Coleridge left among his literary remains a work published in 1840 under the title of Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit. What is here written is largely upon the basis of intuition and forecast like that of Remarus and Lessing a half-century earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, and destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss' first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first radical and subversive in the extreme. They were fiercely repudiated in Strauss' own country. Yet in the main there was acknowledgement of the correctness of the principle for which Strauss had stood. Hardly before the decade of the sixties was that method accepted in England in any wider way, and hardly before the decade of the seventies in America. Ronan was the first to set forth, in 1863, the historical and critical problem in the new spirit, in a way that the wide public which read French understood.
When we come to speak of the scientific movement it is not easy to say where the leadership lay. Many Englishmen were in the first rank of investigators and accumulators of material. The first attempt at a systematisation of the results of the modern sciences was that of Auguste Comte in his Philosophie Positive. This philosophy, however, under its name of Positivism, exerted a far greater influence, both in Comte's time and subsequently, in England than it did in France. Herbert Spencer, after the middle of the decade of the sixties, essayed to do something of the sort which Comte had attempted. He had far greater advantages for the solution of the problem. Comte's foil in all of his discussions of religion was the Catholicism of the south of France. None the less, the religion which in his later years he created, bears striking resemblance to that which in his earlier years he had sought to destroy. Spencer's attitude toward religion was in his earlier work one of more pronounced antagonism or, at least, of more complete agnosticism than in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his scientific freedom and conscientiousness. Both of these men represent the effort to construe the world, including man, from the point of view of the natural and also of the social sciences, and to define the place of religion in that view of the world which is thus set forth. The fact that there had been no such philosophical readjustment in Great Britain as in Germany, made the acceptance of the evolutionary theory of the universe, which more and more the sciences enforced, slower and more difficult. The period of resistance on the part of those interested in religion extended far into the decade of the seventies.
A word may be added concerning America. The early settlers had been proud of their connection with the English universities. An extraordinary number of them, in Massachusetts at least, had been Cambridge men. Yet a tradition of learning was later developed, which was not without the traits of isolation natural in the circumstances. The residence, for a time, even of a man like Berkeley in this country, altered that but little. The clergy remained in singular degree the educated and highly influential class. The churches had developed, in consonance with their Puritan character, a theology and philosophy so portentous in their conclusions, that we can without difficulty understand the reaction which was brought about. Wesleyanism had modified it in some portions of the country, but intensified it in others. Deism apparently had had no great influence. When the rationalist movement of the old world began to make itself felt, it was at first largely through the influence of France. The religious life of the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century was at a low ebb. Men like Belaham and Priestley were known as apostles of a freer spirit in the treatment of the problem of religion. Priestley came to Pennsylvania in his exile. In the large, however, one may say that the New England liberal movement, which came by and by to be called Unitarian, was as truly American as was the orthodoxy to which it was opposed. Channing reminds one often of Schleiermacher. There is no evidence that he had learned from Schleiermacher. The liberal movement by its very impetuosity gave a new lease of life to an orthodoxy which, without that antagonism, would sooner have waned. The great revivals, which were a benediction to the life of the country, were thought to have closer relation to the theology of those who participated in them than they had. The breach between the liberal and conservative tendencies of religious thought in this country came at a time when the philosophical reconstruction was already well under way in Europe. The debate continued until long after the biblical-critical movement was in progress. The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically total ignorance of these facts. There are traces upon both sides of that insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws. There will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by reverent and, in their own way, learned and original men. Yet there is a pathos about the sturdy originality of good men expended upon a problem which had been already solved. The men in either camp proceeded from assumptions which are now impossible to the men of both. It was not until after the Civil War that American students of theology began in numbers to study in Germany. It is a much more recent thing that one may assume the immediate reading of foreign books, or boast of current contribution from American scholars to the labour of the world's thought upon these themes.
We should make a great mistake if we supposed that the progress has been an unceasing forward movement. Quite the contrary, in every aspect of it the life of the early part of the nineteenth century presents the spectacle of a great reaction. The resurgence of old ideas and forces seems almost incredible. In the political world we are wont to attribute this fact to the disillusionment which the French Revolution had wrought, and the suffering which the Napoleonic Empire had entailed. The reaction in the world of thought, and particularly of religious thought, was, moreover, as marked as that in the world of deeds. The Roman Church profited by this swing of the pendulum in the minds of men as much as did the absolute State. Almost the first act of Pius VII. after his return to Rome in 1814, was the revival of the Society of Jesus, which had been after long agony in 1773 dissolved by the papacy itself. 'Altar and throne' became the watchword of an ardent attempt at restoration of all of that which millions had given their lives to do away. All too easily, one who writes in sympathy with that which is conventionally called progress may give the impression that our period is one in which movement has been all in one direction. That is far from being true. One whose very ideal of progress is that of movement in directions opposite to those we have described may well say that the nineteenth century has had its gifts for him as well. The life of mankind is too complex that one should write of it with one exclusive standard as to loss and gain. And whatever be one's standard the facts cannot be ignored.
The France of the thirties and the forties saw a liberal movement within the Roman Church. The names of Lamennais, of Lacordaire, of Montalembert and Ozanam, the title l'Avenir occur to men's minds at once. Perhaps there has never been in France a party more truly Catholic, more devout, refined and tolerant, more fitted to heal the breach between the cultivated and the Church. However, before the Second Empire, an end had been made of that. It cannot be said that the French Church exactly favoured the infallibility. It certainly did not stand against the decree as in the old days it would have done. The decree of infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is viewed in the light of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, and again of the Encyclical of 1907, or whether the encyclicals are viewed in the light of the decree, the fact remains that a power has been given to the Curia against what has come to be called Modernism such as Innocent never wielded against the heresies of his day. Meantime, so hostile are exactly those peoples among whom Roman Catholicism has had full sway, that it would almost appear that the hope of the Roman Church is in those countries in which, in the sequence of the Reformation, a religious tolerance obtains, which the Roman Church would have done everything in its power to prevent.
Again, we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that the reaction had been felt only in Roman Catholic lands. A minister of Prussia forbade Kant to speak concerning religion. The Prussia of Frederick William III. and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna. The history of the censorship of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom. But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively sustained, was almost doomed to further that alienation between the life of piety and the life of learning which is so much to be deplored. In the Church the conservatives have to this moment largely triumphed. In the theological faculties of the universities the liberals in the main have held their own. The fact that both Church and faculties are functionaries of the State is often cited as sure in the end to bring about a solution of this unhappy state of things. For such a solution, it must be owned, we wait.
The England of the period after 1815 had indeed no such cause for reaction as obtained in France or even in Germany. The nation having had its Revolution in the seventeenth century escaped that of the eighteenth. Still the country was exhausted in the conflict against Napoleon. Commercial, industrial and social problems agitated it. The Church slumbered. For a time the liberal thought of England found utterance mainly through the poets. By the decade of the thirties movement had begun. The opinions of the Noetics in Oriel College, Oxford, now seem distinctly mild. They were sufficient to awaken Newman and Pusey, Froude, Keble, and the rest. Then followed the most significant ecclesiastical movement which the Church of England in the nineteenth century has seen, the Oxford or Tractarian movement, as it has been called. There was conscious recurrence of a mind like that of Newman to the Catholic position. He had never been able to conceive religion in any other terms than those of dogma, or the Christian assurance on any other basis than that of external authority. Nothing could be franker than the antagonism of the movement, from its inception, to the liberal spirit of the age. By inner logic Newman found himself at last in the Roman Church. Yet the Anglo-Catholic movement is to-day overwhelmingly in the ascendant in the English Church. The Broad Churchmen of the middle of the century have had few successors. It is the High Church which stands over against the great mass of the dissenting churches which, taken in the large, can hardly be said to be theologically more liberal than itself. It is the High Church which has showed Franciscanlike devotion in the problems of social readjustment which England to-day presents. It has shown in some part of its constituency a power of assimilation of new philosophical, critical and scientific views, which makes all comparison of it with the Roman Church misleading. And yet it remains in its own consciousness Catholic to the core.
In America also the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete effects of the division of the churches was the separation of the education of the clergy from the universities, the entrusting it to isolated theological schools under denominational control. The system has done less harm than might have been expected. Yet at present there would appear to be a general movement of recurrence to the elder tradition. The maintenance of the religious life is to some extent a matter of nurture and observances, of religious habit and practice. This truth is one which liberals, in their emphasis upon liberty and the individual, are always in danger of overlooking. The great revivals of religion in this century, like those of the century previous, have been connected with a form of religious thought pronouncedly pietistic. The building up of religious institutions in the new regions of the West, and the participation of the churches of the country in missions, wear predominantly this cast. Antecedently, one might have said that the lack of ecclesiastical cohesion among the Christians of the land, the ease with which a small group might split off for the furtherance of its own particular view, would tend to liberalisation. It is doubtful whether this is true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their permanence. The middle of the nineteenth century in the United States was a period of intense denominationalism. That is synonymous with a period of the stagnation of Christian thought. The religion of a people absorbed in the practical is likely to be one which they at least suppose to be a practical religion. In one age the most practical thing will appear to men to be to escape hell, in another to further socialism. The need of adjustment of religion to the great intellectual life of the world comes with contact with that life. What strikes one in the survey of the religious thought of the country, by and large, for a century and a quarter, is not so much that it has been reactionary, as that it has been stationary. Almost every other aspect of the life of our country, including even that of religious life as distinguished from religious thought, has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. This it is which in a measure has created the tension which we feel.