Modern Substitutes for Christianity Part 2

But what is the superstructure which Dr. Stanton Coit proceeds to build upon this foundation? One would naturally expect that Prayer and Churches and Sacraments would have no place. But these are exactly what he insists on retaining; these will apparently be more important, more necessary, in the future than in the past. 'We should appropriate and adapt the materials furnished us by the rites and ceremonies of the historic Church. As the woodbird, bent on building her nest, in lieu of better materials makes it of leaves and of feathers from her breast, so may we use what is familiar, old, {43} and close at hand. It is all ours; and the homelike beauty of the Church of the future will be enhanced by the ancient materials wrought into its new forms.' So much enhanced, indeed, that most people will be inclined to tolerate the new forms simply because of the ancient materials which are allowed to remain. Among the ancient materials which Dr. Coit appropriates or adapts, prayer occupies a prominent place. And he is severe upon those, _e.g._, Comte and Dr. Congreve, who would banish pet.i.tion from the sphere of worship. He delights in pointing out that, in despite of themselves, they include requests for personal blessings. Nor is prayer to be a mere aspiration or inarticulate longing of the soul.

'No mental activity can become definite, coherent, and systematic, and remain so, except it be embodied and repeated in words.... A pet.i.tion that does not, or cannot, or will not, formulate itself in words, and let the lips move to shape them, and the {44} voice to sound them, and the eye to visualise them on the written or printed page, becomes soon a mere torpor of the mind, or a meaningless movement of blind unrest, or a trick of pretending to pray. Perfected prayer is always spoken.'

To whom, or to what, this prayer, uttered or unexpressed, is to be offered, may be difficult of comprehension. It is not to G.o.d, as we have hitherto employed that sacred name; but Dr. Coit insists that the word 'G.o.d' shall be retained, and that we have no right to deny to this G.o.d the attribute of Personality. 'Any one who worships either a concrete social group or an abstract moral quality may justly protest against the charge that his G.o.d is impersonal: he may insist that it is either superpersonal or interpersonal, or both.' The worship of Nature appears to be discouraged, and to be considered as of comparatively little worth. 'We dare never forget that moral qualities stand to us in a {45} different dynamic relation from the gra.s.s and the stars and the sea--no effects upon us or upon these will result from pet.i.tions even of a most righteous man to them. But no one can deny that prayers to Purity, Serenity, Faith, Humanity, England, Man, Woman, to Milton, to Jesus, do create a new moral heaven and a new earth for him who thirsts after righteousness.' Leaving the name of our Lord out of the discussion, why should a prayer to Serenity have more moral influence than a prayer to the Sea? Why should a prayer to the Stars be less efficacious than a prayer to Milton, whose soul was like a star and dwelt apart? We have only to invest the stars and the sea with certain qualities evolved from our own imagination to make them as worthy of worship as either Milton or Serenity. Dr. Coit is scathing in his criticism of the Positivist prayers, whether of Comte or of Dr.

Congreve: they are 'screamingly funny': 'the most monstrous {46} absurdity ever perpetrated by a really good and great man.' The epithets are possibly justified; but are they quite inapplicable to one who supposes that an invocation of the Living and Eternal G.o.d means no more than an invocation of England, or Faith, or Woman? It is only when G.o.d has become to us an abstraction that an abstraction can take the place of G.o.d.

A manual of services fitted to a nation's present needs is what, according to Dr. Coit, is required to ensure the progress and triumph of the ethical movement. 'Until the new idealism possesses its own manual of religious ritual, it cannot communicate effectively its deeper thought and purpose. The moment, however, it has invented such a means of communication, it would seem inevitable that a rapid moral and intellectual advancement of man must at last take place, equal in speed and in beneficence to the material advancement which followed {47} during the last century in the wake of scientific inventions.'

The ritual of ethical societies will not outwardly differ much from the ritual to be found in existing religions. Its details have yet to be arranged or 'invented.' The only things certain are that a book of prayers ought to be provided at once, and that in Swinburne's _Songs before Sunrise_ may be found an 'anthology of prayer suitable for use in the Church of Humanity,' prayers 'as sublime and quickening in melody and pa.s.sion as anything in the Hebrew prophets or the Litany of the Church.'

Dr. Coit does not denounce theology as theology, he even insists on being himself ranked among theologians. His readers may be surprised to learn on what doctrines he dwells with particular fondness. He laments that belief in the existence and power of the devil should be waning. 'We may not believe in a personal devil, but we must believe in a devil who acts very like a person.' {48} He predicts that teachers will more and more teach a doctrine of h.e.l.l-fire. Out of kindness they will terrify by presenting the evil effects, indirect and remote, of selfish thoughts and dispositions. 'We must frighten people away from the edge of the abyss which begins this side of death.' Finally, though, of course, the word is not used in the ordinary sense, the necessity of the doctrine of the Incarnation is upheld. 'The Incarnation must for ever remain a fundamental conception of religion.

Until all men are incarnations of the principle of constructive moral beneficence, and to a higher degree, Jesus will remain pre-eminent; and it is quite possible that in proportion as he is approached, grat.i.tude to him will increase rather than diminish.' 'Even should any one ever in the future transcend him, still it will only be by him and in glad acknowledgment of the debt to him. There never can in the future be a dividing of the world into Christianity {49} and not Christianity. It will only be a new and more Christian Christianity, compatible with liberty and reason.'

Thus the drift and tendency of this book bring us back, however unintentionally, to the Faith of which it appears, at first sight, to be the renunciation. It establishes irresistibly that Morality, to be living and permanent, must have religious sanction and inspiration, that we need to be delivered from the awful thraldom of evil, that the supreme realities are the things which are unseen; that prayer is the life of the soul; that public worship is a necessity; that in Christ the greatest redemptive power has been embodied, and the purest vision of the Eternal has been granted; and that, in its adaptation to human needs, its fostering of human aspirations, its ministering to human sorrows, its renewal of human penitence, its consecration of life and its hope in death, no Ethical Society yet devised gives any {50} symptom of being able to supplant the Church of Him Who said, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.'

V

Now, from the fact that Morality at its best a.s.sumes a religious tinge, merges itself in Religion, we may legitimately infer that, without the inspiration of Religion, Morality at its best will not long prevail.[2]

'Love, friendship,' said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 'good nature, kindness carried to the height of sincere and devoted affection, will always be the chief pleasures of life, whether Christianity is true or false; but Christian Charity is not the same as any of these, or all of these put together, and I think that if Christian Theology were exploded, Christian Charity would not survive it.'[3] At present, when Religion has pervaded everything with its sacred sanctions, it is easy to say that Religion {51} would not be greatly missed were it discarded, and that Morality would be unaffected. This is pure conjecture. To test its worth we should need a state of society from which every vestige of Religion had disappeared. It will not do to retain any of the beliefs or the customs which owe their origin to a sense of the Unseen and Eternal, to a sense of any Power above ourselves, ruling our destinies and instilling into our minds thoughts and desires and hopes beyond the visible and the material. If Morality, in the limited acceptation of the term, is sufficient for the elevation and welfare of mankind, it is not to be supported by any admixture of Religion: it must prove its power by itself. Religion must be utterly abolished, its every sanction must be universally rejected, its every impulse must have universally ceased before it can be contended with any measure of a.s.surance that the world will be none the worse, may be even the better, for its vanishing.

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If Religion is a delusion, remember what must be eliminated from our convictions. There can be no higher tribunal than that of man by which our actions can be judged.[4] A life of outward propriety is the utmost that can be demanded of us, if it is only against the wellbeing of our neighbour or the promotion of our own happiness that we can transgress. What has human law to do with our hearts? What legislation can deal with 'envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness,' unless they manifest themselves in outward acts? A base, unloving, impure, acrimonious, untruthful man may crawl through life, never having been arrested, never having been sentenced to any term of penal servitude. He can stand erect before all the laws of the country and say, 'All these have I kept from my youth up.' And unless there be a higher law than the law of man, unless there be a law written on our hearts by the Finger of {53} G.o.d, unless there be One to whom, above and beyond all earthly appearances, we can mournfully declare, 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned,' nothing more can be reasonably demanded. If there is nothing higher than the visible, it can be only visible results which are of any value. The giving of money to help the needy, and the giving of money in order to obtain a reputation for generosity, must stand on the same level. The widow's mite will be worth infinitely less than the shekels which come from those who devour widows' houses. If there be none to search the heart, none save poor frail fellow-mortals to whom we must give account, what an incentive to purity of motive and loftiness of aspiration is removed! But let men talk as they will, there is a conscience in them which whispers, It does matter whether our hearts as well as our actions are right; it does matter whether we have good motives, good intentions; there is a scrutiny of hearts, {54} making and to be made more fully yet; there is One before Whom, even though we have not broken the law of the land, we confess with anguish, Against Thee have I sinned and done evil in Thy sight: where I appear most irreproachable, Thine eye detecteth error: it is not the occasional trespa.s.s that I have chiefly to lament, it is the sin that is almost part and parcel of my very being, the sin that corrodes even where it does not glare, the sin that undermines even where it does not crash.

VI

The most thoughtful of those who have lost faith in the Living G.o.d and in fellowship with Him hereafter, look on this life with a pessimistic eye. Without trust in the Unseen and Eternal, life is worthless, an idle dream. With its hara.s.sing cares, with its petty vexations, with its turbulence and strife, its sorrows, its breaking up of old a.s.sociations, its quenching the light of our {55} eyes, 'O dreary were this earth, if earth were all!' On the stage of the world, 'the play is the Tragedy Man, the hero the conqueror worm!'

We cannot but extend the deepest sympathy, the warmest admiration to those who, bereft of belief and of hope, yet cling tenaciously to moral goodness.[5] 'What is to become of us,' asks the pensive Amiel, 'when everything leaves us, health, joy, affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, capacity for work, when the sun seems to us to have lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all its charms? ... There is but one answer, keep close to Duty. Be what you ought to be; the rest is G.o.d's affair.... And supposing there were no good and holy G.o.d, nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the key of the enigma, the pole star of a wandering {56} humanity.'[6] Who does not see that it is the lingering faith in G.o.d which gives strength to this conviction and that, were the faith obliterated, the natural conclusion would be for the cultured, 'Vanity of vanities: all is vanity'; and for the mult.i.tudes, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' 'I remember how at Cambridge,' says Mr. F. W. H. Myers of George Eliot, 'I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity on an evening of rainy May: and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet calls of men--the words _G.o.d, Immortality, Duty_--p.r.o.nounced with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the _first_, how unbelievable the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and uncompromising Law. I {57} listened and night fell: her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a sibyl's in the gloom, and it was as though she withdrew from my grasp one by one the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like t.i.tus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls, on a sanctuary with no presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a G.o.d.'[7]

Withdraw belief in a G.o.d above and in a life beyond, the only reason for obedience to Duty and Morality will be either our own pleasure, the doing what is most agreeable to ourselves; or sympathy, the bearing of others' burdens, in the hope that when we have pa.s.sed away there may be some on earth who will reap the harvest which we have {58} sown; or public opinion, the views which are prevalent in a particular time in a particular region; and these reasons are hardly likely to produce a morality which will be other than that of self-indulgence, of despair, or of conventionality.[8]

'We can get on very well without a religion,' said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 'for though the view of life which Science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy. The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think that most men find no difficulty in turning their minds away from its transient character.' If it would only last! But it does not last: those dearer to us than ourselves are s.n.a.t.c.hed away. Could anything be more selfish, more despicably base than to go about saying, All that is of no {59} consequence, so long as I meet with pleasant people and have an infinite number of things to enjoy? It is true that an infinite number of my fellow-creatures may not be enjoying an infinite number of things, may have trouble in recalling almost anything worthy of the name of enjoyment, but why should I be depressed by that? I find no difficulty in turning away my mind from the misfortunes of others. 'We can get on very well without religion.' No doubt without it some of us can have agreeable society and a variety of pleasures more or less refined; but this does not prove that religion is no loss. On the same principle, we can get on very comfortably without honesty, without sobriety, without purity, without generosity. We can get on very comfortably indeed without anything except without a heart which is intent on self-gratification, and which excludes all thought of the wants and woes of the world. 'Let us eat and drink, for {60} to-morrow we die,' is the irresistible, though rather inconsistent, conclusion of that sublime austerity which so indignantly repudiates the merest hint of reward or hope within the veil, and which so sensitively shrinks from the mercenariness of the Religion of the Cross.

'The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust, Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly!'[9]

What are the facts? What is the growing tendency where men think themselves strong enough to do without religious beliefs, when they have been proclaiming that the suppression of Religion will be the exaltation of a purer Morality? There are plenty of indications that the laws of Morality are found to be as irksome as the dictates of Religion. The first step is to cry out for a higher Morality, to censure the Morality of {61} the New Testament as imperfect and inadequate, as selfish and visionary. The next step is to question the restraints of Morality, to clamour for liberty in regard to matters on which the general voice of mankind has from the beginning given no uncertain verdict. The last step is to declare that Morality is variable and conventional, a mere arbitrary arrangement, which can be dispensed with by the emanc.i.p.ated soul. The literature which a.s.sumes that Religion is obsolete does not, as a rule, suffer itself to be much hampered by the fetters of Morality. The non-Religion of the Future is what, we are confidently told, increasing knowledge of the laws of Sociology will of necessity bring about. Should that day ever dawn, or rather let us say, should that night ever envelop us, it will mean the diffusion of non-Morality such as the world has never known.[10]

[1] Appendix.

[2] Appendix VI.

[3] _Nineteenth Century_, June 1884.

[4] Appendix VII.

[5] Appendix VIII.

[6] _Journal Intime_, ii.

[7] _Modern Essays_.

[8] Appendix IX.

[9] Tennyson, _Wages_.

[10] Appendix X.

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III

THE RELIGION OF THE UNIVERSE

'Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence.'--PSALM cx.x.xix. 7.

'Do I not fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord.'--JEREMIAH xxiii. 24.

'The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee.'--1 KINGS viii.

27.

'In Him we live, and move, and have our being.'--ACTS xvii. 28.

'One G.o.d and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in you all.'--EPHESIANS iv. 6.

'Of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things: to Whom be glory for ever. Amen.'--ROMANS xi. 36.

'That G.o.d may be all in all.'--1 CORINTHIANS xv. 28.

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III

THE RELIGION OF THE UNIVERSE

Among proposed subst.i.tutes for Christianity, none occupies a more prominent place than Pantheism, the ident.i.ty of G.o.d and the universe.

'Pantheism,' says Haeckel, 'is the world system of the modern scientist.'[1] Pantheism, or the Religion of the Universe, is, in one aspect, a protest against Anthropomorphism, the making of G.o.d in the image of man. It is in supposing G.o.d to be altogether such as we are, to be swayed by the same motives, to be actuated by the same pa.s.sions as we are, that the most deadly errors have arisen. Robert Browning, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, represents a half-brutal {66} being who lives in a cave speculating upon the government of the world, wondering why it came to be made, and what could be the purpose of the Creator in making it. Every motive that could sway the savage mind is in turn discussed: pleasure, restlessness, jealousy, cruelty, sport. 'Because I, Caliban,' such is the process of his reasoning, 'delight in tormenting defenceless animals, or would crush any one that interfered with my comfort, or do things because my taskmaster obliges me to do them, so must it be with Him Who made the world.' With great grotesqueness, but with marvellous power, the degraded monster argues as to the reasons which could have prompted the Unseen Ruler to frame the earth and its inhabitants. Everything that he attributes to G.o.d is in keeping with his own base nature. What is the explanation of the horrors which have been perpetrated in the Name of G.o.d? The sacrifice of human {67} beings, of vanquished enemies, or of the nearest and the dearest, the agonies of self-torture, did not these originate in the transference to the Invisible G.o.d of the emotions and principles by which men were guiding their own lives? They had no notion of forbearance and forgiveness and patience, therefore they did not think that there could be forgiveness with G.o.d. They were to be turned aside from their fierce, revengeful purposes by bribes and by the protracted sufferings of their foes, therefore they thought that G.o.d might be bribed by gifts or propitiated by pains. What they were on earth, delighting in bloodshed and conquest and revelry, that, they supposed, must be the Being or the Beings who ruled in the world unseen.