III.—THE DRIFTS OF FREE-RELIGIONISM.
It would be difficult to predict the precise course of these “come-outers” of the latest date, called free-religionists. Some will probably stop after having repudiated Protestantism, rest upon the truths of reason, and, without inquiring further, vainly try to satisfy, with a species of theism, the great aspirations and deep needs of their souls; eventually they may fall back on old Unitarianism. Others will venture to examine, as some before them have done, the claims of the Catholic Church, and finding that these are founded on human reason, that her doctrines perfect the truths of human reason, and that she alone is adequate to satisfy all the wants of the human heart, will become in the course of time Catholics, and save their souls—that is, reach their high destiny. Another section will, during, perhaps, their whole lives, seriously amuse themselves with the study of Brahminism, Buddhism, and every other kind of outlandish religion—not a vain intellectual amusement, except when associated with the absurd idea of concocting a new religion. While the larger section, we fear, will follow the tangent and end in nihilism. For although the main drift of the religious world outside of the Catholic Church, especially in the United States, is towards naturalism; although the face of each free-religionist looks in a somewhat different way, yet the actual movement of the greatest number of these Unitarian dissenters is apparently in the direction of zero.
Precisely where the president of the Free-Religious Association stands, to what definite truths he assents as undeniable, and what convictions he holds as settled, is not to be gathered from any of his sermons, tracts, speeches, and several published books. He seems to be laboring under the impression that he has a mission to bring forth a new religion, but thus far he or his associates in this illusive idea have given to the world no new word in religion, or in morals, or in philosophy, or in politics, or in social life, or in art, or in science, or in method, or in anything else scibile. Mr. William R. Alger has ventured to predict to his free-religionist brethren in their last annual gathering a new incarnation and its gospel, in which we fail to see anything new or important, if true. “The spirit of science,” such are the words of his prophecy, “enriched with the spirit of piety, is the avatar of the new Messiah.”
Francis Ellswood Abbot, a conspicuous member of the Free-Religious Association, as well as one of its active directors and the editor of the Index, a weekly journal which is in some sort the organ of the free-religious movement, has, among other notable things, come to the front and publicly impeached Christianity. His indictment contains five counts against the Christian religion: “human intelligence, human virtue, the human heart, human freedom, and humanitarian religion.”[[19]] Here are his charges: “Christianity,” he says, “no longer proclaims the highest truths, inculcates the purest ethics, breathes the noblest spirit, stimulates to the grandest life, holds up to the soul and to society the loftiest ideal of that which ought to be.”[[20]] But this is neither new nor original; for what is the Christianity which Mr. Abbot so boldly impeaches? Why, in all its main features it is that disfigurement of Christianity which he has inherited from his Calvinistic progenitors, and which the Council of Trent impeached, and for the most part on the very same grounds as he does, more than three centuries ago; so that in each of his articles of impeachment every Catholic to-day will heartily join, and to each of his charges say: Amen; Anathema sit!
What is surprising to Catholics is that there should be intelligent and educated men living in this enlightened nineteenth century who have found out that Calvinism is false, and have not yet discovered in the intellectual environment of Boston that Calvinism is not Christianity. “They do not attack the Catholic Church,” said Daniel O’Connell, in speaking of a similar class of men, “but a monster which they have created and called the Catholic Church.”
But Mr. Abbot is not of the men who are content to rest in mere negation. In a lecture delivered by him in a course under the auspices of the Free-Religious Association, entitled A Study of Religion, after much preliminary discourse, he gives with the heading, “The New Conception of Religion,” the following definition of religion: “Religion,” he says, “is the effort of man to perfect himself.”[[21]] Now, what is the origin of “man’s effort to perfect himself”? “Religion,” he affirms, “appears in its universal aspect as the decree of Nature that her own end shall be achieved. Religion is the inward impulsion of Nature, seconded by the conscious effort of the individual to conform to it,” etc.[[22]]
What Mr. Abbot calls “nature” and “ideal excellence in all directions” is what the common sense of mankind has named God. Mr. Abbot has no objection to the same name; only he insists that the idea of God, which is very proper, should be submitted “to the educated intelligence of the human race.”[[23]] “It is,” he says, “because I do believe in God that I am willing to submit my belief in him to the sharpest and most searching scrutiny of science.”[[24]]
Now, Mr. Abbot admits that if you once concede the Messianic claim of Christ, “then it is true that Catholicism is itself Christianity in its most perfect form.”[[25]] He therefore stops virtually in his analysis of religion at the idea of God, and, if he believed in the Divinity of Christ and did not eschew logic, he would have to embrace Catholicity. Mr. Abbot, like many Unitarians, agrees on this point with P. J. Proudhon, but with this difference: the Frenchman recedes a step, and maintains that “outside of Christianity there is no God, no religion, no faith, no theology.... The church believes in God, and believes in God more faithfully and more perfectly than any sect. The church is the purest, most perfect, and most enlightened revelation of the divine Being, and none other understands what is worship. From a religious stand-point the Catholicism of the Latin peoples is the best, the most rational, and the most perfect. Rome, in spite of her repeated and frightful falls, remains the only legitimate church.” Hence Proudhon and those of his school lay it down as a sine qua non that the elimination of the idea of God, and of all obligation to any divine law, is the condition of all true progress. From this we may draw the conclusion that Francis E. Abbot is on the curve line, and, if he follows out his definition of religion to its logical consequences, he will surely land, whatever may be the sweep of his continuous curve, in the bosom of the Catholic Church. There is no escape from this ultimate result, if reason is to rule, except by hastily taking the back track, and starting on the tangent, and eventually plunging with Proudhon into the dark abyss of nihilism. Hence every sagacious straight-line radical cannot but look upon the platform of the editor of the Index as the jumping-off place into popery for all consistent theists. That this is not meant as pleasantry, but is written in downright earnestness, we quote the conclusion of his lecture on A Study of Religion, and preface it by saying that the language with which he urges his definition of religion on his hearers finds in every word an echo in the hearts of all sincere and instructed Catholics, and receives their full endorsement.
“I speak now,” he says, “as one who believes in religion, thus conceived, from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head, without apology either for the name or the thing, and without the smallest concession to the prejudice that assails either the one or the other. To-day I speak only to the large in heart and broad in mind—to those who must accept science and would fain accept religion too. To these I say that science itself would lose its fearless love of truth, were it not that religion fed its secret springs; that social reform would lose its motive and inspiration, literature and art their beauty, and all human life its sweetest and tenderest grace, did not religion evermore create the insatiable hunger after perfection in the soul of man. Bright, cheerful, ennobling, stimulating, emancipating, religion is the greatest friend of humanity, ever guiding it upward and onward to the right and the true; ay, and to all we yearn for, if, as we believe, the right and the true are indeed the pathway to God.”
But not all free-religionists are gifted with so deep, intelligent, and healthy an appreciation of the essence of religion as Francis E. Abbot, who leaves nothing at present to be desired but the courage of his convictions—proficiat!
There is, however, in the Christian Inquirer a revelation made by William Ellery Channing, a distinguished nephew of the celebrated Dr. Channing, which tells quite another story. It appears by this article that the president of the Free Religious Association, O. B. Frothingham, had attributed to Mr. Channing, one of the speakers in the tenth annual assembly, a “poetic Christianity,” a “religion in the air,” an “up-in-a-balloon” religion, and in reply to this accusation he draws from nature the following unattractive personal portraits:
“Let me,” says Mr. Channing, “make a clean breast of it to you before all onlookers. What you mean by the ‘rumors’ that I had become ‘ecclesiastical in tastes and opinions’ I can but conjecture. But the simple facts are in brief these: You remember how seven years ago, on the public platform, and in the reunions of the Free-Religionists in dear John Sargent’s hospitable rooms, and in private ‘confabs’ with yourself, and W. J. Potter, and S. Longfellow, and S. Johnson, and J. Weiss, and T. W. Higginson, and D. A. Wasson, and F. E. Abbot, etc., I tried to preach my gospel, that the vital centre of free religious union is the life of God in man as made gloriously manifest in Jesus the Christ. And you remember, too, how around that centre I illustrated the historic fact that the great religions of our race arranged themselves in orderly groups. For nearly a year I opened my heart and mind to the free-religionists and liberal Christians, without a veil to hide my inmost holy of holies. But shall I tell you, my friend, that when I bade you all farewell, in the summer of 1870, it was with sad forebodings? And why? The story, too long to tell in full, ran thus: One, in his wish to be bathed in the sense of ever-present Deity, had ceased to commune with the Spirit of spirits in prayer. Another, in his repulsion from imprisoning anthropomorphism, had abandoned all conceptions of a personal God, and so lost the Father. A third, in his historic purpose to lead a heavenly-human life, here and now, gave up the hope of immortal existence, as a sailor might turn from contemplating the cloud-palaces of sunset to pull the tarry cordage and spread the coarse canvas of his ship. And, saddest of all, a fourth, in his bold purpose to be spontaneous in every impulse and emotion, spurned the motherly monitions of duty so sternly that conscience even seemed driven to return to heaven, like ‘Astræa Redux.’ In brief, one felt as if the liberal college of all religions in council with pantheism, agnosticism, and atheistic materialism was destined to fall flat to dust in a confused chaos of most commonplace spiritual ‘know-nothingism.’ Such was my disheartening vision of the near future for dearly-loved compeers. And a darker valley of ‘devastation,’ as our Swedenborgian friends say, than I was driven into I have never traversed.”
But Mr. Channing goes further; he shows that he has studied the religious philosophers of antiquity to some purpose, seized their true meaning and real drift, and in touching language takes his readers into his confidence, offering to them an insight into his present relations to Christianity.
The following remarkable paragraph possesses a thrilling interest for Catholics; and if it affects others as it has the present writer on reading it, they will not fail to offer up an aspiration to Him who has given such graces to the soul of the man who penned it—and doubtless to others among the free-religionists—that he will render their faith explicit and perfect it.
“Once again,” he says, “I sought comfort with the blessed company of sages and saints of the Orient and Hellas—with Lao-Tsee and Kung Fu-Tsee; with the writers of the Bhagava-Geeta and the Dhamma-Bada; of the hymns of ancient Avesta and the modern sayings and songs of the Sufis; with radiant Plato and heroic Epictetus, etc., etc. Once more they refreshed and reinspirited me as of old. But they did something better: hand in hand they brought me up to the white marble steps, and the crystal baptismal font, and the bread and wine-crowned communion-table—ay, to the cross in the chancel of the Christian temple—and, as they laid their hands in benediction on my head, they whispered: ‘Here is your real home. We have been but your guides in the desert to lead you to fellowship with the Father and his Son in the spirit of holy humanity. Peace be with you.’ And so, my brother, once again, and with a purer, profounder, tenderer love than ever, like a little child, I kissed the blood-stained feet and hands and side of the Hero of Calvary, and laid my hand on the knees of the gentlest of martyrs, and was uplifted by the embracing arms of the gracious elder Brother, and in his kiss of mingled pity and pardon found the peace I sought, and became a Christian in experience, as through a long life I had hoped and prayed to be. Depend upon it, dear Frothingham, there is on this small earth-ball no reality more real than this central communion with God in Christ, of which the saints of all ages in the church universal bear witness.”