Aspects of religious and scientific thought

Front matter

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Contents

PAQE

1. Cebbds and Wobship 1

2. The Vabious Causes op Scepticism ... 8

II The Various Causes Of Scepticism 1878

Mk. Gladstone, in his remarkable article in the Contemporary Review on " The Sixteenth Century Arraigned Before the Nineteenth," and Mr. Baldwin Brown, in his not less remarkable address to the Congregational Union at Liverpool on Tuesday on the explanation of the great sceptical movements of the day, strike the same note. They hold that the truest explanation of the shortcomings of scepticism in our generation is the fault of the orthodoxy of the previous generation. It was the practical paganism of the Catholic world, say both, which gave rise to the Reformation ; and it was the onesidedness of the various Eeformers which gave rise to the intellectual revolts of the later heresiarchs. Thus Mr. Baldwin Brown holds that it was Calvinism which caused Unitarianism. " Take the Unitarian heresy in modem times. He held that the high Calvinistic theology, coming perilously near, as it did, to the presentation of an interior discord in the Triune Nature, which was harmonised by the Atonement, almost inevitably developed a community which could see only the unity, and felt itself called to bear witness to the

II THE VAKIOXJS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM 9

vital aspect of that truth to the world." And no doubt not only is there very great truth in the general doctrine that the degeneracy of a great faith almost inevitably leads to the sincere proclamation of some half-true but energetic doctrine which is the natural protest against the spurious form in which that faith has been held, — just as idolatrous tendencies in Christianity directly promoted the spread of Mahommedanism, — but those who know the history of Calvinism and Unitarianism know how much there is to be said for Mr. Baldwin Brown's special illustration of it. At the same time, I cannot believe that explicit reaction against a degenerate and implicitly heterodox faith is the sufficient explanation of all such forms of error. Else what are we to say to the widespread atheism, — or to the still more dangerous, because colder and more indifferent, secularism, — of the present day ? Is that to be explained as a legitimate reaction against the hollowness of any previous form of religious faith 1 It can hardly be true that all falsehood is half-truth, and is the proper cure for some deficiency in the previous profession of the truth. It may well be indeed that while the people of Europe were slowly learning to believe in a righteous and loving God, it was impossible for them to be taught to believe in physical law ; and it may also be that now when the people of Europe are being taught the meaning and uses of physical law, it is not very easy for them to retain at the highest point, — ^the point of truth, — ^their belief in a righteous and loving God. Nobody can say that in dealing with " such creatures as we are, in such a world as the present," it is easy to give us a firm grasp of any great class of truths whatever without loosening our grasp on some other class of truths, perhaps nobler and more vital, though

10 THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM II

it may be also, for that very reason, a class of truths less difficult to recover. Still, this is a very different thing from saying that every form of explicit error is due to reaction against some still more serious implicit error in the faith of our fathers. Voltaire may have been raised up as a wholesome scourge of seliish superstitions, and yet it does not follow that every one who follows Voltaire has been driven into the rank of his followers by disgust for such superstitions. So far as I can see, the theory that the spiritual and moral law of action and reaction will account for all dominant errors, is an exaggeration of the function of a valuable, though limited principle. Doubtless, asceticism and monasticism lead to reactions in which the fibre of human character is dangerously relaxed ; doubtless, mysticism encourages the growth of rationalism, and rationalism in its turn some kind of regression to idealism and mysticism. Still, these complementary phases of faith are not sufficient, or nearly sufficient, to account for all we see ; nor could they be so, unless man were indeed alone in the world, and the Hegelianism which explains all his convictions as partly the growth of, and partly the recoil against, previous convictions, were true. What it leaves out of account is the free, reciprocal action — not necessarily determined by any considerations of this sort, — of God on man, and if I may say so without irreverence, since this is clearly the teaching of Christ, — of man on God. Luther never forgot this most important of all the explanations of the growth or decay of the religious life. " We say to our Lord God," he said, " that if He will have His Church, He must keep it, for we cannot keep it ; and if we could, we should be the proudest asses under heaven." And Luther implied, of course, that it might please God

II THE VARIOUS CAUSES OE SCEPTICISM 11

to humble the Church, to make it feel His presence less at one time, as well as more at another ; to give it, for His good purposes, times of aridity, conventionality, and artificiality, as well as times of rich and flowing faith. And if it be true, as Christ teaches, that man may take the initiative with God, as well as God with man, — that times of trust are times of grace, that knocking leads to opening, — that when man throws himself on God, God pours a new tide of spiritual life into man, then, surely, one of the explanations of a want of faith in the invisible is a previous want of appeal to the invisible, — a selfoccupation in thoughts and things which turn us away from the invisible, a life of absorption in the superficial phenomena of existence, a generation of outward interests and outward service. This is an explanation almost opposite to that of the law of action and reaction. That law would suggest that to an age of too much outwardness and coldness, an age of pietism or mysticism would inevitably succeed. Yet such is by no means the universal experience of men. On the contrary, the age in which it was said that "the word of the Lord was precious in those days, — there was no open vision," immediately preceded th? age in which the Jews demanded a king, because their faith in that succession of divine judges by which they had been distinguished from the neighbouring peoples, had in great measure disappeared. The times distinguished by the apparent silence of Heaven frequently lead to periods which are relatively periods of secularism in human history, not to periods of true and deep religious life. And the recent access of Atheism seems to be even more due to an apparent dryness of the spiritual life of man (which may be quite as much due to the will of

12 THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM II

Heaven as to the will of man) than to any reaction from former superstitions. As Luther would have said, God has not thought fit to keep His .Church as He once kept it. God may have willed that, for a time, it would be better for man to try to the full, what he could, and what he could not do, without conscious trust in Himself. He may have willed, — as He certainly appears to have willed during many generations even of the life of the people who were specially trained to reveal His mind to the world, — to withhold that stream of spiritual inspiration which is perhaps the only thing corresponding, in the religious life, to what the physicists call " verification " in the world of positive phenoniena. We hear on all sides the complaint of the Agnostics that it is not their fault if they do not believe in God, — that they will believe at once, if His existence can be verified to them, — that, as Professor Huxley puts it, "no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more tenaciously " than they would clutch a belief in God which could be verified. If they do not exactly cry aloud, they yet seem to cry under their breath, with the prophet, " Oh, that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence ! " — in other words, that if only something physical might "verify" the divine presence for them, they would be only too happy to accept it. And yet in almost the same breath they declare, — and declare most reasonably, — that nothing physical could prove it, that happen what might, they could only interpret any physical event as a new aspect of nature, that nature is so large and so elastic, that no room is left in it for anything physical to rank as supernatural. Well, it is obvious that such a state of mind as this is one which

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could be changed by the,direct touch of the Divine Spirit, and by that only, — ^by an event of the soul, not an event of the body, — ^by the power which convinces the conscience, not by any power which only enlarges the experience of the senses.

But it does not follow that because no such event happens, — because the only verification of which the case admits, does not take place, — the Agnostic has either, on the one hand, the least right to suppose himself entitled to assume the negative view to be true ; or, on the other hand, may fairly be regarded by those who do recognise as final evidence, the influence of God over their soul, as morally inferior to themselves. Neither of these conclusions is true. The Agnostic is not right, for his negative experience, however frequently repeated, cannot outweigh a single clear experience of a positive kind. But none the less,- he must not, on account of this negative experience, be treated as morally inferior to one who has verified the existence of a divine will over him and in him ; — for if it has been, as doubtless it has, for the advantage of mankind that hundreds of generations should have felt the need of high social and moral laws, before ever social and moral laws were established and obeyed, and that hundreds of generations more felt the need of a clear recognition of constant physical laws, before physical laws were discovered and turned to account, why should it not also be for the advantage of nian that certain classes, even in the modern times of larger knowledge and higher aims, should be taught to feel acutely the need of a divine light for the true interpretation even of those physical principles of order, which they are so strenuous in asserting and enforcing in their apparent divorce from any spiritual principle ? I may say roughly, — a very

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great thinker indeed did say,.— that during the middle-ages thinking men were chieily occupied in sounding their own minds, to see how much light the careful exploring of those minds might shed on the external order of things; and that a knowledge of the insufficiency of the study of mind to explain the laws of matter, was the first step to that true study of the laws of matter which followed. And I believe that the eminent Agnostics of the present day may be said to be discharging the similar function of exaggerating indefinitely the influence of material laws in things moral and spiritual, — in order eventually to show their well-marked limits ; — that they are trying (and failing) to prove that material laws are the true keys to the knowledge of mental and moral life, just as the middle-ages tried and failed to show that moral and spiritual laws were the true keys to the knowledge of material life. And it would be just as foolish to suppose the modern physicists inferior to those who do not fall into their error, only because they are not equally fascinated by their truths, as it would have been to denounce the Schoolmen as morally inferior to the first heralds of the new science, only for trying to deduce principles of astronomy out of the a priori and abstract conceptions of the human mind. The truth is, that in every great stage of human progress there is, and must be, an undue appreciation of the step just made. In some sense, it may be said that Providence is the real cause of that undue appreciation. It is, of course, the divine guidance which determines the main lines of direction and intensity for human thought ; and if the Creator withdraws Himself at times from the vision of men, or of some men, it is no doubt for the benefit of all men that He does so. To speak of those who do not

II THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM 15

themselves see God as " living without God in the world," is itself atheism. You might as well suppose that before the atmosphere was recognised as having weight and substance, men who did not know the difference between it and a vacuum lived without the air they breathed. God is not less behind the consciousness of men who have no glimpse of Him through their consciousness, than He is within the heart of those who worship Him ; and the only real rejection of God is the resistance to His Word, whether it be felt as His Word, or only as a mysterious claim on the human will which it is impossible adequately to define. I hold that, in a sense, God is Himself, in all probability, no unfrequent cause of the blindness of men to His presence. He retires behind the veil of sense when He wishes us to explore the boundaries of sense, and to become fully aware of a life beyond. The physicists in every school are doing this great work for us now. They are explaining, defining, mapping all the currents of physical influence, and from time to time crying out, like Professor Huxley, for " the hen-coop " of which, like shipwrecked sailors, they see no sign ; like Professor Tyndall, for the elevating idealism which is conspicuous by its absence in all their investigations ; like Professor Clifford, for something to replace the theism of Kingsley and Martineau. To suppose that the men who are doing this great work, — who are mapping for us the quicksands and sunken rocks of physical scepticism, — are necessarily deserted by God, because they do not see Him, is to be more truly atheists than any physicist. There is a scepticism which is of God's making, in order that we may see how many of the highest springs of human life are founded in trust, — how everything else fails, even in

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the highest minds, to produce order, peace, and calm. The physicists of to-day are suffering for us, as ■well as for themselves. It is their failure to find light, which will show where the light is not, and also where it is. As Mr. Mallock well says, in the best paper he has yet written — that in the Nineteenth Gentwry, on " Faith and Verification," — ^the pitiful cries of modern physicists, as they raise their hands to what they deem a spiritual vacuum, are about the best auguries we could have that it is not in physical science that man can ever find his salvation.

Ill

THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD 1889

Dr. Liddon, in the new volume which he has just published under the title of Christmas-Tide Sermons, begins with two striking sermons on St. Thomas, in which he suggests that one of the modern maladies, which palliates though it does not justify a good deal of its unbelief, is "a morbidly active imagination which cannot acquiesce in the idea of fixed and unalterable truth." Such a malady of imagination there no doubt is, and it shows itself in morbid activity; but this morbid activity is more often, I believe, the inability to rest which is due to overfatigue, than the inability to rest which is due to abundance of life, — the restlessness of fever, not the restlessness of overflowing vitality. Look at such a book as Amiel's Journal, of which Mrs. Humphry "Ward has just issued a new edition, with a portrait in which Amiel looks out upon the world with tired eyes that seem to be discerning in every new glimpse they take of life, some fresh difficulty which his strenuous but wearied soul cannot surmount. " Que vivre est difficile, mon coeur fatigu6 ! " are the words with which his long scrutiny of himself con-

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eludes ; and perhaps the most characteristic thing in a journal full of characteristic things is this, — " Am I not more attached to the ennuis I know, than in love with pleasures unknown to mel" "Attached to the ennuis I know " ! — is it not the condition of half the souls which are yearning for faith and unahle to attain it 1 Shelley declared nearly seventy years ago : —

" The world is weary of the past.

Oh, might it die or rest at last ! "

But since Shelley made that declaration, the world has grown more weary of the present than it was then of the past, and now, too, seems to be so weary of the future that it yearns after some modern form of the Nirvana doctrine of the Buddhists. When Mrs. Humphry Ward makes her dying hero, Eobert Elsmere, declare that he can neither ascribe nor deny personality or intelligence to God-, is it not obvious that the predominant feeling in that tired mind which is dying of its spiritual struggles is something like Amiel's "Que vivre est difficile, men cosur fatigu^ ! " — the difference being, however, that Amiel was really dying when he so wrote, and that physical exhaustion may have prompted the exclamation; while there is no reason at all to suppose thfit Mrs. Humphry Ward intended her imaginary hero's deliberate judgment to be symptomatic of the physical exhaustion of his condition. Eobert Elsmere's fatigue is purely intellectual and moral, not physical. Yet he can neither affirm nor deny the eternal spring of life in God, for it is at least clear that if God may be denied personality and intelligence. He must also be denied what forms part of the very essence of life to all hiiman experience.

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Dr. Liddon might even have suggested, what is not, I think, at all improbable, that when St. Thomas anticipated, as he remarks, "something of the positive spirit of the modern world," and was so anxious " to escape illusions and to arrive at truth by experiment," that he would trust only his own senses, it was just because he was more subject than the other Apostles to this dejection and weariness of the soul. Does not the suggestion, when Christ prepares to return to Jerusalem to restore Lazarus to life, " Let us also go that we may die with him," read like the cry of an aflfectionate but weary soul that could see no end to all the tragic elements which were gathering so thick about our Lord, except death, and had not a glimpse of the new life and refreshment that was about to spring from that great collapse of their recent hopes 'i Indeed, the question which forms the subject of Dr. Liddon's second sermon on St. Thomas, "Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way ? " has all the air of a mind that had almost exhausted itself already in the effort to follow the vivid but mystic teaching of his master in tracks to him new and strange ; and if so, there is less reason to wonder that when he was told that Christ had appeared to the ten Apostles in Jerusalem, he found the statement a new demand upon his spiritual nature to which he was hardly equal, so that he devolved, as it were, upon his senses the responsibility of faith. "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe." There is the same tone of fatigued spiritual feeling about a great deal of the scepticism of to-day. As Dr. Liddon says, men are impressed by the apparent difficulties of Christianity, and ask to put

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their hands into the print of the nails if they are to receive it ; but in all probability they would not find it any the easier to believe if they could do so ; they would immediately explain it away as subjective illusion. Most likely they have not vivid life enough in themselves to enter into so great a manifestation of the divine life : —

" For we, brought forth and reared in hours Of change, alarm, surprise.

What shelter to grow ripe is ours. What leisure to grow wise ? "

Is it not this want of vivid life in themselves which makes men like Amiel at once unable to believe and to disbelieve, unable to reject so great and natural a consolation for the soul as faith, and yet unable to accept it ? Dr. Liddou finds fault with the Poet- Laureate for saying : —

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

But there I think that he does not quite give the significance which Tennyson meant to be given to the epithet "honest" doubt. There is a healthy doubt which may properly be called "honest," and which is in many men and women the beginning of true faith ; but it is not the doubt of mere hesitation and erniui. It is not even the rather sickly faith which the Poet-Laureate describes in some lines which perhaps better deserved Dr. Liddon's stricture than the line praising " honest doubt " : —

" I falter where I firmly trod.

And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope thro' darkness up to God,

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I stretoli lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what 1 feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope."

This " faint " trusting of the larger hope, this double mind of which the one self shrinks and suffers in the shadow, while the other only totters feebly towards the light, betrays, I think, a good deal more of the morbid tendency of the day, than doubt which faces calmly and boldly the testing of its true significance. I feel quite sure that a vast deal of the spiritual lassitude of the day is due much less to the magnitude of the obstacles to hearty faith than to the fatigue of spirit with which those obstacles are regarded. The modern world is far too full of small cares and interests, and the modern conception of life and its duties is far too favourable to the frittering away of life on a multitude of petty distractions. As Dr. Liddon says in the sermon I have referred to, a great deal of the scepticism of the day is due to the insufficiency of people's knowledge of Christianity, to their very superficial acquaintance with it, the complete absence of any preparation for sounding its depths, and surveying its wide horizon, and apprehending the inner harmonies of its spiritual teaching. And, in fact, this is often impossible with the meagre amount of life which remains to be thrown into the search for spiritual truth after all the other excitements of life have been provided for. There is now no adequate economy of human strength for the higher objects of life, too much a great deal being lavished on its petty interests. People are attached to their religion much as Amiel said that he was attached to his emiuis. They have

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not the strength requisite either to give it up or to give themselves up to its demands, and so they hover in a miserable state of nervous tension on the boundary that divides faith from doubt, their worldly energy being diminished by the anxious glances they cast over their shoulder at the faith which they halfbeUeve, and their spiritual energy being "sicklied o'er by the pale cast " of sceptical hesitations. Christianity cannot be understood in any degree without being approached with a certain passion both of hope and fear. The whole history which led up to it, the whole history which has flowed forth from it, has been a history of spiritual passion, and there is no meaning in Christianity at all if it be not true that divine passion is as deep-rooted in the eternal spirit as infinite reason itself. If men come to Christ with exhausted natures they will never know what there is in Him. And they do come too often to the study of His teaching with the mere fag-end of their powers, with heart and mind both battered and fevered by the contending interests and pleasures of a life that is much too full of small excitements. No doubt Christianity offers a new life of its own, and an inexhaustible spring of that life ; but it offers it only to those who can give a life for a life, who can give up the whole mind and heart that a new mind and a new heart may be substituted in their place. There must be the power to exult even in suffering for a great end, in those who would really understand the passion of Christian teaching ; and the power to exult in suffering for a great end takes an intensity of nature which is very easily extinguished by a life of minute distractions and of widely distributed affections. A generation, of which the most impressive characteristic is its

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spiritual fatigue, will never be truly Christian till it can husband its energy better, and consent to forego many petty interests that it may not forego the religion of the Cross.

IV Religious Uncertainty 1880

The Eev. Edward White has just published a striking little book on The Tone and Teaching of the New Testctment on Certainty in Beligion,^ which was preached as the Merchants' Lecture for the last October in the Weigh-House Chapel, where the late Dr. Binney was so long the minister. It would be difficult to iind a more suitable subject for consideration at Christmastime than the comparative certainty and uncertainty of the Christians of the first age and the Christians of this. Assuredly if, when the word " Christmas " is mentioned in any society, the certain convictions could be enumerated to which the mention of the word gives rise, how very small a proportion of them would be religious convictions, or perhaps even irreligious convictions, at all. Some would feel certain that they were going to suffer from seasonable conventions ; others would feel certain that they were going to make themselves ill ; a few young people would feel certain that they were going to be happy ; many would feel certain that they were going to be rather more than usually

1 Elliot Stock.

IV RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTY 25

unreal ; and how very rare would be any flash of deep and eager conviction that tliere is anything at all in the invisible world corresponding to the external festival to be celebrated. Mr. White's striking little book brings out very powerfully how . strong a contrast to this state of mind is afforded by the mind of the writers of the New Testament. Take one passage, in which he begins his sketch of that mind : —

"Let attention be drawn to the remarkable phenomenon that these books — from the Gospel of Matthew onward to Apocalypse — though differing in style, object, and feeling, are marked by one characteristic, which pervades them in every page, — and that is, the solemn tone of certainty which runs through them, without one single breakdown into speculation or balancing of probabilities. At all events, these writers thoroughly believed what they wrote. This characteristic distinguishes the New Testament books, not only from all the Eoman literature of the same age, but from all other Greek books that ever were written. In thpse literatures you have argument on both sides, guess, divination, doubt, mockeiy, despair. But here every page overflows with the feeling of certainty. The Evangelists and Apostles of the Gospel absolutely exhaust all the language of certainty in giving expression to their ideas. There are no words expressive of absolute truth and trustworthiness, and intense faith founded on that trustworthiness, which these men have not employed. ' This is the victory which has overcome the world ' of doubters — ' even their faith.' Such thorough belief and confidence were contagious. They drove mankind before them, 'and shut them up' in the fold of faith. The Eoman world at large believed nothing much — but at least these men believed, ' nothing doubting.' The New Testament stands up like a mighty and immovable rock of certainty in the midst of the wide, unstable sea of contemporary thought — in the Jewish,