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Free thought.

On the general subject of the growth of Free Thought with special reference to the United States, we present a condensation of Professor Goldwin Smith's views.

The history of religion during the past century may be described as the sequel of that dissolution of the mediaeval faith which commenced at the Reformation.

At the Reformation Protestantism threw off the yoke of pope and priest, priestly control over conscience through the confessional, priestly absolution for sin, and belief in the magical power of the priest as consecrator of the Host, besides the worship of the Virgin and the saints, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, and other incidents of the medieval system.

Though Protestantism produced a multitude of sects, especially in England at the time of the Commonwealth, hardly any of them were free-thinking or sceptical; those of any importance, at all events, were in some sense dogmatic, and were anchored to the inspiration of the Bible.

Under the Restoration religious thought and controversy slept. The nation was weary of those subjects. The liberty for which men then struggled was political, though with political liberty was bound up religious toleration, which achieved a partial triumph under William III.

The Church of Rome, to meet the storm of the Reformation, reorganized herself at the Council of Trent on lines practically traced for her by the Jesuit. Papal autocracy was strengthened at the expense of the episcopate, and furnished at once with a guard and a propagandist machinery of extraordinary power in the order of Loyola. That the plenary inspiration of the Bible in the Vulgate version, and including the Apocrypha, should be reaffirmed was a secondary matter, inasmuch as the Church of Rome holds that it is not she who derives her credentials from Scripture, but Scripture which depends for the attestation of its authority upon her.

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. 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 aeons, a version which, even if accepted, would not have accounted for the entrance of death into the world before the creation of man. Many will 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.

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 Peons and abortive species which seem to preclude the idea of an intelligent and omnipotent designer.

The chief interpreters of science in its [438] 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 that our agency in some qualified sense is free.

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.” 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.

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.

The main support of orthodox Protestantism in the United States now is an off-shoot from the old country. It is Methodism, which, by the perfection of its organization, combining strong ministerial authority with a democratic participation of all members in the active service of the Church, has so far not only held its own but enlarged its borders and increased its power; its power, perhaps, rather than its spiritual influence, for the time comes when the fire of enthusiasm grows cold and class-meetings lose their fervor. The membership is mostly drawn from a class little exposed to the disturbing influences of criticism or science; nor has the education of the ministers hitherto been generally such as to bring them into contact with the arguments of the sceptic. [439]

In the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were faint relics of state churches—churches, that is, recognized and protected, though not endowed by the state. But there had been little to irritate scepticism or provoke it to violence of any kind, and the transition has accordingly been tranquil. Speculation, however, has now arrived at a point at which its results in the minds of the more inquiring clergy come into collision with the dogmatic creeds of their churches and their ordination tests. Especially does awakened conscience rebel against the ironclad Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. Hence attempts, hitherto baffled, to revise the creeds; hence heresy trials, scandalous and ineffective.

Who can undertake to say how far religion now influences the inner life of the American people? Outwardly life in the United States, in the Eastern States at least, is still religious. Churches are well maintained, congregations are full, offertories are liberal. It is still respectable to be a church-goer. Anglicanism, partly from its connection with the English hierarchy, is fashionable among the wealthy in cities. We note, however, that in all pulpits there is a tendency to glide from the spiritual into the social, if not into the material; to edge away from the pessimistic view of the present world with which the Gospels are instinct; to attend less exclusively to our future, and more to our present state. Social reunions, picnics, and side-shows are growing in importance as parts of the church system. Jonathan Edwards, if he could now come among his people, would hardly find himself at home.

In French Canada the Catholic Church has reigned over a simple peasantry, her own from the beginning, thoroughly submissive to the priesthood, willing to give freely of its little store for the building of churches which tower over the hamlet, and sufficiently firm in its faith to throng to the fane of St. Anne Beaupre for miracles of healing. She has kept the habitant ignorant and unprogressive, but made him, after her rule, moral, insisting on early marriage, on remarriage, controlling his habits and amusements with an almost Puritan strictness. Probably French Canada has been as good and as happy as anything the Catholic Church had to show. From fear of New England Puritanism it had kept its people loyal to Great Britain during the Revolutionary War. From fear of French atheism it kept its people loyal to Great Britain during the war with France. It sang Te Deum for Trafalgar. So things were till the other day. But then came the Jesuit. He got back, from the subserviency of the Canadian politicians, the lands which he had lost after the conquest and the suppression of his order. He supplanted the Gallicans, captured the hierarchy, and prevailed over the great Sulpician Monastery in a struggle for the pastorate of Montreal. Other influences have of late been working for change in a direction neither Gallican nor Jesuit. Railroads have broken into the rural seclusion which favored the ascendency of the priest. Popular education has made some way. Newspapers have increased in number and are more read. The peasant has been growing restive under the burden of tithe and fabrique. Many of the habitants go into the Northern States of the Union for work, and return to their own country bringing with them republican ideas. Americans who have been shunning continental union from dread of French-Canadian popery may lay aside their fears.

It was a critical moment for the Catholic Church when she undertook to extend her domain to the American Republic. She had there to encounter a genius radically opposed to her own. The remnant of Catholic Maryland could do little to help her on her landing. But she came in force with the flood of Irish, and afterwards of South German, emigration. How far she has been successful in holding these her lieges would be a question difficult to decide, as it would involve a rather impalpable distinction between formal membership and zealous attachment. In America, as in England, ritualism has served Roman Catholicism as a tender. The critical question was how the religion of the Middle Ages could succeed in making itself at home under the roof of a democratic republic, the animating spirit of which was freedom, intellectual and spiritual as well as political, while the wit of its people was [440] proverbially keen and their nationality was jealous as well as strong. The papacy may call itself universal; in reality, it is Italian. During its sojourn in the French dominions the popes were French: otherwise they have been Italians, native or domiciled, with the single exception of the Flemish Adrian VI., thrust into the chair of St. Peter by his pupil, Charles V., and by the Italians treated with contumely as an alien intruder. The great majority of the cardinals always has been and still is Italian. She has not thrust the intolerance and obscurantism of the encyclical in the face of the disciples of Jefferson. She has paid all due homage to republican institutions, alien though they are to her own spirit, as her uniform action in European politics hitherto has proved. She has made little show of relics. She has abstained from miracles. The adoration of Mary and the saints, though of course fully maintained, appears to be less prominent. Compared with the medieval cathedral and its multiplicity of side chapels, altars, and images, the cathedral at New York strikes one as the temple of a somewhat rationalized version. Yet between the spirit of American nationality, even in the most devout Catholic, and that of the Jesuit or the native liegeman of Rome, there cannot fail to be an opposition more or less acute, though it may be hidden as far as possible under a decent veil. This was seen in the case of Father Hecker, who had begun his career as a Socialist at Brook Farm, and, as a convert to Catholicism, founded a missionary order, the keynote of which was that “man's life in the natural and secular order of things is marching towards freedom and personal independence.” This he described as a radical change, and a radical change it undoubtedly was from the sentiments and the system of Loyola. Condemnation by Rome could not fail to follow. Education has evidently been the scene of a subterranean conflict between the Jesuit and the more liberal, or, what is much the same thing, the more American section. The American and liberal head of a college has been deposed, under decorous pretences, it is true, but still deposed. In the American or any other branch of the Roman Catholic Church freedom of inquiry and advance in thought are of course impossible. Nothing is possible but immobility, or reaction such as that of the syllabus. Dr. Brownson, like Hecker, a convert, showed after his conversion something of the spirit of free inquiry belonging to his former state, though rather in the line of philosophy than in that of theology, properly speaking. But if he ever departed from orthodoxy he returned to it and made a perfectly edifying end.

Such is the position in which at the close of the nineteenth century Christendom seems to have stood. Outside the pale of reason—of reason; we do not say of truth —were the Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches; the Roman Catholic Church resting on tradition, sacerdotal authority, and belief in present miracles; the Eastern Church supported by tradition, sacerdotal authority, nationality, and the power of the Czar. Scepticism had not eaten into a church, preserved, like that of Russia, by its isolation and intellectual torpor; though some wild sects had been generated, and Nihilism, threatening with destruction the church as well as the state, had appeared on the scene. Into the Roman Catholic Church scepticism had eaten deeply, and had detached from her, or was rapidly detaching, the intellect of educated nations, while she seemed resolutely to bid defiance to reason by her syllabus, her declaration of papal infallibility, her proclamation of the immaculate conception of Mary. Outside the pale of traditional authority and amenable to reason stood the Protestant churches, urgently pressed by a question as to the sufficiency of the evidences of supernatural Christianity-above all, of its vital and fundamental doctrines: the fall of man, the incarnation, and the resurrection. The Anglican Church, a fabric of policy compounded of Catholicism without a pope and biblical Protestantism, was in the throes of a struggle between those two elements, largely antiquarian and of little importance compared with the vital question as to the evidences of revelation and the divinity of Christ.

In the Protestant churches generally aestheticism had prevailed. Even the most austere of them had introduced church [441] art, flowers, and tasteful music; a tendency which, with the increased craving for rhetorical novelty in the pulpit, seemed to show that the simple Word of God and the glad tidings of salvation were losing their power, and that human attractions were needed to bring congregations together.

The last proposal had been that dogma, including the belief in the divinity of Christ, having become untenable, should be abandoned, and that there should be formed a Christian Church with a ritual and sacraments, but without the Christian creed, though still looking up to Christ as its founder and teacher; an organization which, having no definite object and being held together only by individual fancy, would not be likely to last long.

The task now imposed on the liegemen of reason seems to be that of reviewing reverently, but freely and impartially, the evidences both of supernatural Christianity and of theism, frankly rejecting what is untenable, and if possible laying new and sounder foundations in its place. To estimate the gravity of the crisis we have only to consider to how great an extent our civilization has hitherto rested on religion. It may be found that after all our being is an insoluble mystery. If it is, we can only acquiesce and make the best of our present habitation; but who can say what the advance of knowledge may bring forth? Effort seems to be the law of our nature, and if continued it may lead to heights beyond our present ken. In any event, unless our inmost nature lies to us, to cling to the untenable is worse than useless; there can be no salvation for us but in truth.


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