In the course of our inquiry, one fact has been made strikingly manifest, namely, the persistence of religious ideas. We found that Christianity at its beginning was only the result of a tendency long latent in Judaism, that its doctrines were wholly Jewish while its adherents were chiefly Jews, and that afterwards, when Pagans in large numbers entered the Church, they carried with them and made Christian the principles of their Pagan religions. Similarly we saw that no new religion was created by the Reformation, that it was merely an instance of reversion, of the falling back of part of Christianity to an older type. In fact, from our study of this subject, we might conclude that religious ideas are practically indestructible, or, at least, that they can only be modified by gradual processes working during long periods of time.
This conclusion would be unquestionably correct, and it especially needs to be insisted on at the present moment. A conviction is general among enlightened men that we are on the threshold of a great religious revolution, which is to be effected by the speedy destruction of Christianity and the consequent abolition of supernatural religion. There seems to be some reason for this belief. Within the last half-century Christianity has declined considerably. Thought and culture have broken loose from it. Fifty years ago the vast majority of the men of letters and science of Europe professed some form of it; now only a small minority do so, and even this minority is steadily growing smaller. We might predict with almost absolute certainty that fifty years hence hardly a single believer in dogmatic Christianity will be found among the leading men of European literature and science. Christianity is dying at the top.
There is a certain resemblance between this state of things and the condition of the Roman world at the time Christianity was beginning to conquer it. Pagan religions then were dying at the top. Philosophers despised them and wits laughed at them; the thought of the age was as completely agnostic as the thought of our own day is tending to become. A thinker, studying the phenomena of the period, might then have reasonably concluded that supernatural religion was destined speedily to perish, that, as men of learning had abandoned it, after a short time their views would spread downwards, and be adopted by all classes of the people. How exquisitely this conclusion would have been exposed by the irony of history! Ten centuries later the religious ideas then current among the populace were common to every class, and the descendants and representatives of the philosophers who rejected super-naturalism were employing their philosophical powers in determining exactly the nature of angels. Perhaps the future is preparing a similar exposure for the philosophers of our own day, who are confident that supernatural religion will soon be a curiosity of the past. A few centuries hence, if esoteric Buddhism shall take the place of Christianity, perhaps philosophy will be engaged in explaining the meaning of “karma,” and science will be occupied in ascertaining the exact nature of an astral body.
Supernaturalism has just as much vitality now as it had a century after Christ. Even if within the next few hundred years Christianity were to become wholly extinct, the ideas underlying it would simply be transferred to some other form of dogmatic religion. The decline of Christianity now, like the decline of the Paganism of the Roman empire, so far as it is real, is the prelude to the formation of new religions. If the support to which the religious ideas of a generation have attached themselves is overthrown, they soon find another system to sustain them. The fall of an old religion is the signal for the rise of a new.
Signs of this transfer of religious allegiance are distinctly visible at present. There is the same mixture of credulity and scepticism now that there was in the first century of the Christian era. We, too, have a philosophical class intensely sceptical, but we also have a class of people who are eager votaries of new religions and excessively credulous. The credulity of the many is the consequence of the scepticism of the few, and is the mark of religious change. It now characterizes those whose faith in Christianity is shaken, but in whom religious ideas are as strong as ever.
The religious ideas now embodied in Christianity and stamped on the general mass of mankind come under the head of dogmatic supernaturalism; they are most of them concerned with God, personal immortality, heaven, and hell. This dogmatic supernaturalism began with the earliest illusions which created religion thousands of years ago. Since then, with every step of his upward progress, man has been more and more the slave of religious dogma. The higher religions of historical times have multiplied assertions about unknown phenomena; Christianity, the highest of religions, has done so most of all. Having inherited, then, this vast inheritance of belief in supernatural dogma, which began to accumulate in the remotest ages, and has since been enlarged and made sure by the great religion which for fifteen hundred years has been identified with the main civilization of the world, how can men of our own day lightly shake off supernaturalism! A few here and there, as variations from the general type necessarily limited in number, may manage to put it aside after a severe contest with the irrational instincts which they have inherited. But so far as the mass of mankind are concerned, ages must elapse before the work of ages can be undone.
Just as in the first century the disbelief of philosophers had discredited the Pagan religions, so now the disbelief of men of thought is discrediting Christianity. And as a certain class of Pagans then turned from the discredited religions to find another basis for their religious ideas, so now a certain class of people are seeking a basis for their religious ideas apparently surer than discredited Christianity. There is a difference of degree between the two periods; Christianity is not yet as much discredited as the Pagan religions were when it attacked them. We have not yet reached the condition of the time when the mysteries were the last props of Paganism, and the importation of foreign religions was one of the recognized industries of Rome. But the seeds of the development of such phenomena are plainly visible. Spiritualism and the Psychical Research Society are the rudiments of Christian mysteries, and certainly attempts on a small scale are being made to import religions into London from Syria and India.
Here in England between the large class of those who still believe in Christianity and the small class of those who put the supernatural wholly aside lies the class, continually increasing in numbers, of those who have lost faith in Christianity, but have not lost faith in the ideas which form the essence of it. Books like “Esoteric Buddhism” and Mr. Laurance Oliphant’s “Sympneumata” are written for and by members of this class. The absurd weakness of such attempts to give the supernatural a natural basis does not in the least detract from their popular power.
Life is full of inevitable illusions, and only a few are in a position to detect their illusive character. In regard to these illusions, the belief of the great majority of mankind must be determined by authority; they can only choose between alternative authorities. And their choice cannot rest on strong grounds of personal conviction. The class of people just mentioned, for instance, who have lost faith in Christianity, for the most part could give but poor reasons for their refusal to accept its dogmas. They simply feel that it is discredited, and they do not like to be on the losing side. Any system which embodies their religious ideas, and does not appear to be discredited, they will believe in readily, even though it has not a particle of evidence to support it.
Moreover, when men in general have to choose between authorities whose real weight they are not in a position to determine, their wishes naturally affect their choice. If one alternative is pleasanter than the other, they are sure to decide in its favour. Take, for instance, the belief in personal immortality. This rests on an illusion which can be seen through only by the exercise of a certain amount of philosophical imagination, namely, the impossibility of conceiving its own extinction inherent in the mind’s consciousness of life. As every one wishes to be immortal, that is, shrinks from the return to his pre-natal non-existence; and as nearly every one, besides, has lost some loved relative or friend whose death he cannot bear to think of as a final effacement, most people are quite ready to accept this illusion as valid evidence of the truth of the belief. Thus a religious system which asserts the immortality of the soul so far has mankind on its side. And the long influence of Christianity, which from the beginning has been built on the doctrine of personal immortality, has of course co-operated with its primary attractiveness in stamping it deeply on the nature of men of our times. Life seems unbearable to many people unless it is assumed to be true. It is a prominent feature of all our new religious growths. The Psychical Research Society seeks to confirm it by the evidence of ghost-stories. Many generations will have to pass away before mankind in general can renounce it, and till then, if only to supply it with an apparent basis, dogmatic religion must survive.