THE SCEPTICISM OF THE AGE.
The strong current of scepticism which set in during the eighteenth century extends into the nineteenth. Among the lower strata of society, among the dwellings of the poor—long the last refuge of religion—and especially among the factories and workshops, this scepticism has made various inroads on the ancient foundations of faith. By the sulphurous glare of the ominous flashes which momentarily relieve the clouded European horizon, we often catch glimpses of the horrors that are steadily accumulating in the lowest social depths. A powerful Christian current, whose volume has as usual increased with persecution, runs evidently by the side of this scepticism, but the latter, nevertheless, preponderates, and it is therefore not surprising that the barometric mean of our civilization should be such a low one.
The frivolous scepticism of the Voltairean school, now almost extinct in the French army, still survives among a majority of the political and military leaders of the other Latin nations, as, for instance, in Spain and Piedmont. For this reason the noble Spanish people, in spite of their hereditary virtues and high spirit, are still accursed with mediocre party leaders, while statesmen like the pious and chivalrous Valdegamas are only too rare. In Piedmont, unbelief, leagued with Italian cunning and rapacity, has during the last years borne blossoms which may well make us blush for our boasted civilization. "The proclamation of Cialdini and Pinelli" (one of which calls the Pope a clerical vampire and vicegerent of Satan), observed Nicotera, speaking in the National Assembly of the conduct of these generals in Naples and Sicily, "would disgrace a Gengis-Khan and an Attila!" "Such acts," exclaimed Aversano, alluding to the same subject in the Italian Parliament, "must disgrace the whole nation in the eyes of the world!" "It is literally true," said Lapena, President of the Assizes at Santa Maria, "that in this second half of the nineteenth century a horde of cannibals exists in our beautiful Italy!"
Other nations may perhaps thank God with the Pharisee in Scripture that they are not like the Italians. But if they have not gone to the length of fusillading defenceless priests (the case of Gennaro d'Orso, Gazette du Midi, February 1, 1861)—if they have never trodden under foot the crucifix—if their mercenaries have never raised blasphemous hands against the consecrated Host (Giornale di Roma, January 24, 1861)—in short, if other European nations have not yet been guilty of such atrocities as the Italians, very few have much cause to pride themselves upon their godliness and piety. Even in Germany, the fanaticism of infidelity has brought men close to the boundary-line which divides a false civilization from barbarism, and in some cases this line has already been crossed. At Mannheim the cry, "Kill the priests, and throw them into the Rhine!" was raised in 1865. In many parts of Southern Germany, the members of certain religious orders have been grossly ill-treated by an ignorant and brutal populace. "It is but too true," says the Archbishop of Freiburg, in his pastoral of May 7, 1868, "that the servants of the church are often exposed to insult and violence."
Ascending from the levels of ordinary life into the higher regions of civilization, science, and art, we discover that the scepticism of the last century has made more progress among our philosophers and poets. It is especially among the former that this scepticism seems to have gained ground, for materialism ranks lower in the scale of intelligence than the deification of the human mind. This return to the atomic theory of Epicurus is calculated rather to stupefy than to enlighten, for Humboldt remarks that a multiplicity of elementary principles is not to be met with even among the savages. Materialism is utterly incapable of elevating the heart, and destroys therefore a branch of civilization quite as essential as intellectual culture itself. Where all this tends to, how it brutalizes man and degrades him below the animal, how it obliterates every distinction between good and evil, how it robs our accountability of all meaning, how it makes the savage state with its attendant ignorance and barbarism our normal condition, has been forcibly pointed out in Haeffner's admirable treatise on The Results of Materialism. "The materialist," says Haeffner, "virtually tells man: You are wrong to set yourself in aristocratic pride over the other brutes; you are wrong to claim descent from a nobler race than the myriads of worms and grains of sand that lie at your feet; you are wrong to build your dwelling above the stalls of the animals: descend, therefore, from your grand height, and embrace the cattle in the fields, greet the trees and grasses as equals, and extend your hand in fellowship to the dust whose kindred you are."
As in modern philosophy, so the scepticism of the preceding century is equally manifest in modern poetry. "No department of human activity," observes a profound thinker of the present day, "is so feeble and occupies so low a moral standpoint as poetry, through which all the demoralization of the eighteenth century has been transmitted." It is a sort of confessional, from which we publish to the world our own effeminacy and degradation—not to regret and repent, but to defend and make parade of them. What we feel ashamed to say in simple prose, we proclaim boldly and complacently in rhyme. If a poet soars now and then to virtue, it is generally only virtue in the ancient heathen sense. Hence it comes that, when a political storm impends in the sultry atmosphere of the Old World, the night-birds and owls of anarchy fill the air with their cries. In times of peace they luxuriate in our modern political economism with the law of demand and supply, by whose agency human labor has been reduced to a mere commodity. In literature they preach the evangel of materialism under the flimsy guise of so-called popularized science, and even the school has been perverted into an institution whose sole object seems to be to supply labor for the white slave mart.
Those who desire to behold the fruits which spring from this unchristian culture of material interests should go to England for an illustration. Though the Anglican sect is the state religion, infidelity has made nowhere greater progress than in that country. Its principal church, St. Paul's, London, gives no evidences of Christianity. The interior does not address itself like Paul to the Areopagus, but like the Areopagus to Paul, for it inculcates an unadulterated heathenism. The first monument that arrests the attention of the visitor is dedicated to the pagan Fama, who consoles Britannia for the loss of her heroic sons. The next monument belongs to the heathen goddess of Victory, who crowns a Pasenby; while a Minerva calls the attention of budding warriors to La Marchand's death at Salamanca. Then come a Neptune with open arms, Egyptian sphinxes, the East India Company seal. When the principal religious edifice of a nation is thus turned into a heathen temple, the people themselves must become heathenized, and this we find to be so here. In Liverpool 40, in Manchester 51, in Lambeth 61, in Sheffield 62 per cent. profess no religion at all. So says the London Times of May 4, 1860. In the city of London thousands and tens of thousands know no more of Christianity than the veriest pagans. In the parish of St. Clement Danes, on the Strand, the rector discovered an irreligiousness incredible to believe (Quarterly Review, April, 1861). For generations hundreds and thousands of coal miners have lived in utter ignorance of such a book as the Bible. In answer to the question whether he had ever heard of Jesus Christ, one of them replied: "No, for I have never worked in any of his mines." Innumerable facts attest that civilization retrogrades in a ratio with this deplorable religious ignorance. "Among all the states of Europe," remarked Fox in the House of Commons (Feb. 26, 1850), "England is the one where education has been most neglected." The justice of this observation is fully sustained by the report presented in May of the same year by the board of school trustees of Lancashire: "Nearly half the people of this great nation," say they, "can neither read nor write, and a large part of the remainder possesses only the most indispensable education." Out of 11,782 children, 5,805 could barely spell, and only 2,026 could read with fluency. Out of 14,000 teachers, male and female, 7,000 were found grossly incompetent for their positions. Among the troops sent to the Crimea, no more than one soldier in every five was able to write a letter home.
A glance at a few statistics will clearly show that moral deterioration keeps even pace with the intellectual. From 1810 to 1837, the number of criminals has annually increased, in certain districts, from 89 to 3,117; from 1836 to 1843, the average number of persons arrested each year in the manufacturing districts of York and Lancaster increased over 100 per cent., and the number of murderers 89 per cent.; from 1846 to 1850, the number of criminals in the Dorset district increased from 726 to 1,300, giving, in a population of 115,000 souls, 1 criminal to every 60 individuals. In London, the number of persons arrested in 1856 amounted to 73,260, whence it appears that about 1 inhabitant in every 40 passes through the hands of the police. Of the 200,000 criminal offences tried each year before the English tribunals, one-tenth part are committed by children, and 50,000 by persons less than twenty years of age. In London alone, 17,000 minors are yearly tried, which is 1 inhabitant in every 175; whereas the ratio for Paris is only 1 inhabitant in every 400. Mayhew computes that £42,000 are stolen during the year in the metropolis; and the London Examiner lately deplored that there should be less danger in crossing the great desert than in passing through some of the more remote suburbs of London at night. The story of a Professor Fagin, who gave private lessons in stealing, has often been regarded as a canard; but we read, in the Morning Chronicle, an advertisement in which one Professor Harris announces a similar course of instruction, and even promises his pupils to take them, for practice, to the theatres and other places of public resort. Among these startling fruits of British civilization must be included the 28 cases of polygamy which occurred in London in a single twelvemonth; the 12,770 illegitimate children born, during 1856, in the workhouses alone; the children market, held openly in a London street every Wednesday and Thursday, between the hours of six and seven, where parents exhibit their offspring for sale, or hire them out for infamous purposes. Such being the condition of an overwhelming majority of the people, it is no longer difficult to credit the existence of the new race which is now said to be growing up in England—a race whose civilization Dr. Shaw contrasts, rather disparagingly, with that of the African and the Indian. "After a careful investigation," says Dr. Shaw, "I have been forced to arrive at the conclusion that, while the moral, physical, intellectual, and educational status of the lowest English classes is about on the same level with that of the savage, they rank even below him in morals and customs."
And what has England, politically considered, done for the cause of civilization since cotton achieved its great triumph over corn? As one of the great powers of the Christian world, she has virtually abdicated. For national right and justice, for really oppressed nationalities, she has long ceased to upraise her voice or her arm. It is only when some Manchester cotton-lord suffers an injury in his pocket that her fleets threaten a bombardment. She is an asylum for the refuse of all nations, and freely permits the torch of the incendiary to be cast into the dwellings of her neighbors. Her literature, philosophy, religion, as well as her industry, trade, and diplomacy, are intended to hand the nations completely over to materialism. Wherever England's policy predominates, there virtue and simplicity, happiness and peace, disappear from the earth, and out of the ruins rises an arrogant and inordinate craving for the goods of this world. British influence has destroyed Portugal, weakened Spain, distracted Italy, and impaired the moral prestige of France. Her religious apathy encourages a degrading heathenism. Britain's political economy has inaugurated in Europe not only a serfdom of labor, but a serfdom of mind. The Scotchman, Ferguson, predicted that thought would become a trade, and Lasalle remarks that it has already become one in the hands of most English scholars. And these are the results of our much-vaunted civilization!
The pernicious example set by England in philosophy, poetry, and letters has unfortunately found but too many imitators on the Continent of Europe and elsewhere. Our literature is at present in the same condition in which it was in the days of Sophists and Greek decadence. When God desires to punish a civilized people—remarked some years ago an eloquent French pulpit orator—he visits them with such a swarm of unbelieving scholars as the clouds of locusts which he inflicted upon ancient Egypt. Men of perverse heads and corrupted hearts generate, in centuries which are called enlightened, a darkness upon which the goddess Genius of Knowledge sheds uncertain flashes, resembling the lightning which relieves the evening sky on the approach of a storm: The Sophists of ancient Greece were such heralds of impending wrath and desolation, and this class of men closely resemble the majority of our modern literati. If we compare the atheistic, material tendencies of a Protagoras, Antiphon, or Œnopides with our present progressive science; if we recall the time when Prodikus or Critias, in their efforts to destroy the religion of Greece, represented it as an invention of selfishness or of the ancient lawgivers; if Hippias offered himself to lecture on every conceivable subject, just as prominent writers now undertake to discuss all topics; if the latter again cloak their designs under the same phraseology; in short, when all this is once more re-enacted, then the parallel between that age and our own will be found almost perfect. The same class of scholars flourished in both eras; in both they claimed to be the high-priests of truth, although they are no more entitled to this honor than those whom Lucian describes leading the Syrian goddess on asses about the land. We live, in fact, in the days of a declining civilization, and nothing but a speedy return to the cardinal principles of Christianity can save us from relapsing into barbarism.