An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

by Edward Caldwell Moore

[THE POETS]

It may now sound like a contradiction if we assert that the years from 1780 to 1830 constitute the era of the noblest English poetry since the times of great Elizabeth. The social direction of the new theology of the present day, with its cry against every kind of injustice, with its claim of an equal opportunity for a happy life for every man—this was the forecast of Cowper, as it had been of Blake. To Blake all outward infallible authority of books or churches was iniquitous. He was at daggers drawn with every doctrine which set limit to the freedom of all men to love God, or which could doubt that God had loved all men. Jesus alone had seen the true thing. God was a father, every man his child. Long before 1789, Burns was filled with the new ideas of the freedom and brotherhood of man, with zeal for the overthrow of unjust privilege. He had spoken in imperishable words of the holiness of the common life. He had come into contact with the most dreadful consequences of Calvinism. He has pilloried these mercilessly in his 'Holy Tulzie' and in his 'Holy Willie's Prayer.' Such poems must have shaken Calvinism more than a thousand liberal sermons could have done. What Coleridge might have done in this field, had he not so early turned to prose, it is not easy to say. The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction, fundamental to his later philosophy, that all the new ideas concerning men and the world are a revelation of God. Wordsworth seems never consciously to have broken with the current theology. His view of the natural glory and goodness of humanity, especially among the poor and simple, has not much relation to that theology. His view of nature, not as created of God. in the conventional sense, but as itself filled with God, of God as conscious of himself at every point of nature's being, has still less. Man and nature are but different manifestations of the one soul of all. Byron's contribution to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a negative sort. It was destructive rather than constructive. Among the conventions and hypocrisies of society there were none which he more utterly despised than those of religion and the Church as he saw these. There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks. But there is a difference. Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current religion. Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion. Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron thought he had none. Posterity has felt that he had much. His attack was made in a reckless bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the truth of many things which he said is now overwhelmingly obvious. Shelley began with being what he called an atheist. He ended with being what we call an agnostic, whose pure poetic spirit carried him far into the realm of the highest idealism. The existence of a conscious will within the universe is not quite thinkable. Yet immortal love pervades the whole. Immortality is improbable, but his highest flights continually imply it. He is sure that when any theology violates the primary human affections, it tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become good. The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss later called 'the old faith and the new,' or, as Arnold phrased it, were 'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,' found their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough. From the time of the opening of Tennyson's work, the poets, not by destruction but by construction, not in opposition to religion but in harmony with it, have built up new doctrines of God and man and aided incalculably in preparing the way for a new and nobler theology. In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in England who did more to read all of the vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher faith, and to fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of knowledge, than did Browning. Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a little of the noblest conviction of the age. And what shall one say of Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who have spoken, often with consummate power and beauty, that which one never says at all without faith and rarely says well without art?

[COLERIDGE]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at his father's vicarage, Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire. He was the tenth child of his parents, weak in frame, always suffering much. He was a student at Christ's Hospital, London, where he was properly bullied, then at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he did not take his degree. For some happy years he lived in the Lake region and was the friend of Wordsworth and Southey. He studied in Göttingen, a thing almost unheard of in his time. The years 1798 to 1813 were indeed spent in utter misery, through the opium habit which he had contracted while seeking relief from rheumatic pain. He wrote and taught and talked in Highgate from 1814 to 1834. He had planned great works which never took shape. For a brief period he severed his connexion with the English Church, coming under Unitarian influence. He then reverted to the relation in which his ecclesiastical instincts were satisfied. We read his Aids to Reflection and his Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, and wonder how they can ever have exerted a great influence. Nevertheless, they were fresh and stimulating in their time. That Coleridge was a power, we have testimony from men differing among themselves so widely as do Hare, Sterling, Newman and John Stuart Mill. He was a master of style. He had insight and breadth. Tulloch says of the Aids, that it is a book which none but a thinker upon divine things will ever like. Not all even of these have liked it. Inexcusably fragmentary it sometimes seems. One is fain to ask: What right has any man to publish a scrap-book of his musings? Coleridge had the ambition to lay anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. The Aids were but of the nature of prolegomena. For substance his philosophy went back to Locke and Hume and to the Cambridge Platonists. He had learned of Kant and Schleiermacher as well. He was no metaphysician, but a keen interpreter of spiritual facts, who himself had been quickened by a particularly painful experience. He saw in Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of our spiritual being and the remedy for its disorder. The evangelical tradition brought religion to a man from without. It took no account of man's spiritual constitution, beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of hell. Coleridge set out, not from sin alone, but from the whole deep basis of spiritual capacity and responsibility upon which sin rests. He asserts experience. We are as sure of the capacity for the good and of the experience of the good as we can be of the evil. The case is similar as to the truth. There are aspects of truth which transcend our powers. We use words without meaning when we talk of the plans of a being who is neither an object for our senses nor a part of our self-consciousness. All truth must be capable of being rendered into words conformable to reason. Theologians had declared their doctrines true or false without reference to the subjective standard of judgment. Coleridge contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data, but upon inward experience. The authority of Scripture is in its truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human reason and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The doctrine of an atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too comes within the range of spiritual experience. The apostolic language took colour from the traditions concerning sacrifice. Much has been taken by the Church as literal dogmatic statement which should be taken as more figure of speech, borrowed from Jewish sources.

Coleridge feared that his thoughts concerning Scripture might, if published, do more harm than good. They were printed first in 1840. Their writing goes back into the period long before the conflict raised by Strauss. There is not much here that one might not have learned from Herder and Lessing. Utterances of Whately and Arnold showed that minds in England were waking. But Coleridge's utterances rest consistently upon the philosophy of religion and theory of dogma which have been above implied. They are more significant than are mere flashes of generous insight, like those of the men named. The notion of verbal inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures could not possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had made itself felt. The rabbinical idea was bound to disappear. A truer sense of the conditions attending the origins and progress of civilisation and of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, brought of necessity a changed idea of the nature of Scripture and revelation. Its literature must be read as literature, its history as history. For the answer in our hearts to the spirit in the Book, Coleridge used the phrase: 'It finds me.' 'Whatever finds me bears witness to itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Ghost. In the Bible there is more that finds me than in all the other books which I have read.' Still, there is much in the Bible that does not find me. It is full of contradictions, both moral and historical. Are we to regard these as all equally inspired? The Scripture itself does not claim that. Besides, what good would it do us to claim that the original documents were inerrant, unless we could claim also that they had been inerrantly transmitted? Apparently Coleridge thought that no one would ever claim that. Coleridge wrote also concerning the Church. His volume on The Constitution of Church and State appeared in 1830. It is the least satisfactory of his works. The vacillation of Coleridge's own course showed that upon this point his mind was never clear. Arnold also, though in a somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. If Thomas Arnold's moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save this theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be expected from Coleridge.

[THE ORIEL SCHOOL]

It has often happened in the history of the English universities that a given college has become, through its body of tutors and students, through its common-room talk and literary work, the centre, for the time, of a movement of thought which gives leadership to the college. In this manner it has been customary to speak of the group of men who, before the rise of the Oxford Movement, gathered at Oriel College, as the Oriel School. Newman and Keble were both Oriel tutors. The Oriel men were of distinctly liberal tendency. There were men of note among them. There was Whately, Archbishop of Dublin after 1831, and Copleston, from whom both Keble and Newman owned that they learned much. There was Arnold, subsequently Headmaster of Rugby. There was Hampden, Professor of Divinity after 1836. The school was called from its liberalism the Noetic school. Whether this epithet contained more of satire or of complacency it is difficult to say. These men arrested attention and filled some of the older academic and ecclesiastical heads with alarm. Without disrespect one may say that it is difficult now to understand the commotion which they made. Arnold had a truly beautiful character. What he might have done as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford was never revealed, for he died in 1842. Whately, viewed as a noetic, appears commonplace.

Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was Hampden. In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the title of The Scholastic Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology, he assailed what had long been the very bulwark of traditionalism. His idea was to show how the vast fabric of scholastic theology had grown up, particularly what contributions had been made to it in the Middle Age. The traditional dogma is a structure reared upon the logical terminology of the patristic and mediæval schools. It has little foundation in Scripture and no response in the religious consciousness. We have here the application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were not wrong in saying that his method would dissolve, not merely that particular system of theology, but all creeds and theologies whatsoever. Patristic, mediæval Catholic theology and scholastic Protestantism, no less, would go down before it. A pamphlet attributed to Newman, published in 1836, precipitated a discussion which, for bitterness, has rarely been surpassed in the melancholy history of theological dispute. The excitement went to almost unheard of lengths. In the controversy the Archbishop, Dr. Howley, made but a poor figure. The Duke of Wellington did not add to his fame. Wilberforce and Newman never cleared themselves of the suspicion of indirectness. This was, however, after the opening of the Oxford Movement.

[ERSKINE AND CAMPBELL]

The period from 1820 to 1850 was one of religious and intellectual activity in Scotland as well. Tulloch depicts with a Scotsman's patriotism the movement which centres about the names of Erskine and Campbell. Pfleiderer also judges that their contribution was as significant as any made to dogmatic theology in Great Britain in the nineteenth century. They achieved the same reconstruction of the doctrine of salvation which had been effected by Kant and Schleiermacher. At their hands the doctrine was rescued from that forensic externality into which Calvinism had degenerated. It was given again its quality of ethical inwardness, and based directly upon religious experience. High Lutheranism had issued in the same externality in Germany before Kant and Schleiermacher, and the New England theology before Channing and Bushnell. The merits of Christ achieved an external salvation, of which a man became participant practically upon condition of assent to certain propositions. Similarly, in the Catholic revival, salvation was conceived as an external and future good, of which a man became participant through the sacraments applied to him by priests in apostolical succession. In point of externality there was not much to choose between views which were felt to be radically opposed the one to the other.