness, the earthquake, the rending of the veil of the Temple, the opening of the tombs and the apparition of the dead in the streets of Jerusalem, being totally unconfirmed by history or by any recorded effect, stagger belief. Such testimony as St. Paul bears to the Resurrection is second hand, is that of a convert in the ecstasy of conversion, and is manifestly uncritical. His own enthusiasm is intelligible on merely human grounds. We may be sure that had God become incarnate to save man, absolutely conclusive proof of that fact would have been vouchsafed. But the proof is not sufficient to establish anything not otherwise perfectly credible, far less to establish the miraculous Birth, the Resurrection, and the Incarnation. Such in broad outline is the case of Rationalism against Supernatural Religion presented by the work just mentioned and its allies. The effects are visible even in High Church writings. In the writings of liberals, of course, they are still more visible. Jowett had come to the conclusion that our sources of knowledge about Christ had been reduced to a single document, no longer in existence, which formed the basis of the first three Gospels.

The desire to minimize the supernatural and throw it into the background, bringing the personal character of Christ and his ethical teaching into the foreground, is now manifest in English, as it has long been in German, divines. It is conspicuous in the very popular and colorably orthodox works of Dr. Farrar. In his _Life of Lives_ the supernatural has little place. There is an evident tendency throughout to disentangle from it the character and moral teaching. Responsibility for belief in the Godhead of Christ seems to rest on the Nicene Council. In the _Life of Christ_ we see reduced to a natural occurrence the miracle of Gadara, where the devils cast out of the men enter into the herd of swine. It is needless to say that with the miraculous element of these occurrences their value as evidence for the supernatural disappears.

Scotland generally remained fast bound by her Westminster Confession. There had been a period of liberalism marked by the appearance of “Jupiter” Carlyle; Robertson, the historian; Dugald Stewart, and other philosophers and men of mind. But the Church of Scotland being democratic, its faith was in the keeping of the people, who were impervious to criticism and naturally opposed to innovation. At last, however, the thaw came, hastened perhaps by the collision between the state Church of Scotland and the Free Church. The Westminster Confession, it seems, has now been tacitly laid aside, and Scotch theology has had its Robertson Smith, whose critical views on the Old Testament earned him removal from his professorial chair.

Another book which in its day startled the world and awakened all the echoes of orthodox alarm was Buckle’s _History of Civilization_, in which the characters of nations and the progress of humanity were traced to physical influences, excluding the moral and by implication the theistic element. Its thesis was supported by an overwhelming display of learning. Though not expressly, it was in its tenor hostile to religious belief. Of Buckle’s work less is now heard, but it had an influence in its day, perhaps more in America than in its native land. Americans, it seems, were captured both by the boldness of the theory and by the imposing display of erudition.

In the line of learned and dispassionate research France has produced Renan, whose _Life of Jesus_ especially made a vast impression on Europe, and still probably exercises an influence by virtue not only of the boldness of the speculation and the intense interest of the subject, but of the extreme beauty of the style. The work, however, is one in which imagination acts strongly on history. It lacks critical basis; not that the author fails fully to set out his authorities, but that in his narrative he fails to discriminate among them. One incident is treated as real, another as mythical, to suit the requirements of poetical conception, without reason assigned for the distinction. There seems no reason, for example, why the miracle of the raising of Lazarus should be treated as historical, though in the sense of imposture or illusion, while other miracles are treated as totally unhistoric. Nor is the portrait free from a French and slightly sensuous cast. From the whole body of Renan’s histories of Israel, of Christ, and of the early Church the supernatural is entirely excluded.

The Roman Catholic Church has not suffered from criticism—historical, literary, or scientific—in the same way as the Protestant Churches, that is, internally, because it depends not so much on intellectual conviction as on ecclesiastical organization, and rests comparatively little on the authority of the Bible. Its priesthood has not been affected like the clergy of the Church of England or the ministries of the Protestant Churches. But it has everywhere been losing the educated classes, or retained a part of them, not so much from conviction—still less from speculative conviction—as because its alliance is congenial to political and social reaction. Its inability to come to terms with science has been shown by the recent case of St. George Mivart, and scientific eminence among Roman Catholics is rare. In Italy, the centre of the system, while the poorer classes still flock to the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples or the exudation of the bones of St. Andrew at Amalfi, still climb the Holy Staircase on their knees or make pilgrimages to the House of Loretto, the general tone of intelligence is described as sceptical, though aristocratic families, more especially those of Papal creation, adhere to the Papacy on political and social rather than on religious grounds. Near to the shrine of Ignatius Loyola stands the statue of Giordano Bruno, on the spot of his martyrdom by fire, “dedicated to him by the age which he foresaw.” Attempts have been made to liberalize the Church of Rome and enable it to float with the current of the day, but they have failed. Pio Nono for a time put himself at the head of the popular and liberal movement in Italy. But he soon found, as Carlyle said, that it was an alarming undertaking. Lamennais’s attempt at liberalization ended, after a long intellectual agony, in his own secession. The combined attempt of Lacordaire to liberalize ecclesiastically, and of Montalembert to liberalize politically, had a scarcely less melancholy result; both of them died under the shadow of Papal displeasure or of that of the Jesuit party, by which the Papacy was controlled. The defiantly reactionary spirit of Ultramontanism de Maistre has prevailed. The Jesuit has ruled at the Vatican. Under his guidance the Papacy has proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, thus breaking completely and finally with reason and with all who, like the “Old Catholics” in Germany, remained in some degree within that pale. It has gained in its own despite in respectability and influence by deprivation of its temporal power, against which the Prisoner of the Vatican still hopelessly protests.

In France the national religion, abolished and persecuted by the Jacobins, was restored for a political purpose by Napoleon. The new Charlemagne was requited with the degradation of the Pope, who came to Paris to crown him on the morrow of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien and broke the best traditions of the Holy See by failing to veto the divorce from Josephine. Identified with political reaction under the restored Bourbons, the Church nearly suffered wreck in the revolution by which they were overthrown. She remained the object of intense and persecuting hatred to the revolutionary and republican party. Plaintively, when the Orleans monarchy fell, she chanted _Domine salvum fac populum_. Joyously, when the Empire succeeded, she chanted _Domine salvum fac Imperatorem_. But the Empire in its turn fell. The Church has continued to ally herself with political reaction and aristocratic hostility to the Republic, though she has latterly been receiving hints from the Vatican that the Republic is strong, that the monarchical and imperial pretenders both are weak. The consequence is a violence of hostility on the part of the Radicals and Socialists which assails not only monastic fraternities, but educational institutions and even charitable institutions in clerical hands, and has produced an infidel literature carrying blasphemy to the height almost of frenzy and culminating in a comic _Life of Christ_. The official world of France is almost formally infidel, and a religious expression would be very injurious to a politician. On the other hand, the Church braves and exasperates public reason with apparitions of the Virgin and the miracles of Lourdes. Over most of the women, the priest still holds sway. Of the men, not many are seen in churches. The general attitude of the educated towards religion seems to be not so much that of hostility as that of total indifference, a state of estrangement more hopeless than hostility itself.

There is in France a Protestant Church, of which Guizot was an eminent member, and which in his time was renewing its life. But there was a schism in it between an evangelical party and a party which was entirely rationalist, Guizot belonging to the first, his son-in-law to the second; and rationalism seems to have prevailed. With the Protestant party of France was allied an evangelical party in Switzerland, of which Vinet was the most eloquent divine. But in Vinet, as in liberal divines generally, we find an inclination to rest on the spiritual rather than on the supernatural. In the city of Calvin generally opinions appear to reign more opposed to the religion of Calvin than those for which he burned Servetus.

But of the disintegrating forces criticism—the Higher Criticism as it is the fashion to call it—has by no means been the only one. Another, and perhaps in recent times the more powerful, has been science, from which Voltaire and the earlier sceptics received little or no assistance in their attacks; for they were unable to meet even the supposed testimony of fossils to the Flood. It is curious that the bearing of the Newtonian astronomy on the Biblical cosmography should not have been before perceived; most curious that it should have escaped Newton himself. His system plainly contravened the idea which made the earth the centre of the universe, with heaven above and hell below it, and by which the cosmography alike of the Old and the New Testament is pervaded. Yet the Star of Bethlehem remained little disturbed as an article of faith. The first destructive blow from the region of science was perhaps dealt by geology, which showed that the earth had been gradually formed, not suddenly created, that its antiquity immeasurably transcended the orthodox chronology, and that death had come into the world long before man. Geologists, scared by the echoes of their own teaching, were fain to shelter themselves under allegorical interpretations of Genesis totally foreign to the intentions of the writer; making out the “days” of Creation to be æons, a version which, even if accepted, would not have accounted for the entrance of death into the world before the creation of man. Those who attended the lectures of Buckland and other geologists of that generation well recollect the shifts to which science had recourse in its efforts to avoid collision with the cosmogony supposed to have been dictated by the Creator to the reputed author of the Pentateuch. That the narrative of Genesis could hold its ground so long against science was due at once to its dignity, which earned for it the praise of Longinus, and to its approximation to scientific truth in describing the universe as the work of a single mind. These characteristics have even in the day of geology and Darwin raised up for it such an apologist as Mr. Gladstone, whose defence, however, amounts to this, that the Creator, in giving an account of his own work to Moses, came remarkably near the truth.

The grand catastrophe, however, was the discovery of Darwin. This assailed the belief that man was a distinct creation, apart from all other animals, with an immortal soul specially breathed into him by the author of his being. It showed that he had been developed by a natural process out of lower forms of life. It showed that instead of a fall of man there had been a gradual rise, thus cutting away the ground of the Redemption and the Incarnation, the fundamental doctrines of the orthodox creed. For the hypothesis of creation generally was substituted that of evolution by some unknown but natural force.

Not only to revealed or supernatural but to natural religion a heavy blow was dealt by the disclosure of wasted æons and abortive species which seem to preclude the idea of an intelligent and omnipotent designer.

The chief interpreters of science in its bearing on religion were, in England, Tyndall and Huxley. Tyndall always declared himself a materialist, though no one could less deserve the name if it implied anything like grossness or disregard of the higher sentiments. He startled the world by his declaration that matter contained the potentiality of all life, an assertion which, though it has been found difficult to prove experimentally, there can be less difficulty in accepting, since we see life in rudimentary forms and in different stages of development. Huxley wielded a trenchant pen and was an uncompromising servant of truth. A bitter controversy between him and Owen arose out of Owen’s tendency to compromise. He came at one time to the extreme conclusion that man was an automaton, which would have settled all religious and moral questions out of hand; but in this he seemed afterwards to feel that he had gone too far. An automaton automatically reflecting on its automatic character is a being which seems to defy conception. The connection of action with motive, of motive with character and circumstance, is what nobody doubts; but the precise nature of the connection, as it is not subject, like a physical connection, to our inspection, defies scrutiny, and our consciousness, which is our only informant, tells us that our agency in some qualified sense is free.

Materialists or physicists such as Tyndall and Huxley, or their counterparts on the Continent, would console us for the loss of religion by substituting the majesty of law. But the idea of law implies a law-giver or an intelligent and authoritative imponent of some kind. There is no majesty in a mere sequence, even the most invariable and on the largest scale, the existence of which alone physical science can prove.

The all-embracing philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer excludes not only the supernatural but theism in its ordinary form. Yet theism in a subtle form may be thought to lurk in it. “By continually seeking,” he says, “to know, and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the Unknowable.” In this and subsequent passages he evidently looks upon the Unknowable as an object of reverence, otherwise it would hardly be our highest duty to regard it as that through which all things exist, or to maintain any particular attitude towards it. But Unknowableness in itself excites no reverence, even though it be supposed infinite and eternal. Nothing excites our reverence but a person, or at least a Moral Being. There lingers in Mr. Spencer’s mind the belief that the present limit of our knowledge is the veil of the Deity.

Had the Darwinian discoveries been known to Schopenhauer they would have conspired with the earlier discoveries of science and with his pitiless survey of the human lot to confirm him in the belief that this was the worst of all possible worlds. Amid the general distraction even pessimism has found adherents, and a European version of Buddhism promising final relief from the miseries of conscious existence has been accepted as an anodyne by troubled minds.

Positivism, the work of Comte, totally discards belief in God and treats theism in all its forms as merely a mode of contemplating phenomena and a step in the course of human progress. Yet the Positivist feels the need of a religion, and for the worship of God he substitutes the worship of Humanity. Humanity is an abstraction and an imperfect abstraction, the course of the human race having not yet been run. It cannot hear prayer or respond in any way to adoration. The adherents of Comte’s religion, therefore, are few, though those of his philosophy are more numerous, and the religious Comtists appear to be rather enthusiasts of Humanity than worshippers of the abstraction.

A conspicuous though equivocal place among the defenders of revealed religion in England was held by Mansel, professor of moral and metaphysical philosophy at Oxford and afterwards dean of St. Paul’s. Attempting in his Bampton lectures to make philosophy fall on its own sword, he fell on his own sword in the attempt. He maintained that God, being absolute, could not be apprehended by the finite intelligence of man, and that the finite morality of man was not the same as the absolute morality of God. Hence the passages of the Bible which seemed to conflict with human morality really transcended it and were moral miracles. In this Mansel was reviving the theory of Archbishop King and Bishop Browne, who had maintained that our knowledge of God was not actual, but merely analogous. The inference was promptly drawn by Mansel’s opponents that what could not be apprehended could not be matter of belief, and that he had therefore cut away the possibility of belief in God. They even contended that he was too anti-theistic, since he did away with all possibility of reverence for the Unknown. To deny the identity of human with divine morality and assert that what was immoral with man was moral with God was to sever the moral relation between God and man, and, in effect, to destroy morality altogether. We could conceive of only one morality, and acts ascribed to God which violated that morality must be to us immoral. “If,” said John Stuart Mill in the fervor of ethical protest, “an Almighty Being tells me that I shall call that righteous which is wicked or go to hell, to hell I will go.”

To meet the inroads of science on Biblical cosmogony and cosmography recourse was had to allegorical interpretation. But allegorical interpretation cannot be forced upon a writer when it manifestly is not in his mind. The writer or writers of Genesis undeniably intended his or their statements to be taken literally. They meant that the earth was really created in six days, as the Fourth Commandment assumes; that the formation of Eve out of a rib of Adam, the temptation of Eve by the serpent, and all the actions of the anthropomorphic God, who walks in the garden at evening and makes garments for Adam and Eve, were actual events. To foist upon them allegorical interpretation is to falsify their testimony. Besides, instead of having the facts of the creation revealed to us we are left to interpret allegory at a venture.