A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

Of the state of thought in the United States it is difficult to speak with precision. The latitude allowed to or taken by the majority of the clergy keeps within the ostensible pale of the numerous churches much opinion that elsewhere would rank as extremely heterodox; and it was from American churchmen that there came the project of the so-called “Rainbow Bible,” in which the heterogeneous sources of the Old Testament books are indicated by printing in variously coloured inks. As in all countries where the clergy are democratically in touch with the people, the breach between authority and modern thought is thus less marked than in the sphere of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. But in such a civilization, development is inevitably continuous.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the prevailing creed of educated New England, then noted for “plain living and high thinking,” was Unitarianism. This seems to have grown rapidly after the Revolution, partly from seed sown by Priestley, who made New England his home, partly from the Deism of the educated class. Nearly all the leaders of the Revolution—Washington, Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams—had been Deists. But Deism is an inconvenient creed for public men in a church-going or clerically-influenced world; and Unitarianism, with its decorous worship and use of the Bible, was a convenient compromise. Later “transcendental” teaching, such as the movement around Emerson, led men in the same direction. Latterly, however, the Unitarian congregations relatively dwindle; and while some of the defection stands for the relapse of the children from the strenuous thought of their fathers, some stands for complete abandonment of the habit of worship.

At the same time popular rationalism has been greatly diffused in the United States by the lecturing of the late Colonel Ingersoll, one of the greatest orators of his time, as was his contemporary Charles Bradlaugh in England. Each of those men probably convinced more of his fellow countrymen of the untruth of the Christian creed than were ever rationally persuaded of its truth by the preachers or teachers of modern times. What preserves the form of faith in the States is probably less the socio-economic pressure seen so commonly in England and Scotland (since all life is franker and freer in the New World, especially in the West) than the simple lack of leisure for study in a community where competition for income drives all men at a pace that almost seems to belie prosperity. A shrewd and pliable clergy keeps itself rather better abreast of new scholarship and criticism than does the mass of the flock; and men and women who first learn from the pulpit something of the change of view passing over Biblical study are not apt to turn away from the teacher as Europeans do from an unteachable priest. But despite all accommodation the sense of an absolute change is diffused, and there is record of western preachers bidding farewell to the pulpit and being chorussed by laymen forsaking the pew.

In strict keeping with the shrinkage of faith among the “higher” races is the expenditure of effort to spread it among the “lower.” Faith naturally seeks the comfort of converts at lower intellectual levels; and it is in some quarters able to report a certain expansion of territory by such means. But the total statistics of Protestant missions tell only of handfuls of converts scattered among the yellow and brown and black races, a number grotesquely disproportionate to the immense outlay. This goes on in virtue of the still sufficient wealth of the churches, which are in consistency bound to respond to missionary appeals while they profess belief in the Christian doctrine of salvation. It is found, however, that the missionary system needs, to maintain it, either an ever more substantial stipend or some other opportunity of gain to the individual missionary; and the triviality of the results becomes increasingly discouraging to all save the most fervent faith. Disparagement of missionary labours on both moral and political grounds is probably more common among professed churchmen than among unbelievers, who sometimes, as in the case of Darwin, bear cordial testimony to the merits and the success of some missionaries as against the egoism of the normal trader in his relations with the undeveloped races.

The final problem of Protestantism is its collective relation to Catholicism; and in the first half of the nineteenth century many Protestants still hoped to gain ground at the expense of the Church of Rome, now that propaganda was free. No such success, however, has taken place. It is found on the contrary that the more devotional types tend to revert from Protestantism to Rome, while those who reject Catholicism rarely become Protestants. In France this is peculiarly apparent. At the Revolution, it was found that proportionally as many Protestant pastors as Catholic priests were ready to abjure their creed. In the religious reaction both Churches alike regained ground; and the Protestant Church in France has always had adherents distinguished for learning and moral earnestness. To-day, however, though its members are relatively numerous in places of political power, by reason doubtless of their serious and practical education, their Church does not make any corresponding gains. Its numbers may not latterly dwindle as steadily as those of the Catholic mass; but there is no prospect that it will recover strength through Catholic defections. In Austria, the anti-Roman movement already mentioned may conceivably give rise to a non-Romish Church; but it is impossible to forecast the issue.

§ 3. Greek Christianity

It is the pride of the Greek Church to call itself Orthodox; and in no part of Christendom has the faith had less to fear from unbelief. Mere sectarian strife, indeed, has never been lacking; and at the very moment of the fall of Constantinople there was deadly schism between the orthodox and those who were politically willing to unite with the Latin Church. But vital heresy never throve. Political vicissitude in the Eastern empire, from Constantine onwards, seems always to have thrown the balance of force on the side of religious conservatism; and so devoid is Greek ecclesiastical history since the Middle Ages of any element of innovating life that the student is tempted almost to surmise a national loss of faculty. Greek intellectual life since the fall of Constantinople, however, is only a steady sequence from that which went before. After the overthrow of the Latin kingdom set up by the Crusaders, and the restoration of Greek rule, the whole nation was very naturally thrown back on its traditions, recoiling from further contact with the West; and the process of fixation was repeated for what of Greek life was left after the Turkish conquest. The extraordinary gift for despotic government shown by the first race of Ottoman Turks brought about a resigned degradation on the Christian side. Allowed a sufficient measure of toleration to make them “prefer the domination of the Sultan to that of any Christian potentate,” they paid to him not only their taxes, but, for a time, a large annual tribute of children, with perfect submission; and thus, in the words of the British historian of modern Greece, they “sank with wonderful rapidity, and without an effort, into the most abject slavery.” Many indeed became Mohammedans to escape the tribute of children, which after a time ceased to be exacted, becoming rare in the seventeenth century.

In such circumstances the Christian priesthood and remaining laity were thrown very closely together, somewhat as happened in Ireland under English rule, and the result was a perfect devotion on the part of the Greek peasantry to their creed. It is accordingly claimed as the force which preserved their nationality. But the nationality so preserved could not well do much credit to the creed, which, in turn, gave Greeks a ground of differentiation from their conquerors without supplying any force of retrieval or progress. What was secured was not moral union but merely doctrinal persistence in the state of subjection; and the conqueror “availed himself of the hoary bigotry and infantine vanity of Hellenic dotage to use the Greek Church as a means of enslaving the nation.” The first Sultan sagaciously appointed a conservative Patriarch, and left Christian disputes alone. The result was that the Church was kept impotent by its own quarrels and corruptions. Unity of forms alone remained; simony “became a part of the constitution of the Orthodox Church,” the women of the Sultan’s harem selling Christian ecclesiastical offices; and Christian life as such set up in the Moslem onlookers an immovable contempt. “No more selfish and degraded class of men has ever held power,” says Finlay, “than the archonts of modern Greece and the Phanariots of Constantinople.” Greek life remained at its best in the rural districts, where the old village governments were allowed to subsist, and where accordingly the people kept apart from the corrupt and oppressive Turkish law courts. And in these districts, as it happens, there has been the maximum of pagan survivals.

The Church in particular exhibited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a worse degree, all the corruption and backwardness of that of the West in the pre-Reformation period. Greek monasteries, despite attempts at reform by single emperors, had long been in large measure places of comfortable retreat for members of the upper classes; and under Turkish rule they became still more so, acting however as centres of political intrigue in addition. The result was that, with every facility for such study as the Benedictines carried on in the West, the Greek monks as a rule left learning alone, and were active chiefly as Turkish political agents, in the manner of the Western Jesuits. The secular clergy at the same time became so depressed economically that they were commonly obliged to work with their hands for a living; and though those of the country districts were as a rule morally much superior to those of the towns, all alike were necessarily very ignorant. In the towns, where many of the aristocracy had become Moslems at the conquest, both clergy and monks frequently apostatized to Islam, three cases being recorded in the year 1675; and about that time there is a curious record of the Turks putting a Christian renegade to death for cursing his own religion in the divan. Moslems seem always to have retained a reverence for the Gospel Jesus, considered as apart from his Church.