If the religious sentiment should disappear, it may be objected, it would leave a void which it would be impossible to fill, and humanity’s horror of a vacuum is even greater than nature’s. Humanity, therefore, would satisfy somehow or other, even with absurdities, that eternal need of believing of which we have spoken above. The instant one religion is destroyed another takes its place; it will be always so from age to age, because the religious sentiment will always exist as a continuing need for some object of worship which it will create and re-create in spite of all the ratiocination in the world. No victory over nature can be lasting; no permanent need in the human breast can be long silenced. There are periods in human life when faith is as imperious as love; one experiences a hunger to embrace something, to give one’s self—even to a figment of the imagination; one is a victim to a fever of faith. Sometimes this mood lasts throughout one’s whole life, sometimes it lasts some days only or some hours; there are cases in which it does not present itself till late, and even very late, in life. And the priest has taken note of all these vicissitudes; he is always there, patient, waiting tranquilly for the moment when the symptoms shall appear, and the sleeping sentiment shall awaken and become masterful; he has the Host ready, he has great temples reverberating with sacred prayers, where man may come to kneel, and breathe in the spirit of God, and arise strengthened. The reply is that it is a mistake to regard all humanity as typified in the person of the recently disabused believer. It has often been made a subject of reproach to free-thinkers that they endeavour to destroy without replacing, but one cannot destroy a religion in the breasts of a people. At some certain moment in its history it falls of its own weight, with the disappearance of the pretended evidences on which it was resting; it does not, properly speaking, die; it ceases simply—becomes extinct. It will cease definitely when it shall have become useless, and there is no obligation to replace what is no longer necessary. Among the masses, intelligence is never far in advance of tradition; one never adopts a new idea until one has by degrees become accustomed to it. It all takes place without violence, or at least without lasting violence; the crisis passes, the wound closes quickly, and leaves no trace behind; the forehead of the masses bears no scar. Progress lies in wait for the moment of least resistance, of least pain. Even revolutions do not succeed except in so far as they are purely beneficial, as they constitute a universally advantageous evolution. For the rest, there is no such thing as a revolution, or a cataclysm, properly so called, in human belief. Each generation adds a doubt to those which existed before in the minds of their parents, and thus faith falls away bit by bit, like the banks of a river worn by the stream; the sentiments which were bound up with the belief go with it, but they are incessantly replaced by others, a new wave sweeps forward to fill the void, and the human soul profits by its losses and grows larger, like the bed of a river. The adaptation of a people to its environment is a beneficent law. It has often been said, and justly, that there is food for the soul as well as food for the body; and the analogy may be pursued by remarking that it is difficult to induce a people to change its national diet. For centuries the inhabitants of Brittany have lived upon imperfectly cooked buckwheat cakes, as they live by their simple faith and infantine superstitions. It may, however, be affirmed, a priori, that the day will come when the reign of the buckwheat cake in Brittany will be at an end, or at least will be shared by other, and better prepared, and more nourishing foods; it is equally rational to affirm that the faith of Brittany will some day come to an end, that the somewhat feeble minds of the inhabitants will sooner or later seek nourishment in solider ideas and beliefs, and that the whole of their intellectual life will, by degrees, be transformed and renewed.
The disenchantment that accompanies it temporary.
It is only those who have been reared in a faith, and then disabused of it, that preserve, along with their primitive sentiments, a certain home-sickness for a belief to correspond to these sentiments. The reason is that they have been violently hastened in their passage from belief to incredulity. The story of the passing disenchantment with life, which the recent disbeliever experiences, has often been told. “I felt horribly exiled,” M. Renan once said, in speaking of the moral crisis through which he himself had passed. “The fish in Lake Baikal have taken thousands of years, it is said, to transform themselves from salt-water to fresh-water fish. I had to achieve my own transformation in the course of some weeks. Catholicism surrounds the whole of life like an enchanted circle with so much magic that, when one is deprived of it, everything seems insipid and melancholy; the universe looked to me like a desert. If Christianity was not true, everything else seemed to me to be indifferent, frivolous, scarce worthy of attention; the world looked mediocre, morally impoverished to me. The world seemed to me to be in its dotage and decadence; I felt lost in a nation of pigmies.” This pain incident to metamorphosis, this sort of despair at renouncing everything that one has believed and loved up to that time, is not peculiar to the Christian who has fallen away from Christianity; it exists in diverse degrees, as M. Renan well knew, whenever a love of any sort comes to an end in us. For him who, for example, has placed his whole life in the love of a woman and feels himself betrayed by her, life seems not less disenchanted than for the believer who sees himself abandoned by his God. Even simple intellectual errors may produce an analogous sentiment. Archimedes no doubt would have felt his life crumble away beneath him, if he had discovered irremediable lacunæ in his chain of theorems. The more intimately a god has been personified and humanized, the more intimately he comes to be beloved, and the greater must be the wound he leaves behind when he deserts the heart. But even though this wound be in certain instances incurable, that fact constitutes no argument in support of the religion of the masses, for an illegitimate and unjustifiable love may cause as much suffering when one is deprived of it as a legitimate love. The bitterness of truth lies less in truth itself than in the resistance offered to it by intrenched and established error. It is not the world which is desert when deprived of the god of our dreams, it is our own heart; and we have ourselves to blame if we have filled our hearts with nothing better than dreams. For the rest, in the majority of cases, the void, the sense of loss which a religion leaves behind, is not lasting; one adapts one’s self to one’s new moral environment, one becomes happy again; no doubt not in the same manner—one is never happy twice in the same manner—but in a manner less primitive, less infantine, more stable. M. Renan is an example of it. His transmutation into a fresh-water fish was achieved in reality tranquilly enough; it is doubtful whether he ever dreams now of the salt-water stretches of the Bible, and nobody has ever declared so forcibly that he is happy. One might almost make it a matter of reproach to him, and suggest that the profoundest happiness is sometimes not so precisely aware of itself. If every absolute faith is a little naïve, one is not absolutely without naïveté when one is too confident of one’s own happiness.
The essential cheapness of religious speculation.
To the surprise and to the disenchantment which a former Christian experiences in the presence of scientific truth may be opposed the even more profound astonishment which those who have been exclusively nourished on science experience in the presence of religious dogma. The man of science can understand religious dogmas, for he can follow the course of their birth and development century by century; but he experiences, in his effort to adapt himself to this narrow environment, something of the difficulty that he might feel in an effort to enter a Liliputian fairy palace. The world of religion—with the ridiculous importance which it ascribes to the earth as the centre of the universe, with the palpable moral errors that the Bible contains, with its whole body of legend, which is affecting only to those who believe in them, with its superannuated rites—all seems so poor, so powerless to symbolize the infinite, that the man of science is inclined to see in these infantine dreams the repugnant and despicable side rather than the elevated and attractive side. Livingstone says that one day, after having preached the Gospel to a new tribe, he was taking a walk in the neighbouring fields when he heard near him, behind a bush, a strange noise like a convulsive cough; he there found a young negro who had been taken by an irresistible desire to laugh by the account of the Biblical legends, and had hidden himself there out of respect for Livingstone, and in the shadow of the bush was writhing with laughter and unable to reply to the questions of the worthy pastor. Certainly the surprising legends of religion can give rise to no such outburst of gaiety as this in one who has spent his life among the facts of science and the reasoned theories of philosophy. He feels rather a certain bitterness, such as one feels generally in the presence of human feebleness, for man feels something of the same solidarity in the presence of human error as in the presence of human suffering. If the eighteenth century ridiculed superstition, if the human mind was then “dancing,” as Voltaire said, “in chains,” it is the distinction of our epoch more accurately to have estimated the weight of those chains; and in truth, when one examines coolly the poverty of the popular attempts that have been made to represent the world and the ideal of mankind, one feels less inclination to laugh than to weep.
Inevitable extinction of fanaticism.
But, however that may be, the evolution of human belief must not be judged by the painful revolutions of individual belief; in humanity such transformations are subject to regular laws. The very explosions of the religious sentiment, explosions even of fanaticism, which still occur and have so often occurred in the course of religious degeneration, enter as an integral part into the formula of the very process of degeneration itself. After having been so long one of the most ardent interests of humanity, religious faith must, of necessity, be slow in cooling. Every human interest resembles those stars which are gradually declining at once in light and heat, and which from time to time present a solid exterior and then, as the result of some inner disturbance, burst through their outer rind and become once more brilliant to a degree that they had not rivalled for hundreds of centuries; but this very brilliancy is itself an expenditure of light and heat, a phase simply of the process of cooling. The star hardens once more on its surface, and, after every fresh cataclysm and illumination, it becomes less brilliant and dies in its efforts to revive. A spectator who should be watching it from a sufficient height might even find a certain comfort in the triumphs of the very spirit of fanaticism and reaction which result in a prolonged subsequent enfeeblement and a more rapid approach toward final extinction. Just as haste is sometimes more deliberate than deliberation, so a violent effort to reanimate the past sometimes results in hastening its death. You cannot heat a cold star from the outside.
II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of morality among the people?
The general enfeeblement of the religious instinct will set free, for employment in social progress, an immense amount of force hitherto set aside for the service of mysticism; but it may well be asked also whether there are not a number of forces hurtful to society, and hitherto held in check or annulled by the religious instinct, which upon its disappearance will be given free play.