Having just told us that "It is difficult to say whether Shakespeare had any religious faith or no," Green intimates that Shakespeare was an agnostic, and probably a disciple of Montaigne. If he was an agnostic, it is not true that we do not know "whether he had any religious faith or no." We can be sure that he was without religious faith of any kind, using the word "religious" in the sense of the supernatural—if he preferred agnosticism to the creeds. He was an agnostic, it is to be supposed, because he could not conscientiously profess any of the "religious faiths" of his day.
But to be an agnostic does not mean to be without a religion; it only means to be without a revealed religion. This very agnosticism, as the expression of a courageous, honest and rational protest against revealed religions, is a religion—more manly, certainly, than the popular religions, because while the latter are imitative to a large extent, the former is unconstrained and personal.
Those who say unqualifiedly that Shakespeare had no religion, as Prof. Santayana of Harvard University, does, must mean by religion a recognition of the supernatural, which we submit is to make a partisan use only of the word religion. Wishing to prove the absence of religion in Shakespeare, Prof. Santayana writes: "If we were asked to select one monument of human civilization that should survive to some future age, or be transported to another planet to bear witness to the inhabitants thereof what we have been upon earth, we should probably choose the works of Shakespeare. In them we recognize the truest portrait and best memorial of man." After this magnificent tribute to the universality of Shakespeare.
* Venus and Adonis.
Prof. Santayana proceeds to qualify his statement by deploring what he calls "the absence of religion in Shakespeare." He fears that if Shakespeare were our sole interpreter, "the archaeologists of that future age, or the cosmographers of that other part of the heavens, after conscientious study of our Shakespearian autobiography, would misconceive our life in one important respect. They would hardly understand that man had had a religion." This fear is unfounded. It may surely be learned from Shakespeare that "man had had" many superstitions, and also that there was in our world the worship of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Such a report would not leave the inhabitants of a strange planet in the dark as to whether or not "man had had a religion." Let us make this point a little clearer: In Shakespeare we find both the religion of superstition—addicted to the belief in ghosts, spirits, miracles, visions, and revelations past and present—and the religion of sense, namely, the elimination of the supernatural from human affairs, and the exalting of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, with Truth as the greatest of the three, as the highest possible ideals of man. But, evidently, Prof. Santayana does not believe that it is possible to leave out the supernatural from religion and still have a religion. "But for Shakespeare, in the matter of religion," writes Santayana, "the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing." In our opinion Shakespeare chose something which was more in accord with the concensus of the competent, though opposed to the prejudices of the populace, namely: the rationalist attitude in the presence of life and death. And why is not this attitude as much entitled to be called a philosophy and a religion as the theological?
Would it not be unfair to say, for instance, that Tennyson's The Coming Church of Humanity is no church at all, because it is not after the fashion of orthodoxy:
I dreamed that stone by stone I reared a sacred fane,
A temple, neither pagod, mosque, nor church,
But loftier, simpler, always open-doored
To every breath from heaven; and truth and peace