CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.
I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification of the great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is the appearance of a new religion to be expected?—Future miracles impossible—Religious poetry not to be expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely and naïvely labouring in the creating of a new religion not to be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original stock of religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last attempts at a new cult in America and in France—The Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can socialism renew religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic experiments.
II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith—1. Will the absence of religion result in scepticism? Will the number of sceptics increase with the disappearance of religion? 2. Substitution of doubt for faith—Genuinely religious character of doubt.
III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and instinct for metaphysics—Imperishable character of the latter—Sentiment at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of our ideal—Spencer’s attempted reconciliation of science and religion—Confusion of religion with metaphysics.
I. Is a renovation of religion possible?
Is contemporary scepticism final?
We have seen that the influence of dogma and of religious morality is on the wane in actually existing societies; but will not this period of decline be followed by a reaction in the opposite direction?
Consolidation of existing religions not possible.
Such a reaction could take place in two ways only: 1. By the unification of religions; 2. By the appearance of a new religion. The unification of existing religions is not to-day to be thought of; each of them has shown itself to be incapable of assimilating the others. The different Christian confessions hold each other in mutual respect, but they do the same with the great religions of the East. Islamism alone has made notable progress among tribes still imbued with primitive animism, and for them it represents a manifest progress. As for Christian missionaries they have never been able to make many proselytes among the Mussulmans, the Buddhists, or the Hindus. The Hindu who has been instructed in European science necessarily comes to doubt the revealed foundation of his national religion, but he is not on that account any the more inclined to believe in the Christian revelation. He ceases simply to be religious and becomes a free-thinker. All peoples alike are in that position; the principal great religions possess an approximate value as symbols of the unknowable, and worshippers perceive no advance in passing from one of them to the other: mankind in general does not welcome change for change’s sake. Missionaries themselves to-day lack faith in their religion; they possess either enthusiasm minus talent or talent minus enthusiasm, and the time is at hand when the spirit of propagandism, which has hitherto constituted the power of religion, will abandon it. Few people can cry to-day in the words of the unbelieving Jesuit missionary: “Ah, you have no conception of the pleasure of convincing men of what you do not believe yourself!” Where absolute faith is lacking, and absolute faith in the very details of the dogmas is lacking, sincerity, which constitutes the essential power of all propagandism, is lacking too. Bishop Colenso was one day asked, by his neophytes in Natal, some questions on the Old Testament. After having followed him up from question to question they asked him, on his word of honour, if all that was true. Seized by a scruple, the Bishop fell into a profound train of reflection, studied the question, read Strauss and the German commentators, and finally published a book in which he treats Biblical history as a series of myths. To this celebrated example of Colenso among the Kaffirs, must be joined that of Mr. Francis Newman in Syria, and of the Rev. Adams in India, and of others less well known. Efficiently to combat religions as well organized as those of India, for example, our missionaries would be obliged to become seriously proficient in the history of religion. But the day they sincerely study comparative religion in the hopes of converting somebody else, they will themselves undergo conversion, or at least will rapidly learn to reject a belief in a special revelation.[114] The great religions, and principally the “universal” religions, which to-day have attained their full development, hold each other in check. These vast bodies show almost no signs of life except within, by the formation of new centres of activity which detach themselves from the primitive nucleus, as we see daily happening in the bosom of Protestantism, which is constantly being subdivided into new sects; as also within the bosom of Hinduism, insomuch that the only sign of life that these religions give is that they are beginning to disintegrate.