“What you say,” he answered, “makes clear to me, then, that you do not accept this ‘faculty of apprehending the Infinite,’ and philosophically make the best of it, but you wish to call it mere childishness or, as you say, superstition and—‘eliminate’ it! And yet you talk of Religion! What, may I ask, does a pure Scientist, as you seem to be, Mr. Alcock, mean by Religion?”
“Well,” said Alcock frankly, “I confess that, to me, it means little more than credulity. I am not, of course, hostile to Religion; on the contrary, I support it. It helps to keep society together.”
“It will do,” said Hawkesbury, “for the People! Pending the arrival of that education, which is to teach them the high satisfaction of social evolution, the masses may amuse themselves with such used-out mummeries as the Devil, Christ, and God. The People is grateful. It has, it knows, as much to expect from Science as from Culture.”
Fitzgerald was quite amused.
“Mr. Alcock,” he said, “since you pure Scientists are generally reckoned as the foes of us Christians, we can ask you to do us no kinder service than to nail these colours of yours to the mast in the sight of all men. I do not alone mean your belief that Religion is all but a synonyme for credulity; but this general conception of things of yours which includes no further consideration for Religion than elimination. We can have no doubt of the results. The world will doubtless find in our conception of things a certain amount of, what Mr. Hawkesbury has called, used-out mummery (for man’s free-will has ever turned use into abuse), but it will find also things which savour of the kindly earth and the genial sun; whereas, if you will let me say so, in yours all that it will find will be the steel-cold atmosphere of some heatless planet, filled with the dreary whirr of abstract machinery. Superstition with Religion, they will say, is better than Superstition without. And then, after they have given you a trial—and a trial they will give you, and such a great and long trial that we shall be eliminated almost as much as even you, Mr. Alcock, could wish us to be—then they will come back to us, and, having been driven by sore anguish of soul to re-discover, as their Father did, the sense of duty and of the Divine, they will find that this first step leads inevitably to another, and that to yet another. And, in the end, all high souls, and after them of course all other souls (for the wisdom of to-day is the common sense of to-morrow), will see that their best and truest Father was a man who, passing through all this before them, has these years stood with clear and radiant faith, his longing hands held out to all that would take their strong help and guidance to that place of joy and of peace!”
Alcock, supposing this man to be Jesus and having made it a rule never in mixed company to speak of that to him, under such circumstances, embarrassing personage, kept silence, looking at the table-cloth. Hawkesbury too did not understand the allusion, which even Maddock, unless he had been warned by Gildea of Fitzgerald’s connection with Cardinal Newman, might have missed. As it was, Gildea, perceiving and amused at Alcock’s misunderstanding, was ready to at once dissipate it.
“Newman,” he said, “is indeed the great modern example of a man of high intellect and all spiritual powers giving, not only, as Heine did, ‘his tribute of admiration,’ but everything he had, ‘to the splendid consistency of the Roman Catholic doctrine.’ I remember once hearing a rather able High-churchman say that he could not see, any more after than before reading the celebrated Apologia, why Newman had joined the Church of Rome: which is to say, that he could not see that, to a certain type of mind, the only two logical positions for a man of thought to-day are those of Scientific Atheism or of Catholic Faith.”
“He leaves no place, then,” said Hawkesbury, “for the Theists or the Pantheists?”
“The Theists,” answered Gildea, “leave no place for themselves—except in the spiritual out-houses and the Unitarian chapels. There is not, I think, in modern times, one man of first, or second, or even third-class intellectual power that has believed in a personal God and not believed in a divine Christ. All men of thought are really now divided into two classes, Christians and Atheists: the first believing in a personal Christ and a personal God, the second in Law. All other differences are, as it seems to me, at heart mere divergences of symbolism. We are accustomed, for instance, to call those who hold that matter produces spirit Materialists, and those who hold that spirit produces matter Idealists, and those who hold that matter and spirit are identic and divine, Pantheists; but really they are all Atheists. There is no Atheism, no disbelief in a personal God, more intense than that of our Idealists, Renan, Arnold, Emerson, who never cease, however, to talk of God and bid us find in Him our only comfort and guide: they are the true children of Goethe whose conception of God was Humanity in Nature, and of Religion Humanity in Art.”