The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

II

Thus far the humanitarian sentiment has been regarded in its combination with Christian faith, and as giving new force and distinction to Christian life and thought. But, on the other hand, it must now be noted that the same force working apart from the Church, and often in opposition to it, has been a limitation to Christian progress. In the French Revolution humanitarianism was associated with a negative, destructive tendency, which overthrew the Church, disowned God and immortality, and set up in the place of deity a so-called Goddess of Reason. This negative tendency has continued to exist and has found influential manifestation. It has attempted the deification of humanity, as though the human race were worthy in itself of being an object of worship. It has exalted man at the expense of God, conceiving of humanity as alone immortal, as competent to steer its own course without supernatural direction. It has weakened the sense of nationality, has injured and endangered family life, has taken away the highest sanctions from morality, and has reduced religion from being a revelation from God to a purely subjective process in the soul of man, worthy of respect, but without authority. It has created an abnormal sensitiveness in many directions. It has swayed socialistic movements aiming at the rights of man and seeking to achieve universal happiness, but with an antagonism sometimes latent, sometimes expressed, to God and Christ and the Christian Church. The prejudice remains which had its birth in the French Revolution, that religion is a creation of priests for their own selfish ends, and the Church an agency for robbing humanity of its rights, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Principles and convictions like these found utterance in the philosophy of Comte (1789–1857), who called himself the “founder of the religion of humanity,” and who proposed the scheme of a humanitarian Church, limited by no national boundaries, whose only deity was man, whose ritual found a place only for great men who had been the benefactors of the race. Theology and metaphysics were discarded as outgrown methods of explaining the phenomena of the universe, and in the place they vacated stood the so-called “Positive philosophy” which rejected all supernatural influence. The Church of humanity had, indeed, no history and was a failure from its birth. But the combination, first seen in Comte, of humanitarianism with the methods and principles of natural science, has been the most formidable opponent against which Christianity was ever called to struggle. It has been represented in England by John Stuart Mill and by Herbert Spencer and many others. To the influential writings of this school of thinkers is due in great measure the widespread, deep-seated scepticism since the middle of the century. To the same cause, by way of reaction, are owing the spiritualistic movement, the so-called “Christian Science” and other kindred tendencies towards a crude supernaturalism.

Those who entered the controversy in behalf of Christianity and against the adherents of the Positive philosophy suffered at first for the lack of any adequate philosophical method on which to rest in the effort to overcome this stupendous alliance between a humanitarianism working for the improvement of social conditions in combination with natural science, whose postulates involved the denial of the miracle, and indeed of all supernatural agency (agnosticism). It seemed for a time as though the philosophy of Hegel would serve the purpose of a stronghold to which Christian warriors might resort while in the stress of a conflict which involved not only the readjustment of Christian doctrines to their new environment, but also the maintenance of the idea of God, of the kingdom of God in this world and of a future life for the immortal soul. In Germany systems of theology were worked out on the basis of Hegelian principles, which, as interpreted by orthodox theologians, stood for a principle of surpassing value if it could be maintained—that the life of humanity, while dependent in the present order on physical conditions, was yet above the life in external nature with which the natural sciences deal; that the very definition of humanity implies the power of rising to the knowledge of God. Nature has no knowledge or consciousness of God, or intimation of immortality. It is in bondage to natural law and without freedom. The life of humanity must not be studied from the point of view of natural science, but is seen in the records of human history. The influence of Hegel deepened the interest in historical inquiry at a moment when the absorption in the natural sciences threatened to gain the ascendency. But the Hegelian philosophy, for reasons which it is not possible here to render, failed to accomplish the service expected from it. It may be that the failure was temporary only, and because it was not fully understood. There arose a school of thinkers—the Hegelian left wing—who, while retaining their interest in history, yet fell under the influence of the presuppositions of the natural sciences. Thus Strauss, in his Leben Jesu, conceived of the person of Christ as a casual product of the human imagination, while Feuerbach, in his Essence of Christianity, reached the conclusion that religion begins and ends in a subjective process in the soul. Thus, instead of overcoming the Positive philosophy, German thought gravitated to the same result, with this difference perhaps, that it assumed the form of pantheism rather than of atheism. In the Tübingen school, led by F. C. Baur, whose contributions to the study of Church history are yet of high value, there was reserve about the miracle, if not its tacit denial, and a conception of the Christian Church as a product of human origin rather than the purpose of Christ.

But the effect of Strauss was beneficial in that it sent inquirers back to the study of the person of Christ and of His age. Never before was attention so concentrated upon the life of Jesus, as illustrated in a large number of biographical works, too large to be enumerated here. As a result of these studies, the conviction grows that while there is a local aspect of the person of Christ, so that He reflected the peculiar opinions and living interests of His age, and availed Himself of current beliefs, yet He was also infinitely above His time. What He was and did and said in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago must be supplemented by what He has been to the world in subsequent ages, or what He is and is doing in the present age.

While Christian thinkers were struggling with the problems raised by the Positive philosophy, the natural sciences were commanding in an increasing degree the world’s attention, until Darwin made his great discovery of a law of evolution, when it seemed as though natural science had become the arbiter and final tribunal before whose judgments the world must bow. Then there followed the sharp, even bitter conflict between science and theology, when scientific men whose lives had been spent in devotion to the study of natural phenomena were tempted to write expositions of religious history in order to show the fallaciousness of the religious attitude, and theologians, accustomed only to the postulates of the spiritual sphere, ventured into the domain of science to put a spiritual interpretation on its conclusions and discoveries. It was a confusing and painful moment when a subtle scepticism pervaded the Churches and haunted even the minds of Christian believers. Now that the smoke of the battle has cleared away, while many tragedies are disclosed, it does not appear that the Churches have been weakened by the strife or have yielded any essential truth or conviction. The belief in God, and in his creation and government of the world, the incarnation of God in Christ, the miracle for which Christ stands, and pre-eminently the miracle of His resurrection—in a word, the supernatural interpretation of life, remains unshaken. It is unjust to charge, as has sometimes been done, dishonesty and a spirit of evasion against those who, while the fierce battle was in progress, kept silence, unable to defend by cogent argument what yet they cherished still as true.

In the latter part of the century there came efforts at the reconstruction of theology in order to a better adjustment of the increase of knowledge regarding the nature of God and His relation to the world. The doctrine of God as immanent in the world, and not only transcendent or above and apart from it, has proved valuable in reconciling many of the discoveries of history and of natural science with the Christian faith. Efforts have also been made to simplify theology by the reduction of the large and complex, even conflicting, mass of Christian tenets and beliefs, given in history or represented in various Christian sects, to a few simple principles in which all must agree, resting for their confirmation not on metaphysics, but on the genuine Christian instincts as revealed in the New Testament. There has been attained also a better philosophical method for meeting the difficulties and perplexities of the age.

But these attempts at the better interpretation of revealed religion, and the formation of more consistent theological systems, have found a temporary rival in efforts to create, first of all, a better system of “natural theology,” as it may be called, which shall take account of the doctrine of evolution and other discoveries of natural science since Paley’s time and the day of the Bridgewater Treatises. Those who aim at a reconciliation of religion with science treat the idea of evolution as a mediating principle by which the conflict between science and religion may be overcome. This effort is the more significant, in view of the popular interest in evolution—a word which has become almost the watchword of the age. From this point of view the invasion of religious territory by scientific men (Huxley, Tyndale, Haeckel, and others), and the counter-invasion of scientific territory by philosophers and theologians, give promise of some mutual understanding in the future.