Aversion to Nominal Heterodoxy
Names and Realities.
But if a nominal orthodoxy is accepted, a nominal heterodoxy is still regarded with aversion. It is a mere question of names. Here is a case in which the persons concerned were known to me. A young gentleman asks a young Catholic lady in marriage and is accepted. He is perfectly well known to be a freethinker, as he is entirely without hypocrisy, never even going to church. Some enemy sets in circulation a sinister rumour to the effect that he is a Protestant. This might have broken off the marriage if he had not been able to prove his Catholic baptism. If people were to put realities before names, it clearly could not be of any importance to what religion a freethinker nominally belonged when he was a baby. It is not the baby who is to be married, but the man. The anxiety in this case was to avoid the objectionable word “Protestant.” The reader may wonder if libre penseur would not be infinitely worse. Perhaps, but it is ingeniously avoided by saying, “Monsieur X est Catholique, mais il ne pratique pas.”
Support given by Unbelievers to Dominant Religions.
Discretion and Liberality in the Clergy.
Personal Comfort of Unbelievers.
It would be an omission to close this chapter without recognising the existence of a quite unforeseen source of strength for dominant and fashionable religions. That is, the preferential support of well-educated unbelievers. It is not an active or a visible support, but it exists extensively, and the value of it steadily increases with the growth of cultivated doubt. What the unbeliever most dreads and detests is to be worried by rude religious enthusiasts. He does not dislike a priest or a parson who is discreet, and ready to sink religious differences in personal intercourse; nay, he may even be attracted to the wise clergyman, as to a man of intellect and education, who has an ideal above the level of the Philistine vulgar. The experienced unbeliever is generally of opinion that discretion and liberality are more likely to be found in an ancient Church that is bound up with the life and experience of the great world, than in the narrower and more inquisitorial strictness of the minor sects. Hence the curious but unquestionable fact, that in England the cultivated unbeliever prefers the Anglican Church to the dissenting bodies, and does not wish to see them become predominant, whilst in France he dislikes the Protestants more than the Romish priests. This preference arises simply from the unbeliever’s knowledge of the state of things most conducive to his personal comfort, and has nothing to do with theological doctrines, which are a matter of indifference to him in any case. In France, he especially congratulates himself that the dominant religion is not Sabbatarian, the reason being that Sabbatarianism is much more than a theological doctrine, as it passes so easily into legislative domination over all men.
CHAPTER IV
FAITH
Two senses of the Word “Faith.”
The word “Faith” is used in two different senses. In ordinary language it means little more than a custom or a name. When people say that Napoleon I. belonged to the Roman Catholic faith, they only mean that he bore the name and followed the external customs of that religion, for we know that his own belief was a kind of fatalistic deism. The facility with which some exalted personages have gone from one faith to another, and in some cases have even repeated the change for obviously political reasons, is explicable only by reading the word “Faith” as a custom or a ceremony.