In such a day, in such a time, we of the present age are living. The wave of the sub-race to which we all belong, or nearly all of us, that is breaking on the shore of time; the wave behind it of the race that shall be, to whom the new heaven and the new earth shall be a habitation—that is the race which is coming to the birth, which, in its turn, shall rule this changing earth. For many and many a century, nay, even for millennia, the slow course of evolution goes on quietly without much observation, and then suddenly comes a change—a change of a dying and a birthing race, a transition stage, a transition age in which all movement is rapid, in which catastrophes are frequent, in which sudden changes make themselves felt, in which men grow in a year more than their forefathers grew perhaps in a century. In such a transition age again the world is standing at the present time. Behind us, the long centuries through which the great Aryan race has been sending out wave after wave of humanity in successive billows, sweeping over Asia and over Europe, one after another rising, growing, ruling, and then passing to its fall. During all the time of a sub-race, the world rolls down what have been called the grooves of change, steadily, quietly, without much of jolt or of trouble; the wheels running fairly smoothly, continuously, with little of shock. And then, again, the time comes when a new sub-race must be born, when another shall succeed and the old shall pass away.
If you look around you now, on every side you will see the signs of a closing age; thoughts which have reached a point beyond which they cannot continue on the old lines and in the old methods, that which I have called a deadlock; in all the most important departments of human thought and human activity, rapid, extraordinarily rapid, growth. The changes which the elder amongst us have seen are marvellous exceedingly, change succeeding change, and each change greater than the one before it, until the whole of society seems to be rushing onwards swiftly without a pause, and men wonder what the next thought will be, what the next development will forebode.
It is not, of course, for the first time in human history that such a period as this has come upon the world. Look back to the time when the sub-race preceding the Teutonic was at the zenith of its power, and see then how troubled were the minds of men. It was the time that was marked by the birth of Him who is known in western lands as the Christ—a period of swift transition like our own, of marked and sudden changes. And if to the people of that day you had said, as I am now saying to you: “You are in one of the great transition periods of the world’s history; the race that is dominant and imperial is really reaching its zenith, and after the zenith comes the slow descent, inevitable, sure”; if you had said to the people of the time that among them would come a mighty Teacher who should revolutionise the future world and change the very foundations of civilisation; who should change the type of religion for the foremost races of the world; who should lift up a different ethical code, and make that virtuous which before had been despised, and that which had been looked down upon the topmost crown of saintship—if to the people of that day you had spoken such words, they would have laughed at you as dreamer or threatened you as madman. For why should the world change on its appointed ways, and why should the feet of the world seek to tread new and untrodden paths? And yet there were many who felt a change was coming; yet there were prophets and seers who spoke of a coming kingdom and a coming Teacher, and changes which should alter the face of the world. Of little use to look back to those far-off times if you repeat in your own day the blindness of the people then; for surely in these two thousand years men should have learned something more of wisdom, their eyes should have gained something more of insight, and the signs of a closing age should be more palpable to them than in the days of their forerunners in the closing age of Rome.
Even at that time a future was spoken of where changes should again occur, where a great Teacher should again appear, where a new age should be born, a new heaven and a new earth should be seen. It is in that next transition age, then, that you and I are standing; and although many of you may say, as they would have said of old, that I am a dreamer or am mad, none the less will I strive to tell you this evening, and the Sundays that follow, something of the signs by which you may judge for yourselves whether a great change is not coming over the world, whether there is not coming a new kingdom and a mighty Teacher, whether in our days again, as in the days of the past, the world is not to take on a new form and a nobler type of humanity to live and rule on earth, for many are the signs of the age that is closing, and many the signs also of the day that is dawning upon earth. In this and in the following lecture we shall be dealing with the dying, not the race which is to be born; and if in some ways, therefore, these two lectures may seem a little gloomy or a little grey, then I would remind you that the night must come before the dawn, and the greyness of the sky before the sunrising. If we can see behind the greyness the first faint gleams of the rose-tipped fingers of the dawn, ah! then we need not mind that the night is still with us, for the night is closing, and we, the children of the day, shall see the rising of the sun.
I have taken for this evening three great departments of human thought—Religion, Science, Art; and our task now is to see whether, looking over the world of religion, of science, and of art, we can find that the old methods have carried us as far as we can go, that they are breaking in our hands, that we no longer can use them for opening up new vistas of thought and hope for man. On every side there is a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling, I might almost say, of distress; a questioning what is truth, what is reliable? where can we find some rock on which we may put our feet amid all the buffeting of various opinions, of doubt, nay, of scepticism and unbelief?
I.—Religion.
What is the position of the religious world to-day? First of all, there have been working in it now for many long years certain forces undermining the religion of the time; and when I speak now of religion, I mean the religion of the West, for I am speaking in the West; although I might show you that in other parts of the world as well the same forces are at work, though not quite so prominently, and have brought about there to some extent the same results. Now, it is not from the mouth of a Theosophist like myself that I would ask you to take the testimony as to the difficulties in which the religious world finds itself to-day, and on the most important points of which I shall touch, after drawing your attention to the destructive forces that have been undermining religion, I shall take my testimony from bishop and from clergyman in their published writings, which all may read who will. The undermining forces that I allude to are chiefly three, and each destructive; the absence of construction is one of the signs of the day that is closing. First, as you know well, the undermining which has been done by scholarship in Christendom, in which what is called the higher criticism has been tearing to pieces the documents on which historical Christianity has been built up—taking one after another, examining, studying, scrutinising, comparing one kind of language with another kind in the same document; pointing out marks of different ages where a single writer was supposed to have been speaking, and gradually collecting from all sides different readings, placing them side by side, and finding them to a very great extent mutually destructive. So far has that gone, as you know, that, not so very long ago, the whole of this line of investigation was condemned by the authoritative head of the great Roman Catholic communion. The higher criticism, the historical dealing with Church teaching and Church history, the analysing, scrutinising, investigating spirit of our own time—the whole of that, with all its results, has been condemned and forbidden to be taught within the teaching establishments of the great Roman communion; the results of historical criticism have been banned, and, most fatal of all policies, kept largely out of the knowledge of those who are to become the teachers of the generations that are to be born. Is there any wonder, if you look at it only from the outside point? For where religion is a matter of authority, of books, of successions, of historical events, there criticism must always destroy; the form changes, and cannot remain stable in a transitory world, and we find the ancient documents shorn of their ancient value; we find inspiration, limited and fettered to words instead of the spirit, failing to hold its own against the critical scholarship of the day. One defence after another is thrown up, only to be abandoned before the approaching tide, as children throw up castles in the sand, dreaming that sand castles can stop the flow of waves. You know, on every side questions have arisen in regard to documents; most disheartening and discouraging if religion were a matter of books and words, and not a matter of the living and divine spirit in man, which no criticism is able to destroy. For, out of it all, thought arises and all criticism itself has birth. But, for the moment, in that tearing to pieces of the documents, one great inroad is made on the religion of the time.
Then, if you turn to another destructive force that has been undermining popular religion, you find it in archæological research; you find it in what is called comparative mythology, built up out of the results of that research; unburied cities, unburied libraries, unburied tombs—they have all given up their longhidden secrets, and those secrets have been used as weapons against the religion of the West. Dates have been thrown overboard, hundreds of years have been lengthened into millions; archæology, geology, antiquarianism of every kind, researches into long-dead races have all given the same result, shaking the very foundations on which it was thought, however wrongly, that religion must be built. Out of all this undermining, this destruction, from the continuously critical spirit of man, have arisen doubt and question and half-scepticism, and only a hope instead of a knowledge, only an aspiration instead of a living faith. And beyond those minor questions of religion which can be touched by this kind of destructive criticism, beyond and above those, the central ideas of religion have been thrown into the Crucible of Reason. The idea of God Himself has been under discussion, argued about, reasoned about, and the conception of God has changed. Who now dreams of troubling himself much about Butler’s Analogy? Who now would spend his time poring over Paley’s Evidence? These are out of date, and they do not deal with the questions of the time; for the thought of Evolution has affected religion, and the central conception of Deity has not been able to escape the corrosion of that atmosphere of thought. Here, again, outward demonstrations are failing, outward reasonings fail to satisfy. Reason, though piled upon reason, can give no more than a reasonable probability, so long as you watch for God only in the outer world, and not in His highest manifestation, the Spirit which lives in yourself. The idea of an extra-cosmic God is gradually disappearing from the world of thought. The idea of a God who made the universe as a piece of machinery, and stood outside it while the wheels were turning and the bands were working—that idea has almost passed away; and instead of that a God immanent in everything, a God who is a life and not a mechanician, a God who is an informing Spirit and not an outside creator—that nobler, more exquisite idea is dawning on the religious world to-day. But still, to see Him only immanent in the universe, that is not the final answer of religion; there is something more that is needed than the God who is found within the universe and within man, that mighty truth which is spoken out in an Eastern scripture: “I established this universe with a portion of Myself, and I remain.” That is one of the new avenues of thought, of escape from the destructive forces of the thought that we are considering.
Along another of the great Christian concepts there is much of trouble and of difficulty to-day. I take here, for a moment, one of a series of remarkable articles that appeared in the Hibbert Journal for January last, one perhaps of the finest numbers that have been issued, dealing with this question of the time. One of these articles has a strange title which marks out the crux of many a mind to-day; the title is, “Jesus or Christ?”; not “Jesus Christ,” not “Jesus and Christ,” but “Jesus or Christ?”; natural enough if it were written by a Theosophist, but this is written by a minister of a Christian church, and he confesses, with wonderful candour and boldness, the difficulties that all must face who are dealing on the one side with a spiritual ideal and on the other with a man. He asks whether the claims made are on behalf of a spiritual ideal, to which provisionally the word “Christ” may be applied, or are they predicated of Jesus; he then goes through a number of these difficulties (many of you would do well to read the article at your leisure), pointing out in how many cases in the New Testament you come across limitations, acceptance of the thought of the time, and many other difficulties which clash with the idea that this was Very God of Very God. “No condemnation,” he points out, “in the Sermon on the Mount is passed on the harsh and cruel law of debtor and creditor, nor would efforts for legal reform find any encouragement from the words attributed to the Master here. On non-resistance and oath-taking the rule attributed to Jesus is absolute. Yet, as a whole, Christendom has openly violated it throughout its history.” He then speaks of the view which is taken of man in relation to woman, of the “iniquitous principle of sex-inferiority as against woman,” a principle that “has inflicted infinite suffering on half of the human race.” And so he goes on, taking up point after point, and declaring that this conclusion can no longer be avoided—that to identify Jesus with Christ is to “make God a Being who is omnipotent, yet limited in power; omniscient, yet defective in knowledge; infinitely good, yet One who declines ‘to turn any part of His knowledge as God into science for man.’ … It would be an abuse of language to say that this is a mystery. It is flat contradiction.” Now when a clergyman can write like that in a publication that goes almost exclusively among the educated classes, you can realise how great is the difficulty which is confronting modern thought with regard to the personality of Jesus and the larger revelation of the Christ.
It is not possible that questions like this can remain always unanswered, that they should ever be asked and no reply be found; Christendom inevitably must work its way to some reasonable solution, and find how in that marvellous personality there was a divine revelation as men have hoped and believed, and how there is an answer, although orthodoxy as yet may not be prepared to give it. And if you pass from religion proper, as we may say, to the great domain of morals which is so closely bound up with it, see how difficult is the position at the present time. Now, since I was last here in London, you have had a Moral Education Congress, to which no less than twenty-two of the European Governments sent their best representatives. Intense interest was felt in the question of education as part of religion or apart from it. It is one of the most serious social questions of the day, one which society must answer: Shall morals be based on religion and sanctioned by religion, or can they find standing ground apart from, separate from it? Now, the ordinary popular answer of the day is rather in favour of the second—that morals should find an independent ground apart from the sanction of religion. And that is not unnatural, because the quarrels of religious bodies, their disputes over the question of education, have practically wearied the mind of England, and men and women get impatient with the struggles over trivialities where the moral training of tens of thousands of boys and girls, the future citizens of the country, is concerned. If you take that Moral Education Congress, the point was put very strongly and very plainly. Here, again, in this number of the Hibbert that I am dealing with, we find a very brief article speaking of that and of the relation of education to religion; and the writer speaks of one remarkable speech at the Education Congress, in which it was declared that while children should be taught “the respect due to the idea of religion … they are to be taught that the chief mode of honouring God consists in each doing his duty according to his conscience and his reason.” Now that is a statement that would find very wide acceptance at the present day, and yet its value or its lack of value depends on two words, “conscience” and “reason.” If the conscience be unenlightened, there will be very little useful service done to man by the boys and girls who follow that conscience as men and women. The enlightened conscience is truly the foundation of a State, but the unenlightened may lead men into every kind of crime. The inquisitor followed his conscience when he racked the heretic and sent him to the stake. Laud followed his conscience when he persecuted, tortured, mutilated Puritans who would not bow before him. Conscience has committed the greatest crimes against nations and against individuals; conscience must be enlightened before it is a safe guide. And so also with reason. If the reason is developed, illuminated, cultured, trained, that reason might indeed, be followed along the path of life; but a reason that is not exercised according to the laws of logic and right thinking may be as irrational as though the name of reason were not applied to it. It is not enough to teach that men should follow conscience and reason unless you train the reason and illuminate the conscience.