The faith of reason

Front matter

THE

FAITH OF REASON, a Series of ^Discourses

ON

Preface

' I "'HIS volume is made up of a series of discourses preached in rapid succession to my own people in the months of January and February, 1879. It may be that some apology is due to the general reader for the directness of their form, and for some passages that make him a party to the confidential talk of a minister to his congregation. But the fact that the volume is printed in accordance with the expressed desire of my habitual hearers, and is intended primarily for their perusal, is my excuse for retaining the original form of its constituent parts. If reason as well as excuse is needed, let it be that the directness of their method is so deeply implicated in the various discourses, that to eliminate it wholly

PREFACE.

would be to change their character so much that with less trouble I could re-write the entire series. I am persuaded that the form will prove no serious embarrassment to the general reader. Besides I have no desire to make the volume appear other than it is, — a collection of discourses on the leading topics of religion, written with reference to current discussions, and in answer to questions put to me by the more earnest and thoughtful members of my congregation.

Brooklyn, October 25, 1879.

Contents

Entrotmctorg JBfecourgeg.

PAGE

I. Agnostic Religion 13

I. Agnostic Religion

" £^NE can begin so many things with a new person," says George Eliot, " even to be a better man." Why not with a new year as well as with a new person? Somehow the aspect of the season seems to' lend itself to thoughts of hope and cheer. The outward aspect of the days is hardly any different from those immediately preceding. The sun rises a few minutes later than it did, and lengthens out each day a little at the end; a lazy way of lengthening his days, at first, as if it came a little hard to him. But the inward aspect somehow is not the same. A week ago, the backward look was natural, but now the forward look is so. Even those of you who have fared the worst of late are beginning to see light ahead. The fresh new year shall see you on your feet again before it die, and marching on to victory.

What I propose to do this morning is to avail myself of this courageous attitude in which you find yourselves, and invite your attention to a subject which would not perhaps have been appropriate to the more sombre mood which was engendered by your old-year meditations. I am aware that such a course is open to the objection that it is a sort of death's-head at the feast ; but I remember that the purpose of that same death's-head was not to chill the merriment, but rather to encourage it with a somewhat grim and yet good-natured carpe diem — Seize on to-day. What I wish to do is to consider certain tendencies of modern thought; also the goal to which they seem to tend ; and then to ask as fearlessly and answer as frankly as possible the question, Supposing that these tendencies go on and ultimate, will there be any thing left to mankind that can properly be called religion ; and, if so, will it be any thing that will be worth the sympathy and loyalty of earnest and true-hearted men and women?

The tendencies to which I refer are far less

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noticeable here in America than they are in England and upon the Continent. Or perhaps a truer statement would be that here they attain to much less frequent and important literary expression. But, before going further, I am in duty bound to state what tendencies I have in mind. They are not such as have for their objective point the denial of the dogmas of our popular theology, nor even such as contravene its fundamental assumption of the supernatural origin of Christianity. Those tendencies are ubiquitous and positive enough, but their significance is slight in comparison with other tendencies, hardly less ubiquitous and hardly less positive. But these attain to much less frequent and expansive and well-ordered literary expression. They have no respectable organ here in America, so far as I am able to discover. "The Index," which is edited by my noble friend Francis Ellingwood Abbot, is certainly respectable ; but it is not the organ of agnosticism, of nescience, much less of dogmatic denial. Mr. Abbot himself is not an atheist, but a rational theist, able he thinks

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to give a reason for the faith that is in him. Nevertheless, the tendencies which I have in mind find more conspicuous expression in his paper than in any other of equal intellectual force and general refinement.

These tendencies, as I have now sufficiently implied, are those whose ultimate goal is the denial of any positive reality corresponding to the terms, God, Immortality, Prayer. Of private expression of these tendencies here in America, there is certainly no lack. And, judging from my personal experience, for every person affected by these tendencies a dozen years ago, there are a score affected by them now. Notably scientific men, albeit professors in the most orthodox colleges, and regular attendants upon such " means of grace " as are provided by the college authorities for the benefit of the rising generation, confess to you when they are off duty that, corresponding to the words which I have named above, they are aware of no substantial meanings. Even the late Professor Agassiz, who, in default of better, publicly attacked Dar-

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win with the ad captandum argument, " We are not the children of monkeys : we are the children of God," said to me privately in just so many words, " Mr. Chadwick, the scientific man knows nothing about God." But the tendencies which I have named are not confined to scientific men. I find them everywhere where there are thoughtful men and women ; not such as are hilariously happy in their discovery that there is no God, no immortality, and that every spoken prayer is so much wasted breath, though many such there are ; but there are also those to whom the loss of these convictions and ideas out of their anxious lives is an immeasurable sorrow, who yet, because they cannot or think they cannot honestly retain them, with moistened eye and trembling lip bid them a sad farewell. There is one man here in America, who, better perhaps than any other, publicly represents the tendencies I have in mind ; in whom indeed, if I am not mistaken, they have reached their ultimate goal of absolute nescience. I refer to Mr. Felix Adler. Refined, scholarly, reverent, intensely moral, ardently benevolent, with a genuine enthusiasm for humanity, he does not say, There is no God, There is no immortality, but he does say, If there be a God or immortality, we have no knowledge of the one or of the other, and he says that prayer is a survival of beliefs which we no longer entertain, with which it ought to be discarded.

. In some respects, England is a much freer country than the United States. The tyranny of public opinion is much more repressive here than there. It is quite possible that there is much less of Mr. Adler's style of thought here than in England. But what there is, is much more timid in its expression here than there. There, there is so much of it, and it has grown so much of late, that they have made a new word to express it, — agnosticism {a is the negative, and gnosticism means knowing or knowledge; and so agnosticism is literally not knowing, and an agnostic is one who does not know). The creation of these words, and the frequent use of them of late, — you must all of you have come upon them many times, — are signs of the increasing prevalence of the things which they denote. The increasing use of the word nescience y the negative opposite of science in its primitive sense, knowledge, is another finger pointing in the same direction. Those of our periodicals which reprint the most striking English articles introduce to the American public many of the agnostic articles that appear in England, but only a small proportion of. them all. To one who follows up the course of English thought in the reviews and magazines pretty closely, nothing is more impressive than the extent to which the agnostic element prevails in such literature, as well as in scores of books, and the rapidity with which it has increased within a dozen years. The " Fortnightly Review " is virtually the organ of agnostic thought, and its editor, John Morley, is a man whose culture and ability are second to no man's in Great Britain. But his review does not monopolize all the agnosticism. It appears in the " Contemporary " and the " Nineteenth Century," side by side with the pretentious vaporings of cardinals and bishops. It appears almost everywhere. Men of the highest social, scientific, and literary rank make no concealment of their utter lack of faith in any God or immortality. And what is so obvious in Great Britain will shortly be so in America. If you and I were cowards, we should try perhaps to blink these facts, to make believe that no such facts exist. But they would exist just the same for all our cowardliness and lying. However it may be with others, whatever faith / have must be in spite of all that I can hear or read against it. If I should catch myself wilfully trying to believe one thing or another, not seeking for the truth, but seeking for arguments to bolster up some preconceived opinion, I should be ashamed ever to face you in this place again. Very likely, if I had avoided all the way along every book of less conservative aspect than my own thought, I might have remained just where I was a dozen years ago, or even have gone the way of various others, back to the flesh-pots of the popular theology. And it may be that I

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have read too exclusively the most iconoclastic writers who have challenged my beliefs. If it has been so, you may at least congratulate yourselves that the opinions which I have presented to you have not been drifted to my feet by any tide of mere conventionality, but have been plucked out of the teeth of danger, and fought for upon many a painfully contested field.

From twelve' to twenty years ago, when the supernatural theory of Christianity, the special inspiration of the Bible, and so on, were being summoned sharply to the bar of reason, there were those who said that the process of negation would not end with any of these things. It would go on, they said, till it involved the faiths of natural religion in a common ruin with supernatural Christianity. But those who said these things were, like Cassandra, doomed to have their prophecies habitually disbelieved and disregarded. I know that I for one did not believe them or regard them. The supernatural, I thought, was but a parasitic growth, which had sucked, was sucking, and would suck,

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the life out of natural religion. Destroy this parasitic growth, thought I, — and I was one of many who thought so, — and natural religion would at once renew its youth, bourgeon and blossom out as it had never done before, and bear such fruit of joy and blessing as had never gladdened the eyes and fed the hungry hearts of men since time began. But the Cassandras were right. Supernatural religion has everywhere lost its hold on the intelligence of the civilized world, and so has natural religion, too, in any such concrete shape as men imagined its triumphant future. If Theodore Parker, for example, could come back to us, he would confess that things had taken quite a different turn from that which he anticipated and predicted. He would find a thousand ready to accept his anti-supernaturalism where he found a score when he was in the flesh. But would he find them all as confident as he was of a perfect God, a glorious immortality ; all of them ready to sanction his old-time prayers, wherein he talked with God as naturally and simply as a boy with his own mother? No, he would not. He would find in many instances that these things which were more dear to him than his own life had gone the way of -others which were to him hateful and intolerable to the last degree. I am sure that Mr. Froude does not exaggerate when he says that there is silently transpiring in our midst a more important change in thought than any which the world has undergone since the downfall of Paganism and the conversion of the Roman Empire.. I doubt if he would have exaggerated if he had said that even this was less important than the change which is at present going on.

Now it is no part of my scheme this morning to state the arguments for or against one or the other of those great doctrines which have heretofore been deemed essential to religion. I will only say that, because the tendency of late has been so strong either to dogmatic denial of these doctrines or to agnostic inability to assent to them, it does not follow that this tendency is absolutely just, and that we should all at once

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and all together abandon ourselves to it without reserve, as if its ultimate must be the final good. The tendency of thought at any given time may be in quite the opposite direction from that " final philosophy" which a Princeton Professor imagines he has discovered and condensed into one bulky volume, but which is still, I fancy, far, far ahead of us. There are those who speak as if the tendency of thought at any given time being discovered, there was nothing else for us to do, but drop our oars and let it bear us as it will upon its bosom. But sometimes there is nothing else for us to do, so we be men not things, than to contend against it with all our strength. And there is sometimes nothing else than this for us to do when the tendency of thought for the time being is towards the perfect. If it does not seem so to us, then we must go the other way. The band of Arctic explorers who patiently and painfully walked towards the North day after day, and then discovered they had been walking on an immense ice-floe all the time, which had taken them hundreds of miles southward, nevertheless did well to do just as they did. They knew the way their feet were going; they did not know there was a mighty current sweeping them at its own will. And so it often is with us. The mighty sweep of things, the ultimate tendency which gathers up into itself all aberrations and divergences, — just as a ship's course to her destination all of her tackings on and off, — of this we cannot be aware. We are on an ice-floe of such vast extent that, with strained eye or telescope, we have never seen its utmost bound. What we can know is whether our own feet are keeping on, however wearily and painfully, towards that which seems to us to be the true and good. If they are doing this, then we may look the whole world in the face without one blush of shame. It is here, I think, that rationalists are often quite as narrow, quite as unjust, as the most bigoted supernaturalists. They blame this or that person for not going with them, when he does not go with them simply and only because they do not seem to him to be going towards the truth. Instead of blaming him for his refusal to accept their guid-

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ance, they should admire him for his steadfastness to personal convictions, — a nobler thing in any man than following, if this were possible, the absolute truth without such steadfastness.

On the other hand, it is no less certain that if the facts which come within our ken seem hostile to those doctrines and ideas which we regard as mo'st essential to religion, seem wholly subversive of them, then there is nothing else for us to do but to accept this conclusion manfully and adjust our lives to it as best we can. Whatever is doubtful, one thing is certain, — that no real good can come to us except along the line of our own personal integrity of thought and deed. It may well be that the negations of the present time are but so many steps in a progress to some higher affirmation than the world has ever yet received. I believe this. In hours of higher sanity, of deeper thought, I seem to catch some glimpses of a far-off time when man shall have a thought of God, of immortality, of prayer, more grand and beautiful than any thought of these which has so far appealed to the intelligence of

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men. But, however this may be, nothing remains for us but to accept that which we are convinced is true, to give up every thing which does not seem so any longer. It may be hard, but if it is our duty, then there is no more to say. And, however some of us may conscientiously abide in a more positive order of ideas, let us beware lest we should ever cast the faintest shadow of reproach on those who have been inwardly compelled to surrender every most distinctive article of natural religion as it has so far been conceived. If they are as narrow and bitter in their iconoclasm as others are in their conservatism, then we may blame their narrowness and bigotry. But you and I have many a friend whose agnosticism is complete, but whose fidelity to personal conviction puts to shame our own and that of our most orthodox acquaintances. For such we have no words of blame, and even our pity seems to find no joint in their self-poise and self-respect which it can penetrate.

The aim of my discourse is not to question the validity of any of the leading doctrines of religion,

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or to analyze the processes by which these doctrines have lost their hold upon so many minds, but simply, facing, for the time, the fact that there are many minds on which their hold is broken, to ask, What then? Does any thing remain to such that can with any justness or propriety be spoken of as religion ; and, if so, what is the nature and the good of it?

I find the question stated in a recent number of the " London Spectator " in a bit of verse : —

" What is the good and what is the bad ?

What is the perfectly true ?

What is the end you live for, my lad,

And what may I ask are you ?

Unproven I fear is your heaven above ;

Life is but labor and sorrow ; Then why should we hope, and why should we love,

And why should we care for the morrow ? "

And not only is the question put, but also the following answer : —

" There may be a fight worth fighting, my friend,

Though victory there be none ; And though no haven be ours at the end,

Still we may steer straight on. And though nothing be good and nothing be bad

And nothing be true to the letter, Yet a good many^things are worse, my lad,

And one or two things are better."

The scope of this question and answer is indeed somewhat wider than that of my own question as I have stated it above. These introduce the ethical problem from which so far I have kept myself clear. The average assumption of the agnostic thinker is that, when we come to ethics, we come to terra firma. But recently various writers have been arguing, very laboriously, to prove that morals are dependent on religion, and that with the dogmatic denial of God and immortality, or the agnostic refusal to make either of these affirmations, the ground of all morality is cut away under its feet. Into the merits of this controversy, I have been with you already. Suffice it now to say that we arrived at the conclusion that, whatever inspiration or incitement for ethical action resides in the convictions corresponding to the terms God and Immortality, the basis of morals is in the social life of man, — in the absolute necessity for men who are to live together in harmonious relations to accept certain limits to their conduct, to forego certain acts, however pleasant, because they are anti-social in their nature, and to perform certain others, however painful, because the social good demands them. The importance of moral actions does not lie in their determination of the happiness or misery of individual men beyond the grave, but in their determination of the happiness or misery of the agent and of society here in this present world. Instead of saying, therefore, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," if we have no longer any faith in an immortal life beyond the grave, we should say, Let us eat and drink, temperately and wisely, for to-day we live, and shall live well or ill in part according as we manage well or ill this bodily structure which is so closely implicated with the fortunes of our intellect and will And as morality is not dependent on any theory of a future life, so is it not dependent upon any theory of God.

That it is not dependent upon God, I do by no means say. For to my mind, in the last analysis, he is " the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness. " But whether a man conceives him so or not, he cannot but admit that there is such a power, and he may still be moral, intensely so, whatever theory he may have of it. Ay, though, with or without the adjunct of a God, a man should hold with Schopenhauer and Hartmann that this is the worst possible world, I do not see that the foundations of morality would even then be shaken. On the contrary, I have often wondered if pessimism be not a better working creed than optimism. If this is the best possible world, as Leibnitz taught, to endeavor to improve it would appear to be an idle task. But if this is the worst possible world, it still remains for us to better it a little if we can. So much then, at least, remains for the agnostic, — " mere morality.'' Of God and immortality he may not presume to speak, and prayer may seem to him an idle form of words. But duty still remains. He is still living in a social world where his own actions do not end in themselves, but affect the welfare of others in ever-widening circles and to the remotest generations. The experience of innumerable gen-

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erations has wrought out for him a moral code, which, although still capable of further emendation, is not to be lightly set aside. So much remains to the agnostic thinker. All arguments to the contrary are so many brilliant tours de force by which it is attempted to terrify men back into the beliefs they have discarded, — a process morally akin to threats of pincers, rack, and wheel. Let the a priori reasoner prove ever so conclusively that the unbelieving man cannot be moral, and lo, his next-door neighbor is an unbeliever, the whiteness of whose moral nature, the courage of whose moral action, puts his own to shame. Ah ! but, says Mr. Mallock, his morality is only a survival of the beliefs his ancestors once held. It is a convenient subterfuge. An unbelieving community, we are assured, or one which had worked out the entire stock of its hereditary faith, would not be moral. Such a contingency is so remote that it is very safe to prophesy. Meantime what we are certain of is, that men whose faith is of the smallest in those doctrines of religion which are considered most essential are moral peers of the most enthusiastic believers of their own or any other time. Of this we are entirely certain; about the other it remains to be seen.

But there are those who think that, properly speaking, morality is no part of religion. For better or for worse, the two have been associated from the earliest times; but if nothing more remains to the agnostic, they would say, than " mere morality," albeit there is nothing else in the whole world so good as this, they do not think he can be justly said to have any thing which is really of the nature of religion. Does there, then, remain to the agnostic any thing but mere morality, any thing which has either the form or essence of religion over and above its moral elements? There certainly does, if those who accept Comte in his entirety have any right to answer. These, answering for themselves, insist that they have a religion which is just as truly a religion as the Romanist's or Calvinist's. It* has no God; it has no immortality; though it has a kind of prayer.

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But it has a substitute for God, namely, Le Grand Etre> the Great Being, Humanity, past, present, and future. It has a substitute for immortality, — the perpetuity of social influence ; and that it is no ignoble one let George Eliot's poem testify, the grandest poem of these latter days : —

" Oh, may I join the choir invisible ! "

It has a substitute for prayer, — ascriptions of reverence and adoration to the spirits of great men and saintly women who have been incorporated into the Great Being. And yet, although the religion of humanity, as this is called, is capable of very grand expression, and though it corresponds to a circle of ideas which is full of goodly inspiration, is it not, after all, a sort of make-believe religion? Its god, its immortality, its prayer, are substitutes for the God and immortality and prayer of bond fide religion, and excellent as substitutes; and if my question were, What substitutes are there for God and immortality with the agnostic who has completely lost his faith in these? I might assign to them a very honorable place.

Setting aside, then, the so-called religion of humanity, does there remain to the agnostic any thing of the essence of religion after he feels himself compelled to say, " If there is any God, I cannot find him ; if there is any immortality, I cannot prove it : and that God interferes to answer any human prayer I cannot find a particle of warrant." I do not think that I am anxious to make out a case in the affirmative, but only to find out the truth ; but I will not deny that I am very happy when the truth appears to be that the most vital essence of religion may remain to one who finds himself compelled to make the above disclaimers. For the most vital essence of religion is not involved in any theory of God or of the world, nor in any theory of human destiny, nor in any form of prayer which needs an interfering deity. The most vital essence of religion is not involved in any of these distinctions of personal and impersonal. Least of all are those to be ac-

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counted atheists who cannot speak of God as personal. Spinoza could not so speak of him, and yet Novalis rightly said of him, " He was a God-intoxicated man," and Schleiermacher, " Spinoza not believe in God ! My friends, he did not believe in any thing else. ,, Mind you that here I am not pleading for myself; for, if I cared to be dogmatic about the mysteries of the Godhead, I should say, To predicate personality of the Infinite is to express the inexpressible a little better than to predicate impersonality. But may we not go one step further, and declare that the most vital essence of religion is not involved in any theory of God whatever, or even in any affirmation of a being who is the moving force of all phenomena? To affirm God is to affirm a theory of the universe; to me a theory of all-sufficing excellence and absolutely indispensable. I can conceive that all the harmonious order of the universe was potential in that vaporous cloud which was the primordial substance of the world, but only if there was potential in it an-

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decedent to the lowest term of the ascending series, a higher than the highest. Evolution of a higher from a lower is comprehensible enough. But evolution of a higher by a lower is absolutely incomprehensible. To affirm God, then, is to affirm a theory of the universe ; most indispensable, but still a theory. And the most vital essence of religion is not involved in man's relation to any theory of the universe, but in his relation to the universe itself. It is to be impressed with its majestic order, to thrill with recognition of the tender grace and awful sweep of things, and to convert this passive recognition into a voluntary energy of devotion to the eternal order in which we find ourselves embosomed. And even for the complete agnostic there may remain this vital essence of religion. He may discard all theories, but he cannot discard the universe. Evermore his little life is set in the midst of this abounding order, mystery, and law. And the question, Is he a religious man? is answered, not by discovering what theory he has of God or of the universe, but by discovering in what attitude he stands before the everlasting fact. If in an attitude of easy indifference or unawed garrulity, then truly he is not a religious man. But if the morning and the evening hush, the glow at night of multitudinous stars, the "spring's delicious trouble in the ground," the summer's beautiful effulgence, the imperial splendor of autumnal days, and, more than all, the mystery of human life and thought and love, — if all these things gladden his heart so much that he cannot express his joy, and yet soften it so that suddenly it overflows with unforbidden tears, then he may well be more religious than one who has a theory of God or of the universe which he can rattle off to you as glibly as a boy his morning lesson. And though such a man may never pray in any form of words, and least of all may ever wish to coax the Infinite to interfere to turn his mill or sell his merchandise, or even to make him a better man, which he can do at any time himself by simply availing himself of the normal