[THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF.]
The Restoration of Belief. No. I. Christianity in Relation to its Ancient and Modern Antagonists. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1852.
We have heard it quoted as the remark of a distinguished foreigner, conversant with the choicest society in several of the capitals of Europe, that nowhere is the alienation of the higher and professional classes from all religious faith so widespread and complete as in England. That the masses at the other end of the social scale are indifferent or disaffected to the institutions which visibly embody the Christianity of our age, can be no secret to any observant inhabitant of a large English town. It is on the middle class alone that the various forms of Protestant worship have any real hold. Removed alike from the passionate temptations of the homeless artisan, and from the mental activity of the statesman or man of letters, the rural gentry and the urban tradespeople are detained under traditional influences, partly by the wholesome conservatism of moral habit, partly by helpless accommodation to conventional standards. Men of this class, if once really touched and possessed by earnest conviction, are the best defenders of a religion from political assault. But a faith exposed to an intellectual struggle finds among them but a precarious shelter; especially if their attachment to it is less a living persuasion than a fear of the blank which its removal would create. Persecuted by the magistrate, they know how to defend their worship from the oppression of law. Assailed by the critic, they can offer but the resistance of a dumb impenetrability; they cannot bring their sterling personal qualities to bear upon the contest; they are obliged, for all active conduct in the strife, to trust to a body of literary Swiss, engaged to protect the Vatican of their faith, and accustomed never to report defeat. In proportion as the methods of sceptical aggression become more formidable, and its temper more earnest, it is found necessary to improve the training of the band of Church defenders;—a measure at once indispensable and fatal; for it lifts them into an intellectual position, which spoils the blind singleness of their allegiance, discloses the hopelessness of the task expected from them, and often destroys their antipathy to the noble revolutionary foe. It is the vainest of hopes, that a body of clergy, brought up to the culture of the nineteenth century, can abide by the Christianity of the sixteenth or of the second; if they may not preserve its essence by translation into other forms of thought, they will abandon it, in proportion as they are clear-sighted and veracious, as a dialect grown obsolete. The number accordingly is constantly increasing, in every college capable of training a rich intellect, of candidates for the ministry forced by their doubts into lay professions, and carrying thither the powerful influence, in the same direction, of learning and accomplishment. The higher offices of education are, to no slight extent, in the hands of these deserters of the Church; and through the tutor in the family, or the master in the school, or the professor in the lecture-room, contact and sympathy are established between the best portions of the new generation, and a kind of thought and culture with which the authorized theology cannot co-exist. College friendships, foreign travel, current literature, familiarize all educated young men with the phenomenon of scepticism, and in a way most likely to disenchant it of its terrors. Thus by innumerable channels it enters the middle class at the intellectual end of their life, assuming in general the form of historic and critical doubt; while from below, from the classes born and bred amid the whirl of machinery, and shaped in their very imagination by the tyranny of the power-loom, it pushes up in the ruder form of material fatalism. The intermediate enclosure, safe in the dull innocence of an unsuspected creed, is growing narrower every day; and, though reserved to the last for its hour of temptation, will be the least prepared to win its victory.
No one who appreciates the real sources of a healthy national life, and knows what to expect from the dissolution of ancient faiths, can look without anxiety at a prospect like this; especially in a country whose religious institutions, rigid with usage, overloaded with interests, charged with the bequests of the past, are manifestly unequal to the crisis, and, in their attempt to train the affections of the Future, wield every power but the right one, and are indeed already regarded, like the Court of Chancery with its wards, as a dry nursery for grown babies. A people that reverences nothing—nothing at least that stretches a common heaven over all—has lost its natural unity. Incipient decay is spreading through the secret cement of its civilization, which, far from bearing the weight of further growth, precariously holds its existing mass together. So far we are entirely at one with those who see something to deplore in the "Eclipse of Faith," and something to desire in the "Restoration of Belief." They do not overrate the evils of a state of society in which, if you think with the wise, you must cease to believe with the vulgar. We would join with them, heart and hand, in the effort to terminate this fatal discrepancy, and find some language of devotion and aspiration, veracious alike from the lips of the richest knowledge and the most primitive simplicity. But when, like the author whose publication is before us, they would abolish the discrepancy by simply reinstating the taught in the creed of the untaught; when they insist on the surrender without terms of modern philosophy and criticism to the "unabated" authority of the Bible; when they pretend to wipe out from calculation all the theological researches of the last half-century, as if they were mere ciphers made in sport on the tablet of history, and had no effect on our computed place at all,—we separate sorrowfully from them, largely sympathizing with their wish, but wholly despairing of their method. The received theory of the origin of Christianity from agencies exclusively divine, and of the infallible character of the canonical books, can no more be "restored," than Roman history can be put back to its state before Niebuhr's time, or Greek mythology be treated as if Heyne and Ottfried Müller had never lived. The present age is not more distinguished by its advance in the material arts, than by its astonishing progress in the interpretation and true painting of the past; a Boeckh or a Grote carries in his mind a picture of Athenian life in the days of Pericles more perfect, it is probable, than could be formed by Plutarch or Longinus; and it would be strange if the Christian era—certainly the object of the most elaborated study—were the only one to escape the work of reconstruction, or to undergo it without considerable change. The limits of that change are at present definable by no consentient estimate; but that they are such as to remove the old lines of Christian defence, and require the choice of more open ground, can no longer be denied, except by the astute consistency of a Romanist hierarchy, and the innocent unconsciousness of English sects. When the time shall come for a dispassionate history of the first two centuries,—a history which, resolving the canon back into the general mass of early Christian literature, shall find an original clew for tradition, instead of accepting one from its posthumous hand,—which shall detect opinions before they were heretic or orthodox, and trace the several streams of tributary thought to their confluence in a determinate Christianity,—the narrowness of our present polemic will be apparent of itself; its fears and triumphs be regarded with a smile; and many, both of its positive and negative results, will vanish from the interests of religion, and be absorbed in a higher view of the relation between the Divine and Human in this world.
We had hoped at first that the author of "The Restoration of Belief" was about to take up the problem of Christianity with a real appreciation of its altered conditions, and with unaffected justice towards those who cannot solve it like himself. His present essay is but the commencement of a series, designed to arrest the progress of educated scepticism, to expose the sophistries of modern criticism, and re-establish the plenary authority, as oracles of faith, of the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. It would perhaps be unreasonable to complain that his argument does not march very far in this first movement; and engages us rather by the stateliness of its step, than by the clearness of its direction. Nevertheless, we do think that the discursive license of introductory exposition is carried by him to an extreme which promises ill for the exactitude of his method. At the outset he declares that the difficulties which embarrass modern faith go down to the very depths of philosophy, and can be resolved only by reaching the ultimate roots of thought. Yet he remains on the upper surface of history, and, without once hinting how this is to lead him to the pith of the controversy, dwells only on facts which are undisputed, and his conception of which might be as readily gathered from Gibbon as from Neander. Like many writers whose eye is caught by grandeur of effect, and whose imagination is sensitive to wonder, he is fascinated by the moment in human affairs when the Roman Empire was exactly poised between the forces of external unity and of internal decay, and the political organism of the Past, so august in its mass and its proportions, held no soul but the young spirit of the Future. Of this crisis, assigned to the reign of Alexander Severus, our author presents an impressive and, we believe, a faithful sketch. Amid the splendor, the misery, the decay of belief and hope, the universal incertitude of that period, there emerges into notice the beautiful and beneficent phenomenon of a real Faith,—a Faith that can live, a Faith that can die. The inevitable conflict between this new power and the Pagan prerogatives of the Cæsars is well brought out by the essayist; and the victory of Christianity is justly ascribed to the peculiar character of the religion, as a feeling directed to a person rather than the simple assent to an idea. It was the force of this personal feeling which first awakened in men the sentiment of obligation in regard to religious truth, and substituted faithful veracity for indifferentism and laxity of profession. The author thus sums up the positions which he regards the present essay as establishing:—
"That the Christian communities did, during the period that we have had in view, make and maintain a protest against the idol-worship of the times, which protest, severe as it was in its conditions, at length won a place in the world for a purer theology, and set the civilized races free from the degrading superstitions of the Greek Mythology.
"That in the course of this arduous struggle, and as an unobserved yet inevitable consequence of it, a New Principle came to be recognized, and a New Feeling came to govern the minds of men, which principle and feeling conferred upon the individual man, however low his rank, socially or intellectually, a dignity unknown to classical antiquity; and which yet must be the basis of every moral advancement we can desire, or think of as possible.
"That the struggle whence resulted these two momentous consequences, affecting the welfare of men for ever, was entered upon and maintained on the ground of a definite persuasion, or Belief, of which a Person was the object.
"That this belief toward a person embraced attributes, not only of superhuman excellence and wisdom, but also of superhuman power and authority. If we take the materials before us as our guide, it will not be possible to disengage the history from these ideas of superhuman dignity."—p. 106.