LETTER IV.
TO THE SON OF THE LADY TO WHOM THE PRECEDING LETTER WAS ADDRESSED.
Difficulty of detaching intellectual from religious questions—The sacerdotal system—Necessary to ascertain what religion is—Intellectual religion really nothing but philosophy—The popular instinct—The test of belief—Public worship—The intellect moral, but not religious—Intellectual activity sometimes in contradiction to dogma—Differences between the intellectual and religious lives.
Your request is not so simple as it appears. You ask me for a frank opinion as to the course your mind is taking in reference to very important subjects; but you desire only intellectual, and not religious guidance. The difficulty is to effect any clear demarcation between the two. Certainly I should never take upon myself to offer religious advice to any one; it is difficult for those who have not qualified themselves for the priestly office to do that with force and effect. The manner in which a priest leads and manages a mind that has from the first been moulded in the beliefs and observances of his Church, cannot be imitated by a layman. A priest starts always from authority; his method, which has been in use from the earliest ages, consists first in claiming your unquestioning assent to certain doctrines, from which he immediately proceeds to deduce the inferences that may affect your conduct or regulate your thoughts. It is a method perfectly adapted to its own ends. It can deal with all humanity, and produce the most immediate practical results. So long as the assent to the doctrines is sincere, the sacerdotal system may contend successfully against some of the strongest forms of evil; but when the assent to the doctrines has ceased to be complete, when some of them are half-believed and others not believed at all, the system loses much of its primitive efficiency. It seems likely that your difficulty, the difficulty of so many intellectual men in these days, is to know where the intellectual questions end and the purely religious ones can be considered to begin. If you could once ascertain that, in a manner definitely satisfactory, you would take your religious questions to a clergyman and your intellectual ones to a man of science, and so get each solved independently.
Without presuming to offer a solution of so complex a difficulty as this, I may suggest to you that it is of some importance to your intellectual life to ascertain what religion is. A book was published many years ago by a very learned author, in which he endeavored to show that what is vulgarly called scepticism may be intellectual religion. Now, although nothing can be more distasteful to persons of culture than the bigotry which refuses the name of religion to other people’s opinions, merely because they are other people’s opinions, I suspect that the popular instinct is right in denying the name of religion to the inferences of the intellect. The description which the author just alluded to gave of what he called intellectual religion was in fact simply a description of philosophy, and of that discipline which the best philosophy imposes upon the heart and the passions. On the other hand, Dr. Arnold, when he says that by religion he always understands Christianity, narrows the word as much as he would have narrowed the word “patriotism” had he defined it to mean a devotion to the interests of England. I think the popular instinct, though of course quite unable to construct a definition of religion, is in its vague way very well aware of the peculiar nature of religious thought and feeling. The popular instinct would certainly never confound religion with philosophy on the one hand, nor, on the other, unless excited to opposition, would it be likely to refuse the name of religion to another worship, such as Mahometanism, for instance.
According to the popular instinct, then, which on a subject of this kind appears the safest of all guides, a religion involves first a belief and next a public practice. The nature of the belief is in these days wholly peculiar to religion; in other times it was not so, because then people believed other things much in the same way. But in these days the test of religious belief is that it should make men accept as certain truth what they would disbelieve on any other authority. For example, a true Roman Catholic believes that the consecrated host is the body of Christ, and so long as he lives in the purely religious spirit he continues to believe this; but so soon as the power of his religious sentiment declines he ceases to believe it, and the wafer appears to him a wafer, and no more. And so amongst Protestants the truly religious believe many things which no person not being under the authority of religion could by any effort bring himself to believe. It is easy, for example, to believe that Joshua arrested the sun’s apparent motion, so long as the religious authority of the Bible remains perfectly intact; but no sooner does the reader become critical than the miracle is disbelieved. In all ages, and in all countries, religions have narrated marvellous things, and the people have always affirmed that not to believe these narratives constituted the absence of religion, or what they called atheism. They have equally, in all ages and countries, held the public act of participation in religious worship to be an essential part of what they called religion. They do not admit the sufficiency of secret prayer.
Can these popular instincts help us to a definition? They may help us at least to mark the dividing line between religion and morality, between religion and philosophy. No one has ever desired, more earnestly and eagerly than I, to discover the foundations of the intellectual religion; no one has ever felt more chilling disappointment in the perception of the plain bare fact that the intellect gives morality, philosophy, precious things indeed, but not religion. It is like seeking art by science. Thousands of artists, whole schools from generation to generation, have sought fine art through anatomy and perspective; and although these sciences did not hinder the born artists from coming to art at last, they did not ensure their safe arrival in the art-paradise; in many instances they even led men away from art. So it is with the great modern search for the intellectual religion; the idea of it is scientific in its source, and the result of it, the last definite attainment, is simply intellectual morality, not religion in the sense which all humanity has attached to religion during all the ages that have preceded ours. We may say that philosophy is the religion of the intellectual; and if we go scrupulously to Latin derivations, it is so. But taking frankly the received meaning of the word as it is used by mankind everywhere, we must admit that, although high intellect would lead us inevitably to high and pure morality, and to most scrupulously beautiful conduct in everything, towards men, towards women, towards even the lower and lowest animals, still it does not lead us to that belief in the otherwise unbelievable, or to that detailed cultus which is meant by religion in the universally accepted sense. It is disingenuous to take a word popularly respected and attribute to it another sense. Such a course is not strictly honest, and therefore not purely intellectual; for the foundation of the intellectual life is honesty.
The difficulty of the intellectual life is, that whilst it can never assume a position of hostility to religion, which it must always recognize as the greatest natural force for the amelioration of mankind, it is nevertheless compelled to enunciate truths which may happen to be in contradiction with dogmas received at this or that particular time. That you may not suspect me of a disposition to dwell continually on safe generalities and to avoid details out of timidity, let me mention two cases on which the intellectual and scientific find themselves at variance with the clergy. The clergy tell us that mankind descend from a single pair, and that in the earlier ages the human race attained a longevity counted not by decades but by centuries. Alexander Humboldt disbelieves the first of these propositions, Professor Owen disbelieves the second. Men of science generally are of the same opinion. Few men of science accept Adam and Eve, few accept Methuselah. Professor Owen argues that, since the oldest skeletons known have the same system of teething that we have, man can never have lived long enough to require nine sets of teeth. In regard to these, and a hundred other points on which science advances new views, the question which concerns us is how we are to maintain the integrity of the intellectual life. The danger is the loss of inward ingenuousness, the attempt to persuade ourselves that we believe opposite statements. If once we admit disingenuousness into the mind, the intellectual life is no longer serene and pure. The plain course for the preservation of our honesty, which is the basis of truly intellectual thinking, is to receive the truth, whether agreeable or the contrary, with all its train of consequences, however repulsive or discouraging. In attempting to reconcile scientific truth with the oldest traditions of humanity, there is but one serious danger, the loss of intellectual integrity. Of that possession modern society has little left to lose.
But let us understand that the intellectual life and the religious life are as distinct as the scientific and the artistic lives. They may be led by the same person, but by the same person in different moods. They coincide on some points, accidentally. Certainly, the basis of high thinking is perfect honesty, and honesty is a recognized religious virtue. Where the two minds differ is on the importance of authority. The religious life is based upon authority, the intellectual life is based upon personal investigation. From the intellectual point of view I cannot advise you to restrain the spirit of investigation, which is the scientific spirit. It may lead you very far, yet always to truth, ultimately,—you, or those after you, whose path you may be destined to prepare. Science requires a certain inward heat and heroism in her votaries, notwithstanding the apparent coldness of her statements. Especially does she require that intellectual fearlessness which accepts a proved fact without reference to its personal or its social consequences.