In no other direction are the moral ideals of rationalism less fully vindicated by the movement of civilisation. The humane and scientific treatment of criminals has actually been antagonised, in the name of the Christian doctrine of sin, from the ranks of the Howard Society, established to promote such humane treatment. Rationalism can no other: religion seems willing to leave it the credit. Above all, the great cause of Peace on earth—the very motto (a mistranslation, as it happens) cited as that of nascent Christianity—visibly depends more and more on the spread of rational calculation, the spirit of reason, rather than on that of faith, however faithfully many a good Christian continues to plead for it. There is no Peace Church: even Quakerism has latterly had its war-mongers; and there is no record in history that the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God ever withheld men from fratricidal war.
We shall still hear, it may be, that the intellectual pride of rationalism is in tendency anti-democratic; Gibbon and Hume being cited as cases in point. And the rationalist democrat, shunning the lead of his antagonist to panacea-mongering, may here at once—or once more—confess that the spirit of reason in things intellectual is no guarantee for the immediate elimination of egoism in human relations. Christianity has claimed to be such a guarantee—with the results we know. But it is flatly inconceivable that the spirit which challenges all authority and anomaly in doctrine can tend to conserve either tyranny or social and political inequality. The very apologists who make the charge are the successors and coadjutors of those who have charged upon irreligious philosophy the generating of the French Revolution. Anti-democratic rationalists there will be, as there have been; but for every one such there are a hundred of the contrary ideal; and it is not in conservative parties that they are found to avow themselves. For rationalism, on the side of thought, must forever mean liberty, equality, fraternity, ‘the giving and receiving of reasons,’ the complete reciprocity of judgment. To all races, all castes, it makes the same appeal, being as universalist as science, naming no master, proffering no ritual, holding out no threat. The rationalist, as such, can have no part in the errant Darwinism which would conserve struggle because struggle has yielded progress; much less in the pseudo-Darwinism which would further degrade backward races because they have been ill-placed. Of race-hatred he cannot be guilty without infidelity to his first principles.
And if all this be termed vaunting, the objector may, perhaps, be placated by the repeated avowal that neither is rationalism proclaimed to be a wholly new way for the nations, nor is the rationalist as such acclaimed as the monopolist of good. He respectfully urges upon the best and ablest followers of other flags that under his they will not deteriorate or be less cherished; that their gifts are precious in his eyes; that he wants their collaboration for humanity’s sake. His panegyric of Reason is but the praise of what is wisest and best in man: his ‘ism’ is the concern to put off dead husks of opinion, to lift all life to the plane of light. The religionist may, if he must, come over with permission to call the cultus of truth and sanity a religion: some there are who suppose themselves to solve the dispute by that means, as Spencer thought to solve it by inviting Science and Religion to join hands in an avowal of a common ignorance. Such eirenicons do not seem widely acceptable: it is really better to let words keep their historic meanings than wilfully to change their values.
But if the question be whether rationalism is a creed to live by, an ideal to live by, let these pages be taken as giving part of the answer.
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at the Edinburgh University Press