[355] Prof. Neocles Karasis, Greeks and Bulgarians in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, 1907, pp. 15–17, citing a Bulgarian journal. [↑]
CONCLUSION
Any fuller survey of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century will but reveal more fully the signal and ever-widening growth of rational thought among all classes of the more advanced nations, and among the more instructed of the less advanced. The retrospect of the whole past tells of a continuous evolution, which in the twentieth century proceeds more extensively than ever before. There has emerged the curious fact that in our own country a measure of rational doubt has been almost constantly at work in the sphere in which it could perhaps least confidently be expected—to wit, that of poetry. From Chaucer onwards it is hard to find a great orthodox poet. Even Spenser was as much Platonist as Christian; and Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning (to name no others) in their various ways baffle the demand of faith. Latterly, the sex which has always been reckoned the more given to religion has shown many signs of adaptation to the higher law. In Britain, as in France, women began to appear in the ranks of reason in the eighteenth century.[1] In the nineteenth the number has increased at a significant rate. Already in the fierce battles fought in the time of reaction after the French Revolution women took their place on the side of freedom; and Frances Wright (Madame d’Arusmont) played a notable part as a freethinking publicist and philanthropist.[2] Since her day the names of Harriet Martineau and George Eliot tell of the continual gain of knowledge; and women rationalists are now to be counted by thousands in all the more civilized countries.
The same law holds of public life in general. Gladstone eagerly maintained in his latter years that politicians, in virtue of their practical hold of life, were little given to skepticism; but the facts were and are increasingly against him. The balance of the evidence is against the ascription of orthodoxy to either of the Pitts, or to Fox; and we have seen that the statesmen of the American Revolution, as of the French, were in general deists. Garibaldi[3] in Italy, and Gambetta in France, were freethinkers; Lincoln and his opponent, Douglas, were deists; towards the close of the century, in New Zealand, Sir Robert Stout and the late Mr. John Ballance, avowed rationalists, were among the foremost politicians of their generation; and in the English Cabinet rationalism began to be represented in the person of Lord Morley.
While such developments have been possible in the fierce light of political strife, the process of disintegration and decomposition has proceeded in society at large till unbelief can hardly be reckoned a singularity. Within the pale of all the Christian Churches dogmatic belief has greatly dwindled, and goes on dwindling: and “Christianity” is made to figure more and more as an ethical doctrine which has abandoned its historical foundations, while preserving formulas and rituals which have no part in rational ethics. The mythical cosmogony out of which the whole originally grew is no longer believed in by any educated person, though it is habitually presented to the young as divine truth. Thousands of clergymen, economically gripped to a false position, would gladly rectify their professed creeds, but cannot; because the political and economic bases involve the consent of the majority, and changes cannot be made without angry resistance and uproar among the less instructed multitude of all classes. The Protestant Churches collectively dread to figure as repudiating the historic creed; while the Roman Catholic Church, conscious of the situation, maintains a semblance of rigid discipline and a minimum standard of instruction for its adherents, counting on holding its ground while the faculty of uncritical faith subsists. Only by the silent alienation of the more thoughtful and sincere minds from the priesthood can the show of orthodoxy be maintained even within the Catholic pale.
In all orders alike, nevertheless, the “practice” of religion decays with the theory. The Churches are constantly challenged to justify their existence by social reforms and philanthropic works: no other plea passes as generally valid; and it is only by reason of a general transference of interest from religious to social problems that the decay of belief is disguised. “Piety,” in the old sense, counts relatively for little; and while orthodoxy is still a means of advantage in political life, religion counts for nothing in international relations. In the war of 1899–1902, “Bible-loving” England forced a quarrel on the most Bible-loving race in the world; and at the time of the penning of these lines six nations are waging the greatest war of all time irrespectively of racial and religious ties alike, though all alike officially claim the support of Omnipotence. In Berlin a popular preacher edifies great audiences by proclaiming that “God is not neutral”; and his Emperor habitually parades the same faith, with the support of all the theologians of Germany—the State supremely guilty of the whole embroilment, and the deliberate perpetrator of the grossest aggression in modern history. On the side of the Allies “Christianity” is less systematically but still frequently invoked. On both sides the forms of prayer are officially practised by the non-combatants, very much as the Romans in their wars maintained the practice of augury from the entrails of sacrificed victims; and “family prayer” is said to be reviving.
Everywhere, nevertheless, the more rational, remembering how in the “ages of faith” deadly wars were waged for whole generations in the very name of religion, recognize that Christianity furnishes neither control for the present nor solution for the future; and that the hope of civilization lies in the resort of the nations to human standards of sanity and reciprocity. The ties which hold are those of fellow-citizenship.