CHAPTER IV.

NATURALISM AND CHRISTIANITY.

I SUPPOSE there are few students of man and of society to whom the present religious condition and apparent religious prospect of the world can seem very satisfactory. If there is any lesson clear from history it is this: that in every age religion has‍ been the mainstay both of private life and of the public order,-"the substance of humanity," as Quinet well expresses it, "whence issue, as by so many necessary consequences, political institutions, the arts, poetry, philosophy, and, up to a certain point, even the sequences of events." The existing civilization of Europe and America-I use the word civilization in its highest and widest sense, and mean by it especially the laws, traditions, beliefs, and habits of thought and action, whereby individual family and social life is governed-is mainly the work of Christianity. The races which inhabit the vast Asiatic continent are what they are chiefly from the influence of those great non-Christian systems which we have surveyed in the last chapter.

1 Le Génie des Religions, 1. i. c. i.

CHAP. IV.] THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE.

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In the fetishism of the rude tribes of Africa, still in the state of the childhood of humanity, we have what has been called the parler enfantin of religion:-it is that rude and unformed speech, as of spiritual babes and sucklings, which principally makes them to differ from the anthropoid apes of their tropical forests: "un peuple est compté pour quelque chose le jour où il s'elève a la pensée de Dieu." But the spirit of the age is unquestionably hostile to all these creeds from the highest to the lowest. In Europe there is a movement-of its breadth and strength I shall say more presentlythe irreconcilable hostility of which to "all religion and all religiosity," to use the words of the late M. Louis Blanc, is written on its front. Thought is the most contagious thing in the world, and in these days of steam locomotion and electric telegraphs, of cheap literature and ubiquitous journalism, ideas travel with the speed of light, and the influences which are warring against the theologies of Europe are certainly acting as powerful solvents. upon the religious systems of the rest of the world. But, apart from the loud and fierce negation of the creed of Christendom which is so striking a feature of the present day, there is among those who nominally adhere to it a vast amount of unaggressive doubt. Between the party which avowedly aims at the destruction of "all religion and all religiosity,"

1 Le Génie des Religions, 1. i. c. iv.

at the delivery of man from what it calls the "nightmare," or "the intellectual whoredom" of spiritualism, and those who cling with undimmed faith to the religion of their fathers, there is an exceeding great multitude who are properly described as sceptics. It is even more an age of doubt than of denial. As Chateaubriand noted, when the century was yet young, "We are no longer living in times when it avails to say 'Believe and do not examine'; people will examine whether we like it or not." And since these words were written people have been busily examining in every department of human thought, and especially in the domain of religion. In particular Christianity has been made the subject of the most searching scrutiny. How indeed could we expect that it should escape? The greatest fact in the annals of the modern world, it naturally invites the researches of the historian. The basis of the system of ethics still current amongst us, it peremptorily claims the attention of the sociologist. The fount of the metaphysical conceptions accepted in Europe, until in the last century, before the "uncreating word " of Lockian sensism,

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,

Sinks to her second cause, and is no more,

it challenges the investigation of the psychologist. The practical result of these inquiries must be

CHAP. IV.] THE IMMEDIATE OUTLOOK,

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allowed to be, to a large extent, negative. In many quarters, where thirty or forty years ago we should certainly have found acquiescence, honest if dull, in the received religious systems of Europe, we now discern incredulity, more or less farreaching, about "revealed religion' altogether, and, at the best, "faint possible Theism," in the place of old-fashioned orthodoxy. And earnest men, content to bear as best they may their own burden of doubt and disappointment, do not dissemble to themselves that the immediate outlook is

dark and discouraging. Like the French monarch, they discern the omens of the deluge to come after them; a vast shipwreck of all faith, and all virtue, or conscience, of God; brute force, embodied in an omnipotent State, the one ark likely to escape submersion in the pitiless waters. A world from which the high sanctions of religion, hitherto the binding principle of society, are relegated to the domain of old wives' fables; a march through life with its brief dream of pleasure, and long reality of pain unchanged, but with no firm ground of faith, no hope both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil," no worthy object of desire whereby man may erect himself above himself, whence he may derive an inde fectible rule of conduct, a constraining incentive to self-sacrifice, an adequate motive for patient endurance, such is the vision of the coming time, as

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it presents itself to many of the most thoughtful and competent observers.

In these circumstances it is natural that so thoughtful and competent an observer as the author of Ecce Homo should take up his parable. Wide knowledge of the modern mind, broad sympathies, keen and delicate perceptions, freedom from party and personal ends, and a power of graceful and winning statement must, upon all hands, be conceded to him. What such a man thinks on the religious outlook of the world is certain to be interesting; and, whether we agree with it or not, is as certain to be suggestive. I propose, therefore, first of all to consider what may be learnt about the topic with which I am concerned, from this writer's work on Natural Religion, and I shall then proceed to deal with it in my own way.

The author of Natural Religion starts with the broad assumption that "supernaturalism" is discredited by modern "science." I may perhaps, in passing, venture to express my regret that in an inquiry demanding, from its nature and importance, the utmost precision of which human speech is capable, the author has in so few cases clearly and rigidly limited the sense of the terms which he