Much excitement was caused a few years ago by a pamphlet of an Austrian professor. Another Austrian professor, of high rank in science, criticized the pamphlet as “A reckless and absolute negation of the foundation of the Christian dogma in the widest sense of the word, proclaimed as the verdict of science and of common sense. It is replete with blasphemous jokes, such as may usually be heard only in the most vulgar places.”
A cry of indignation was raised by the Catholic people of the Tyrol against this base insult to their creed; it was shown that the author of this pamphlet had misused his lectures on Catholic Canon Law, to speak to his Catholic students disdainfully of the Divinity of Christ, of the Sacraments, of the Church, and the prime foundations of Christianity. Upon indictment by the public prosecutor, the pamphlet was condemned in Court as a libel upon the Christian religion.
It was expected that the representatives of science, in defence of the threatened honour of science, would repudiate all community of interest with a production that was merely the expression of an anti-Christian propaganda. That expectation was not fulfilled; on the contrary, those in authority at the Austrian universities, and numerous professors of other countries, joined in a protest against the violation of the rights of a professor, against the attacks on freedom of science. They demanded full immunity for the author of the libel. Even the state department of Religion and Education expressed the opinion that the accused “had only availed himself of the right of free research.”Is this the freedom in teaching that is to be protected by the state? And yet there are those who indignantly deny that there is danger for religion in this freedom!
He who really has at heart the honour of science and of the universities, and is inspired by their ideals, should bear in mind that to realize these ideals the first thing necessary is public confidence: not the confidence of a revolutionizing minority,—a scrutiny of those elements that give them their plaudits ought to arouse reflection,—but the confidence of earnest, conservative circles of the uncorrupted people.
In academic circles the increasing lack of respect for the university and its teachers is complained of. Professor Von Amira writes: “Thirty years ago the academic teacher was reverenced by the highest society; his association was sought; he had no need of any other title than the one that told what he was. To-day we see a different picture, particularly as to the title 'professor.' To-day they smile at it. Nowadays, if a professor desires to impress, he must bear a title designating something else than what he really is. A literature has grown up that deals with the decline of the universities. The fact of a decline is taken for granted, only its causes and remedies are discussed. And this is not all. Invectives are bestowed upon the institutions, upon the teachers as a body, upon the individual teacher. And there is no one to take up [pg 335]the cudgels in our defence!” A fact suggesting earnest self-examination, and the resolution not to forfeit still more this respect. It is not sufficient to repudiate with indignation the complaints. Nor will it do to pretend a respect for religion and Christianity, and a desire to see both preserved, that are not really felt. What is needed is the admission that the road taken is the wrong one.
The Responsibility before History.
The distressing fact is realized that the worm of immorality is devouring in our day the marrow of the most civilized nations. It is also known that its wretched victims are in no class so numerous as in the class of college men. Earnest-minded men and women are raising a warning cry, and are forming societies to stem the ruin of the nations. The alarm bell is ringing through the lands.
Remarkable words on this subject are those written not long ago by Paulsen: “It looks as if all the demons had been let loose at this moment to devastate the basis of the people's life. Those who know Germany through reading only, through its comic weeklies, its plays, its novels, the windows of its bookshops, the lectures delivered and attended by male and female, must arrive at the opinion that the paramount question to the German people just now is whether the restrictions put on the free play of the sexual impulse by custom and law are evil and should be abolished?” Paulsen puts the responsibility for it upon the sophistry on the sexual instinct and the present naturalism in the view of the world: “The prevailing naturalism in the view of world and life is leading to astonishing aberrations of judgment, and this is true also of men otherwise discerning. If man is nothing else but a system of natural instincts, similar in this to the rest of living beings, then, indeed, no one can tell what other purpose life could have than the gratification of all instincts.... Reformation of ideas—this is the cry heard in all streets; cast off a Christianity hostile to life, that is killing in embryo thousands of possibilities for happiness. True, even in past ages young people were not spared temptation. But the barriers were stronger; traditional, moral, religious sentiment, and sensible views. Our time has pulled down these barriers; young people everywhere are advised by all the leading lights of the day: old morals and religion are dead, slain by modern science; the old commandments are the obsolete fetters of superstition. We know now their origin; they are but auto-suggestions of common consciousness which mistakes them for voices from another world, that has been deposed long since by the scientific thought of to-day.”
These are words of indignation of a well-meaning friend of mankind. Do they not rebound upon the speaker himself [pg 336] to become terrible self-accusations for him and others, who, while perhaps of similar well-meaning sentiment, are actually working for the annihilation of the moral-religious sentiment, as Paulsen himself has done by his books?
“The old religion is dead, slain by science,” is proclaimed in innumerable passages of his books; the idea of another world has long been disposed of by the scientific reasoning of the present time, “hence a philosophy,” he tells us, “which insists upon the thesis that certain natural processes make it necessary to assume a metaphysical principle, or a supernatural agency, will always have science for an irreconcilable opponent.” “It will be difficult for a future age to understand,” he writes elsewhere, “how our times so complacently could cling to a system of religious instruction originated many centuries ago under entirely different conditions of intellectual life, and which in many points forms the decided opposite to facts and notions which, outside of the school, are taken by our times for granted.” In respect to morals, too, one can do without a supernatural law. “According to the view presented here, ethics as a science does not depend on belief.... Moral laws are the natural laws of the human-historical life of time and place.... Nor does it seem advisable in pedagogical-practical respect to make the force or the significance of ethical commands dependent on a matter so uncertain as the belief in a future life.” We might cite many similar expressions from his writings.