Part 45

Such is the position in which at the close of the last century Christendom seems to have stood. Outside the pale of reason—of reason; we do not say of truth—were the Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches; the Roman Catholic Church resting on tradition, sacerdotal authority, and belief in present miracles; the Eastern Church supported by tradition, sacerdotal authority, nationality, and the power of the Czar. Scepticism had not eaten into a Church, preserved, like that of Russia, by its isolation and intellectual torpor; though some wild sects had been generated, and Nihilism, threatening with destruction the Church as well as the state, had appeared on the scene. Into the Roman Catholic Church scepticism had eaten deeply, and had detached from her, or was rapidly detaching, the intellect of educated nations, while she seemed resolutely to bid defiance to reason by her Syllabus, her declaration of Papal infallibility, her proclamation of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Outside the pale of traditional authority and amenable to reason stood the Protestant Churches, urgently pressed by a question as to the sufficiency of the evidences of supernatural Christianity, above all, of its vital and fundamental doctrines: the Fall of Man, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection. The Anglican Church, a fabric of policy compounded of Catholicism without a Pope and Biblical Protestantism, was in the throes of a struggle between those two elements, largely antiquarian and of little importance compared with the vital question as to the evidences of revelation and the divinity of Christ.

In the Protestant churches generally æstheticism had prevailed. Even the most austere of them had introduced Church art, flowers, and tasteful music; a tendency which, with the increased craving for rhetorical novelty in the pulpit, seemed to show that the simple Word of God and the glad tidings of salvation were losing their power and that human attractions were needed to bring congregations together.

The last proposal had been that dogma, including the belief in the divinity of Christ, having become untenable should be abandoned, and that there should be formed a Christian Church with a ritual and sacraments, but without the Christian creed, though still looking up to Christ as its founder and teacher; an organization which, having no definite object and being held together only by individual fancy, would not be likely to last long.

The task now imposed on the liegemen of reason seems to be that of reviewing reverently, but freely and impartially, the evidences both of supernatural Christianity and of theism, frankly rejecting what is untenable, and if possible laying new and sounder foundations in its place. To estimate the gravity of the crisis we have only to consider to how great an extent our civilization has hitherto rested on religion. It may be found that after all our being is an insoluble mystery. If it is, we can only acquiesce and make the best of our present habitation; but who can say what the advance of knowledge may bring forth? Effort seems to be the law of our nature, and if continued it may lead to heights beyond our present ken. In any event, unless our inmost nature lies to us, to cling to the untenable is worse than useless; there can be no salvation for us but in truth.

GOLDWIN SMITH.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.

Redundant chapter titles have been removed.

The name “Van ’t Hoff” always was misprinted as “Van’t Hoff” in the original book. That misprint has been retained here.

Page 40 of the Chemistry chapter uses Dalton’s symbols for the four atoms in five molecules: a circle with horizontal lines (hl), a circle with vertical lines (vl), a circle with a dot in its center (cd), and a hollow circle (hc). If your text viewer cannot display those symbols, the five molecules, in sequence, are: hl-cd, cd-vl-cd, vl-hc, hc-vl-hc, and cd-hc.

Other pages in the Chemistry chapter contain diagrams of molecular structures. Those diagrams only display properly when a fixed-width font is used.

Subscripts in the Chemistry chapter are shown full-height, e.g., H2O.

Text sometimes expresses fractions with a dash instead of a slash. That notation has been retained here.

Page 46: The original book used “Zu” as the symbol for zinc.

Page 122: “entirely changed by” was printed as “charged”; changed here.

Page 139: “barometric” was printed as “barometic”; changed here.