Linger no longer in the “reconstruction” of fables which once beguiled the Arabs of the desert and the Syrian slaves of Corinth, but set your hearts and minds to the making of a new earth! Sweep these ancient legends out of your schools and colleges, your army and navy, your code of law, your legislative houses, and substitute for them a spirit of progress, efficiency, boldness, and candour!
Fine words, brave words, honest words, but hollow within. Mr. McCabe is no psychologist.
The fables and legends of old times may be abandoned, the desire for the realities round which fable and legend grow remains and cannot be extirpated by a rationalistic operation. Supernaturalism—in the widest sense—is ineradicable. Religion will not be suspended by the discovery that it is possible to formulate excellent theories of social equity without the assistance of priests. The hunger of the human heart for knowledge of God persists though all the old religious systems may prove illusions.
Our little rationalists imagine that they are hitting the foundations of religion when they successfully assail the crumbling walls of dogmas. Religious life escapes their fire. Faith and hope rise above disillusionment. Love knows instinctively that it is not made of dust. Through the darkness and the wilderness it calls to God, and lo! God responds with light and guidance which outlast earthquakes and massacres. Reject every creed that has been offered as an explanation of the mysteries of life, forsake all the humiliating, joy-killing penances for sin, and God will reveal Himself in the beauty of Nature. He will speak through the impulses of creative art, through music and poetry and painting. He will
attract our thought through philosophy and our emotion through the impetus to improve the social order. And science—the greater science, which rejects dogmatism and lies of self-sufficiency as it rejects the crudities of the Creed—takes us by circuitous paths to new temples for the worship of God.
The tenet that science and religion are incompatible and antagonistic, so dear to the hearts of the scientists in the middle of the nineteenth century, and still repeated with mechanical certainty in every secularist mission-hall, is likely to undergo a complete revision in the near future. The antagonism between dogmatic religion and materialistic science will never be removed. But the signs are apparent everywhere that religion is shedding its adherence to outer forms and entering into the freedom of the living spirit, whilst science is turning to problems which used to lie within the domain of unexplored religion. Religion will become scientific and science will become religious. The principles laid down by Darwin and Huxley have lost their power of stifling religious aspiration; the startling pronouncements in defiant materialism of Büchner and Haeckel now startle none but the ignorant. The
anxiety to exclude scientific facts disappears with the realization that all truth, all knowledge, all reason, are subservient to the search for God. The struggle between the wish to believe and the temptation to think caused real distress of mind to many thinkers of the nineteenth century. The choice seemed to lie between atheism and blind submission to authority. “Let us humbly take anything the Bible says without trying to understand it, and not torment ourselves with arguments,” said Charles Kingsley. “One word of Scripture is more than a hundred words of man's explaining.” The modern mind does not dread the meeting of science and religion. It does not labour to reconcile them. It is conscious of their ultimate identity and their present insufficiency. Hence a new tolerance which is mistaken for indifference by the zealots on both sides. Hence the absence of actuality in the fierce denunciations of Bradlaugh and Holyoake and Ingersoll. They did valiant battle against religious formalism of the past; they were champions of reason and science at a time when religionists fought to exclude both.
It is not science which is undermining the future of institutional religion. There is a new
enemy, more subtle and more powerful. It is the growing consciousness of an intolerable inconsistency between religious theory and practice. The war thus becomes a stumbling-block to faithfulness to conventional Christianity, and the glee of the rationalist is pardonable. I again quote Mr. McCabe:
What did the clergy do to prevent the conflict? In which country did they denounce the preparations for the conflict, or the incentives of the conflict? What have they done since it began to confine the conflict within civilized limits? Have they had, or used, a particle of moral influence throughout the whole bloody business? And, if not, is it not time we found other guardians and promoters of high conduct?