A month in Switzerland

by F. Barham Zincke

Consider the lilies of the field.—Gospel of St. Matthew.

The powers that be are ordained of God.—Epistle to the Romans.

It was 8 o’clock in the evening when I left Brussels. At 6 o’clock the next morning I stepped upon the platform of the Charing Cross Station. So ended, after very nearly five weeks, my little excursion. In the foregoing pages I have set down, not only what I saw, which could not have had much novelty, but the thoughts, also, as well about man as about nature, which what I saw suggested to me; and these, too, may not have much value. To some, however, everything in nature is instructive and interesting, and so is everything in man; or they seem to be so. But, in order to secure this instruction and interest, I believe that they must be viewed connectedly. The one is properly intelligible only by the light that shines from the other. To regard either separately is to misunderstand both. Nature is the field in which He, Whose form no man hath seen at any time, reveals to us His Creative Power, for the purpose that the intelligent contemplation of the objects, He presents to our view, should engender in us certain sentiments and ideas, which have from the beginning, in the degree and form possible at each epoch, underlaid religion. Our fellow men are the field in which He reveals to us the capacities and conditions; the strength, the weaknesses, the workings, and the aspirations of moral and of intellectual being, as conditioned in ourselves: another, and perhaps a higher, revelation of Himself; and the consciousness of which being in the individual constitutes, as far as we know, in this visible world of ours, the distinctive privilege of man; and the exercise of which, under the sense of responsibility, crowns the edifice of religion. The study of both has been equally submitted to us, is equally our duty, and is necessary for the completion of our happiness. They are the correlated parts of a single revelation, and of a single study. The man who shuts his eyes to the one, or to the other, cannot understand, at all events as fully as he might, either that portion of the revelation at which he looks exclusively, or himself, or Him, Who makes the revelation, in the sense in which He has willed that each should be understood.

The products of our modern advanced methods of agriculture bear the same kind of relation to the products of the burnt stick (they could both support life, but very differently), that the religious sentiments and ideas produced by our knowledge of nature bear to those which the ignorant observation of a few prominent phenomena, as thunder and lightning, the power of the wind and of the sun, the action of fire, life and death, produced in the minds of the men of that remote day. The mind of the inhabitants of this country, precisely like the land of this country, was just the same at that day as at this. The powers and capacities of each are invariable. What varies, and always in the direction of advance, is that which is applied to the mind: as is the case also with respect to the land. The knowledge of what produces the thunder and lightning, of the laws that govern the motions of the heavenly bodies, of what originates and calms the wind, of the forces of nature, of the structure of animals and plants, are so many instruments, by which the constant quantity, the human mind, is cultivated for greater productiveness. No one dreams that we have approached the end of such knowledge, any more than that our agriculture has reached its last advance. The state of knowledge, whatever it may be at any time (from that of our rudest forefathers to our own), produces corresponding ideas and sentiments. Its reception into the mind unfailingly generates those ideas and sentiments, just as the application of any method of agriculture, with the appliances that belong to it, gives the amount and kind of produce from the land proper to that method and to those appliances. As an instance taken from a highly civilized people, the close observation of the instincts of animals, and of the properties of plants, offered to the leisure, accompanied by some other favouring circumstances, of the ancient Egyptians, but unaccompanied by any knowledge of the laws, the forces, and the order of nature; that is to say, their existing knowledge, together with the existing limitations to that knowledge, led unavoidably to the ideas and sentiments we find in them; that is to say, to what was their religion, which combined the worship of plants and animals, with belief in a future life.

The other self-acting factor to that organization of thought and sentiment, which is religion, is the observation of what will perfect human society, and the life of the individual, under the conditions of their existence at the time. Certain things ought to be removed: it is religion to remove them. Certain things ought to be maintained: it is religion to maintain them. Certain things ought to be established: it is religion to establish them. Certain knowledge ought to be propagated: it is religion to propagate it.

Now both these contributions to religion, the knowledge of nature, which is inexhaustible, and the conditions of human society, which are endlessly multiform, are progressively variable quantities; religion, therefore, the resultant of the combined action of the two, must itself vary with them; that is to say, must advance with them.

It is a corollary to this, that from the day a religion forms itself into a completed system, it becomes a matured fruit; the perfected result of a train of anterior and contemporary conditions, that have long been working towards its production. Thenceforth it is useful for a time just as a fruit may be. It has, also, in itself, as a fruit has, the seed of a future growth. But with that exception, though still serviceable, it is dead, though organized, matter. A certain concurrence of conditions, which can never be repeated, because knowledge and society are ever advancing, produced the fruit, which, like that of the aloe, can only be produced once out of its own concurrence of conditions. Man’s spiritual nature feeds on that fruit, and is nourished by it, for a greater or less number of generations. At last, for it must come, a new concurrence of conditions arises, and a new fruit is produced. The vital germ that was in the old fruit, passed into the milieu of the new ideas and sentiments, and a new growth commenced. Organization then ensued, and in due time bore, as its fruit, its own matured and perfected system. At the establishment of Christianity, in the order of knowledge, the perception of the absurdity of thousands of local divinities, and, in the social and political order, the establishment of an Universal Empire, which gave rise to a sense of the brotherhood of mankind, combined in demanding that the whole organization of religious thought should be recast. Everyone can see the part these two facts had in the construction, and in bringing about the reception, of Christian ideas and Christian morality. In these days we see that social and political conditions are changing, though we cannot so exactly define and describe in what that change consists as we can that just referred to; but we know that at the time of that change there was, though it was distinctly felt, the same absence of power to define and describe it distinctly. About the recent advance, however, in knowledge there is no want of distinctness: that is as palpable as it is, beyond measure, greater than the advances of all former times. It amounts almost to a revelation of the constitution and order of nature. The ideas and sentiments this new knowledge has given rise to are somewhat different from, for instance they are grander and give more satisfaction to thought than, the ideas and sentiments that accompanied the knowledge, or rather the ignorance, on the same subjects, of two, or of one, thousand years back. This must have some effect on the religion of Christendom, and the effect cannot but be elevating and improving. This knowledge cannot possibly be bad, because it is only the attainment of the ideas, which, on the theory both of religion and of commonsense, were in the mind of the Creator before they were embodied in nature; which were embodied in nature, and were submitted to us, in order that they might be attained to by us, for the sake of the effect the knowledge would have upon our minds, that is to say, ultimately on our religion.

This knowledge, it is notorious, is not estimated in this way by many good men amongst us, they, on the contrary, being disposed to regard it rather with repugnance, horror, and consternation. The reason is not far to seek. They have, probably, in all such cases, received only a theological and literary training. Now every theology, as is seen in the meaning of the word, and as belongs to the nature of the construction, contains an implicit assertion, both that no new knowledge, which can have any good influence on men’s thoughts, sentiments, and lives, can be attained, subsequently to the date of its own formation; and that the workings of human society will never lead to advances beyond those, which had at that time been reached. And literary training, in this country, has hitherto meant a kind of dilettante acquaintance with the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, regarded, not as a chapter in the moral and intellectual history of the race, but rather as supplying models for expression. No wonder, then, need be felt at finding those, who are conversant only with what is dead, scared at the phenomena of life. The wonder would be if it were otherwise. But the same conditions, we all know, act differently on differently constituted minds: and this explains the opposite effect which modern criticism has upon the minds of some of those who have had only literary training. This criticism they find opposed to some of the positions of the old theology; and the effect of this discovery upon them is that it makes them hostile to religion itself. As well might Newton have felt horror at the idea of gravitation because Ptolemy had believed in cycles and epicycles. It is the preponderance of literary training in them, also, that issues in this opposite result.

Religion is the organization of all that men know both of outward nature and of man, for the purpose of guiding life, of perfecting the individual and society, and of feeding the mind and the heart with the contemplation of the beauty and order of the universe, inclusive of man and of God, that is to say, of the conception we can form, at the time, of the All-originating, All-ordering, and All-governing Power. This is, ever has been, and ever will be Religion, unless we should pass into a New Dispensation, at present inconceivable, because it would require the recasting, at all events, of man, if not of the external conditions of his existence, that is, of the world also. But as long as things continue as they have been, knowledge will always advance religion; and religion will always conform itself to knowledge. The essential difference between one religion and another, from Fetishism up to Christianity, is one of knowledge.

Before the construction of systematic theologies, knowledge and religion were convertible terms. It was so under the Old Dispensation; and so again in the early days of Christianity. After their construction the former term was modified. It had been generic, it thenceforth became specific. The differentiating limitation imposed upon it was that of this particular theology, exclusive of all other theologies; and, as it was a theology, this involved the exclusion of the ideas of correction and enlargement.