Yet another phase of the professional defence of the faith calls for notice. At the close of a very comprehensive and catholic survey of the religions of the world, Professor J. E. Carpenter writes:—
There is no doubt whatever of the dependence of Christianity upon Jewish Messianic expectation. Its pictures of human destiny ... are pictures drawn by Jewish hands. Its promises of the Advent of the Son of Man ... are couched in the language of earlier Jewish books. For one religion builds upon another, and must use the speech of its country and its time. Its forms must therefore change from age to age.... But it will always embody man’s highest thought concerning the mysteries that surround him, and will express his finest attitude to life. Its beliefs may be gradually modified; ... but history shows it to be among the most permanent of social forces, and the most effective agent for the slow elevation of the race.[1]
We have here two typical assumptions: first, that religion always did, and always will, “embody man’s highest thought” and “express his finest attitude to life”; second, that it is “the most effective agent for the slow elevation of the race.” No pretence is made of proving the latter proposition; it is taken for granted, like the other. And the writer has previously declared (p. 34) that “Theologies may be many, but religion is one”: all religions, therefore, are included in the closing panegyric. We are thus presented with the profoundly pessimistic proposition that the welfare of humanity has always depended mainly upon the acceptance of illusory beliefs; for neither the writer nor anyone else pretends to believe that the mass of credences in question are aught else. Yet he brings them all within his generalization. Of the old Aztec religion he writes (p. 57) that “out of the fusion of nationalities in Mexico rose a developed polytheism in which lofty religious sentiment seems strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual.”
It becomes necessary to challenge emphatically the moral and sociological science which thus certificates as “lofty” beliefs admittedly bound up with systematic atrocity of action, and sees an elevating force in creeds directly productive of immeasurable evil. The religion last referred to was destroying the Aztec State, morally and economically, when both alike were destroyed by Christian invaders. Lay moral sense, now as so often in the past, must correct the sacerdotal; and a false sociological generalization must be confronted with the historic facts.
The chapters which follow challenge, by simple historic representation, both the ethical and the sociological judgments under notice. If the reader is disposed, in deference to “authority,” to assent to either, let him turn to another volume in the same series with that of Professor Carpenter, the History of Freedom of Thought, by Professor Bury; and he will see presented, from a strictly historical point of view, the negation of the doctrine that religion has been “the most effective agent for the slow elevation of the race.” The sociological verdict of the specialist in history is presumably as weighty as that of the specialist in religion on the question of the causation of progress.
But I am far from suggesting that the question is to be settled by “authority” of any kind. The prime necessity is detached, independent, self-consistent thinking upon a broad scrutiny of the facts. If these pages in any degree promote that process, they will have justified their production.
[1] Comparative Religion, by J. Estlin Carpenter; “Home University Library,” 1912, end. [↑]