Tendency toward simplicity and uniformity.
The rôle which prophecies played in the religion of the Hebrews is well known. In the Middle Ages certain prophecies, such as that of the millennium, were publicly and miserably put to the proof. Since that time dogmatic religion, in the fear of compromising itself, has stood aloof from oracles and prophecies, preferring increase of security to extent of influence. Thus by degrees authoritative religion has come to renounce its sway over one of the most important portions of human life, which it pretended formerly to possess a knowledge of, and to regulate—the future. It contents itself to-day with the present. Its predictions, ever vaguer and more vague, nowadays bear only on the period beyond the grave; it contents itself with promising heaven to the faithful—which the Catholic religion indeed goes the length of in some measure securing for them by absolution. And one may recognize in the confessional a certain substitute for the divination of former times. The hand of the priest opens or shuts the door of heaven for the believer kneeling in the shadow of the confessional; he wields a power in some respects greater than that of the Pythoness who might determine with a word the fate of battles. Confession itself, however, has disappeared in the stronger and younger offshoots of Christianity. In orthodox Protestantism one is one’s self the judge of one’s own future, and possesses no other clew to one’s destiny than the dictum of one’s own conscience, with all its uncertainty upon its head. Owing to this transformation dogmatic faith in the word of a priest or a prophet tends to become a simple reliance on the voice of conscience, which becomes ever less and less authoritative, ever more and more feeble in the face of doubt. Faith in oracles and in the visible finger of Providence in this world has become to-day simply a somewhat hesitating reliance upon an inner oracle and an together transcendental Providence. This is one of the items in respect to which religious evolution may be considered as already something like complete, and religious individualism as on the point of replacing obedience to the priest, and the negation of the marvellous as substituted for antique superstition.
Belief in God falls with belief in devils.
The strength of the belief in a personal God has been in all times proportionate to the strength of the belief in a devil—we have just seen an illustration of it in the case of Luther. In effect these two beliefs are correlatives; they are the opposite faces of one and the same anthropomorphism. Well, in our days, belief in the devil is incontestably becoming feebler; and this enfeeblement is even especially characteristic of the present epoch; there has at no other time been anything to equal it. There is not an educated person to be found in whom the notion of a devil does not excite a smile. That, believe me, is a sign of the times, a manifest proof of the decline of dogmatic religion. Wherever the power of dogmatic religion by an exception to the general course of things has retained its vitality, and retained it, as in America, even to the point of giving birth to new dogmas, the fear of the devil has subsisted in its entirety; wherever, as in more enlightened regions than America, this fear no longer exists except as a symbol or a myth, the intensity and the fecundity of the religious sentiment decline inevitably in the same degree. The fate of Javeh is bound up with that of Lucifer; angels and devils go hand in hand, as in some fantastic mediæval dance. The day when Satan and his followers shall be definitively vanquished and annihilated in the minds of the people, the celestial powers will not have long to live.
Results.
To sum up, in all these relations, dogmatic faith—and in especial, such as is narrow, authoritative, intolerant, and at enmity with a spirit of science—seems on every account destined to disappear, or to survive, if at all, among a small number of believers. Every doctrine, no matter how moral or how elevating, seems to us nowadays to lose these attributes and to become degraded from the moment it proposes to impose itself upon the human mind as a dogma. Dogma happily—that crystallization of faith—is an unstable compound; like certain complex crystals, it is apt to explode, under a concentrated ray of light, into dust. Modern criticism supplies the ray. If Catholicism, in pursuit of religious unity, logically results in the doctrine of infallibility, modern criticism in the course of its establishment of the relativity of human knowledge and of the essential fallibility of intelligence in general, tends toward religious individualism and toward the dissolution of every universal or “Catholic” dogma. And on that score orthodox Protestantism is itself menaced with ruin, for it also has preserved in its dogmas an element of Catholicity, and by that very fact of intolerance, if not practical and civil, at least theoretical and religious.
CHAPTER II.
SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.
I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation of the Bible substituted for a literal explanation.