Footnote 7:[(return)]
Siebeck, Religionsphilosophie, 1893, s. 407.
[CHAPTER VI]
[THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES: ACTION AND REACTION]
In those aspects of our subject with which we have thus far dealt, leadership has been largely with the Germans. Effort was indeed made in the chapter on the sciences to illustrate the progress of thought by reference to British writers. In this department the original and creative contribution of British authors was great. There were, however, also in the earlier portion of the nineteenth century movements of religious thought in Great Britain and America related to some of those which we have previously considered. Moreover, one of the most influential movements of English religious thought, the so-called Oxford Movement, with the Anglo-Catholic revival which it introduced, was of a reactionary tendency. It has seemed, therefore, feasible to append to this chapter that which we must briefly say concerning the general movement of reaction which marked the century. This reactionary movement has indeed everywhere run parallel to the one which we have endeavoured to record. It has often with vigour run counter to our movement. It has revealed the working of earnest and sometimes anxious minds in directions opposed to those which we have been studying. No one can fail to be aware that there has been a great Catholic revival in the nineteenth century. That revival has had place in the Roman Catholic countries of the Continent as well. It was in order to include the privilege of reference to these aspects of our subject that this chapter was given a double title. Yet in no country has the nineteenth century so favourably altered the position of the Roman Catholic Church as in England. In no country has a Church which has been esteemed to be Protestant been so much influenced by Catholic ideas. This again is a reason for including our reference to the reaction here.
According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy may be said to have begun in Great Britain in the year 1825, with the publication of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection. In Coleridge's Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, published six years after his death in 1834, we have a suggestion of the biblical-critical movement which was beginning to shape itself in Germany. In the same years we have evidence in the works of Erskine and the early writings of Campbell, that in Scotland theologians were thinking on Schleiermacher's lines. In those same years books of more or less marked rationalistic tendency were put forth by the Oriel School. Finally, with Pusey's Assize Sermon, in 1833, Newman felt that the movement later to be called Tractarian had begun. We shall not be wrong, therefore, in saying that the decade following 1825 saw the beginnings in Britain of more formal reflexion upon all the aspects of the theme with which we are concerned.
What went before that, however, in the way of liberal religious thinking, though informal in its nature, should not be ignored. It was the work of the poets of the end of the eighteenth and of the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The culmination of the great revolt against the traditional in state and society and against the conventional in religion, had been voiced in Britain largely by the poets. So vigorous was this utterance and so effective, that some have spoken of the contribution of the English poets to the theological reconstruction. It is certain that the utterances of the poets tended greatly to the dissemination of the new ideas. There was in Great Britain no such unity as we have observed among the Germans, either of the movement as a whole or in its various parts. There was a consecution nothing less than marvellous in the work of the philosophers from Kant to Hegel. There was a theological sequence from Schleiermacher to Ritschl. There was an unceasing critical advance from the days of Strauss. There was nothing resembling this in the work of the English-speaking people. The contributions were for a long time only sporadic. The movement had no inclusiveness. There was no aspect of a solid front in the advance. In the department of the sciences only was the situation different. In a way, therefore, it will be necessary in this chapter merely to single out individuals, to note points of conflict, one and another, all along the great line of advance. Or, to put it differently, it will be possible to pursue a chronological arrangement which would have been bewildering in our study heretofore. With the one great division between the progressive spirits and the men of the reaction, it will be possible to speak of philosophers, critics and theologians together, among their own contemporaries, and so to follow the century as it advances.
In the closing years of the eighteenth century in England what claimed to be a rational supernaturalism prevailed. Men sought to combine faith in revealed religion with the empirical philosophy of Locke. They conceived God and his relation to the world under deistical forms. The educated often lacked in singular degree all deeper religious feeling. They were averse to mysticism and spurned enthusiasm. Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical side of the empirical philosophy, played a prominent part also in orthodox belief. The theory of the universe which obtained among the religious is seen at its worst in some of the volumes of the Warburton Lectures, and at its best perhaps in Butler's Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion. The character and views of the clergy and of the ruling class among the laity of the Church of England, early in the nineteenth century, are pictured with love and humour in Trollope's novels. They form the background in many of George Eliot's books, where, in more mordant manner, both their strength and weaknesses are shown. Even the remarks which introduce Dean Church's Oxford Movement, 1891, in which the churchly element is dealt with in deep affection, give anything but an inspiring view.
The contrast with this would-be rational and unemotional religious respectability of the upper classes was furnished, for masses of the people, in the quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after the manner of the Methodists. But the Methodism of the earlier age had as good as no intellectual relations whatsoever. The Wesleys and Whitefield had indeed influenced a considerable portion of the Anglican communion. Their pietistic trait, combined, for the most part, with a Calvinism which Wesley abhorred and an old-fashioned low church feeling with which also Wesley had no sympathy, shows itself in the so-called evangelical party which was strong before 1830. This evangelical movement in the Church of England manifested deep religious feeling, it put forth zealous philanthropic effort, it had among its representatives men and women of great beauty of personal character and piety. Yet it was completely cut off from any living relation to the thought of the age. There was among its representatives no spirit of theological inquiry. There was, if anything, less probability of theological reconstruction, from this quarter, than from the circles of the older German pietism, with which this English evangelicalism of the time of the later Georges had not a little in common. There had been a great enthusiasm for humanity at the opening of the period of the French Revolution, but the excesses and atrocities of the Revolution had profoundly shocked the English mind. There was abroad something of the same sense for the return to nature, and of the greatness of man, which moved Schiller and Goethe. The exponents of it were, however, almost exclusively the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron. There was nothing which combined these various elements as parts of a great whole. Britain had stood outside the area of the Revolution, and yet had put forth stupendous efforts, ultimately successful, to make an end of the revolutionary era and of the Napoleonic despotism. This tended perhaps to give to Britons some natural satisfaction in the British Constitution and the established Church which flourished under it. Finally, while men on the Continent were devising holy alliances and other chimeras of the sort, England was precipitated into the earlier acute stages of the industrial revolution in which she has led the European nations and still leads. This fact explains a certain preoccupation of the British mind with questions remote from theological reconstruction or religious speculation.