Chapter III: The Bitter Fruit

The Vocation of Science.

Science is, and ever was, an influential factor operating upon the thought, aims, and actions of man. Hence science must remain conscious of its vocation. First of all it is to hold aloft and preserve the _spiritual possessions of mankind_. True, science must also progress; but progress means growth, which presupposes the preservation of what has been received from of old. This applies pre-eminently to the philosophical-religious patrimony of the past; no error could be more fatal than to presume that each generation must start from the beginning, that the foundations, which have safely supported human life for centuries, must be obsolete because human nature is suddenly considered changed.

What are these foundations? They are the tested religious and moral convictions of mankind, and, for our nations particularly, the divine tenets of Christianity, that have been their highest ideals for centuries, and have produced serenity and a high standard of morality. If science aims to be the principle of conservation and not of destruction, it must look upon the safeguarding of those possessions of the nations as its sacred task. Indeed, it would perform this task but poorly were it to waste this patrimony piece by piece, or to shatter it with wicked fist, instead of respecting and honouring it, or to set fire to the sanctuary where mankind hitherto has dwelled in peace and happiness. A science of this kind would not only cease to be a bulwark for the mental life of mankind, but turn into a positive danger.

In as far as it follows the principles of liberal freedom of research, present-day science does present this danger. This cannot be denied, the facts speak too plainly. By its very nature it _must_ become such danger. For it recognizes no belief, neither in God nor in the Church; no dogmas, no “prejudices,” no traditions, however sacred, are to be respected; it is fundamental unbelief, the principle of opposition to the Christian religion. Its autonomous Subject emancipates himself from the yoke of objective truth which he cannot procreate free out of himself. It confesses the principle that there are neither truths nor values that endure; _plus ultra!_ always new ideas! _Quieta movere_, hitherto the watchword of unwisdom, is this science’s maxim. And liberal freedom of research is what its nature compels it to be. Can it do any more than it has done, to prove itself a principle of mental pauperism? We shall not demand a list of the things it has thrown aside and shattered. Let us rather ask, _what it has left whole_ of the sacred institutions of truth, inherited from a Christian past. Alas, it has cast off and denied everything; it has lost not only the things a Christian age has treasured, but even those a higher paganism had revered. Let us examine this sad work of negation and annihilation. It is a more melancholy spectacle than any war of extermination that was ever waged against Europe’s Christian civilization by a people bent on trampling down every flower of Christian culture, and on razing every castle to the ground.

Are We Still Christians?

This was the question proposed some scores of years ago by _D. Strauss_ to himself, and to those of his mind. With this question we will begin. To our forefathers, especially of the German nation, nothing was more sacred than the Christian religion; no people like the German has absorbed it so fully, has been so permeated with it. But now, wherever liberal science—here especially modern Protestant theology that brings liberal freedom of research into full application—wherever it has made the Christian religion a subject of its study, one treasure after another has been lost; of the whole of Christendom nothing remains but an empty name and a formal homage, reminding of the courtesy paid to deposed rulers.

In the first place, there has been dropped the fundamental thesis of the _divinity of Christ_, whereupon rests the entire structure of Christianity. Man’s modern emancipation from everything supernatural has been accomplished also with respect to the person of Christ: the man Christ is divested of His divinity and of everything miraculous; His birth by the virgin, His miracles and prophecies, His resurrection and ascension, once the subjects of exalting feasts, have fallen a victim to unbelieving science. It is true, they exert themselves to keep His person in view, they want the purely human Jesus to hold His old position of God and man in the believing consciousness, to conceal the mental pauperization. But this trick is failing more and more. The Son of God sees Himself gradually placed among the great men of history; we are becoming accustomed to find in the “Biographies of Celebrated Men,” among “Religious Educators,” side by side with _Confucius_, _Buddha_, _Augustine_, _Mohammed_, _Luther_, _Kant_, and _Goethe_, also the name of Jesus. The lustre of the past belief in His divinity is paling. In the eyes of unbelieving science He has ceased to be the infallible, all-surpassing Authority, and the basis of the faith. The teaching of Jesus has become the subject of an analyzing and eliminating criticism, and whenever deemed advisable His authority is simply ignored; He was human, affected by the views and errors of His age.

Thus they know, as does _H. Gunkel_, that “Jesus and the Apostles
evidently have taken those narratives (the miracles of Genesis) to
be reality and not poetry”; “the men of the New Testament on such
questions take no particular attitude but share the (erroneous)
opinions of their times.” They also know “that in regard to
persons possessed with demons Jesus shared the erroneous notions
of his time” (_Braun_), and _Fr. Delitzsch_ informs us that it was
“particularly a Babylonian superstition,” in consequence of which
“the belief in demons and devils assumed such importance in the
imagination of Jesus of Nazareth and of his Galilean disciples.”
Thus the word is fulfilled literally: “He is a sign which will be
contradicted.”

No one knows really _who Jesus was_. His person is the football of opinions. “If any one desiring reliable information, as to who Jesus Christ was, and what message He brought, should consult the literature of the day, he would find buzzing round him contradictory voices.... Taken all in all, the impression made by these contradicting opinions is depressing: the confusion seems past hope,” admits Prof. _Harnack_.

Also _E. V. Hartmann_ remarks: “Thus, according to some, Jesus was
a poet, to others a mystic visionary, a third sees in him the
militant hero for freedom and human dignity, to a fourth he was
the organizer of a new Church and of an ecclesiastical system of
ethics, to a fifth the rationalistic reformer ... to the eleventh
a naturalistic pantheist like _Giordano Bruno_, to the twelfth a
superman on the order of _Nietzsche’s_ Zarathustra....” A chaos of
opinions agreeing only in the one aim of rejecting His divinity.
_A. Schweitzer_, himself a representative of liberal Protestant
research, says, “Nothing is more negative than the result of the
research concerning the life of Jesus.” And knowing Jesus’s person
no longer, they no longer know anything certain about His
teaching, as is clear from the above. According to _I.
Wellhausen_, from the “unsufficient fragments at hand we can get
but a scanty conception of the doctrine of Jesus.”—The fathers
were rich, the children have grown poor. _Dissipaverunt
substantiam suam!_

To many even the _existence of Jesus_ has become doubtful; and
this not only to men of an irreligious propaganda, like Prof. _A.
Drews_, who, carried away by the corroding tendency of a radical
age, journeyed from town to town in order to proclaim, in the
twentieth century of Christian reckoning, the scientific discovery
of the “Myth of Christ”; but even to others the existence of Jesus
has become doubtful or at least valueless. The task now is to do
away entirely with the person of Jesus, and to solve the problem
of preserving a Christian faith without a Christ. In this sense
Prof. _M. Rade_ writes: “Serious and gifted men having asserted
that Jesus never existed (or, what amounts to the same, that, if
He ever lived, nothing is known of Him; hence, His existence is of
no historical importance), we dogmatists almost have to be
grateful to them for having helped us to put a very concrete
question no longer in general terms: how does religious certainty
face historical criticism? but quite specifically: how does
religious certainty (of the Christian) regard the
historic-scientific possibility of the non-existence of the
historical Jesus?” They frankly assert that they could entirely
forego the person of Christ. Thus Prof. _P. W. Schmiedel_
declares: “My innermost religious conviction would not suffer
injury were I to be convinced to-day that Jesus never lived.... I
would know that I could not lose the measure of piety that has
become my property long since, even if I cannot derive it any
longer from Jesus.” “Neither does my piety require me to see in
Jesus an absolutely perfect type, nor would it disturb me were I
to find someone else actually surpassing Him, which undoubtedly is
the case in some respects.” For him to whom Christ is no longer
God but a man and capable of error, His person and existence have
necessarily lost their value.

Thus we have arrived at a _Christianity without a Christ_. As yet the person of the Lord is usually surrounded by a halo: it is the after-effect of a faithful past, the last rays of a setting sun. That this last glimmer, too, will pale and give way to darkness is but a question of time, when with more honesty expression will be given to the conclusion necessarily arrived at. If Christ is not what He claimed to be, God and Messiah, then the belief in His being the Son of God and the Messiah, in His right to abrogate the religion of the Old Testament and to found a new religion, commanding its acceptance under penalty of damnation—all this can be nothing but the result of religious fanaticism and mental derangement. And science is, in all seriousness, preparing to turn into this direction.

It is true, many are hesitating to draw these fearful conclusions
and to utter them; arriving at this point, they cautiously stop:
so _Harnack_. “How Jesus could arrive at the consciousness of His
unique relation to God as His Son, how He became conscious of His
power as well as of the obligation and task involved in this
power, that is His secret, and no psychology will ever disclose
it.... Here, all research must halt.” It is the silence of
embarrassment, but equally of unscientific method. Having arrived
at untenable conclusions, when question upon question is
impetuously suggested, they stop suddenly and have nothing to say
but a vague word about inscrutableness.

But there are those who actually speak the word so horrible to a
Christian heart: Jesus was demented, a subject for pathology.
_Strauss_ indicated this cautiously: “One who expects to return
after his death in a manner in which no human being had ever
returned, he is to us ... not exactly a lunatic, but a great
visionary.” Others speak more plainly. _Holtzmann’s_ answer to the
question: Was Jesus an Ecstatic, is an emphatic: “Yes, He was.”
_De Loosten_ considers him insane. _E. Rasmussen_ thinks Him an
epileptic, but grants to physicians the right to reckon him among
paranoiacs or lunatics. To _A. Jülicher_ Jesus is a visionary, “a
mystic, not satisfied to dream of his ideals, but who lived with
them, worked with them, even saw them tangibly before his eyes,
deceiving himself and others.” Thus the supernatural has become
madness; Jesus Christ, for whose divinity the martyrs went to
their death, wears now, before the forum of a false science,
Herod’s cloak of foolishness.

With the fall of this fundamental dogma there must necessarily fall all other specific truths of Christianity, and they have fallen. The Holy Writ, once the work of the Holy Ghost, has now become a book like the Indian Vedda, to some perhaps even more unreliable; original sin, Redemption and grace, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments, have been dropped or changed into symbols, of which every one may think what he pleases. They have tried to make Christianity “acceptable to our times,” to “bring it nearer to the modern idea.” There is really nothing left to offend modern man, nothing that could get in conflict with any idea. The essence of Christianity is depreciated and emptied until it has become only a vague sentiment, without thought; a few names, without ideas. “Christianity as a Gospel,” so teaches _Harnack_, “has but one aim: to find the living God, that every individual may find Him as his God, gaining strength and joy and peace. How it attains this aim through the centuries, whether with the Coefficient of the Jewish or the Greek, of flight from the world or of civilization, of Gnosticism or Agnosticism—this all is of secondary consideration.” Of secondary consideration it is, then, whether one is convinced of the existence of God or whether he doubts with the agnostics, whether he believes in a personal God or not. To-day even the pantheist who does not acknowledge a Creator of Heaven and Earth may be a Christian; and so can he who no longer believes in personal immortality and in a hereafter; for, we are informed, “this religion is above the contrasts of here and the beyond, of life and death, of Reason and Ecstatics, of Judaism and Hellenism” (_Harnack_). Thus there is no thought which could not be made to agree with this despoiled Christianity. For, we are told further, “much less does the Gospel presuppose, or is joined to, a fixed theory of nature—not even in a negative sense could this be asserted” (_Harnack_). Materialism and Spiritualism, Theism and Pantheism, Belief or Negation of Creation, everything will harmonize with a Christianity thus degraded to a thing without character or principle.(15)

All that is left is a word of love, of a kind Father, of filiation to God, and union with God: words robbed of their true meaning; a shell without a kernel, ruins with the name “Christianity” still inscribed thereon, telling of a house that once stood here, wherein the fathers dwelt, but long since vacated by their children. _Dissipaverunt substantiam suam!_

As to God and divine filiation, everybody is welcome to his own
interpretation. He may form with _O. Pfleiderer_ the
“Neoprotestantism” which, “after breaking with all ecclesiastical
dogmas, recalled to mind the truths of the Christian religion,
hidden beneath the surface of these dogmas, in order to realize,
more purely and more perfectly than ever before, the truth of
God’s incarnation in the new forms of autonomous thought and of
the moral life of human society.” Christianity and God—the symbols
of autonomous man! Or he may follow _Bousset_, to whom nature is
God, and in this way combines harmoniously Christianity and
Atheism. “This is the forceful evolution of Christian religion,”
says he, “the notion of redemption, the Dogma of the divinity of
Christ, the trinity, the idea of satisfaction and sacrifice,
miracles, the old conception of revelation—all these we see
carried off by this wave of progress.” “What is left? Timid people
may think: a wreck. But to our pleasant surprise we found stated
at many points in our inquiry: what is left is the simple Gospel
of Jesus.” And what does this simplified Gospel contain? “Of
course we cannot simply accept in full the Gospel of Jesus....
There is the internal and the external. The external and
non-essential includes the judgment of the world, angels,
miracles, inspiration, and other things.” All this may be
disregarded. “But even the essentials, the internal of the Gospel
cannot be simply subscribed to. They must be interpreted.” What,
then, is this essential, this internal of the Gospel, and what is
its interpretation? “The belief of the Gospel in the personal
heavenly Father; to this we hold fast with all our strength. But
we carry this belief in God into our modern thought.” And what
becomes then of “God”? “To us, God is no longer the kind Father
above the starry skies. God is the Infinite, Omnipotent, who is
active in the immense universe, in infiniteness of time and space,
in infinitely small and in infinitely large things. He is the God
whose garb is the iron law of nature which hides Him from the
human eye by a compact, impenetrable veil.” We see the belief of
the Gospel has dwindled down to atheistic Monism.

As early as 1874 _Ed. von Hartmann_, in his book “Die
Selbstzersetzung des Christentums,” came to the conclusion that
“liberal Protestantism has in no sense the right to claim a place
within Christendom.” In a later book his keen examination
demonstrates how the speculation of liberal Protestantism has
changed the Christian religion step by step into pantheism: “Not a
single point in the doctrine of the Church is spared by this
upheaval of principle, every dogma is formally turned into its
very opposite, in order to make its religious idea conform to the
tenet of divine immanence.”

This is called the development of Christianity. It is this
“religious progress,” the same “free Christianity,” that they are
now trying to promote by international congresses. The invitation
to the “World’s Congress for free Christianity and religious
progress” at Berlin, in 1910, was signed by more than 130 German
professors, including 47 theologians. We have here the development
of the dying into the lifeless corpse, the progress of the strong
castle into a dilapidated ruin, the advance of the rich man to
beggary.

We began our inquiry with the question proposed some years ago by _D. Strauss_ to his brethren-in-spirit: Are we still Christians? We may now quote the answer, which he gives at the conclusion of his own investigation: “Now, I think, we are through. And the result? the reply to my question?—must I state it explicitly? Very well; my conviction is, that if we do not want to make excuses, if we do not want to shift and shuffle and quibble, if yes is to be yes, and no to remain no, in short, if we desire to speak like honest, sincere men, we must confess: we are no longer Christians.”

This is the bitter fruit of autonomous freedom of thinking, which, declining any guidance by faith, recognizes no other judge of truth than individual reason, with all the license and the hidden inclinations that rule it. Protestantism has adopted this freedom of research as its principle; in consistently applying it, Protestantism has completely denatured the Christian religion. If anything can prove irrefutably the monstrosity and cultural incapacity of modern freedom of research, it is the fate of Protestantism. Any one capable of seriously judging serious things must realize here how pernicious this freedom is for the human mind.

Reduced to Beggary.

But the loss is even greater. The better class of paganism still clung to the general notion of an existing personal God, of a future life, of a reward after death; it was convinced of the existence of an immortal soul and a future reward, of the necessity of religion, of immutable standards for morals and thought. Has liberal science at least been able to preserve this essential property of a higher paganism? Alas, no! It has lost nearly everything.

No longer has it a personal God. While belief in God may still survive in the hearts of many representatives of this science, it has vanished from science itself. It begs to be excused from accepting any solution of questions, if God is a factor in the solution. The opinion prevails that _Kant_ has forever shattered all rational demonstrations of the existence of God. Yet _Kant_ permits this existence as a “postulate,” which, according to _Strauss_, “may be regarded as the attic room, where God who has been retired from His office may be decently sheltered and employed.” But now He has been given notice to quit even this refuge. There must be nothing left of Him but His venerable name, which is appropriated by the new apostasy in the guise of pantheism or a masked materialism. Monism is the joint name for it: this is the modern “belief in God.” In days gone by it was frankly called “atheism.”

This disappearance of the old belief in God is noted with
satisfaction by modern science: “It is true,” says _Paulsen_, “the
belief in gods ... is dying out, and will never be resurrected.
Nor is there an essential difference whether many or only one of
these beings are assumed. A monotheism which looks upon God as an
individual being and lets him occasionally interfere in the world
as in something separate from and foreign to him, such a
monotheism is essentially not different from polytheism. If one
should insist on such conception of theism, then, of course, it
will be difficult to contradict those who maintain that science
must lead to atheism.”

Therefore God, as a personal being, is dead, and will never come to life again. While there is an enormous exaggeration in these words, they nevertheless glaringly characterize the ideas of the science of which _Paulsen_ is the mouthpiece. It does not want directly to give up the name of God; it serves as a mask to conceal the uncanny features of pantheism and materialism.

“The universe,” we hear often and in many variations, “is the
expression of a uniform, original principle, which may be termed
God, Nature, primitive force, or anything else, and which appears
to man in manifold forms of energy, like matter, light, warmth,
electricity, chemical energy, or psychical process.... These
fundamental ideas of monism are by no means ‘atheistic.’ Many
monists in spite of assertions to the contrary believe in a
supreme divine principle, which penetrates the whole world, living
and operating in everything. Of course, if God is taken to mean a
being who exists outside of the world ... then it is true we are
atheists” (_Plate_). We have already seen that one can even be a
Protestant theologian and yet be satisfied with a “God” of this
description.

In the place of God has stepped _man_, with his advanced civilization, radiant in the divine aureole of the absolute as its highest incarnation. But what has liberal research done even to him? According to the Christian idea, man bears the stamp of God on his forehead: “after My image I have created thee”; in his breast he carries a spiritual soul, endowed with freedom and immortality—_gloria et honore coronasti eum_. Liberal science pretends to uplift and exalt man; but in reality it strips him of his adornments, one after the other. He is no longer a creature of God because this would contradict science. His birthplace and the home of his childhood are no longer in Paradise, but in the jungles of Africa, among the animals, whose descendent man is now said to be. Liberal science, almost without exception, denies the freedom of will which raises man high above the beast, and as a rule it calls such freedom an “illusion”: of a substantial soul, of immortality, of an ultimate possession of God after death, it frequently, if not always, knows nothing.

Let us take up a handbook of modern _Psychology_ of this kind,
Wundt’s, for instance. We see at a glance that it is a very
learned work. The thirty lectures inform us in minute
investigations of the various methods and resources of
psychological research. The reader has reached the twentieth
lecture, and he asks, how about the soul? The title of the book
states that the chapters would treat of the human soul, but so far
not a word has been said about it. But there are ten lectures
more; he continues to turn over the leaves of the book. He finds
beautiful things said about expression and emotions, about
instincts in animal and man, about spontaneous actions and other
things. At last, the third before the last page of the book, there
arises the question, what about the soul, and what does the reader
learn? “Our soul is nothing else, but the sum total of our
perception, our feeling and our will.” The conviction he held
hitherto, that he possessed a substantial, immortal soul, which
remains through changing conceptions and sentiments, he sees
rejected as “fiction.” The reader learns that, though he may still
use the term “soul,” he has no real soul, much less a spiritual
soul, least of all an immortal soul. In its stead he is treated to
some learned statements about muscular sensations and such things,
by way of compensation. _Jodl_, too, speaks of the “illusions,
based upon the old theories about the soul,” and he rejects the
dualistic psychology which “mistook an abstract thought, the soul,
for a real being, for an immaterial substance”; and which defended
this notion “with worthless reasons.”

It is manifest that, together with the substantial soul,
immortality is also disposed of. True, here too the word is
cautiously retained; but by immortality is now understood
perpetuation in the human race, in the ideas of posterity, in
“objective spirit,” in the “imperishable value of ethical
possessions,” for which the individual has laboured. Some fine
words are said about it, as roses are used to cover a grave. Yet,
it is only the immortality of the barrel of Regulus, or the
Gordian knot in history, the immortality of which the printers’
press may partake in the effect of the books it prints. To quote
_Jodl_ again: “The fact of the objective spirit, together with the
organic connection of the generations to one another, form the
scientific reality of what appears in popular, mythological tenets
of faith as the idea of personal immortality ... and which has
been defended by the dualistic psychology with worthless, invalid
arguments.” The refutation of these arguments does not bother him.
“A refutation of these scholastic arguments is as little needed as
a refutation of the belief in the miracles and demons of former
centuries is needed by a man standing on the ground of modern
natural science.” This reminds one of _Haeckel’s_ method. The
latter nevertheless found it worth while in his “Weltraetsel” to
dispose in thirteen lines of six such arguments, and then to
assure the reader that “All these and similar arguments have
fallen to the ground.” That the matter in question is an idea that
has been the foundation of Christian civilization and ethics for
thousands of years, that has led millions to holiness; an idea,
indeed, that has been the common property of all nations at all
times—this seems to count for very little.

This technique of a superficial speculation, which, devoid of
piety, casts everything overboard, finds no trouble in disposing
of the entire _spiritual world_. “No one is capable,” says _Jodl_
again, “of imagining a purely spiritual reality.” This is disposed
of. “Since the war between the Aristotle-scholastic and the
mechanical method has been waged, spiritual powers have never
played any other part in the explanation of the world than that of
an unknown quantity in equations of a higher degree, which,
unsolvable by methods hitherto prevalent, are only awaiting the
superior master and a new technique (_sic_) in order to disappear”
(p. 77 _seq._).

With the denial of a personal God and of the immortality of the soul, true _religion_ is abandoned. Of course, there is much said and written about religion in our days: the scientific literature about it has grown to tremendous proportions—to say nothing of newspapers, novels, and plays. One might welcome this as a proof that this world will never entirely satisfy the human heart. But it is also a sign that religion is no longer a secure possession, but has become a problem—that it has been lost. Even on the part of free-thought it is not denied that “only unhappy times will permit the existence of religious problems; and that this problem is the utterance of mental discord.” Yet they do not want to forego religion entirely, for they feel that irreligion is tantamount to degeneration. But what has become of religion? It has been degraded to a vague sentiment and longing, without religious truths and duties, a plaything for pastime.

For _Schleiermacher_ religion is a feeling of simple dependence,
though no one knows upon whom he is dependent: according to
_Wundt_ religion consists in “man serving infinite purposes,
together with his finite purposes, the ultimate fulfilment whereof
remains hidden to his eye,” which probably means something, but I
do not know what. _Haeckel_ calls his materialism the religion of
the true, good, and beautiful; _Jodl_ even thinks, “As the realm
of science is the real, and the realm of art the possible, so the
realm of religion is the impossible.” Religion having been
degraded to such a level, it is no longer astonishing that
religion is attributed even to animals, and in the words of _E.
von Hartmann_, “we cannot help attributing a religious character,
as far as the animal is concerned, to the relation between the
intelligent domestic animals and their masters.”

What, finally, has become of the old standard of _morals_? A modern philosopher may answer the question.

_Fouillée_ writes: “In our day, far more so than thirty years ago,
morality itself, its reality, its necessity and usefulness, is in
the balance.... I have read with much concern how my
contemporaries are at fundamental variance in this respect, and
how they contradict one another. I have tried to form an opinion
of all these different opinions. Shall I say it? I have found in
the province of morals a confusion of ideas and sentiments to an
extent that it seemed impossible to me to illustrate thoroughly
what might be termed contemporaneous sophistry” (Le Moralisme de
Kant, etc.).

Where is left now to liberal science a single remnant of those great truths on which mankind has hitherto lived, and which it needs for existence? There was a God—but He is gone. There was a life to come, and a supernatural world; they are lost. Man had a soul, endowed with freedom, spirituality, and immortality; he has it no longer. He had fixed principles of reasoning and laws of morals; they are gone. He possessed Christ, full of grace and truth, he possessed redemption and a Church; everything is lost. Burnt to the ground is the homestead. In the blank voids, that cheerful casements were, sits despair; man stands at the grave of all that fortune gave!

The names alone have survived; now and then they speak of God and religion, of Christianity and faith, immortality and freedom; but the words are false, pretending a possession that is lost long since. They are patches from a grand dress, once worn by our ancestors; ruins of the ancestral house that the children have lost. They are still cherished as the memories of better times. People thus acknowledge the irreparable forfeiture which those names denote, without realizing how they pronounce their own condemnation by having destroyed these possessions.(16) _Dissipaverunt substantiam suam._

The son came to his father. In his heedless anxiety for freedom he would leave the father’s house, to get away from restraining discipline and dependence. “Father, give me the portion of the goods that falleth to me.” And he departed into a far country. Soon he had spent all and had nothing to appease his hunger.

Despairing of Truth.

These, then, are the achievements liberal research can boast of in the fields of philosophy and religion: Negations and again negations; temples and altars it has destroyed, sacred images it has broken, pillars it has knocked down. Free from Christianity, free from God, free from the life to come and the supernatural, free from authority and faith—it is rich in freedom and negation. But what does it offer in place of all the things it has destroyed? What spiritual goods does it show to the expectant eyes of its confiding followers? The most hopeless things imaginable, namely, despair of all higher truth, mental confusion, and decay. One other brief glance at the consequences and we shall be competent to judge of the fitness of liberal freedom of thought for the civilization of mankind.

As far as it is inspired by philosophy, modern science confesses the principle: “No objective truth can be positively known, at least not in metaphysics”; restless doubt is the lot of the searching intellect. We have amplified this elsewhere in these pages. This result of the modern doctrine of cognition is not infrequently boasted of. It was good enough, say they, for the ancients to live in the silly belief of possessing eternal truth; they were simple and unsuspecting; we know there is in store for man only doubt and everlasting struggle for truth.

“We confess that we do not know whether there are for mankind as a
whole, and for the individual, tasks and goals that extend beyond
this earthly existence” (_Jodl_). “There is no scientific
philosophy of generally recognized standard, but only in the form
of various experiments for the purpose of defining and expressing
the harmony and the idea of the active principle; consequently
there cannot be a final philosophy, it must be ready at all times
to revise any point that previously seemed to have been
established” (_Paulsen_). “Only to dogmatism,” says another, “are
the various theories of the world contradictory; to science they
are hypotheses of equal value, which, as they are all limited, may
exist side by side, the theistic as well as the atheistic, the
dualistic, the monistic, and whatever their names may be. Man, who
conceives these hypotheses, is master over them all and makes use
of them, here of one, there of another, according to the kind of
the problem he is occupied with at the time. Thus, he is
independent of any view of the world” (_L. von Sybel_). Again we
are told: “There has been formulated a free variety of
metaphysical systems, none of them demonstrable.... Is it our
task, perhaps, to select the true one? This would be an odd
superstition; this metaphysical anarchy is teaching, as obviously
as possible, the relativity of all metaphysical systems” (_W.
Dilthey_). Therefore, nothing but impressions and opinions, and
not the truth; indeed, for the cognition of transcendental,
metaphysical truths, they often have only words of disdain.

“The fact should be emphasized,” says _G. Spicker_, “that
philosophy really is devoid of any higher ideal; that, through its
doubt of the objective cognizability of things above us, outside
and inside of us, it has fallen prey to scepticism, even if
philosophers do not admit it and try to evade the issue with the
phrase ‘theory of cognition.’ ”

A science cannot sink to a lower level than by the admission that it has nothing to offer and nothing to accomplish. It is tantamount to bankruptcy. This science undertakes to nourish the human mind, but offers stones instead of bread; it wants to uplift and to instruct, and confesses that it has nothing to tell. _Amphora coepit institui, currente rota urceus exit._ In the beginning a proud consciousness and the promise to be everything to mankind; at the end mental pauperism and scepticism, a caricature of science.

This, then, is the terminal at which the free-thought of subjectivism has arrived: the loss of truth, without which man’s mind wanders restlessly and without a goal. That is the penalty for gambling boldly with human perception, the retribution for rebelling against the rights of truth and for the vainglorious arrogance of the intellect, which would draw only from its own cisterns the water of life, while alone those lying deep in the Divine may offer him the eternal fountains of objective truth. Scepticism is gnawing at the mental life of the world. A scepticism cloaked with the names of criticism and research, and of positivism and empiric knowledge, but which, nevertheless, remains what it is, an ominous demon, liberated from the grave into which has been lowered the Christian spiritual life, the spirit of darkness now pervading the world.

In All Directions of the Compass.

They have lost their way, puzzled by mazes and perplexed with error they are in hopeless confusion; a correlative of individualistic thinking. If the absolute subject and his experiences of life are the self-appointed court of last resort, the result must be anarchy and not accord. This is manifest; moreover, it is frankly admitted by the spokesmen of freethought.

This anarchy is described in vivid words by Prof. _Paulsen_,
recently the indefatigable champion of freest thought: “We no
longer have a Protestant philosophy, in the sense of a standard
system. _Hegel’s_ philosophy was the last to occupy such a
position. Anarchy rules ever since. The attempted rally around the
name of _Kant_ failed to put an end to the prevalent anarchy, or
to the division into small fractions and individualisms. Then
there is the mental neurasthenia of our times, the absolute lack
of ideas, especially noticeable among so-called educated
people.... Billboard art has found a counterpart in
billboard-philosophy. Here, there, and everywhere we meet the cry:
here is the saviour, the secret ruler, the magic doctor, who cures
all ills of our diseased age.... After a while, the mob has again
dispersed and the thing is forgotten” (“Philosophia Militans”).

“There is no uniform philosophic theory of the world, such as we,
at least to a certain extent, used to have,” says _Paulsen_
elsewhere, “the latest ideas are diverging in all directions of
the compass.” When one buildeth up, and another pulleth down, what
profit have they but the labour? (Ecclus. xxxiv. 28). “We have no
metaphysics nowadays,” says _R. Eucken_ in the same strain, “and
there are not a few who are proud of it. They only would have the
right to be so if our philosophy were in excellent shape, if, even
without metaphysics, firm convictions ruled our life and actions,
if great aims held us together and lifted us above the smallness
of the merely human. The fact is an unlimited discordance, a
pitiful insecurity in all matters of principle, a defencelessness
against the petty human, and soullessness accompanied by
superabounding exterior manifestation of life.”

This is the status of modern philosophy and also of liberal, Protestant, theology. Of views of the world, of notions and forms of Christianity, of ideas, essays and contributions to them, there is choice in abundance. Here, materialistic Monism is proclaimed, warranted to solve all riddles. There, spiritualistic Pantheism is retailed in endless varieties. Yonder, Agnosticism is strutting: no longer philosophy, but facts and reality, is its slogan. Then comes the long procession of ethical views of life: “Contemplations of life; theories of human existence surround us and court us in plenty; the coincidence of ample historical learning with active reflection induces manifold combinations, and makes it easy for the individual to draw pictures of this kind according to circumstance and mood; and so we see individual philosophies whirling about promiscuously, winning and losing the favour of the day, and shifting and transmuting themselves in kaleidoscopic change” (_Eucken_). _Hegel_, although he lectured with great assurance on his own system, lamented: “Every philosophy comes forth with the pretension to refute not only the preceding philosophy, but to remedy its defects, to have at last found the right thing.” But past experience shows, that to this philosophy, too, the passage from Holy Writ is applicable: “Behold, the feet that will carry thee away are already at the threshold.” Indeed, often it has come to pass that these philosophers themselves bury their ideas, preparatory to entering another camp. Consider the changes that men like _Kant_, _Fichte_, _Schelling_, _Strauss_, _Nietzsche_, have essayed in the short course of a few decades, and we are justified in assuming that they would again have changed their last ideas had death not interfered.

Now and then such confusion of opinions is considered an advantage, the advantage of fertility. To be sure, it is fertility,—the fertility of fruitless attempts, of errors, and of fancies, the fertility of disorder and chaos. If this fertility be a cause of pride for science, then mathematics, physics, astronomy, and other exact sciences, are indeed to be pitied for having to forego this fertility of philosophy, and the privilege of being an arena for contradictory views.

Without Peace and without Joy.

After the hopeless shipwreck of the modern, godless thought, can we wonder at meeting frequently the despondency of _pessimism_? Is not pessimism the first born of scepticism? At the close of the nineteenth century we read, again and again, in reviews of the past and forecasts of the future, how the modern world stands perplexed before the riddles of life, confessing in pessimistic mood that it is dissatisfied and unhappy to the depth of its soul. With proud self-consciousness, boasting of knowledge and power of intellect, they had entered the nineteenth century, praising themselves in the words: How great, O man, thou standest at the century’s close, with palm of victory in thy hand, the fittest son of time! With heads bowed in shame these same representatives of modern thought make their exit from the same century.

Of the number that voiced this sentiment we quote but one, Prof.
_R. Eucken_, who wrote: “The greatness of the work is beyond
doubt. This work more and more opens up and conquers the world,
unfolds our powers, enriches our life, it leads us in quick
victorious marches from triumph to triumph.... Thus, it is true,
our desired objects have been attained, but they disclosed other
things than we expected: the more our powers and ideas are
attracted by the work, the more we must realize the neglect of the
inner man and of his unappeased, ardent longing for happiness.
Doubts spring up concerning the entire work; we must ask whether
the new civilization be not too much a development of bare force,
and too little a cultivation of the being, whether because of our
strenuous attention to surroundings, the problems of innermost man
are not neglected. There is also noticeable a sad lack in moral
power: we feel powerless against selfish interests and
overwhelming passions: mankind is more and more dividing itself
into hostile sects and parties. And such doubts arouse to renewed
vigour the old, eternal problems, which faithfully accompany our
evolution through all its stages. Former times did not finally
solve them, (?) but they were, at least to a degree, mollified and
quieted. But now they are here again unmitigated and unobscured.
The enigmatical of human existence is impressed upon us with
unchecked strength, the darkness concerning the Whence and
Whither, the dismal power of blind necessity, accident and sorrow
in our fate, the low and vulgar in the human soul, the difficult
complications of the social body: all unite in the question: Has
our existence any real sense or value? Is it not torn asunder to
an extent that we shall be denied truth and peace for ever?...
Hence it is readily understood why a gloomy pessimism is spreading
more and more, why the depressed feeling of littleness and
weakness is pervading mankind in the midst of its triumphs.”

Similar, and profoundly true, are the words spoken some years ago
by a noted critic in the “Literarische Zentralblatt” (1900): “A
painful lament and longing pervades our restless and peaceless
time. The bulk of our knowledge is daily increasing, our technical
ability hardly knows of difficulties it could not overcome ... and
yet we are not satisfied. More and more frequently we meet with
the tired, disheartened question: What’s the use? We lack the one
thing which would give support and impetus to our existence, a
firm and assured view of the world. Or, to be more exact, we have
found that we cannot live with the view of the world which in this
century of enlightenment has stamped its imprint more and more
upon our entire mental life. Materialism, in coarser or finer
form, has penetrated deeply our habits of thought, even in those
who would indignantly protest against being called materialists;
the name seemed to imply scientific earnestness and liberal views.
However, there was still left a considerable fund of old,
idealistic values, and as long as we could draw upon them we saw
in materialism only the power to clear up rooted prejudices, and
to open the road for progress in every field. To the newer
generation, however, little or nothing is left of this old fund,
hence, having nothing else but materialism to depend upon, they
are confronted by an appalling dreariness and emptiness of
existence. And ever since the man on the street has absorbed the
easy materialistic principles, and looks down from the height of
his ‘scientific’ view of life contemptuously upon all
reactionaries, we have become aware of the danger that imperils
everything implied by the collective word ‘humanism.’ This
explains the plethora of literature which in these days deals with
the questions of a world philosophy.” Who is not reminded after
reading this mournful confession of the words of _St. Augustine_:
“Restless is our heart, till it finds rest in Thee”?

If it be true, then, that philosophical thought stands in closest connection with civilization, determining the latter in its loftier aspects, then the freedom of thought of modern subjectivism has proved its incompetence as a power for civilization; it can produce only a sham-civilization, it can incite the minds and keep them in nervous tension, until, tired of fruitless endeavour, they yield to pessimism. However painful it may be to admit it, this freedom of thought is and remains the principle of natural decadence of all the higher elements of a culture that is not determined by the number of guns, by steam-engines, and high-schools for girls, but which consists, chiefly, in a steadfast, ideal condition of reason and will, from which all else obtains significance and value. What further proof of intellectual and cultural incompetence can be demanded which this principle has not furnished already?

If this be the fact, then it follows in turn that in the life of higher culture, where the health of the soul and the marrow of mental life is at stake, there can rule but a single principle, the _objectivism of Christian thought_, the principle of absolute submission, without variance and change, to a truth against which man has no rights. The submission of Christian thought to a religious, teaching authority, recognized as infallible in all matters pertaining to its domain, while not an exhaustive presentment of this principle, is its perceptive and concrete effect.

A Rock in the Waters.

The history of human thought of all ages, but especially of the last centuries, proves how necessary a divine revelation is to man; viz., the clear exposition of the highest truths in the view of world and of life, emphasized by a divine authority, which links the human mind to the one immutable truth; not only in ignorant nations, not only in the man of the common people, but also, and more especially, in the educated man and in the scientist, he, namely, who, through the moderate studies of a small intellect, has collected a little sum of knowledge that is apt to confuse his limited understanding and to rob him of modesty. It is just as manifest that revelation alone does not suffice, that there is needed also the enduring forum of a teaching Church, which in the course of centuries gives expression to truth with infallible, binding authority.

The full truth of this is felt even by those unfavourably disposed toward this authority. A recent champion of autonomous freedom of thought, the Protestant theologian, _F. Troeltsch_, makes this concession in the words: “The immediate consequence of such autonomy is necessarily a steadily more intensified individualism of convictions, opinions, theories, and practical ends and aims. An absolute supra-individual union is effected only by an enormous power such as the belief in an immediate, supernatural, divine, revelation, as possessed by Catholicism, and organized in the Church as the extended and continued incarnation of God. This tie gone, the necessary sequel will be a splitting up in all sorts of human opinions.”(17)

This is to the Catholic a caution to appreciate the ministry of his Church ever more highly, and to cleave to it still closer. He will not agree with those who think that in our time the principle of Authority must retire. The more his eyes are opened by the present situation, the more clearly he realizes where thought emancipated from faith and authority has led, the more he will affirm his conscious belief in authority. His foothold upon the rock of the Church will be the firmer the more restless the billows of unsafe opinions rise and roll about him. The Catholic of mature, Catholic, conviction would consider it folly to abandon the rock for the restless and turbulent play of the waves. Many, indeed, who are looking for a safe place of truth, we see for this reason taking refuge in a strong Church; many are impressed by the stability of Catholic authority.(18)

The present situation is similar socially to that of the ancient world at its close, and also in regard to the spiritual life. Then, as now, there was learning without idealism, corroded by scepticism, without harmony and cheer. Then, as now, there was but one power to offer rescue. Faith and Church. A longing for help is now also prevailing in the world. It feels its helplessness. If they only had the conviction of a _St. Augustine_, who prayed for deliverance from his errors: “When I often and forcefully realized the agility, sagacity, and acumen of the human mind, I could not believe that truth was hidden completely from us—rather only the way and manner how to discover it, and that we must accept these from a divine authority” (_De utilit. credendi_, 8).

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

It was a solemn hour, pregnant with profound significance, when at midnight at the beginning of this century all the churchbells of the Catholic globe were ringing, and, while everything around was silent, their blessed sound was resounding alone over the earth, over villages and cities, over countries and nations. Grandly there resounded into the whole world, over the heads of the children of men about to enter upon a new century of their history, that the Catholic Church is the Queen in the realm of mind, that she alone preserves infallibly the truths and ideals of which mankind is in quest, by which they are raised above earthly turmoil—those truths and ideals in which the heart and mind of earthly pilgrims find rest and peace on their long journey to the goal of time. Since she assumed the mission of Him who said, “I am the Way and the Truth,” and, “I am with you all days, even unto the consummation of the world,” the Church has travelled a long way through the centuries, has withstood hard times and fierce storms. And she has faithfully preserved for mankind the precious patrimony from God’s hand. And now, at the dawn of new times, her bells proclaimed that she is still alive, holding the old truths in a strong hand. And after another century the bells of the globe will ring again, they will, so we hope—ring more loudly and more forcefully, over the nations. And these bells will also ring over the graves of this present generation, over fallen giants of the forest and over collapsed towers, over mouldy books, and the wreckage left by a culture that the emancipated, fallible human mind created, but which truth did not consecrate. And again the bells will proclaim to a new century that God, and the world’s history, are thinking greater thoughts than the puny child of man is capable of thinking within the narrow compass of his years and of his surroundings.

FOURTH SECTION. FREEDOM OF TEACHING.

Preliminary Conceptions and Distinctions.

Acquisition and distribution, labour and communication of the fruits of labour, are the two factors that determine the progress of mankind. Thus the precious metal is mined and brought to the surface by the labourer, whence it speeds through the world; thus the faithful missionary journeys into remote countries, to disseminate there the mental treasures acquired by study and hard religious effort. And thus science desires to work, and should work, for the culture and progress of mankind, and this work is pre-eminently its task. To properly pursue this vocation science demands freedom, _freedom in research and teaching_. There is, as we have already pointed out, an important distinction between the two. Although research and teaching are mostly joined, the former only attaining its chief end in teaching, there is a real difference between the two elements; and not unfrequently they are separated. It makes quite a difference whether some one within the four walls of his room studies anarchy, or whether he proceeds to proclaim its principles to the world; it is quite different whether a man embraces atheism for his personal use only, or whether he makes propaganda for it from the pulpit; it makes also a world of difference whether a man is personally convinced that materialism is the sole truth, or whether he proclaims it as a science, and is able to affirm that of the German edition of “Welträtsel” 200,000 copies have been sold, of the English edition about as many, and that a dozen other translations have spread the fundamental notions of monism broadcast through the world (_E. Haeckel_, Monismus u. Naturgesetz). Teaching must be viewed from a different point. Research is a personal function, whereas Teaching is a social one. This fact, of itself, makes it evident that teaching cannot be allowed the same measure of freedom as research, hence that teaching must be confined within narrower limits.

But Freedom is demanded not only for research, but also for teaching, in most cases even an unlimited freedom. It is demanded as an inalienable right of the individual, it is demanded in the name of progress, which can be promoted only by new knowledge. Some countries grant this freedom in their constitutions. Before discussing this demand and its presumptions, we shall have to make clear some preliminary conceptions.

First, the meaning of _freedom of teaching_. How is it precisely to be understood? Freedom in teaching in general means, evidently, exemption from unwarranted restraint in teaching. Teaching, however, to use the words of a great thinker of the past, means _Causare in alio scientiam_, to impart knowledge to some one else (_Thomas Aquinas_, Quaest. disp. De verit. q. XI al.). Thus the pious mother teaches the child truths about God and Heaven, the school-teacher teaches elementary knowledge, the college-professor teaches science. Teaching is chiefly understood to be the instruction by professional teachers, from grammar school up to university. Hence freedom in teaching does not necessarily refer to scientific matters only; we may also speak of a freedom of teaching in the elementary school. As a rule, however, the term is used in the narrower sense of freedom in teaching science.

Here it may not be amiss to mention further distinctions. As we
may distinguish in teaching three essentials, namely, the matter,
the method, and the teacher, so there is a corresponding triple
freedom of teaching. If we regard the matter, we meet with the
demand, that no one be excluded in an unjust way from exercising
his right to teach, that no single party should have the monopoly
of teaching: the right to found free universities also belongs
here. It is part of the freedom of teaching. As it has relation to
the state, we shall return to this point later on. A second
freedom, which might be called methodological, concerns the choice
of the method. This is naturally subject to considerable
restraint; not only because the academic teacher may frequently
have to get along without desirable paraphernalia, but also
because of the commission he receives with his appointment,
wherein his field and scope are prescribed. This is necessary for
the purpose of the university; the students are to acquire the
varied knowledge needed later on in their vocations of clergyman,
lawyer, teacher, or physician. There is frequent complaint that
this freedom in method is abused to a certain extent, that the
students are taught many fragments of science with thoroughness,
but too little of that which they actually need later on; they are
trained too much for theoretical work and not enough for the
practical vocation. Thus there is limitation here, too. But this
is not the freedom in teaching which occupies the centre of
interest to-day.

The trophy for which the battle is waged is the freedom relating to the _subject_ of teaching; we shall term it “doctrinal” freedom in teaching: Shall the representative of science be permitted to promulgate any view he has formed? Even if that view conflicts with general religious or moral convictions, with the social order? Or must this freedom be curbed? This is the question.(19)

Obviously, teaching need not always be done _verbally_, it can be done also by _writing_. The professor lectures in the classrooms, but he may also expound his theories in books; this latter the private scholar may also do. In this way _Plato_ and _Aristotle_ and the Fathers are still teaching by their writings, though their lips have long been silent. True, this way of teaching has not the force of the spoken word, vibrating with personal conviction, but it reaches farther out, with telling effect upon masses and remote circles. Thus, freedom in teaching includes also the freedom to print and publish scientific theories, hence it includes part of the _freedom of the press_; in its full meaning, however, the freedom of the press relates also to unscientific periodicals, especially newspapers.

A counterpart to the freedom in teaching is presented by the _freedom in learning_. It concerns the student, and may consist of the right granted to the “academic citizen” to choose at his discretion, but within the restrictions set by his studies, his university, his teachers, and his curriculum.