The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

3. That the clergy represent that their creed civilised Europe and is necessary for the maintenance of its civilisation, yet their influence and their ideas retarded the evolution of European civilisation for centuries, and retard it to-day wherever they have sufficient power or are immune from weighty criticism.

In enumerating the untruths which are still imposed by the clergy, I will not linger over the Old Testament. When you censure them to-day for attaching a sacred value to this collection of ancient Jewish literature, they are apt to reply that your criticism is forty years out of date. Every educated clergyman, they exclaim, now acknowledges that the Old Testament is a mixture of Babylonian legends, primitive tribal traditions, and moral literature of a naïve and very interesting description. Whether this statement is true or no I must leave to the judgment of those who have a closer acquaintance with the modern clergy. Only two years ago I was persuaded, in an idle hour on a liner, to listen to a sermon delivered by a young clergyman who had just issued, with honours, from a highly modern Wesleyan college. It was on the miracles of Moses in the wilderness—ingeniously relieved by references to such other miracles as the appearance of a cross to Constantine—and accepted them as literally as did Peter the Hermit. Religious periodicals and books and parish-magazines suggest that there is a good deal still of this medieval credulity; or that, at least, the number of “educated clergymen” must be somewhat restricted. But let us accept the assurance that the educated clergy do accept the Old Testament at its true historical value. In which case we must be content to express our surprise that no clergyman seems to have the least scruple about imposing these things on young children, and rustic congregations, and less cultivated races—than which there is no more cowardly form of untruth: and that some of the most notoriously unreliable and barbaric pages of the Old Testament are read, Sunday by Sunday, as “the word of God” in all the Christian Churches of the world, under the official orders of every ecclesiastical authority in the world.

However, since these cultivated ecclesiastics smile at our criticism of the Old Testament, and see nothing improper in a deception of the ignorant, of which any body of professional laymen would be incapable, let us turn to the New Testament. It is always useful to consider the attitude of the clergy in its historical perspective. A hundred years ago they were defending against the Deists the absolute truthfulness of the Old Testament. Christ had promised the Holy Spirit to the Church: the Holy Spirit could not possibly tolerate untruth: therefore the teaching of the Church for sixteen centuries must be right. Within two generations they have, in a great number, abandoned the inerrancy of the Old Testament, without abandoning the Holy Spirit. It seems only the other day when Cardinal Newman pleaded wistfully that we were not compelled, under pain of eternal damnation, to believe that Tobit’s dog did really wag its tail. However, outside Scotland clergymen do seem to be free to form their own opinions on such allegations as that a whale swallowed a man and housed him for three days. But in thus admitting that “inspiration” was consistent with error, they have put the New Testament also in the hand of the critic.

It is well to remember, too, that this modern criticism of the Bible is conducted almost entirely by divines. The average churchgoer has an impression that these terrible people who are known as “the Higher Critics” are anti-clerical laymen: possibly lascivious gentlemen whose real ambition is to undermine the salutary discipline imposed by the Churches. They are, of course, on the contrary, nearly all ordained clergymen, and very conscientious clergymen, of some branch of the Church. Rationalists never criticise the Bible. It has become a branch of theological scholarship. I once—having been challenged by the local clergyman, who promptly disappeared when I arrived—gave a lecture on the divinity of Christ to an audience of Presbyterian artisans, and assured them that the views and arguments I put before them were taken solely from the works of distinguished and highly honoured theologians. Their amazement and horror were most amusing. They had not the dimmest idea that controversy on these points lay merely between advanced and not-advanced members of the Christian clergy; and that their local oracle had, in effect, merely been imposing on them the opinions of the less learned divines in opposition to the more learned.

And this fact dispenses me from the need to drag the reader into the somewhat tiring labyrinth of proof and disproof which these warring theologians have constructed. Nothing could be further from my mind than the presumptuous and immodest wish to brand the clergy as dishonest, and their beliefs as superstitious, because I happen to regard those beliefs as false. Let the position be clearly understood. A study of the Hibbert Journal or any scholarly theological periodical, or of any batch of learned theological works, will apprise any person that what are ordinarily conceived to be the fundamental positions of the Christian religion are challenged by a large proportion of distinguished divines. Pleas of “reconstruction” are constantly put before us; and at the Church of England Congress in 1912 it was plainly decided by the presiding Archbishop of York that the “advanced” theologians had a legitimate place in the Church. It is not a question of a few controverted points in the scheme of Christian doctrine. No point that is specifically Christian is left unchallenged. The divinity and miracles—especially the miraculous birth and resurrection—of Christ, the prophecies, the doctrine of heaven and hell, the divine guidance of the Church, the fall and redemption of man—all these characteristic doctrines are gravely disputed within the frontiers of the Churches themselves, wherever freedom of expression is permitted.

One would prefer to rely on theologians only in such a matter, but for my purpose it is not immaterial to add that outside the ranks of the clergy scholarship is overwhelmingly against these doctrines. There has been a good deal of unsubstantial talk about the beliefs of living men of intellectual eminence, but resolute efforts have been made of late years to wring from them a profession of Christian belief, and the result has been so meagre that my statement is fully justified. A large number declare that they are on the side of “religion.” But one has only to reflect that even Sir Oliver Lodge warmly professes to be a Christian—and is, in fact, welcomed to read the lessons in church—to see how little is conveyed by such expressions. The supreme effort of the Churches to secure adhesions of this kind is probably found in Mr. Tabrum’s Religious Beliefs of Scientists (1910), and a study of that extraordinary jumble of the living and the dead, the distinguished and the obscure, the really believing Christians and the men who are notoriously not, will convince any person of the failure of the Churches to obtain the literal adhesion of even a respectable proportion of our distinguished men: not men of science merely—it is a stupid error to suppose that the decay of faith is more or less confined to them—but men of eminence in any department of research or intellectual life. Not one in ten of them, in any educated country of the Christian world to-day, has ever professed a belief in the doctrines or statements I have enumerated; and vague professions of a regard for religion do not concern me here.

Now I am, as I said, not passing any personal opinion on these Christian teachings: I am merely drawing attention to their position in modern life. The uncultivated masses and the body of the clergy who preach to these masses accept the miraculous birth, death, resurrection, and all the rest, quite implicitly. Here and there one finds a preacher who dissents; I am speaking of the mass. At the middle level of mental culture, among both clergy and laity, dissent becomes much more frequent. At the highest level of theological scholarship it would be fair to say that the dissenters are almost, if not quite, as numerous as the believers; and at the higher level of lay culture, where opinions may be more freely formed and expressed, the dissenters are the overwhelming majority. These men may be theists or agnostics or Christians in the broader sense of the word, but the great majority of them do not believe in these distinctively Christian doctrines. Yet the Churches, wherever they are not kept in check by this critical element, invest these doctrines with the most sacred and confident character: stamp them as unquestioned truths on the minds of children and uneducated people, and put them forward as their official and authoritative doctrines. Nay, there is hardly a theologian in any church who does not, when Christmas and Easter annually occur, lend his official and most solemn countenance to these discarded or disputed traditions.

This would not, could not, be done in any branch of lay culture. One may justly insist on one’s opinion in any disputed theme, but what would be the attitude of our leaders of culture if any authoritative historian, philosopher, or scientist attempted to impose on the inexpert, as an unquestioned truth, some older opinion which a large proportion of the expert regarded as false or questionable? What would they say to a responsible teacher in one of these branches of lay culture who read certain statements to those who trusted him, and said within his own mind: “This is what people thought a thousand years ago”? A clergyman told me that it was with this mental reservation that he read the creeds and gospels on Sundays. What would a philosopher, or historian, or scientist say, if his department of culture were an organic association with a public and authoritative teaching, and this public teaching contained statements which a large proportion of the leading representatives regarded as false? And what would he say to any colleagues who urged him to allow these things to stand because a change might lessen the respect of the general public for their authority?

This situation reflects gravely on the character of Christian ministers. One need not attempt the futile task of estimating what proportion of the clergy believe the things they teach, but we are constantly receiving proof, especially posthumous proof, that large numbers of them do not. I have been severely rebuked for suggesting such a thing, but when I find a group of young Oxford divines saying plumply, in an important recent work (Foundations), that Christian theology is “out of harmony with science, philosophy, and scholarship,” I can only say that I trust a sufficient number of the clergy are educated enough to know it. The majority of the clergy are, however, sufficiently ignorant of “science, philosophy, and scholarship” to be in good faith, and one ought not to press the indictment in this sense. At sea I listen occasionally, from some safe distance, to sermons, and am amazed that even a fair proportion of the passengers can sit with grave faces during the delivery of such empty and ignorant vapourings. One reflects that all over the Christian world priests are similarly dogmatising on the most profound problems of life, and not one in a thousand of them has an elementary knowledge of those branches of modern research which a public guide ought to command. It is not the decay, but the survival, of churchgoing that perplexes one.

There is, however, another aspect of the matter which requires serious attention. There have been, from the earliest ages of the Christian Church, men of superior intelligence and independent character who refused to submit to the dictation of the clergy. There is no need to recall how the clergy dealt with them. Christian ministers have in this regard the most abominable record in the whole history of civilised religion. Some day it will be put side by side with that of the priests of Saturn or of Quetzalcotl, who offered human sacrifices. All that need be noted here is the effrontery with which modern clerical writers defend their predecessors. If the principles on which they base their defence are valid, they would again be compelled to burn heretics if they obtained power. The Church of Rome is bold enough to acknowledge this. Huxley tells how his distinguished Catholic friend, Dr. J. Ward, warmly assented to this, but we have had since then a more authoritative indication. A work of Canon Law which was published at Rome under the “enlightened” rule of Leo XIII., and with his emphatic personal approval—the Institutiones Juris Canonici of Father de Luca—proves at length the duty of the Church to put to death heretics.