More and more the thinking and controlling races are developing the power of right reason; and more and more they are leaving to inferior and disappearing races the methods of theological dogmatism.
More and more, in all parts of the civilized world, is developing liberty of thought; and more and more is left behind the tyranny of formulas.
More and more is developing, in the leading nations, the conception of the world's sacred books as a literature in which, as in a mass of earthy material, the gems and gold of its religious thought are embedded; and more and more is left behind the belief in the literal, prosaic conformity to fact of all utterances in this literature.
To one who closely studies the history of humanity, evolution in religion is a certainty. Eddies there are,—counter-currents of passion, fanaticism, greed, hate, pride, folly, the unreason of mobs, the strife of parties, the dreams of mystics, the logic of dogmatists, and the lust for power of ecclesiastics,—but the great main tide is unmistakable.
What should be the attitude of thinking men, in view of all this? History, I think, teaches us that, just so far as is possible, the rule of our conduct should be to assist Evolution rather than Revolution. Religious revolution is at times inevitable, and at such times the rule of conduct should be to unite our efforts to the forces working for a new and better era; but religious revolutions are generally futile and always dangerous. As a rule, they have failed. Even when successful and beneficial, they have brought new evils. The Lutheran Church, resulting from the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century, became immediately after the death of Luther, and remained during generations, more inexcusably cruel and intolerant than Catholicism had ever been; the revolution which enthroned Calvinism in large parts of the British Empire and elsewhere brought new forms of unreason, oppression, and unhappiness; the revolution in France substituted for the crudities and absurdities of the old religion a "purified worship of the Supreme Being" under which came human sacrifices by thousands, followed by a reaction to an unreason more extreme than anything previously known. Goldwin Smith was right when he said, "Let us never glorify revolution."
Christianity, though far short of what it ought to be and will be, is to-day purer and better, in all its branches, than it has ever before been; and the same may be said of Judaism. Any man born into either of these forms of religion should, it seems to me, before breaking away from it, try as long as possible to promote its better evolution; aiding to increase breadth of view, toleration, indifference to unessentials, cooperation with good men and true of every faith. Melanchthon, St. Francis Xavier, Grotius, Thomasius, George Fox, Fenelon, the Wesleys, Moses Mendelssohn, Schleiermacher, Dr. Arnold, Channing, Phillips Brooks, and their like may well be our exemplars, despite all their limitations and imperfections.
I grant that there are circumstances which may oblige a self-respecting man to withdraw from religious organizations and assemblages. There may be reactionary zeal of rabbis, priests, deacons, destructive to all healthful advance of thought; there may be a degeneration of worship into fetishism; there may be control by young Levites whose minds are only adequate to decide the colors of altar-cloths and the cut of man-millinery; there may be control by men of middle age who preach a gospel of "hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"; there may be tyranny by old men who will allow no statements of belief save those which they learned as children.
From such evils, there are, in America at least, many places of refuge; and, in case these fail, there are the treasures of religious thought accumulated from the days of Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, and Thomas a Kempis to such among us as Brooks, Gibbons, Munger, Henry Simmons, Rabbis Weinstock and Jacobs, and very many others. It may be allowed to a hard-worked man who has passed beyond the allotted threescore years and ten to say that he has found in general religious biography, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant, and in the writings of men nobly inspired in all these fields, a help without which his life would have been poor indeed.
True, there will be at times need of strong resistance, and especially of resistance to all efforts by any clerical combination, whether of rabbis, priests, or ministers, no matter how excellent, to hamper scientific thought, to control public education, or to erect barriers and arouse hates between men. Both Religion and Science have suffered fearfully from unlimited clerical sway; but of the two, Religion has suffered most.
When one considers the outcome of national education entirely under the control of the church during over fifteen hundred years,—in France at the outbreak of the revolution of 1789, in Italy at the outbreak of the revolution of 1848, in the Spanish-American republics down to a very recent period, and in Spain, Poland, and elsewhere at this very hour,—one sees how delusive is the hope that a return to the ideas and methods of the "ages of faith" is likely to cure the evils that still linger among us.