Chapter X: Part III: Association (1)

The association of clergymen with ladies in works of charity affords continual opportunities for the exercise of clerical influence over women. A partnership in good works is set up which establishes interesting and cordial relations, and when the lady has accomplished some charitable purpose she remembers for long afterwards the clergyman without whose active assistance her project might have fallen to the ground. She sees in the clergyman a reflection of her own goodness, and she feels grateful to him for lending his masculine sense and larger experience to the realization of her ideas. There are other cases of a different nature in which the self-esteem of the lady is deeply gratified when she is selected by the clergyman as being more capable of devoted effort in a sacred cause than women of inferior piety and strength of mind. This kind of clerical selection is believed to be very influential in furthering clerical marriages. The lady is told that she will serve the highest of all causes by lending a willing ear to her admirer. Every reader will remember how thoroughly this idea is worked out in "Jane Eyre," where St. John urges Jane to marry him on the plain ground that she would be a valuable fellow-worker with a missionary. Charlotte Brontë was, indeed, so strongly impressed with this aspect of clerical influence that she injured the best and strongest of her novels by an almost wearisome development of that episode.

Clerical influence is immensely aided by the possession of leisure. Without underrating the self-devotion of hard-working clergymen (which is all the more honorable to them that they might take life more easily if they chose), we see a wide distinction, in point of industry, between the average clergyman and the average solicitor, for example. The clergyman has leisure to pay calls, to accept many invitations, and to talk in full detail about the interests that he has in common with his female friends. The solicitor is kept to his office by strictly professional work requiring very close application and allowing no liberty of mind.

Much might be said about the effect of clerical leisure on clerical manners. Without leisure it is difficult to have such quiet and pleasant manners as the clergy generally have. Very busy men generally seem preoccupied with some idea of their own which is not what you are talking about, but a leisurely man will give hospitality to your thought. A busy man wants to get away, and fidgets you; a man of leisure dwells with you, for the time, completely. Ladies are exquisitely sensitive to these differences, and besides, they are generally themselves persons of leisure. Overworked people often confound leisure with indolence, which is a great mistake. Leisure is highly favorable to intelligence and good manners; indolence is stupid, from its dislike to mental effort, and ill-bred, from the habit of inattention.

The feeling of women towards custom draws them strongly to the clergy, because a priesthood is the instinctive upholder of ancient customs and ceremonies, and steadily maintains external decorum. Women are naturally more attracted by custom than we are. A few men have an affectionate regard for the sanctities of usage, but most men only submit to them from an idea that they are generally helpful to the "maintenance of order;" and if women could be supposed absent from a nation for a time, it is probable that external observances of all kinds would be greatly relaxed. Women do not merely submit passively to custom; they uphold it actively and energetically, with a degree of faith in the perfect reasonableness of it which gives them great decision in its defence. It seems to them the ultimate reason from which there is no appeal. Now, in the life of every organized Church there is much to gratify this instinct, especially in those which have been long established. The recurrence of holy seasons, the customary repetition of certain forms of words, the observance at stated intervals of the same ceremonies, the adherence to certain prescribed decencies or splendors of dress, the reservation of sacred days on which labor is suspended, give to the religious life a charm of customariness which is deeply gratifying to good, order-loving women. It is said that every poet has something feminine in his nature; and it is certainly observable that poets, like women, are tenderly affected by the recurrence of holy seasons, and the observance of fixed religious rites. I will only allude to Keble's "Christian Year," because in this instance it might be objected that the poet was secondary to the Christian; but the reader will find instances of the same sentiment in Tennyson, as, for example, in the profoundly affecting allusions to the return of Christmas in "In Memoriam." I could not name another occupation so closely and visibly bound up with custom as the clerical profession, but for the sake of contrast I may mention one or two others that are completely disconnected from it. The profession of painting is an example, and so is that of literature. An artist, a writer, has simply nothing whatever to do with custom, except as a private man. He may be an excellent and a famous workman without knowing Sunday from week-day or Easter from Lent. A man of science is equally unconnected with traditional observances.

It may be a question whether a celibate or a married clergy has the greater influence over women.

There are two sides to this question. The Church of Rome is, from the worldly point of view, the most astute body of men who have ever leagued themselves together in a corporation; and that Church has decided for celibacy, rejecting thereby all the advantages to be derived from rich marriages and good connections. In a celibate church the priest has a position of secure dignity and independence. It is known from the first that he will not marry, so there is no idle and damaging gossip about his supposed aspirations after fortune, or tender feelings towards beauty. Women can treat him with greater confidence than if he were a possible suitor, and then can confess to him, which is felt to be difficult with a married or a marriageable clergy. By being decidedly celibate the clergy avoid the possible loss of dignity which might result from allying themselves with families in a low social position. They are simply priests, and escape all other classification. A married man is, as it were, made responsible for the decent appearance, the good manners, and the proper conduct of three different sets of people. There is the family he springs from, there is his wife's family, and, lastly, there is the family in his own house. Any one of these may drag a man down socially with almost irresistible force. The celibate priest is only affected by the family he springs from, and is generally at a distance from that. He escapes the invasion of his house by a wife's relations, who might possibly be vulgar, and, above all, he escapes the permanent degradation of a coarse and ill-dressed family of his own. No doubt, from the Christian point of view, poverty is as honorable as wealth; but from the worldly point of view its visible imperfections are mean, despicable, and even ridiculous. In the early days of English Protestants the liberty to marry was ruinous to the social position of the clergy. They generally espoused servant-girls or "a lady's maid whose character had been blown upon, and who was therefore forced to give up all hope of catching the steward."[17] Queen Elizabeth issued "special orders that no clergyman should presume to marry a servant-girl without the consent of the master or mistress." "One of the lessons most earnestly inculcated on every girl of honorable family was to give no encouragement to a lover in orders; and if any young lady forgot this precept she was almost as much disgraced as by an illicit amour." The cause of these low marriages was simply poverty, and it is needless to add that they increased the evil. "As children multiplied and grew, the household of the priest became more and more beggarly. Holes appeared more and more plainly in the thatch of his parsonage and in his single cassock. His boys followed the plough, and his girls went out to service."

When clergymen can maintain appearances they gain one advantage from marriage which increases their influence with women. The clergyman's wife is almost herself in holy orders, and his daughter often takes an equally keen interest in ecclesiastical matters. These "clergywomen," as they have been called, are valuable allies, through whom much may be done that cannot be effected directly. This is the only advantage on the side of marriage, and it is but relative; for a celibate clergy has also its female allies who are scarcely less devoted; and in the Church of Rome there are great organized associations of women entirely under the control of ecclesiastics. Again, there is a lay element in a clergyman's family which brings the world into his own house, to the detriment of its religious character. The sons of the clergy are often anything but clerical in feeling. They are often strongly laic, and even sceptical, by a natural reaction from ecclesiasticism. On the whole, therefore, it seems certain that an unmarried clergy more easily maintains both its own dignity and the distinction between itself and the laity.

Auricular confession is so well known as a means of influencing women that I need scarcely do more than mention it; but there is one characteristic of it which is little understood by Protestants. They fancy (judging from Protestant feelings of antagonism) that confession must be felt as a tyranny. A Roman Catholic woman does not feel it to be an infliction that the Church imposes, but a relief that she affords. Women are not naturally silent sufferers. They like to talk about their anxieties and interests, especially to a patient and sympathetic listener of the other sex who will give them valuable advice. There is reason to believe that a good deal of informal confession is done by Protestant ladies; in the Church of Rome it is more systematic and leads to a formal absolution. The subject which the speaker has to talk about is that most interesting of all subjects, self. In any other place than a confessional to talk about self at any length is an error; in the confessional it is a virtue. The truth is that pious Roman Catholic women find happiness in the confessional and try the patience of the priests by minute accounts of trifling or imaginary sins. No doubt confession places an immense power in the hands of the Church, but at an incalculable cost of patience. It is not felt to weigh unfairly on the laity, because the priest who to-day has forgiven your faults will to-morrow kneel in penitence and ask forgiveness for his own. I do not see in the confessional so much an oppressive institution as a convenience for both parties. The woman gets what she wants,--an opportunity of talking confidentially about herself; and the priest gets what he wants,--an opportunity of learning the secrets of the household.

Nothing has so powerfully awakened the jealousy of laymen as this institution of the confessional. The reasons have been so fully treated by Michelet and others, and are in fact so obvious, that I need not repeat them.

The dislike for priests that is felt by many Continental laymen is increased by a cause that helps to win the confidence of women. "Observe," the laymen say, "with what art the priest dresses so as to make women feel that he is without sex, in order that they may confess to him more willingly. He removes every trace of hair from his face, his dress is half feminine, he hides his legs in petticoats, his shoulders under a tippet, and in the higher ranks he wears jewelry and silk and lace. A woman would never confess to a man dressed as we are, so the wolf puts on sheep's clothing."

Where confession is not the rule the layman's jealousy is less acrid and pungent in its expression, but it often manifests itself in milder forms. The pen that so clearly delineated the Rev. Charles Honeyman was impelled by a layman's natural and pardonable jealousy. A feeling of this kind is often strong in laymen of mature years. They will say to you in confidence, "Here is a man about the age of one of my sons, who knows no more concerning the mysteries of life and death than I do, who gets what he thinks he knows out of a book which is as accessible to me as it is to him, and yet who assumes a superiority over me which would only be justifiable if I were ignorant and he enlightened. He calls me one of his sheep. I am not a sheep relatively to him. I am at least his equal in knowledge, and greatly his superior in experience. Nobody but a parson would venture to compare me to an animal (such a stupid animal too!) and himself to that animal's master. His one real and effective superiority is that he has all the women on his side."

You poor, doubting, hesitating layman, not half so convinced as the ladies of your family, who and what are you in the presence of a man who comes clothed with the authority of the Church? If you simply repeat what he says, you are a mere echo, a feeble repetition of a great original, like the copy of a famous picture. If you try to take refuge in philosophic indifference, in silent patience, you will be blamed for moral and religious inertia. If you venture to oppose and discuss, you will be the bad man against the good man, and as sure of condemnation as a murderer when the judge is putting on the black cap. There is no resource for you but one, and that does not offer a very cheering or hopeful prospect. By the exercise of angelic patience, and of all the other virtues that have been preached by good men from Socrates downwards, you may in twenty or thirty years acquire some credit for a sort of inferior goodness of your own,--a pinchbeck goodness, better than nothing, but not in any way comparable to the pure golden goodness of the priest; and when you come to die, the best that can be hoped for your disembodied soul will be mercy, clemency, indulgence; not approbation, welcome, or reward.

ESSAY XIV.

WHY WE ARE APPARENTLY BECOMING LESS RELIGIOUS.

It has happened to me on more than one occasion to have to examine papers left by ladies belonging to the last generation, who had lived in the manner most esteemed and respected by the general opinion of their time, and who might, without much risk of error, be taken for almost perfect models of English gentlewomen as they existed before the present scientific age. The papers left by these ladies consisted either of memoranda of their private thoughts, or of thoughts by others which seemed to have had an especial interest for them. I found that all these papers arranged themselves naturally and inevitably under two heads: either they concerned family interests and affections, or they were distinctly religious in character, like the religious meditations we find in books of devotion.

There may be nothing extraordinary in this. Thousands of other ladies may have left religious memoranda; but consider what a preponderance of religious ideas is implied when written thoughts are entirely confined to them! The ladies in question lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period of great intellectual ferment, of the most important political and social changes, and of wonderful material progress; but they did not seem to have taken any real interest in these movements. The Bible and the commentaries of the clergy satisfied not only their spiritual but also their intellectual needs. They seem to have desired no knowledge of the universe, or of the probable origin and future of the human race, which the Bible did not supply. They seem to have cared for no example of human character and conduct other than the scriptural examples.

This restfulness in Biblical history and philosophy, this substitution of the Bible for the world as a subject of study and contemplation, this absence of desire to penetrate the secrets of the world itself, this want of aspiration after any ideal more recent than the earlier ages of Christianity, permitted a much more constant and uninterrupted dwelling with what are considered to be religious ideas than is possible to any active and inquiring mind of the present day. Let it be supposed, for example, that a person to whom the Bible was everything desired information about the origin of the globe, and of life upon it; he would refer to the Book of Genesis as the only authority, and this reference would have the character of a religious act, and he would get credit for piety on account of it; whilst a modern scientific student would refer to some great modern paleontologist, and his reference would not have the character of a religious act, nor bring him any credit for piety; yet the prompting curiosity, the desire to know about the remote past, would be exactly the same in both cases. And I think it may be easily shown that if the modern scientific student appears to be less religious than others think he ought to be, it is often because he possesses and uses more abundant sources of information than those which were accessible to the ancient Jews. It is not his fault if knowledge has increased; he cannot be blamed if he goes where information is most copious and most exact; yet his preference for such information gives an unsanctified aspect to his studies. The study of the most ancient knowledge wears a religious aspect, but the study of modern knowledge appears to be non-religious.

Again, when we come to the cultivation of the idealizing faculties, of the faculties which do not seek information merely, but some kind of perfection, we find that the very complexity of modern life, and the diversity of the ideal pleasures and perfections that we modern men desire, have a constant tendency to take us outside of strictly religious ideals. As long as the writings which are held to be sacred supply all that our idealizing faculties need, so long will our imaginative powers exercise themselves in what is considered to be a religious manner, and we shall get credit for piety; but when our minds imagine what the sacred writers could not or did not conceive, and when we seek help for our imaginative faculty in profane writers, we appear to be less religious. So it is with the desire to study and imitate high examples of conduct and character. There is no nobler or more fruitful instinct in man than a desire like this, which is possible only to those who are at once humble and aspiring. An ancient Jew who had this noble instinct could satisfy it by reading the sacred books of the Hebrews, and so his aspiration appeared to be wholly religious. It is not so with an active-minded young Englishman of the present day. He cannot find the most inspiriting models amongst the ancient Hebrews, for the reason that their life was altogether so much simpler and more primitive than ours. They had nothing that can seriously be called science; they had not any organized industry; they had little art, and hardly any secular literature, so that in these directions they offer us no examples to follow. Our great inspiriting examples in these directions are to be found either in the Renaissance or in recent times, and therefore in profane biography. From this it follows that an active modern mind seems to study and follow non-religious examples, and so to differ widely, and for the worse, from the simpler minds of old time, who were satisfied with the examples they found in their Bibles. This appearance is misleading; it is merely on the surface; for if we go deeper and do not let ourselves be deceived by the words "sacred" and "profane," we shall find that when a simple mind chooses a model from a primitive people, and a cultivated one chooses a model from an advanced people, and from the most advanced class in it, they are both really doing the same thing, namely, seeking ideal help of the kind which is best for each. Both of them are pursuing the same object,--a mental discipline and elevation which may be comprised under the general term _virtue_; the only difference being that one is studying examples of virtue in the history of the ancient Jews, whilst the other finds examples of virtue more to his own special purpose in the lives of energetic Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans.

A hundred such examples might be mentioned, for every occupation worth following has its own saints and heroes; but I will confine myself to two. The first shall be a French gentleman of the eighteenth century, to whom life offered in the richest profusion everything that can tempt a man to what is considered an excusable and even a respectable form of idleness. He had an independent fortune, excellent health, a good social position, and easy access to the most lively, the most entertaining, the most amiable society that ever was, namely, that of the intelligent French nobility before the Revolution. There is no merit in renouncing what we do not enjoy; but he enjoyed all pleasant things, and yet renounced them for a higher and a harder life. At the age of thirty-two he retired to the country, made a rule of early rising and kept it, sallied forth from his house every morning at five, went and shut himself up in an old tower with a piece of bread and a glass of water for his breakfast, worked altogether eleven or twelve hours a day in two sittings, and went to bed at nine. This for eight months in the year, regularly, the remaining four being employed in scientific and administrative work at the Jardin des Plantes. He went on working in this way for forty years, and in the whole course of that time never let pass an ill-considered page or an ill-constructed sentence, but always did his best, and tried to make himself able to do better.

Such was the great life of Buffon; and in our own time another great life has come to its close, inferior to that of Buffon only in this, that as it did not begin in luxury, the first renunciation was not so difficult to make. Yet, however austere his beginnings, it is not a light or easy thing for a man to become the greatest intellectual worker of his time, so that one of his days (including eight hours of steady nocturnal labor) was equivalent to two or more of our days. No man of his time in Europe had so vast a knowledge of literature and science in combination; yet this knowledge was accompanied by perfect modesty and by a complete indifference to vulgar distinctions and vain successes. For many years he was the butt of coarse and malignant misrepresentation on the part of enemies who easily made him odious to a shallow society; but he bore it with perfect dignity, and retained unimpaired the tolerance and charity of his nature. His way of living was plain and frugal; he even contented himself with narrow dwellings, though the want of space must have occasioned frequent inconvenience to a man of his pursuits. He scrupulously fulfilled his domestic duties, and made use of his medical education in ministering gratuitously to the poor. Such was his courage that when already advanced in life he undertook a gigantic task, requiring twenty years of incessant labor; and such were his industry and perseverance that he brought it to a splendidly successful issue. At length, after a long life of duty and patience, after bearing calumny and ridicule, he was called to endure another kind of suffering,--that of incessant physical pain. This he bore with perfect fortitude, retaining to the last his mental serenity, his interest in learning, and a high-minded patriotic thoughtfulness for his country and its future, finding means in the midst of suffering to dictate long letters to his fellow-citizens on political subjects, which, in their calm wisdom, stood in the strongest possible contrast to the violent party writing of the hour.

Such was the great life of Littré; and now consider whether he who studies lives like these, and wins virtue from their austere example, does not occupy his thoughts with what would have been considered religious aspirations, if these two men, instead of being Frenchmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had happened to be ancient Jews. If it had been possible for so primitive a nation as the Jewish to produce men of such steady industry and so large a culture, we should have read the story of their lives in the Jewish sacred books, and then it would have been a part of the popular religion to study them, whereas now the study of such biography is held to be non-religious, if not (at least in the case of Littré) positively irreligious. Yet surely when we think of the virtues which made these lives so fruitful, our minds are occupied in a kind of religious thought; for are we not thinking of temperance, self-discipline, diligence, perseverance, patience, charity, courage, hope? Were not these men distinguished by their aspiration after higher perfection, by a constant desire to use their talents well, and by a vigilant care in the employment of their time? And are not these virtues and these aspirations held to be parts of a civilized man's religion, and the best parts?

The necessity for an intellectual expansion beyond the limits of the Bible was felt very strongly at the time of the Renaissance, and found ample satisfaction in the study of the Greek and Latin classics. There are many reasons why women appear to be more religious than men; and one of them is because women study only one collection of ancient writings, whilst men have been accustomed to study three; consequently that which women study (if such a word is applicable to devotional, uncritical reading) occupies their minds far more exclusively than it occupies the mind of a classical scholar. But, though the intellectual energies of men were for a time satisfied with classical literature, they came at length to look outside of that as their fathers had looked outside of the Bible. Classical literature was itself a kind of religion, having its own sacred books; and it had also its heretics,--the students of nature,--who found nature more interesting than the opinions of the Greeks and Romans. Then came the second great expansion of the human mind, in the midst of which we ourselves are living. The Renaissance opened for it a world of mental activity which had the inappreciable intellectual advantage of lying well outside of the popular beliefs and ideas, so that cultivated men found in it an escape from the pressure of the uneducated; but the new scientific expansion offers us a region governed by laws of a kind peculiar to itself, which protect those who conform to them against every assailant. It is a region in which authority is unknown, for, however illustrious any great man may appear in it, every statement that he makes is subject to verification. Here the knowledge of ancient writers is continually superseded by the better and more accurate knowledge of their successors; so that whereas in religion and learning the most ancient writings are the most esteemed, in science it is often the most recent, and even these have no authority which may not be called in question freely by any student. The new scientific culture is thus encouraging a habit of mind different from old habits, and which in our time has caused such a degree of separation that the most important and the most interesting of all topics are those upon which we scarcely dare to venture for fear of being misunderstood.

If I had to condense in a short space the various reasons why we are apparently becoming less religious, I should say that it is because knowledge and feeling, embodied or expressed in the sciences and arts, are now too fully and too variously developed to remain within the limits of what is considered sacred knowledge or religious emotion. It was possible for them to remain well within those limits in ancient times, and it is still possible for a mind of very limited activity and range to dwell almost entirely in what was known or felt at the time of Christ; but this is not possible for an energetic and inquiring mind, and the consequence is that the energetic mind will seem to the other, by contrast, to be negligent of holy things, and too much occupied with purely secular interests and concerns. A great misunderstanding arises from this, which has often had a lamentable effect on intercourse between relations and friends. Pious ladies, to whom theological writings appear to contain almost everything that it is desirable to know, often look with secret misgiving or suspicion on young men of vigorous intellect who cannot rest satisfied with the old knowledge, and what such ladies vaguely hear of the speculations of the famous scientific leaders inspires them with profound alarm. They think that we are becoming less religious because theological writings do not occupy the same space in our time and thoughts as they do in theirs; whereas, if such a matter could be put to any kind of positive test, it would probably be found that we know more, even of their own theology, than they do, and that, instead of being indifferent to the great problems of the universe, we have given to such problems an amount of careful thought far surpassing, in mental effort, their own simple acquiescence. The opinions of a thoughtful and studious man in the present day have never been lightly come by; and if he is supposed to be less religious than his father or his grandfather it may be that his religion is different from theirs, without being either less earnest or less enlightened. There is, however, one point of immense importance on which I believe that we really are becoming less religious, indeed on that point we seem to be rapidly abandoning the religious principle altogether; but the subject is of too much consequence to be treated at the end of an Essay.

ESSAY XV.

HOW WE ARE REALLY BECOMING LESS RELIGIOUS.

The reader may remember how, after the long and unsuccessful siege of Syracuse, the Athenian general Nikias, seeing his discouraged troops ill with the fever from the marshes, determined to raise the siege; and that, when his soldiers were preparing to retreat, and striking their tents for the march, there occurred an eclipse of the moon. Nikias, in his anxiety to know what the gods meant by this with reference to him and his army, at once consulted a soothsayer, who told him that he would incur the Divine anger if he did not remain where he was for three times nine days. He remained, doing nothing, allowing his troops to perish and his ships to be shut up by a line of the enemy's vessels chained together across the entrance of the port. At length the three times nine days came to an end, and what was left of the Athenian army had to get out of a situation that had become infinitely more difficult during its inaction. The ships tried to get out in vain; the army was able to retreat by land, but only to be harassed by the enemy, and finally placed in such distress that it was compelled to surrender. Most of the remnant died miserably in the old quarries of Syracuse.

The conduct of Nikias throughout these events was in the highest degree religious. He was fully convinced that the gods concerned themselves about him and his doings, that they were watching over him, and that the eclipse was a communication from them not to be neglected without a breach of religious duty. He, therefore, in the spirit of the most perfect religious faith, which we are compelled to admire for its sincerity and thoroughness, shut his eyes resolutely to all the visible facts of a situation more disastrous every day, and attended only to the invisible action of the invisible gods, of which nothing could be really known by him. For twenty-seven days he went on quietly sacrificing his soldiers to his faith, and only moved at last when he believed that the gods allowed it.

In contrast with this, let us ask what we think of an eclipse ourselves, and how far any religious emotion, determinant of action or of inaction, is connected with the phenomenon in our experience. We know, in the first place, that eclipses belong to the natural order, and we do not feel either grateful to the supernatural powers, or ungrateful, with regard to them. Even the idea that eclipses demonstrate the power of God is hardly likely to occur to us, for we constantly see terrestrial objects eclipsed by cast shadows; and the mere falling of a shadow is to us only the natural interruption of light by the intervention of any opaque object. In the true theory of eclipses there is absolutely no ground whatever for religious emotion, and accordingly the phenomenon is now entirely disconnected from religious ideas. The consequence is that where the Athenian general had a strong motive for religious emotion, a motive so strong that he sacrificed his army to the supposed will of Heaven, a modern general in the same situation would feel no emotion and make no sacrifice.

If this process stopped at eclipses the result would be of little importance, as eclipses of the celestial bodies are not frequently visible, and to lose the opportunity of emotion which they present is not a very sensible loss. But so far is the process from stopping at eclipses, that exactly the same process is going on with regard to thousands of other phenomena which are one by one, yet with increasing rapidity, ceasing to be regarded as special manifestations of Divine will, and beginning to be regarded as a part of that order of nature with which, to quote Professor Huxley's significant language, "nothing interferes." Every one of these transferrences from supernatural government to natural order deprives the religious sentiment of one special cause or motive for its own peculiar kind of emotion, so that we are becoming less and less accustomed to such emotion (as the opportunities for it become less frequent), and more and more accustomed to accept events and phenomena of all kinds as in that order of nature "with which nothing interferes."

This single mental conception of the unfailing regularity of nature is doing more in our time to affect the religious condition of thoughtful people than could be effected by many less comprehensive conceptions.

It has often been said, not untruly, that merely negative arguments have little permanent influence over the opinions of men, and that institutions which have been temporarily overthrown by negation will shortly be set up again, and flourish in their old vigor, unless something positive can be found to supply their place. But here is a doctrine of a most positive kind. "The order of nature is invariably according to regular sequences." It is a doctrine which cannot be proved, for we cannot follow all the changes which have ever taken place in the universe; but, although incapable of demonstration, it may be accepted until something happens to disprove it; and it _is_ accepted, with the most absolute faith, by a constantly increasing number of adherents.

To show how this doctrine acts in diminishing religious emotion by taking away the opportunity for it, let me narrate an incident which really occurred on a French line of railway in the winter of 1882. The line, on which I had travelled a few days before, passes between a river and a hill. The river has a rocky bed and is torrential in winter; the hill is densely covered with a pine forest coming down to the side of the line. The year 1882 had been the rainiest known in France for two centuries, and the roots of the trees on the edge of this pine forest had been much loosened by the rain. In consequence of this, two large pine-trees fell across the railway early one morning, and soon afterwards a train approached the spot by the dim light of early dawn. There was a curve just before the engine reached the trees, and it had come rapidly for several miles down a decline. The driver reversed his steam, the engine and tender leaped over the trees, and then went over the embankment to a place within six feet of the rapid river. The carriages remained on the line, but were much broken. Nobody was killed; nobody was seriously injured. The remarkable escape of the passengers was accounted for as follows by the religious people in the neighborhood. There happened to be a priest in the train, and at the time when the shock took place he made what is called "a pious ejaculation." This, it was said, had saved the lives of the passengers. In the ages of faith this explanation would have been received without question; but the notion of natural sequences--Professor Huxley's "order with which nothing interferes"--had obtained such firm hold on the minds of the townsmen generally that they said the priest was trying to make ecclesiastical capital out of an occurrence easily explicable by natural causes. They saw nothing supernatural either in the production of the accident or its comparative harmlessness. The trickling of much water had denuded the roots of the trees, which fell because they could not stand with insufficient roothold; the lives of the passengers were saved because they did not happen to be in the most shattered carriage; and the men on the engine escaped because they fell on soft ground, made softer still by the rain. It was probable, too, they said, that if any beneficent supernatural interference had taken place it would have maintained the trees in an erect position, by preventive miracle, and so spared the slight injuries which really were inflicted, and which, though treated very lightly by others because there were neither deaths nor amputations, still caused suffering to those who had to bear them.

Now if we go a little farther into the effects of this accident on the minds of the people who shared in it, or whose friends had been imperilled by it, we shall see very plainly the effect of the modern belief in the regularity of natural sequences. Those who believed in supernatural intervention would offer thanksgivings when they got home, and probably go through some special religious thanksgiving services for many days afterwards; those who believed in the regularity of natural sequences would simply feel glad to have escaped, without any especial sense of gratitude to supernatural powers. So much for the effect as far as thanksgiving is concerned; but there is another side of the matter at least equally important from the religious point of view,--that of prayer. The believers in supernatural interference would probably, in all their future railway journeys, pray to be supernaturally protected in case of accident, as they had been in 1882; but the believers in the regularity of natural sequences would only hope that no trees had fallen across the line, and feel more than usually anxious after long seasons of rainy weather. Can there be a doubt that the priest's opinion, that he had won safety by a pious ejaculation, was highly favorable to his religious activity afterwards, whilst the opinion of the believers in "the natural order with which nothing interferes" was unfavorable both to prayer and thanksgiving in connection with railway travelling?

Examples of this kind might easily be multiplied, for there is hardly any enterprise that men undertake, however apparently unimportant, which cannot be regarded both from the points of view of naturalism and supernaturalism; and in every case the naturalist manner of regarding the enterprise leads men to study the probable influence of natural causes, whilst the supernaturalist opinion leads them to propitiate supernatural powers. Now, although some new sense may come to be attached to the word "religion" in future ages, so that it may come to mean scientific thoroughness, intellectual ingenuousness, or some other virtue that may be possessed by a pure naturalist, the word has always been understood, down to the present time, to imply a constant dependence upon the supernatural; and when I say that we are becoming less religious, I mean that from our increasing tendency to refer everything to natural causes the notion of the supernatural is much less frequently present in our minds than it was in the minds of our forefathers. Even the clergy themselves seem to be following the laity towards the belief in natural law, at least so far as matter is concerned. The Bishop of Melbourne, in 1882, declined to order prayers for rain, and gave his reason honestly, which was that material phenomena were under the control of natural law, and would not be changed in answer to prayer. The Bishop added that prayer should be confined to spiritual blessings. Without disputing the soundness of this opinion, we cannot help perceiving that if it were generally received it would put an end to one half of the religious activity of the human race; for half the prayers and half the thanksgivings addressed to the supernatural powers are for material benefits only. It is possible that, in the future, religious people will cease to pray for health, but take practical precautions to preserve it; that they will cease to pray for prosperity, but study the natural laws which govern the wealth of nations; that they will no longer pray for the national fleets and armies, but see that they are well supplied and intelligently commanded. All this and much more is possible; but when it comes to pass the world will be less religious than it was when men believed that every pestilence, every famine, every defeat, was a chastisement specially, directly, and intentionally inflicted by an angry Deity. Even now, what an immense step has been made in this direction! In the fearful description of the pestilence at Florence, given with so much detail by Boccaccio, he speaks of "l'ira di Dio a punire la iniquità degli uomini con quella pestilenza;" and he specially implies that those who sought to avoid the plague by going to healthier places in the country deceived themselves in supposing that the wrath of God would not follow them whithersoever they went. That is the old belief expressing itself in prayers and humiliations. It is still recognized officially. If the plague could occur in a town on the whole so well cared for as modern London, the language of Boccaccio would still be used in the official public prayers; but the active-minded practical citizens would be thinking how to destroy the germs, how to purify air and water. An instance of this divergence occurred after the Egyptian war of 1882. The Archbishop of York, after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, ordered thanksgivings to be offered in the churches, on the ground that God was in Sir Garnet Wolseley's camp and fought with him against the Egyptians, which was a survival of the antique idea that national deities fought with the national armies. On this a Member of Parliament, Mr. George Palmer, said to his constituents in a public meeting at Reading, "At the same time I cannot agree with the prayers that have been made in churches. Though I respect the consciences of other men, I must say that it was not by Divine interference, but from the stuff of which our army was made and our great ironclads, that victory was achieved." I do not quote this opinion for any originality in itself, as there have always been men who held that victory was a necessary result of superior military efficiency, but I quote it as a valuable test of the change in general opinion. It is possible that such views may have been expressed in private in all ages of the world; but I doubt if in any age preceding ours a public man, at the very time when he was cultivating the good graces of his electors, would have refused to the national Deity a special share in a military triumph. To an audience imbrued with the old conception of incessant supernatural interferences, the doctrine that a victory was a natural result would have sounded impious; and such an audience, if any one had ventured to say what Mr. Palmer said, would have received him with a burst of indignation. But Mr. Palmer knew the tendencies of the present age, and was quite correct in thinking that he might safely express his views. His hearers were not indignant, they were not even grave and silent, as Englishmen are when they simply disapprove, but they listened willingly, and marked their approbation by laughter and cheers. Even a clergyman may hold Mr. Palmer's opinion. Soon after his speech at Reading the Rev. H. R. Haweis said the same thing in the pulpit. "Few people," he said, "really doubt that we have conquered the Egyptians, not because we were in the right and they were in the wrong, but because we had the heaviest hand." The preacher went on to say that the idea of God fighting on one side more than another in particular battles seemed to him to be a Pagan or at most a Jewish one. How different was the old sentiment as expressed by Macaulay in the stirring ballad of Ivry! "We of the religion" had no doubt about the Divine interference in the battle,

"For our God hath crushed the tyrant, our God hath raised the slave,
And mocked the counsel of the wise, and the valor of the brave;
Then glory to his holy name from whom all glories are,
And glory to our Sovereign Lord, King Henry of Navarre!"

The way in which the great mental movement of our age towards a more complete recognition of natural order is affecting human intercourse may be defined in a few words. If the movement were at an equal rate of advance for all civilized people they would be perfectly agreed amongst themselves at any one point of time, as it would be settled which events were natural in their origin and which were due to the interposition of Divine or diabolical agency. Living people would differ in opinion from their predecessors, but they would not differ from each other. The change, however, though visible and important, is not by any means uniform, so that a guest sitting at dinner may have on his right hand a lady who sees supernatural interferences in many things, and on his left a student of science who is firmly convinced that there are no supernatural interferences in the present, and that there never have been any in the past. Private opinion, out of which public opinion slowly and gradually forms itself, is in our time in a state of complete anarchy, because two opposite doctrines are held loosely, and one or the other is taken up as it happens to seem appropriate. The interpositions of Providence are recognized or rejected according to political or personal bias. The French Imperialists saw the Divine vengeance in the death of Gambetta, whilst in their view the death of Napoleon III. was the natural termination of his disease, and that of the Prince Imperial a simple accident, due to the carelessness of his English companions. Personal bias shows itself in the belief, often held by men occupying positions of importance, that they are necessary, at least for a time, to fulfil the intentions of Providence. Napoleon III. said in a moment of emotion, "So long as I am needed I am invulnerable; but when my hour comes I shall be broken like glass!" Even in private life a man will sometimes think, "I am so necessary to my wife and family that Providence will not remove me," though every newspaper reports the deaths of fathers who leave their families destitute. Sometimes men believe that Providence takes the same view of their enterprises that they themselves take; and when a great enterprise is drawing near to its termination they feel assured that supernatural power will protect them till it is quite concluded, but they believe that the enterprises of other men are exposed to all the natural risks. When Mr. Gifford Palgrave was wrecked in the sea of Oman, he was for some time in an open boat, and thus describes his situation: "All depended on the steerage, and on the balance and support afforded by the oars, and even more still on the Providence of Him who made the deep; nor indeed could I get myself to think that He had brought me thus far to let me drown just at the end of my journey, and in so very unsatisfactory a way too; for had we then gone down, what news of the event off Sowadah would ever have reached home, or when?--so that altogether I felt confident of getting somehow or other on shore, though by what means I did not exactly know." Here the writer thinks of his own enterprise as deserving Divine solicitude, but does not attach the same importance to the humbler enterprises of the six passengers who went down with the vessel. I cannot help thinking, too, of the poor passenger Ibraheem, who swam to the boat and begged so piteously to be taken in, when a sailor "loosened his grasp by main force and flung him back into the sea, where he disappeared forever." Neither can I forget the four who imprudently plunged from the boat and perished. We may well believe that these lost ones would have been unable to write such a delightful and instructive book as Mr. Palgrave's "Travels in Arabia," yet they must have had their own humble interests in life, their own little objects and enterprises.

The calculation that Providence would spare a traveller towards the close of a long journey may be mistaken, but it is pious; it affords an opportunity for the exercise of devout emotion which the scientific thinker would miss. If Mr. Herbert Spencer had been placed in the same situation he would, no doubt, have felt the most perfect confidence that the order of nature would not be disturbed, that even in such a turmoil of winds and waters the laws of buoyancy and stability would be observed in every motion of the boat to the millionth of an inch; but he would not have considered himself likely to escape death on account of the important nature of his undertakings. Mr. Spencer's way of judging the situation as one of equal peril for himself and his humble companions would have been more reasonable, but at the same time he would have lost that opportunity for special and personal gratitude which Mr. Palgrave enjoyed when he believed himself to be supernaturally protected. The curious inconsistency of the common French expression, "C'est un hasard providentiel" is another example of the present state of thought on the question. A Frenchman is upset from a carriage, breaks no bones, and stands up, exclaiming, as he dusts himself, "It was un hasard vraiment providentiel that I was not lamed for life." It is plain that if his escape was providential it could not be accidental at the same time, yet in spite of the obvious inconsistency of his expression there is piety in his choice of an adjective.

The distinction, as it has usually been understood hitherto, between religious and non-religious explanations of what happens, is that the religious person believes that events happen by supernatural direction, and he is only thinking religiously so long as he thinks in that manner; whilst the non-religious theory is that events happen by natural sequence, and so long as a person thinks in this manner, his mind is acting non-religiously, whatever may be his religious profession. "To study the universe as it is manifested to us; to ascertain by patient inquiry the order of the manifestations; to discover that the manifestations are connected with one another after regular ways in time and space; and, after repeated failures, to give up as futile the attempt to understand the power manifested, is condemned as irreligious. And meanwhile the character of religious is claimed by those who figure to themselves a Creator moved by motives like their own; who conceive themselves as seeing through His designs, and who even speak of Him as though He laid plans to outwit the Devil!"