"Educated men should not wait to be reminded that those who, after abandoning a peremptory historic belief, endeavor to retain Faith and Piety for their comfort, stand upon a slope that has no ledges: Atheism in its simplest form yawns to receive those who there stand; and they know themselves to be gravitating towards it.
"It would be far more reasonable for a man to die as a martyr for Atheism,—a stage beyond which no further progress is possible,—than to do so at any point short of that terminus, knowing as he does that every day is bringing him nearer to the gulf. The stronger the mind is, and the more it has of intellectual massiveness, the more rapid will be its descent upon this declivity. Minds of little density, and of much airy sentiment, may stay long where they are, just as gnats and flies walk to and fro upon the honeyed sides of a china vase; they do not go down, but never again will they fly."—p. 94.
This is one of the conventional minatory arguments which betray the absence of security and repose from the heart of the received theology; whose teachers could never propound it, except from a position of conscious danger. They must imagine in their own case that, if they were to find the Gospels no longer oracular, they would plunge at once into endless depths of negation; and that, unless they can refute an interpretation of De Wette's, or correct a date of Baur's, there will be eternal night in heaven. They feel the universe, and life, and love, and sorrow, and the history of times and races unbaptized, to be all atheistic through and through,—profane to the core,—untraced by a vestige, untransfigured by a color, of divine significance. What they can think of a Being who creates all reality and lives in it on these blindfold terms, we will not attempt to decide; but it is no wonder that, having once brought themselves to believe in Him, they feel how a single move would overset them into disbelief. This thing, however, is true of their own state of mind alone; whose spaces, dark throughout with scepticism but for one distant lamp, might easily be left without a ray. It is consistent neither with reason nor with experience to threaten with this rule men who have opened their souls to something else than documentary authority. It is notoriously false that the career of historic doubt usually terminates in the loss of all faith in God; nor do we suppose that our author would have awarded to the atheist, for actually reaching this point, the praise of "intellectual massiveness," had he not wanted a heavy weight to slide down his metaphorical inclined plane,[57] and outstrip the slippery believers who try to stop half-way. The accusation against Theism, of being possible to the light-minded and superficial,—a mere sweet-bait to entrap the silly insects of the intellectual world,—is confuted by the whole history of philosophy and human culture; all whose grandest names have connected themselves with the recognition of a religion indigenous or accessible to the faculties of the soul. Let our author collect on one side of his library all the giants and heroes of utter disbelief, and on the other the literature of natural faith; nay, let him ransack for fresh names and forgotten suffrages Lalande's "Dictionnaire des Athées"; and if, having weighed the various merits of Leucippus and Lucretius, of Baron d'Holbach and La Mettrie, of Robert Owen and Atkinson, he thinks them of more sterling mass than the pure gold of thought and life accumulated by Socrates, Plato, Antoninus,—by Anselm and Abelard, Descartes and Arnaud,—by the authors of the "Theodicée," the "Essay on the Human Understanding," and the "Principles of Human Knowledge,"—by Kant and Cousin,—by Butler and Paley and Arnold,—we can only profess a dissent from his intellectual taste, not less than from his moral judgment.
The few pages on which we have been commenting were the first—though they are near the end of the treatise—that fully opened our eyes to the author's theological animus. For a while, his large professions, and, no doubt, sincere purpose of fairness,—his apparent breadth of view, and his free hand in putting down his subject on the canvas,—secured our admiring confidence, and made us feel that here at length justice, earnestness, and accomplishment will go together. One feature, indeed, we noticed as giving a suspicious appearance to his equity of temper; it displays itself more in censoriousness towards his friends, than in large-heartedness towards his antagonists. He readily allows faults in the advocates of his own side, but is never carried away into even a momentary appreciation of the other. This particular form of impartiality, which consists in detracting from the merits of allies, instead of delighting in those of opponents, is the ecclesiastic counterfeit of candor,—the half-shekel, which is alone payable in the temple-service, but which nowhere, save at the sacred money-table, is deemed equivalent to the good Roman coin of common life. Much as we dislike the chink of this consecrated metal, we hoped that it would only ring for a passing instant on the ear. But alas! it is an indication seldom deceptive; and we feel constrained to report that there are, in this tract, quotations from both Mr. Newman and Mr. Greg, which, if we were in the court of veracity, and not of theology, we would say are unconscientiously made. The quotations are made anonymously as well as unfaithfully, so that the reader, unless haunted by the checking impressions of memory, cannot correct the injustice of the writer. The "Phases of Faith" describes, it will be remembered, the gradual course of Mr. Newman's defections from his original orthodoxy. His first movements of doubt were naturally timid and inconsiderable, bringing him only to the conclusion, that the genealogy in the first chapter of Matthew was copied wrong, and counted wrong, from the Old Testament. On this step followed a second, and a third, each more important than the preceding, and necessitating a next more momentous than itself. The latter stages of his progress included an inquiry into the evidence of the Resurrection, the miraculous gifts ascribed to the early Church, the claims to credit of the Apostle Paul, and other topics, undeniably affecting the very essence of Christian evidence. Having traced the successive advances of his doubts, Mr. Newman, in a recapitulary "Conclusion," makes a solemn appeal to his readers, to say at what point he could have stopped, and to lay a finger distinctly on the place at which the guilt of his scepticism began. One by one he counts out the steps by which he had proceeded, and asks, "Was this the sinful one?" The whole effect of the appeal is certainly an impression that the series, if not an inevitable sequence, is very difficult to break; and that, small as the beginnings were, they linked themselves, by close connection, with very momentous results. From this chapter our author cites a sentence or two, but in such a way as immediately to conjoin the small initial steps of doubt with the great ultimate conclusion, and to make it appear that Mr. Newman renounced Christianity because he could not make out the pedigree of Jesus to his satisfaction. The genealogical difficulty is the only one which he quotes, and as to which Mr. Newman is permitted to speak for himself. Presenting this as a specimen, and suppressing all the rest, he says that he could have shown "this writer" a course far better "than, on account of difficulties such as these, to renounce Christianity"! His citation from Mr. Greg is introduced as follows:—
"Let another witness be heard; and in hearing him one might think that his words are an echo that has come softly travelling down, through sixteen centuries, from some field of blood, or some forum, or some amphitheatre, where Christian men were witnessing a good confession in the midst of their mortal agonies! This witness is one who assures us that 'he can believe no longer, he can worship no longer; he has discovered that the creed of his early days is baseless, or fallacious.' Yet he too takes up the Martyr Truth, that we must not lie to God."—p. 91.
Here, then, Mr. Greg (with concealment of his name) is represented as one who, by his own confession, can neither believe nor worship any more. Turning to the preface of "The Creed of Christendom," we find the following original to this quotation:—
"The pursuit of truth is easy to a man who has no human sympathies, whose vision is impaired by no fond partialities, whose heart is torn by no divided allegiance. To him the renunciation of error presents few difficulties; for the moment it is recognized as error, its charm ceases. But the case is very different with the Searcher whose affections are strong, whose associations are quick, whose hold upon the Past is clinging and tenacious. He may love Truth with an earnest and paramount devotion; but he loves much else also. He loves errors, which were once the cherished convictions of his soul. He loves dogmas which were once full of strength and beauty to his thoughts, though now perceived to be baseless or fallacious. He loves the Church where he worshipped in his happy childhood; where his friends and his family worship still; where his gray-haired parents await the resurrection of the Just; but where he can worship and await no more. He loves the simple old creed, which was the creed of his earlier and brighter days; which is the creed of his wife and children still; but which inquiry has compelled him to abandon. The past and the familiar have chains and talismans which hold him back in his career, till every fresh step forward becomes an effort and an agony; every fresh error discovered is a fresh bond snapped asunder; every new glimpse of light is like a fresh flood of pain poured in upon the soul. To such a man the pursuit of Truth is a daily martyrdom,—how hard and bitter let the martyr tell. Shame to those who make it doubly so; honor to those who encounter it saddened, weeping, trembling, but unflinching still."—p. xvi.
Our author would snatch from Mr. Greg the right to say, we must not lie to God. Which has the better right to say, "Thou shalt not lie to men"?
The more ingenuously the modern Orthodoxy lays bare its essence, the more evident is it that a profound scepticism not only mingles with it, but constitutes its very inspiration. The dread of losing God, the impression that there is but one patent way, not of duty, but of thought, of meeting him, haunt the minds of men, driving some to Anglicanism to compensate defect of faith by excess of sacrament, some to Rome in quest of the Lord's body, and prompting others to conservative efforts of Bibliolatry, conducted with ever-decreasing reason and declining hope. We have seen, however, no such exemplification of this radical distrust as in the treatise before us. Already has the writer declared that the moral side of the universe sends in, with regard to religion, an empty report. And now he hastens to tell us that, on the physical side, the watchmen from every observatory of nature cry out, "No God." He represents the natural sciences as a huge Titanic, resistless mass of knowledge, perfectly demonstrable, and completely irreligious; descending, like a glacier, from the upper valleys of frozen thought; sure to scrape away the wild pine woods and the green fields of natural religion, yet considerate enough, for some reason unexplained, to spare the foundations of the village church. Designating every faith except his own by such phrases as "theosophic fancies," and "pietistic notions," he assures us that they will all be put "right out of existence" by "our modern physical sciences"; and he borrows from the "Positive Philosophy" (apparently by unconscious sympathy) the following maxim to justify his prediction:—
"In any case, when that which on any ground of proof takes full hold of the understanding, (such, for example, are the most certain of the conclusions of Geology,) stands contiguous to that which, in a logical sense, is of inferior quality, and is indeterminate, and fluctuating, and liable to retrogression,—in any such case there is always going on a silent encroachment of the more solid mass upon the ground of that which is less solid. What is sure will be pressing upon what is uncertain, whether or not the two are designedly brought into collision or comparison. What is well defined weighs upon, and against, what is ill defined. Nothing stops the continuous involuntary operation of Science in dislodging Opinion from the minds of those who are conversant with both.