Phases of Faith; Or, Passages from the History of My Creed

by Francis William Newman

As a result of the apostolic doctrines, in the second, third, and following centuries, very gross views concerning the relation of the sexes prevailed, and have been everywhere transmitted where men's morality is exclusively[14] formed from the New Testament. The marriage service of the Church of England, which incorporates the Pauline doctrine is felt by English brides and bridegrooms to contain what is so offensive and degrading, that many clergymen mercifully make unlawful omissions. Paul had indeed expressly denounced prohibitions of marriage. In merely dissuading it, he gave advice, which, from his limited horizon and under his expectation of the speedy return of Christ, was sensible and good; but when this advice, with all its reasons, was made on oracle of eternal wisdom, it generated the monkish notions concerning womanhood. If the desire of a wife is a weakness, which the apostle would gladly have forbidden, only that he feared worse consequences, an enthusiastic youth cannot but infer that it is a higher state of perfection not to desire a wife, and therefore aspires to "the crown of virginity." Here at once is full-grown monkery. Hence that debasement of the imagination, which is directed perpetually to the lowest, instead of the highest side of the female nature. Hence the disgusting admiration and invocation of Mary's perpetual virginity. Hence the transcendental doctrine of her immaculate conception from Anne, the "grandmother of God."

In the above my critics have represented me to say that Christianity has done nothing for women. I have not said so, but that what it has done has been exaggerated. I say: If the theory of Christianity is to take credit from the history of Christendom, it must also receive discredit. Taking in the whole system of nuns and celibates, and the doctrine which sustains it, the root of which is apostolic, I doubt whether any balance of credit remains over from this side of Christian history. I am well aware that the democratic doctrine of "the equality of souls" has a tendency to elevate women,—and the poorer orders too; but this is not the whole of actual Christianity, which is a very heterogeneous mass.

2. Again: the modern doctrine, by aid of which West Indian slavery has been exterminated, is often put forward as Christian; but I had always discerned that it was not Biblical, and that, in respect to this great triumph, undue credit has been claimed for the fixed Biblical and authoritative doctrine. As I have been greatly misunderstood in my first edition, I am induced to expand this topic. Sir George Stephen,[15] after describing the long struggle in England against the West Indian interest and other obstacles, says, that, for some time, "worst of all, we found the people, not actually against us, but apathetic, lethargic, incredulous, indifferent. It was then, and not till then, that we sounded the right note, and touched a chord that never ceased to vibrate. To uphold slavery was a crime against God! It was a NOVEL DOCTRINE, but it was a cry that was heard, for it would be heard. The national conscience was awakened to inquiry, and inquiry soon produced conviction." Sir George justly calls the doctrine novel. As developed in the controversy, it laid down the general proposition, that men and women are not, and cannot be chattels; and that all human enactments which decree this are morally null and void, as sinning against the higher law of nature and of God. And the reason of this lies in the essential contrast of a moral personality and chattel. Criminals may deserve to be bound and scourged, but they do not cease to be persons, nor indeed do even the insane. Since every man is a person, he cannot be a piece of property, nor has an "owner" any just and moral claim to his services. Usage, so far from conferring this claim, increases the total amount of injustice; the longer an innocent man is forcibly kept in slavery, the greater the reparation to which he is entitled for the oppressive immorality. This doctrine I now believe to be irrefutable truth, but I disbelieved it while I thought the Scripture authoritative; because I found a very different doctrine there—a doctrine which is the argumentative stronghold of the American slaveholder. Paul sent back the fugitive Onesimus to his master Philemon, with kind recommendations and apologies for the slave, and a tender charge to Philemon, that he would receive Onesimus as a brother in the Lord, since he had been converted by Paul in the interval; but this very recommendation, full of affection as it is, virtually recognizes the moral rights of Philemon to the services of his slave; and hinting that if Onesimus stole anything, Philemon should now forgive him, Paul shows perfect insensibility to the fact that the master who detains a slave in captivity against his will, is guilty himself of a continual theft. What says Mrs. Beecher Stowe's Cassy to this? "Stealing!—They who steal body and soul need not talk to us. Every one of these bills is stolen—stolen from poor starving, sweating creatures." Now Onesimus, in the very act of taking to flight, showed that he had been submitting to servitude against his will, and that the house of his owner had previously been a prison to him. To suppose that Philemon has a pecuniary interest in the return of Onesimus to work without wages, implies that the master habitually steals the slave's earnings; but if he loses nothing by the flight, he has not been wronged by it. Such is the modern doctrine, developed out of the fundamental fact that persons are not chattels; but it is to me wonderful that it should be needful to prove to any one, that this is not the doctrine of the New Testament. Paul and Peter deliver excellent charges to masters in regard to the treatment of their slaves, but without any hint to them that there is an injustice in claiming them as slaves at all. That slavery, as a system, is essentially immoral, no Christian of those days seems to have suspected. Yet it existed in its worst forms under Rome. Whole gangs of slaves were mere tools of capitalists, and were numbered like cattle, with no moral relationship to the owner; young women of beautiful person were sold as articles of voluptuousness. Of course every such fact was looked upon by Christians as hateful and dreadful; yet, I say, it did not lead them to that moral condemnation of slavery, as such, which has won the most signal victory in modern times, and is destined, I trust, to win one far greater.

A friendly reviewer replies to this, that the apathy of the early Christians to the intrinsic iniquity of the slave system rose out of "their expectation of an immediate close of this world's affairs. The only reason why Paul sanctioned contentment with his condition in the converted slave, was, that for so short a time it was not worth while for any man to change his state." I agree to this; but it does not alter my fact: on the contrary, it confirms what I say,—that the Biblical morality is not final truth. To account for an error surely is not to deny it.

Another writer has said on the above: "Let me suppose you animated to go as missionary to the East to preach this (Mr. Newman's) spiritual system: would you, in addition to all this, publicly denounce the social and political evils under which the nations groan? If so, your spiritual projects would soon be perfectly understood, and summarily dealt with.—It is vain to say, that, if commissioned by Heaven, and endowed with power of working miracles, you would do so; for you cannot tell under what limitations your commission would be given: it is pretty certain, that it would leave you to work a moral and spiritual system by moral and spiritual means, and not allow you to turn the world upside down, and mendaciously tell it that you came only to preach peace, while every syllable you uttered would be an incentive to sedition."—Eclipse of Faith, p. 419.

This writer supposes that he is attacking me, when every line is an attack on Christ and Christianity. Have I pretended power of working miracles? Have I imagined or desired that miracle would shield me from persecution? Did Jesus not "publicly denounce the social and political evils" of Judæa? was he not "summarily dealt with"? Did he not know that his doctrine would send on earth "not peace, but a sword"? and was he mendacious in saying, "Peace I leave unto you?" or were the angels mendacious in proclaiming, "Peace on earth, goodwill among men"? Was not "every syllable that Jesus uttered" in the discourse of Matth. xxiii., "an incentive to sedition?" and does this writer judge it to be mendacity, that Jesus opened by advising to OBEY the very men, whom he proceeds to vilify at large as immoral, oppressive, hypocritical, blind, and destined to the damnation of hell? Or have I anywhere blamed the apostles because they did not exasperate wicked men by direct attacks? It is impossible to answer such a writer as this; for he elaborately misses to touch what I have said. On the other hand, it is rather too much to require me to defend Jesus from his assault.

Christian preachers did not escape the imputation of turning the world upside down, and at length, in some sense, effected what was imputed. It is matter of conjecture, whether any greater convulsion would have happened, if the apostles had done as the Quakers in America. No Quaker holds slaves: why not? Because the Quakers teach their members that it is an essential immorality. The slave-holding states are infinitely more alive and jealous to keep up their "peculiar institution," than was the Roman government; yet the Quakers have caused no political convulsion. I confess, to me it seems, that if Paul, and John, and Peter, and James, had done as these Quakers, the imperial administration would have looked on it as a harmless eccentricity of the sect, and not as an incentive[16] to sedition. But be this as it may, I did not say what else the apostles might have succeeded to enforce; I merely pointed out what it was that they actually taught, and that, as a fact, they did not declare slavery to be an immorality and the basest of thefts. If any one thinks their course was more wise, he may be right or wrong, but his opinion is in itself a concession of my fact.

As to the historical progress of Christian practice and doctrine on this subject, it is, as usual, mixed of good and evil. The humanity of good Pagan emperors softened the harshness of the laws of bondage, and manumission had always been extremely common amongst the Romans. Of course, the more humane religion of Christ acted still more powerfully in the same direction, especially in inculcating the propriety of freeing Christian slaves. This was creditable, but not peculiar, and is not a fact of such a nature as to add to the exclusive claims of Christianity. To every proselyting religion the sentiment is so natural, that no divine spirit is needed to originate and establish it. Mohammedans also have a conscience against enslaving Mohammedans, and generally bestow freedom on a slave as soon as he adopts their religion. But no zeal for human freedom has ever grown out of the purely biblical and ecclesiastical system, any more than out of the Mohammedan. In the middle ages, zeal for the liberation of serfs first rose in the breasts of the clergy, after the whole population had become nominally Christian. It was not men, but Christians, whom the clergy desired to make free: it is hard to say, that they thought Pagans to have any human rights at all, even to life. Nor is it correct to represent ecclesiastical influences as the sole agency which overthrew slavery and serfdom. The desire of the kings to raise up the chartered cities as a bridle to the barons, was that which chiefly made rustic slavery untenable in its coarsest form; for a "villain" who escaped into the free cities could not be recovered. In later times, the first public act against slavery came from republican France, in the madness of atheistic enthusiasm; when she declared black and white men to be equally free, and liberated the negroes of St. Domingo. In Britain, the battle of social freedom has been fought chiefly by that religious sect which rests least on the letter of Scripture. The bishops, and the more learned clergy, have consistently been apathetic to the duty of overthrowing the slave system.—I was thus led to see, that here also the New Testament precepts must not be received by me as any final and authoritative law of morality. But I meet opposition in a quarter from which I had least expected it;—from one who admits the imperfection of the morality actually attained by the apostles, but avows that Christianity, as a divine system, is not to be identified with apostolic doctrine, but with the doctrine ultimately developed in the Christian Church; moreover, the ecclesiastical doctrine concerning slavery he alleges to be truer than mine,—I mean, truer than that which I have expounded as held by modern abolitionists. He approves of the principle of claiming freedom, not for men, but for Christians. He says: "That Christianity opened its arms at all to the servile class was enough; for in its embrace was the sure promise of emancipation…. Is it imputed as a disgrace, that Christianity put conversion before manumission, and brought them to God, ere it trusted them with themselves?… It created the simultaneous obligation to make the Pagan a convert, and the convert free." … "If our author had made his attack from the opposite side, and contended that its doctrines 'proved too much' against servitude, and assumed with too little qualification the capacity of each man for self-rule, we should have felt more hesitation in expressing our dissent."

I feel unfeigned surprize at these sentiments from one whom I so highly esteem and admire; and considering that they were written at first anonymously, and perhaps under pressure of time, for a review, I hope it is not presumptuous in me to think it possible that they are hasty, and do not wholly express a deliberate and final judgment. I must think there is some misunderstanding; for I have made no high claims about capacity for self-rule, as if laws and penalties were to be done away. But the question is, shall human beings, who (as all of us) are imperfect, be controlled by public law, or by individual caprice? Was not my reviewer intending to advocate some form of serfdom which is compatible with legal rights, and recognizes the serf as a man; not slavery which pronounces him a chattel? Serfdom and apprenticeship we may perhaps leave to be reasoned down by economists and administrators; slavery proper is what I attacked as essentially immoral.

Returning then to the arguments, I reason against them as if I did not know their author.—I have distinctly avowed, that the effort to liberate Christian slaves was creditable: I merely add, that in this respect Christianity is no better than Mohammedism. But is it really no moral fault,—is it not a moral enormity,—to deny that Pagans have human rights? "That Christianity opened its arms at all to the servile class, was enough." Indeed! Then either unconverted men have no natural right to freedom, or Christians may withhold a natural right from them. Under the plea of "bringing them to God," Christians are to deny by law, to every slave who refuses to be converted, the rights of husband and father, rights of persons, rights of property, rights over his own body. Thus manumission is a bribe to make hypocritical converts, and Christian superiority a plea for depriving men of their dearest rights. Is not freedom older than Christianity? Does the Christian recommend his religion to a Pagan by stealing his manhood and all that belongs to it? Truly, if only Christians have a right to personal freedom, what harm is there in hunting and catching Pagans to make slaves of them? And this was exactly the "development" of thought and doctrine in the Christian church. The same priests who taught that Christians have moral rights to their sinews and skin, to their wives and children, and to the fruit of their labour, which Pagans have not, consistently developed the same fundamental idea of Christian superiority into the lawfulness of making war upon the heathen, and reducing them to the state of domestic animals. If Christianity is to have credit from the former, it must also take the credit of the latter. If cumulative evidence of its divine origin is found in the fact, that Christendom has liberated Christian slaves, must we forget the cumulative evidence afforded by the assumed right of the Popes to carve out the countries of the heathen, and bestow them with their inhabitants on Christian powers? Both results flow logically out of the same assumption, and were developed by the same school.