I.
I suppose there are few students of man and of society to whom the present religious condition and apparent religious prospect of the world can seem very satisfactory. If there is any lesson clear from history it is this; that, in every age religion has been the main stay both of private life and of the public order,—"the substance of humanity," as Quinet well expresses it, "whence issue, as by so many necessary consequences, political institutions, the arts, poetry, philosophy, and, up to a certain point, even the sequence of events."[26] The existing civilization of Europe and America—I use the word civilization in its highest and widest sense, and mean by it especially the laws, traditions, beliefs, and habits of thought and action, whereby individual family and social life is governed—is mainly the work of Christianity. The races which inhabit the vast Asiatic Continent are what they are chiefly from the influence of Buddhism and Mohammedanism, of the Brahminical, Confucian, and Taosean systems. In the fetichism of the rude tribes of Africa, still in the state of the childhood of humanity, we have what has been called the parler enfantin of religion:—it is that rude and unformed speech, as of spiritual babes and sucklings, which principally makes them to differ from the anthropoid apes of their tropical forests: "un peuple est compté pour quelque chose le jour où il s'elève a la pensée de Dieu."[27] But the spirit of the age is unquestionably hostile to all these creeds from the highest to the lowest. In Europe there is a movement—of its breadth and strength I shall say more presently—the irreconcilable hostility of which to "all religion and all religiosity," to use the words of the late M. Louis Blanc, is written on its front. Thought is the most contagious thing in the world, and in these days pain unchanged, but with no firm ground of faith, no "hope both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the vail," no worthy object of desire whereby man may erect himself above himself, whence he may derive an indefectible rule of conduct, a constraining incentive to self-sacrifice, an adequate motive for patient endurance,—such is the vision of the coming time, as it presents itself to many of the most thoughtful and competent observers.