True magnanimity, it seems to me, must look far outside of a man’s own lot, of his past share of life’s feast, and his readiness now to rise from it satisfied, and must take a wide survey of the lives (so far as they can be known or guessed) of all other men,—of the poverty-stricken, the savage, the ignorant, the diseased, the enslaved, the sin-degraded,—and attain the conclusion that for these also, as well as for himself, life on earth has been sufficient good, and none other need be asked or desired before he can complacently speak of the joy of abandoning faith in God and immortality. “I have had a noble share of life, and I desire no more,” is an expression of personal sentiment which may or may not be right and fitting on the assumed hypothesis. But to join to such expression of individual contentment no word of regret for the closing in of all hope to the suffering millions of our race who have not had “noble” shares of life, and who do, with yearning hunger, desire more than has ever fallen to their lot,—this is, as it seems to me, the reverse of magnanimity. This is littleness and selfishness almost as bad as that of the bigots whom these Atheists abhor, who rejoice to expect heaven for themselves, while leaving thousands of their brethren to perdition. It might be pardonable in one brought up to believe in hell, and who hurriedly leaped to the doctrine of annihilation from that intolerable yoke, and cried, “Let us all perish together rather than that hideous doom overtake a single creature!” Such a choice would be generous and worthy. But when a woman who probably never, at any period of her life, believed in the eternal perdition of a soul, proclaims herself enraptured at the joy of finding out that there is neither a God to protect the weak, nor, finally, any holiness or happiness beyond the grave,—then, I repeat, this is not magnanimity, but gigantic selfishness.
Let us think a little what it would signify to mankind to give up God and heaven,—that is, the belief in God and heaven; for—God be praised!—it rests with no philosophic school to put out the sun or prevent the morning from breaking, but only to blind our eyes to them.
Dr. James Martineau once made in a sermon the startling remark that, “if it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris.” The observation was doubtless true; for, of direct thought of God, the streets of great cities are probably the emptiest of any places wherein mortals may be found. But there is an enormous share of human ideas and feelings not directly or consciously turned toward God, yet nevertheless colored by the belief that such a Being exists. Perhaps it would be more proper to say that in Christendom every idea and every feeling have imperceptibly been built up on the theory that there is a God. We see everything with Him for a background. Inanimate nature and the lower animals, human history and society, poetry, literature, science, and art,—every one of them has its religious aspect, which can only be excluded by a mental tour de force. Take inanimate nature, for example,—the region where it seems easiest to sever the links of habitual thought, and which the doctrine of Evolution (according to some of its teachers) has already withdrawn from the domain of a Creative Power. We all love this nature; and our hearts are moved to their depths by sympathy with it when we gaze round of a summer morning upon the woods and hills and waters, or, later in the year, upon the “happy autumn fields” of ripened corn, or, on a winter’s night, up into the solemn host of stars. But is it merely the glittering “patines of bright gold,” or fields of yellow wheat, or the block of wood and rock which form the forest or the mountain, which awaken in us such mysterious emotion? Are we not dimly worshipping the soul of nature through earth and sky,—the spirit wherewith our spirits are in ineffable harmony, and of which all the loveliness we behold is but the shadow?
Let some Agnostic disenchanter come to us at such an hour and tell us that, though it takes a man of genius to depict worthily on canvas a corner of this wide field of loveliness, yet that the whole great original had no Painter, no Designer; that the mountains had no Architect, the well-balanced stars no supreme Geometer, but that it all came about as we behold it through the action of forces, unguided by any mind, undirected by any Will,—and what revulsion shall we not experience? Shall we not feel like a man enamoured of a beautiful woman whom he has believed to be good and wise and tender, but, when he comes at last to look close into her face, he finds her to be a soulless idiot, from whose stony and meaningless gaze he turns shuddering away?
Science, again, is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.[11] In every department of human thought, in short, something—and that something the most beautiful in it—must be lost, some sacred spell must be broken, if we are to think of it as divested from the deeper sense which religion has (all unconsciously to ourselves) given to it,—the thread of purpose running through; the understood promise of justice; the sympathy of an unseen, all-beholding Spectator.
In the same way, all human relationships will be stripped of the majestic mantle under which they have been sheltered. The idea of the common Fatherhood of God, which Paganism in its best days had begun to teach, and which Christ’s lessons have made the familiar thought of every European child, has put a meaning into the phrase of human brotherhood, which it is much to be doubted if the warmest “Enthusiasts of Humanity” would, without such preliminary training, have been able to give to it. The idea (poorly as it has been hitherto recognized) that the most degraded of mankind, those from whom we naturally turn in disgust, have yet the same Creator and the same Judge as ourselves, has, beyond question, an indirect influence of no small force over all our sentiments concerning them. The same reflection has even at last begun to exercise a perceptible influence over our conduct to the brutes. Christians and Theists of every shade may be found impressed with the sense that religion demands the humane treatment of all sentient creatures; and this, whether they take the view of Cardinal Manning, that, “if I owe no moral duties to the lower animals, I owe all the moral duties that are conceivable to the Creator of those animals,—humanity, mercy, and care for them,” or take the simple Theist stand-point, that, as we love Him, so we naturally look with sympathy and tenderness on everything He has made. Of course, this motive of humanity to brutes disappears with the belief in God; and, accordingly, we find, with quite logical fitness, that, while the opposition to brute torture is maintained by men of every varied shade of religion, the majority of the chief vivisectors of Europe are professed Materialists. Vivisection is the logical outcome of Atheism as regards the brutes; and M. Paul Bert and Carl Vogt are only the most candid examples of men who have carried it out.
But it is in the region of the personal virtues—purity, truth, temperance, contentment—that the loss of the belief in God will be most disastrous. I am far from maintaining that, putting religion wholly out of sight, there are not motives of a purely ethical kind left which ought to make men practise the highest inward virtue. But I think it needs only a slight knowledge of human nature to perceive that the shutting up of the window of the soul, through which an awful and most holy Spectator has hitherto been believed to gaze into all its secrets, must leave a great deal in darkness which has been till now illumined with a sin-exposing light. It takes much for a man to say, like the author of In Memoriam,—
“The dead shall look me through and through.”
The idea of any eye perceiving all that is going on in the recesses of the mind,—the double motives, the unfaithfulnesses, the vanities, the memories of old shameful errors,—this is hard enough. But the belief that such introspection is always taking place, and by the Holiest of all beings, is undoubtedly a sort of purification such as no mere solitary process of self-examination can resemble. Even a warm human friendship in youth brings with it always a burst of self-knowledge. We see ourselves quite freshly in our friend’s view of us. But a thousand times greater inevitably is the self-revelation which comes with the realized presence of God in the soul, the flood of sunshine which discloses all the motes which fill the atmosphere of our thoughts. Now, though it is only spiritually-minded men who know this experience in its full intensity, yet every man who believes in God has gleams of it at intervals through life which are never afterward quite forgotten. But, more (and this is a point which concerns the whole Theistic moral argument most importantly), the supreme experience of spiritual men is filtered down through all grades of minds by books and intercourse. The lofty standard of purity which has been revealed to them is partially exhibited by their words and example, and forms a kind of high-water mark for lesser souls. It is an immense gain, even to very poor sinners, that there should be a few rich saints; and every man who has attained a lofty conception of holiness helps to make all the world around him conscious of its unholiness. He is a mirror in a dark place: the ray of light which has fallen on him dispels somewhat of the gloom around.
Thus, if the belief in God be lost to humanity, we shall lose not only the direct, the incalculable effects on individual souls of the belief in a divine Searcher of Hearts, but also the indirect and universal uplifting influence on society of the presence of men who have experienced such effects, and formed their moral standard accordingly. Is it too much to augur that the result will be a depreciation of the common ideal standard, and a consequently still further depression of the practical level of personal virtue?