NEW FORCES AND OLD FAITHS

Within the last fifty years particularly the fundamentals of the Christian faith have not only come up for reëxamination but have been compelled to adapt themselves to facts and forces which have gone farther toward recasting them than anything for a millennium and a half before. The Reformation went deep but it did not go to the bottom. There are differences enough in all reason between Protestantism and Catholicism, but their identities are deeper still. The world of Martin Luther and John Calvin was not essentially different in its outlook upon life from the world of Augustine and Athanasius. The world of Jonathan Edwards was much the same as the world of John Calvin and the world of 1850 apparently much the same as the world of Jonathan Edwards. There was, of course, an immense difference in the mechanism with which men were working but an unexpectedly small difference in their ruling ideas.

The Readjustments of Christian Faith More Far-reaching in the Last Fifty Years Than for a Thousand Years Before; Science Releases the Challenging Forces

We should not, of course, underestimate the contribution of the Reformation to the breaking up of the old order. It left the theologies more substantially unchanged than Protestantism has usually supposed, but it did mark the rise of changed attitudes toward authority. The reformers themselves did not accept without protest the spirit they released. They imposed new authorities and obediences upon their churches; they distrusted individual initiative in spiritual things and the more democratic forms of church organization. John Calvin sought in his Institutes to vindicate the law-abiding character of his new gospel; Luther turned bitterly against the German peasants in their demand for a most moderate measure of social justice; the Anglican leaders exiled the Pilgrims; the Puritan drove the Quaker out of Boston through an instinctive distrust of inward illumination as a safe guide for faith and religious enthusiasm as a sound basis for a new commonwealth. But the spirit was out of the bottle and could not be put back.

The right of the individual to make his own religious inquiries and reach his own religious conclusions was little in evidence for almost two hundred years after the Reformation, partly because the reactions of the post-Reformation period made the faithful generally content to rest in what had already been secured, partly because traditional authority was still strong, and very greatly because there was neither in history, philosophy nor science new material upon which the mind might exercise itself. We may take 1859, almost exactly two hundred years after the final readjustments of the Reformation period, as the point of departure for the forces which have so greatly modified our outlook upon our world and our understanding of ourselves; not that the date is clean-cut, for we see now how many things had already begun to change before Darwin and the Origin of Species.

Darwin's great achievement is to have suggested the formula in which science and history have alike been restated. He had no thought at all that what he was doing would reach so far or change so much. He simply supposed himself, through patient and exhaustive study, to have accounted for the rich variety of life without the supposition of a special creation for each form. But the time was ripe and longing for what he supplied and his hypothesis was quickly taken and applied in almost every field of thought. Nor does it greatly matter that Darwinism has been and may be still greatly modified. We have come under the spell of evolution. Our universe is no longer a static thing; it is growing and changing. Our imaginations are impressed by long sequences of change, each one of them minute in itself but in the mass capable of accounting for immense transformations. Darwin's initiative released the scientific temper which has been the outstanding characteristic of our own age. The physicist, the chemist and the biologist re-related their discoveries in the light of his governing principle and supplied an immense body of fact for further consideration. Geology was reborn, the records of the rocks came to have a new meaning, every broken fossil form became a word, maybe a paragraph, for the retelling of the past of the earth.

Astronomy supplied cosmic backgrounds for terrestrial evolution and Physics became a kind of court of appeal for both. The physicist proclaimed the conservation of energy, reduced seeming solidities to underlying force and resolved force itself into ultimate and tenuous unities. The processes thus discovered and related seemed to be self-sufficient. No need to bring in anything from the outside; unbroken law, unfailing sequence were everywhere in evidence. Where knowledge failed speculation bridged the gap. One might begin with a nebula and go on in unbroken sequence to Plato or Shakespeare without asking for either material, law or force which was not in the nebula to begin with. Man himself took his own place in the majestic procession; he, too, was simply the culmination of a long ascent, with the roots of his being more deeply in the dust than he had ever dreamed and compelled to confess himself akin to what he had aforetime scorned.

The Reaction of Evolution Upon Religion

All our old chronologies became incidental in a range of time before which even imagination grew dizzy. We found fragments of the skulls of our ancestors in ancient glacial drifts and the traditional 6,000 years since creation hardly showed on the dial upon which Geology recorded its conclusions. There is no need to follow in detail how all this reacted upon religion. The accepted religious scheme of things was an intricately interlocking system irresistible in its logic as long as the system remained unchallenged in its crucial points. If these should begin to be doubted then the Christian appeal would have lost, for the time at least, a most considerable measure of its force. The inner peace which we have already seen to be the keystone of the Protestant arch grew in part out of the sense of a universal condemnation from which the believer was happily saved; this in turn was conditioned by the unquestioned acceptance of the Genesis narrative. We can see clearly enough now that Christianity, and Protestant Christianity especially, really depended upon something deeper than all this. Still for the time being all these things were locked up together and once the accepted foundations of theology began to be questioned far-reaching adjustments were inevitable and the time of readjustment was bound to be marked by great restlessness and confusion.

The evolutionary hypothesis profoundly affected man's thought about himself. It challenged even more sharply his thought about God. Atheism, materialism and agnosticism are an old, old trinity, but they had up to our own time been at the mercy of more positive attitudes through their inability to really answer those insurgent questions: Whence? Whither? and Why? Creation had plainly enough demanded a creator. When Napoleon stilled a group of debating officers in Egypt by pointing with a Napoleonic gesture to the stars and saying, "Gentlemen, who made all these?" his answer had been final. Paley's old-fashioned turnip-faced watch with its analogies in the mechanism of creation had supplied an irresistible argument for a creation according to design and a designing creator. But now all this was changed. If Napoleon could have ridden out from his august tomb, reassembled his officers from the dust of their battlefields and resumed the old debate, the officers would have been apparently in the position to answer—"Sire, they made themselves." Our universe seemed to be sufficient unto itself.