The Religious Situation

by Goldwin Smith

The religious disturbance shows itself at the same time in the prevalence of wild superstitions, such as Spiritualism, rising out of the grave of religious faith, and attesting the lingering craving for the supernatural, somewhat like the mysteries of Isis after the fall of national religion at Rome.

The crisis has come on us rather suddenly, in consequence partly of great physical discoveries. The writer as a young student heard Buckland struggling to reconcile geology with Genesis. Now the struggle is to reconcile Genesis with geology. Before this wonderful advance of science and criticism combined, there had been comparatively little of avowed, still less of popular, scepticism. Rousseau was a sentimental theist; Voltaire erected a church to God. This vast "Modernism," as the poor, quaking Pope rather happily calls the ascendancy of science and criticism, has changed all. It is conceivable that, now as on some former occasions, the range of discovery may have been overrated and the pendulum of opinion may consequently have swung too far. Evolution, apparently, has still a wide space to traverse, even in what may be assumed to be the material sphere. What can it make of the marvellous stores of memory or of the apparently boundless play of the imagination, which by its working in sleep, sometimes with no assignable materials for the fancy, seems almost to show creative power?

Has Deity directly revealed itself to man? It has if the Bible is inspired. Otherwise, apparently, it has not. About the Koran or the Zendavesta it is hardly necessary to speak. "The Bible" we call the Old Testament and the New bound up together, as though they contained the two halves of the same dispensation and the moral ideal of both were the same. The historical importance of the Old Testament can hardly be overrated; nor can the literary grandeur of parts of it, or the advance made in social character and in law. When in connection with the question of American slavery attention was specially directed to the social law of Moses, no careful reader could fail to be greatly struck by its advanced humanity and civilization. Nevertheless, the morality of the Old Testament is tribal, while that of the New Testament is universal. The tribal character of the Old Testament morality is seen in the destruction of the first-born in Egypt in order to force Pharaoh to let the Chosen People go; in the invasion of Canaan and the slaughter of the Canaanites; in the murder of Sisera; in the approval of the treason of Rahab; in David's putting to torture the inhabitants of a captured city. The attempt to reconcile all this with universal morality by styling it the course of "Evolution" can hardly avail, since the spirit of tribal separatism dominates in the latest books of the Old Testament, Ezra and Nehemiah, where Israelites are not only forbidden for the future to marry with Gentiles, but bidden to put away Gentile wives. It is true there are glimpses of a universal dominion of the God of Israel, and of the happiness to be enjoyed by all nations under it. Still, Jehovah is Israel's God.

Were the Old Testament a Divine revelation it would certainly be free from error concerning the works of Deity, which plainly it is not. The narrative in Genesis of creation, compared with other primitive cosmogonies, is rational as well as sublime. But if Professor Buckland could persuade his hearers he could not persuade himself.

Largely good the influence of the Old Testament has no doubt been; largely also it prepared the way for the New. That its influence has been wholly good cannot be said. It has furnished fanaticism with aliment and excuse. It has found mottoes for the black flag of religious war.

Is it possible to believe, in face of doubtful authenticity, contradictions as to fact, and traces of local superstition, that the New Testament any more than the Old was dictated by Deity? Inspired by the creative power, in common with the other works of creative beneficence, as a part of the general plan, the New Testament may have been. Its morality is not tribal, but universal. "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth," this beside the well of Samaria by the Founder himself was proclaimed. If there is any privilege it is in favour not of race, but of class, the class being the poor, whose poverty seems counted to them as virtue, perhaps rather to the disparagement of active goodness.

Had the New Testament been divinely inspired, would not its authority have been clearly attested? Would not the authorship of its books have been made known? Would the slightest error or self-contradiction have been allowed to appear in it? What is the fact? The authenticity of a large portion of the Epistles of St. Paul seems admitted by critics; of other books of the New Testament the authorship is regarded as doubtful. The three Synoptic Gospels have a large element common to them all, and are evidently grafts upon a single document which is lost, and which the critics generally seem inclined to place not earlier than the latter part of the first century. The Synoptics all tell us that when Jesus expired the veil of the Temple was rent. One adds that there was preternatural darkness; a third that the earth quaked, that the rocks were rent, that the graves opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, came out of the graves after the resurrection of Jesus, went into the holy city, and appeared to many. Such apparitions plainly must have produced an immense sensation; such a sensation, it may be assumed, as would have brought scepticism to its knees. This surely must be legendary, and the legend must have had time to grow.

Though grafts on the same original stock, the Gospels are often at variance with each other; as in the case of the genealogy of Jesus, upon which the harmonists labor in vain; in that of the marvels attending his birth; in that of his Last Supper; in that of the resurrection, which again baffles the skill of the harmonists. Here, surely, is proof that the pens of the narrators were not guided by Omniscience.

Concerning the miracles of the casting out of devils generally, and in particular of the casting out of a legion of devils into a herd of two thousand swine at Gadara, what is to be said? Are these not clearly cases of human imagination set at work by a Jewish superstition? Is it possible that they should have had a place in a divine narrative of the life of the Saviour of the world? The Fourth Gospel omits them. Orthodoxy would fain persuade itself that this was to avoid unnecessary repetition.

Satan from the top of a mountain shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth. This seems to imply belief that the earth is a plane. The movement of the star of the Nativity seems to imply belief in the rotation of the heavens.