Chapter III (3)

The French Revolution brought on a strong reaction against the free-thought which had been hideously travestied in the blasphemous follies, and sullied by the crimes, of the Jacobins. In England the Tory mob, with true instinct, sacked the library and laboratory of Priestley. Coleridge, who, like other young men of intellect, had hailed the revolutionary dawn, shared the reaction, and combining in a curious way German metaphysic with English orthodoxy and Establishmentarianism, produced a religious system which perhaps entitles him to high place among English theologians in the proper sense of that term, as denoting a philosophic inquirer into the nature of the Deity and the relations between the Deity and man; though, as his guiding light was philosophy, not authority or tradition, he may in that respect be numbered among the promoters of free-thought and of the results to which it was ultimately to lead. Such free-thinking as there was naturally took a turn answering in violence to the repression. Tom Paine assailed orthodoxy, not with freedom only, but with enmity the most virulent. Though far from an attractive, he is by no means an unimportant figure. His criticisms of the credibility and morality of Scripture, unlearned and coarse as they were, went, not over the heads of the people like the high-flying and metaphysical speculations, but straight to their understandings and their hearts. It was difficult for apologetic fencers to parry such home thrusts. The same sort of effect has been produced by the irreverent frankness of Ingersoll in our own day. Shelley rushed from the religion of Eldon into what he took for Satanism; though his Satan is really the power of good, while the God of Eldon, as viewed by him, is the Devil.

Wrecked, body and soul, by the Thirty Years’ war, and afterwards stifled under a group of petty despotisms, Germany was for a time lost to intellectual progress. Her churches and their clergy, the Lutheran clergy at least, were in a very low condition. When her intellect began to work again, it was in a recluse and highly speculative way, the natural consequence of its exclusion from politics and other fields of action, together with the complete severance of the academical element from the people. Hence, from Leibnitz and Lessing onward, there was a train of metaphysical philosophies, each of them professing to find in our consciousness a key to the mystery of Being and an account of God, of His counsels, and of the relation between Him and man. In derision of such speculations it was said that to the French belonged the land, to the English the sea, to the Germans the air. Essentially incapable of verification, these theories went on shifting in nebulous succession and, with the exception of that of Kant, may now be said to have vanished, leaving scarce a rack behind. Even of the great Hegel little remains. Leibnitz, with his “best of all possible worlds,” hardly survived _Candide_. Still, we must speak with respect and gratitude of these efforts of minds, powerful in their way and devoted to truth, to solve for us the great mystery. Speculation so free could not fail to promote general freedom of thought, and the treatment by these thinkers of the popular and established religion was as philosophic as possible, though, with the exception of Feuerbach, they were theists. By Lessing much was done for the recognition of all religions and the promotion of universal toleration.

Presently, however, came direct criticism of the Bible, the way to which, long before, had been lighted by Spinoza. It assumed a strange form in the work of Paulus, who applied to the Gospel miracles a solvent something like that which Euhemerus had applied to the Pagan Pantheon, reducing them to natural occurrences turned into miracles by a devout imagination. The miraculous fish with the coin in its mouth was a fish which would sell for the coin. The miraculous feeding of the five thousand was brought within the compass of belief by supposing that they were not fasting, but had only gone without a regular meal. Christ’s walking on the water was his holding out a hand from the shore to Peter who had leaped into the water to ascertain whether it was really Christ that was walking on the shore.

Far more serious, and a startling blow to orthodoxy, was the _Life of Jesus_, by Strauss, who undertook to explain the Gospels on the mythical theory, showing that the reputed incidents of the life of Jesus and his miracles were mythical fulfilments of Old Testament prophecies and aspirations. From this, his first theory, Strauss afterwards partly receded, and in his second _Life of Jesus_, after a critical examination of the authorities, he comes to the conclusion that “few great men have existed of whose history we have so unsatisfactory a knowledge as that we have of Jesus.” The figure of Socrates, he thinks, though four hundred years older, is beyond all comparison more distinct. The momentous step, however, had been taken. Jesus had become the subject of a biography founded on critical examination of the materials, and Strauss is right in saying, as he does in his second _Life_, that when the biography was seriously taken up the doom of the theological conception was sealed. Lives of Christ, including even the most popular of them, however they may pretend and struggle to be orthodox, are really, as Strauss says, destructive of the theological conception, while they do not help to confirm our loyalty to historical truth. Ferdinand Christian Baur and his Tübingen school applied historical criticism to the early Christian Church, showing the conflict in it of the Pauline with the Petrine tendency, and bringing it altogether, as well as its source, within the pale of human history. Historical criticism of the Gospels was furthered by the progress of historical criticism in general, shown by such a work as Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. Wolf’s treatment of the Homeric poems had already marked the birth of a critical spirit, which was aided by historical and archæological discoveries of all kinds, as well as by the growing influence of science on the methods of religious and anthropological speculation.

There was an evangelical reaction against rationalism in Germany with a train of controversialists and commentators reputed as orthodox. Yet even in these, more or less of a rationalist undertone is perceived. There is a tendency more or less apparent to minimize the supernatural, to throw the miracles into the background, and dwell rather on the spiritual significance of Christ’s character and words. This is very conspicuous in Neander, the head of the line. An orthodox English divine such as Mr. Rose might well, after a survey of German theology, make a rather mournful report.

In Holland, ever the land of free speculation, criticism advanced without fear, and at last by the pen of Kuenen arraigns the authenticity, antiquity, and authority of the historical books of the Old Testament to an extent totally subversive of their character as records of a primeval history, much more as organs of a divine revelation.

German philosophy had mingled with English theology through Coleridge. German criticism of the Bible did not lag much behind. Milman’s _History of the Jews_, dealing with the subject in the spirit of an ordinary history, treating patriarchs as Arab sheiks and minimizing miracles, gave a serious shock to orthodox sentiment in England. Even what was deemed orthodox in Germany appeared rationalistic to the Anglican divines. To the evangelicals especially, whose leader was Simeon, and who occupied many of the fashionable pulpits, anything like critical treatment of the sacred history seemed impiety. Yet they, with their inward persuasion of conversion and spiritual union with the Saviour, as well as the Quaker with his inner light, or the Roman Catholic with his implicit faith in the Church, were really beyond the critic’s reach.

A long line of British leaders of thought and controversialists succeeds. Rationalist and heterodox in different degrees were Thomas Arnold, Frederick Maurice, Stanley, Jowett, the writers of _Essays and Reviews_, and Robertson, of Brighton. Decidedly sceptical were Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, and James Anthony Froude. Reaction on the High Church side found leaders in Pusey, Newman, and Hurrell Froude. The evangelical pulpit combated at once rationalism and High Church. The state Church was awakened from its long torpor, and under the inspiration of its High Church party strove to reanimate its Convocation.

Frederick Maurice impressed more by his character than by his writings, which were fatally obscure. He was rationalist enough to be deprived of his professorship in an Anglican college. At the same time he could persuade himself that subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was no bondage but a security for free thought. To his yoke-fellow, Kingsley, is to be traced “muscular Christianity,” a rather suspicious adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount to our times. But the pair exercised more influence as social missionaries, striving, in conjunction with Thomas Hughes, to give the labor movement a religious turn, than as religious philosophers or critics.

Thomas Arnold, the head-master of Rugby, was a man of noble character, powerful mind, and intense earnestness of purpose. He was a firm believer in Christianity as a revealed religion. But he held a most liberal view of the Church. He would have admitted to it all the sects of dissenters and have identified it as far as possible with the nation. His theory of the identity of the Church with the nation probably came to him from his passionate study of the ancient commonwealths. He forgot that the philosophers of Greece, though they might sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius, were really outside the state religion, and that the state religion made the chief of them drink hemlock. Prince of educators as he was, he sometimes laid too heavy a strain on his pupils, and prematurely developed their speculative tendencies. In the case of Clough especially, mental health and vigor seem to have been impaired by premature development.

With Thomas Arnold may be coupled his friend Whately, who, though, as Primate of the state Church of Ireland, he held the most equivocal of prelacies, was, by reason of his strong understanding, his fearless character, and his shrewd wit, essentially an iconoclast and a rebuker of ecclesiastical pretensions, as well as a vigorous promoter of education. His keen sayings flew abroad, but his personal influence was greater than his influence as a divine. His _Historic Doubts_ was an apologetic _jeu d’esprit_ which told greatly in its day.

Bishop Connop Thirlwall was a man of first-rate power. At Cambridge he had set out as a rationalist, translating German theology of a heterodox cast and Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. But his intellect was curbed by a bishopric, and though he delivered liberal charges and personally exerted a liberal influence, he was lost to the direct service of reason.

Arthur Stanley was Arnold’s best boy, his most devoted adherent, and his model biographer. He embraced Arnold’s theory of the Church as coextensive with the nation and carried his theory of the supremacy of the state so far as to feel a certain sympathy with “Bluidie Mackenzie” as the defender of a state Church against the independence of the Covenanters of Scotland. His name was for a time a terror to all the orthodox, High Church or Low. Yet there was little that was terrible about him. The sweetness of his character was remarkable. His liberality of religious sentiment was boundless. But he had little of the logical or critical faculty, and showed scarcely the desire, still less the ability, to make his way to definite truth. His passion was history, and the historical picturesque was his forte. In a haze of this to the last he floated, coming to no determinate conclusion. His best works, apart from biography, are not his commentaries or sermons, but his lectures on the history of the Russian Church and his _Sinai and Palestine_; although we cannot help smiling when, in his _Sinai and Palestine_, we see him hunting with passionate interest and implicit faith for the imaginary scenes of mythical events.

Stanley’s yoke-fellow, Jowett, was a man of a different cast of mind and of higher calibre, as all the world now knows. But in him also, though from different causes, there was the same want of inclination to grasp or capacity for grasping definite truth. These two men were eminently typical of an age of religious dissolution, when people felt the ground of faith giving way under their feet and were striving, by some sort of compromise, to save themselves from falling into the abyss. That Jowett had drifted very far away, not only from orthodoxy, but from his belief in Christianity as a miraculous revelation, and even from belief in our knowledge of the historical character of Christ, the posthumous publication of his letters has plainly shown. How he could have reconciled it to his conscience to remain a clergyman, to hold the clerical headship of an Anglican college, to perform the service and administer the sacrament, it is not easy to see. We can only say that the position was found tenable by one of the most upright and disinterested of mankind. Jowett’s defence probably was and is the defence of others, and the indication of spreading doubt. Clergymen are educated men and can hardly be proof against that which is carrying conviction to other minds.

Robertson, of Brighton, as an eloquent preacher and spiritual leader, rather on the rationalist side, is not to be forgotten. In his sermons there is an evident tendency to liberalize Christianity and to present it ethically as a religion of purity and love rather than as a miraculous revelation which did not escape the keen scent of alarmed orthodoxy and exposed the preacher to some social persecution.

By this time a strong current in an opposite direction had begun to flow. The religious movement was closely connected with the political movement, especially where there was a state Church. Alarmed by the progress of liberalism, which had carried the Parliamentary Reform bill and threatened to withdraw from the Church of England the support of the state, some of the clergy began to look about for a new foundation of their authority, and thought that they found it in apostolical succession and the sacerdotal theory of the sacraments. The leaders of the movement were Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford; Henry Newman, a Fellow of Oriel College; and, in its opening, Hurrell Froude, in whose _Life of Becket_ its spirit and aims are plainly revealed. It took practically the shape of an attempt to return to the priestly Middle Ages. Oxford, with its mediæval colleges, the Fellows of which were then clerical and celibate, formed the natural scene of such an attempt. Pusey, who, by his academical rank, gave his name to the movement, was a man of monastic character and mind, with a piety intense but austere and gloomy enough almost to cling to such a doctrine as the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin. Henry Newman was a man of genius, a writer with a most charming and persuasive style, great personal fascination, and extraordinary subtlety of mind. What he lacked was the love of truth; system, not truth, was his aspiration; and as a reasoner he was extremely sophistical, however honest he might be as a man. In this respect he presented a singular contrast to his brother, Francis Newman, in whom the love of truth was the ruling passion, intense and uncompromising, while he was totally devoid of the gifts of imagination with which Henry was endowed. Henry Newman’s attempt to revive mediæval doctrines presently landed him, with his immediate following, in the mediæval Church. Pusey was illogical enough to refuse the leap. He was also believed to be rather strongly attached to the leadership and spiritual directorship which, as a magnate of the Church of England, he enjoyed. He went so near to the brink as, in his _Irenicon_, to avow that nothing separated him from Rome but the unmeasured autocracy of the Pope and the excessive worship of the Virgin, both of them mere questions of degree. Manning in time followed: an aspiring hierarch who would probably have stayed in the Church of England if they had made him a bishop. Passing into the Church of Rome, he became a Cardinal, an active intriguer of the Vatican, and an extreme Ultramontane, outvying Newman, who, when the convert’s first ecstasy was over, might be said to be converted rather than changed.

The mediævalizing movement owed much to the fascinations of mediæval art. The Gothic churches and cathedrals and the Gothic ruins of abbeys have been very powerful conservators and propagators of the faith of their builders. It is curious that this talisman should have been renounced by the Church of Rome in favor of the heathen style, of which St. Peter’s is the paragon, magnificent but, in a religious sense, unimpressive.

By the progress of Tractarianism British Protestantism was alarmed and incensed. The Oxford Convocation was the scene of a pitched battle brought on by a bold deliverance of Ward, a disciple of Newman, more logical and daring than his master, who exultingly proclaimed that English clergymen were embracing “the whole cycle of Roman doctrine.” Ward, after a struggle which was a sort of Armageddon of High and Low Church, was condemned and deprived of his degree. Newman’s conversion speedily followed. The rationalists, such as Stanley and Jowett, voted on liberal grounds against the condemnation of Ward.

A storm from the other quarter was raised by _Essays and Reviews_, a collection of seven essays written by clergymen of the rationalistic school, having for its object the liberalizing of inquiry in the Church. The manifesto at the time created an immense sensation, though in the present advanced state of doctrinal disintegration it would almost pass unnoticed. One of the essays, the most innocent, it is true, which nevertheless committed the author to the general object of the combination, was written by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, and caused the High Church clergy to protest against his appointment as a bishop. The glove thus thrown down was taken up by the High Churchmen. The writers were arraigned for heresy before the Privy Council, and, as Carlyle said, you had a bench of old British judges, “like Roman augurs, debating with iron gravity questions of prevenient grace, supervenient moonshine, and the color of the bishop’s nightmare if that happened to turn up.” Before the same tribunal was arraigned Colenso, a missionary bishop of South Africa and an eminent mathematician, whose arithmetical instincts had led him to examine the numerical statements of the Pentateuch, with highly heretical results. Both the essayists and Bishop Colenso escaped conviction. The Committee of Privy Council, if it was judicial, was also political, and it was resolved, if possible, to avert a rupture in the state Church. Veteran lawyers had little difficulty in finding grounds for acquittal when they did not choose to convict. The language of the impugned writings was seldom so precise as to defy the power of interpretation. “Either the passage means what I say, or it has no meaning,” thundered the counsel for the prosecution. “Is it not possible, Mr. Blank, that the passage may have no meaning?” was the reply of the judge. The Rev. Mr. Voysey, however, succeeded in obtaining the honor of a conviction. Tendered a week to retract, he thanked the court for the opportunity they had given him of rejecting the offer of repurchasing his once cherished position in the Established Church by proclaiming himself a hypocrite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recourse has been had to the theory of partial inspiration, admitting historical and even moral errors in Scripture, but setting them down to the human element in the composition, which has to be recognized without prejudice to that element which remains divine. Such a collaboration of infallibility with fallibility, both historical and moral, is a desperate hypothesis, especially when the object was to reveal vital truths to man. Nor could man distinguish the human element from the divine without being himself inspired and thus above the need of revelation. A condescension of the divine to the primitive shortcomings and aberrations of humanity is a solution surely opposed to any conceivable purpose of revelation.

Another line of defence has been the hypothesis, which may be called quasi-inspiration, reducing the inspiration of the Scriptures to a supreme degree of the same sort of inspiration which we recognize in a great poet or a great author of any kind. This is mere playing with the term “inspiration,” and little better than an equivoque. It may be, and we hope it is, true that the Author of our being manifests Himself in whatever is morally grand and elevating. But this belief is very different from a belief in the special inspiration of the Bible.

Evolution, again, which at first was repelled as atheistic, is now adopted by some as the key to revelation and the solution of all difficulties connected with it. This would make God in His revelation of Himself to man, without apparent motive, subject Himself to a physical or quasi-physical law, the knowledge of which has been withheld from man till the present time. An imperfect revelation of the divine character, one for example which should exhibit the justice of God without His mercy, would be a deception of man instead of a revelation. Besides, evolution repels finality, and we could have no assurance that the manifestation of the divine nature in Christ and the Gospel would be final.

It is needless to say how manifestly all these theories have their origin in controversial necessity, how totally alien they are to the view taken hitherto by the Christian Churches of the Scriptures, and how unlikely it is that God, in revealing Himself to man for the purpose of human salvation, should have chosen a method such as would entail inevitable misconstruction for many centuries and postpone the true interpretation of His character and dealings to an age of human criticism and science.

The ethics of Christianity have hitherto comparatively escaped systematic criticism and are still generally and officially professed. An appeal to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount continues to command formal respect. But Christ’s view of this world as evil and his renunciation of it for the Kingdom of God have been practically laid aside by all but specially religious men. Christ’s moral code was, in its direct bearing, only personal or social, politics and commerce not having come within the view of the teacher of Galilee. In regard to public and international concerns, the abjuration of his principles is most striking. In that sphere Christian meekness, mercy, and self-sacrifice are being openly superseded by maxims drawn from the Darwinian Struggle for Existence and by avowals of the right of the strong. Even professed ministers of Christ have been pandering to Imperialism and the lust of war. In truth, by a strange turn of events, Christian ethics, in questions between nation and nation and in questions concerning humanity at large, have been passing out of the hands of the orthodox teachers of supernatural Christianity into those of men who recognize only the human character and ethical teachings of life.

Professor Seeley in his earlier days had made a great impression with his _Ecce Homo_, an attempt to bring the character of Christ nearer to the heart of humanity. The work was decidedly pietist; yet a rationalizing tendency was scented in it by the Evangelicals, whose leader, Lord Shaftesbury, denounced it. Its author promised a theology. But when, after years of reflection and subjection to the influences of a moving time, the theology came, under the title of _Natural Religion_, it was a total disappointment. Religion was reduced by it to enthusiasm, not exclusively Christian or even theistic, but of any kind, such as enthusiastic love of country or of art.

Minds of the finer cast have preserved the religious spirit, while they have thrown off the shackles of creed and even regarded the whole religious question as matter of doubt and suspense.

“There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

This is the pervading spirit of Tennyson’s poems, and of such a work as Amiel’s diary, but it must manifestly be confined to a circle of minds such as those of Tennyson and Amiel. Agnosticism is the condition into which a large number of educated minds have been more or less consciously passing or drifting. But while in some of them a religious spirit still prevails and the hope is cherished of a new religious dawn, others seem to have finally settled in the conviction that theological inquiry is hopeless and that our knowledge must forever be bounded by that which our senses and science tell us about the laws or forces of our own world.

Reluctance to give up belief in the unseen world and perhaps still more unwillingness to think that the loved ones who are lost by death are lost forever have given birth to Spiritualism. It will hardly be thought necessary to comment on an illusion which has been so often and so decisively exposed. Its very name is belied when the spirits have to materialize before they can make their existence known or hold converse with those who evoke them. The alleged communications from the spirit world through such a medium as Planchette have been trivial, almost fatuous. It is now forgotten that the movement began with table-turning, as though spirits had a special affinity for tables.

Among the anti-theistic, or at least the anti-ecclesiastical, influences and the solvents of our religious system may be reckoned the foundation of systems of morality independent of the divine sanction. Paley’s definition of virtue is “the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This is the theistic view. Opposed to it is the Utilitarian system, generally connected with Bentham’s name, which finds the sole and sufficient motive and reward of virtue in the promotion of our well-being here. So long as a system aims at perfection and beauty of character which transcend temporal happiness there is in the philosophy a theistic element, patent or latent. But of perfection and beauty of character the Utilitarian philosophy in its thorough-going form takes no account.

The weakening of religious belief as a social influence on the conservative side is very marked and excites the fears of statesmen, some of whom, even if they are Protestants, are inclined to look with complacency on the Papacy as a bulwark against social revolution. The drudge rested in dull contentment with his lot while he could believe that hereafter the parts of Dives and Lazarus would be reversed and full amends would be made to him for his privations in this life. This hope having vanished, he is resolved, if he can, to have a share of the good things of the present world. That this sentiment helps to set seething the caldron of socialistic and communistic agitation, all who are familiar with labor literature must be aware. It would probably be found that anarchism and atheism generally went together.

As the natural consequence of the loosened hold of religion over the nations, there has been a general tendency in Europe towards disestablishment. In Italy, the seat of the Papacy, disestablishment is complete. In Spain, while Catholicism is still recognized as the exclusive religion of the nation, the immense revenues of the clergy have been secularized, monasteries have been dissolved, and religion has been almost reduced to a department of the state. In France the process has gone still further than in Spain, and religion may almost be said to be not only a department, but a despised department, of the state. In Ireland the state Church has been disestablished. A bill has been brought in for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, and in England disestablishment seems to be approaching, its advent being hastened by the collision of ritualism with the anti-Roman and anti-sacerdotal spirit of the nation. Popular education has everywhere been largely secularized, and that process is still going on. Sunday-schools or other secondary influences can scarcely countervail the general banishment of religion from the training of the child.

Religion passed from old to New England in the form of a refugee Protestantism of the most intensely Biblical and the most austere kind. It had, notably in Connecticut, a code of moral and social law which, if fully carried into effect, must have fearfully darkened life. It produced in Jonathan Edwards the philosopher of Calvinism, from the meshes of whose predestinarian logic it has been found difficult to escape, though all such reasonings are practically rebutted by our indefeasible consciousness of freedom of choice and of responsibility as attendant thereon. New England Puritanism was intolerant, even persecuting; but the religious founder and prophet of Rhode Island proclaimed the principles of perfect toleration and of the entire separation of the Church from the state. The ice of New England Puritanism was gradually thawed by commerce, non-Puritan immigration from the old country, and social influences, as much as by the force of intellectual emancipation; though in founding universities and schools it had in fact prepared for its own ultimate subversion. Unitarianism was a half-way house through which Massachusetts passed into thorough-going liberalism such as we find in Emerson, Thoreau, and the circle of Brook Farm; and afterwards into the iconoclasm of Ingersoll. The only Protestant Church of much importance to which the New World has given birth is the Universalist, a natural offspring of democratic humanity revolting against the belief in eternal fire. Enthusiasm unilluminated may still hold its camp-meetings and sing “Rock of Ages” in the grove under the stars.