In the intellectual sphere the experience of the past is at least equally unreliable. If the power of the Catholic Church had been suddenly removed from the Europe of the fourteenth century, the consequence would have been a moral anarchy difficult to conceive; but in our own day the real regulator of morality is not the Church, but public opinion, in the formation of which the Church has a share, but only a share. It would therefore be unsafe to conclude that the weakening of ecclesiastical authority must of necessity, in the future, be followed by moral anarchy, since it is possible, and even probable, that the other great influences upon public opinion may gain strength as this declines. And in point of fact we have already lived long enough to witness a remarkable decline of ecclesiastical authority, which is proved by the avowed independence of scientific writers and thinkers, and by the open opposition of almost all the European Governments. The secular power resists the ecclesiastical in Germany and Spain. In France it establishes a form of government which the Church detests. In Ireland it disestablishes and disendows a hierarchy. In Switzerland it resists the whole power of the Papacy. In Italy it seizes the sacred territory and plants itself within the very walls of Rome. And yet the time which has witnessed this unprecedented self-assertion of the laity has witnessed a positive increase in the morality of public sentiment, especially in the love of justice and the willingness to hear truth, even when truth is not altogether agreeable to the listener, and in the respect paid by opponents to able and sincere men, merely for their ability and sincerity. This love of justice, this patient and tolerant hearing of new truth, in which our age immeasurably exceeds all the ages that have preceded it, are the direct results of the scientific spirit, and are not only in themselves eminently moral, but conducive to moral health generally. And this advancement may be observed in countries which were least supposed to be capable of it. Even the French, of whose immorality we have heard so much, have a public opinion which is gradually gaining a salutary strength, an increasing dislike for barbarity and injustice, and a more earnest desire that no citizen, except by his own fault, should be excluded from the benefits of civilization. The throne which has lately fallen was undermined by the currents of this public opinion before it sank in military disaster. “Aussi me contenterai-je,” says Littré, “d’appeler l’attention sur la guerre, dont l’opinion publique ne tolère plus les antiques barbaries; sur la magistrature, qui répudie avec horreur les tortures et la question; sur la tolérance, qui a banni les persécutions religieuses; sur l’équite, qui soumet tout le monde aux charges communes; sur le sentiment de solidarité qui du sort des classes pauvres fait le plus pressant et le plus noble problème du temps présent. Pour moi, je ne sais caractériser ce spectacle si hautement moral qu’en disant que l’humanité, améliorée, accepte de plus en plus le devoir et la tâche d’étendre le domaine de la justice et de la bonté.”
Yet this partial and comparative satisfaction that we find in the present, and our larger hopes for the future, are quite compatible with gratitude to all who in the past have rendered such improvement possible for us, and the higher improvement that we hope for possible to those who will come after us. I cannot think that the present age may be accused with justice of exceptional ignorance or scorn of its predecessors. We have been told that we scorn our forefathers because old buildings are removed to suit modern conveniences, because the walls of old York have been pierced for the railway, and a tower of Conway Castle has been undermined that the Holyhead mail may pass. But the truth is, that whilst we care a little for our predecessors, they cared still less for theirs. The mediæval builders not only used as quarries any Roman remains that happened to come in their way, but they spoiled the work of their own fathers and grandfathers by intruding their new fashions on buildings originally designed in a different style of art. When an architect in the present day has to restore some venerable church, he endeavors to do so in harmony with the design of the first builder; but such humility as this was utterly foreign to the mediæval mind, which often destroyed the most lovely and necessary details to replace them with erections in the fashion of the day, but artistically unsuitable. The same disdain for the labors of other ages has prevailed until within the memory of living men, and our age is really the first that has made any attempt to conform itself, in these things, to the intentions of the dead. I may also observe, that although history is less relied upon as a guide to the future than it was formerly, it is more carefully and thoroughly investigated from an intellectual interest in itself.
To conclude. It seems to me that tradition has much less influence of an authoritative kind than it had formerly, and that the authority which it still possesses is everywhere steadily declining; that as a guide to the future of the world it is more likely to mislead than to enlighten us, and still that all intellectual and educated people must always take a great interest in tradition, and have a certain sentiment of respect for it. Consider what our feelings are towards the Church of Rome, the living embodiment of tradition. No well-informed person can forget the immense services that in former ages she has rendered to European civilization, and yet at the same time such a person would scarcely wish to place modern thought under her direction, nor would he consult the Pope about the tendencies of the modern world. When in 1829 the city of Warsaw erected a monument to Copernicus, a scientific society there waited in the Church of the Holy Cross for a service that was to have added solemnity to their commemoration. They waited vainly. Not a single priest appeared. The clergy did not feel authorized to countenance a scientific discovery which, in a former age, had been condemned by the authority of the Church. This incident is delicately and accurately typical of the relation between the modern and the traditional spirit. The modern spirit is not hostile to tradition, and would not object to receive any consecration which tradition might be able to confer, but there are difficulties in bringing the two elements together.
We need not, however, go so far as Warsaw, or back to the year 1829, for examples of an unwillingness on the part of the modern mind to break entirely with the traditional spirit. Our own country is remarkable both for the steadiness of its advance towards a future widely different from the past, and for an affectionate respect for the ideas and institutions that it gradually abandons, as it is forced out of them by new conditions of existence, I may mention, as one example out of very many, our feeling about the reconstruction of the navy. Here is a matter in which science has compelled us to break with tradition absolutely and irrevocably; we have done so, but we have done so with the greatest regret. The ships of the line that our hearts and imaginations love are the ships of Nelson and Collingwood and Cochrane. We think of the British fleets that bore down upon the enemy with the breeze in their white sails; we think of the fine qualities of seamanship that were fostered in our Agamemnons, and Victories, and Téméraires. Will the navies of the future ever so clothe their dreadful powers with beauty, as did the ordered columns of Nelson, when they came with a fair wind and all sails set, at eleven o’clock in the morning into Trafalgar Bay? We see the smoke of their broadsides rising up to their sails like mists to the snowy Alps, and high above, against heaven’s blue, the unconquered flag of England! Nor do we perceive now for the first time that there was poetry in those fleets of old; our forefathers felt it then, and expressed it in a thousand songs.[7]
LETTER III.
TO A LADY WHO LAMENTED THAT HER SON HAD INTELLECTUAL DOUBTS CONCERNING THE DOGMAS OF THE CHURCH.
The situation of mother and son a very common one—Painful only when the parties are in earnest—The knowledge of the difference evidence of a deeper unity—Value of honesty—Evil of a splendid official religion not believed by men of culture—Diversity of belief an evidence of religious vitality—Criticism not to be ignored—Desire for the highest attainable truth—Letter from Lady Westmorland about her son, Julian Fane.
The difference which you describe as having arisen between your son and you on the most grave and important subject which can occupy the thoughts of men, gives the outline of a situation painful to both the parties concerned, and which lays on each of them new and delicate obligations. You do not know how common this situation is, and how sadly it interferes with the happiness of the very best and most pure-minded souls alive. For such a situation produces pain only where both parties are earnest and sincere; and the more earnest both are, the more painful does the situation become. If you and your son thought of religion merely from the conventional point of view, as the world does only too easily, you would meet on a common ground, and might pass through life without ever becoming aware of any gulf of separation, even though the hollowness of your several professions were of widely different kinds. But as it happens, unfortunately for your peace (yet would you have it otherwise?), that you are both in earnest, both anxious to believe what is true and do what you believe to be right, you are likely to cause each other much suffering of a kind altogether unknown to less honorable and devoted natures. There are certain forms of suffering which affect only the tenderest and truest hearts; they have so many privileges, that this pain has been imposed upon them as the shadow of their sunshine.
Let me suggest, as some ground of consolation and of hope, that your very knowledge of the difference which pains you is in itself the evidence of a deeper unity. If your son has told you the full truth about the changes in his belief, it is probably because you yourself have educated him in the habit of truthfulness, which is as much a law of religion as it is of honor. Do you wish this part of his education to be enfeebled or obliterated? Could the Church herself reasonably or consistently blame him for practising the one virtue which, in a peaceful and luxurious society, demands a certain exercise of courage? Our beliefs are independent of our will, but our honesty is not; and he who keeps his honesty keeps one of the most precious possessions of all true Christians and gentlemen. What state of society can be more repugnant to high religious feeling than a state of smooth external unanimity combined with the indifference of the heart, a state in which some splendid official religion performs its daily ceremonies as the costliest functionary of the Government, whilst the men of culture take a share in them out of conformity to the customs of society, without either the assent of the intellect or the emotion of the soul? All periods of great religious vitality have been marked by great and open diversity of belief; and to this day those countries where religion is most alive are the farthest removed from unanimity in the details of religious doctrine. If your son thinks these things of such importance to his conscience that he feels compelled to inflict upon you the slightest pain on their account, you may rest assured that his religious fibre is still full of vitality. If it were deadened, he would argue very much as follows. He would say: “These old doctrines of the Church are not of sufficient consequence for me to disturb my mother about them. What is the use of alluding to them ever?” And then you would have no anxiety; and he himself would have the feeling of settled peace which comes over a battle-field when the dead are buried out of sight. It is the peculiarity—some would say the evil, but I cannot think it an evil—of an age of great intellectual activity to produce an amount of critical inquiry into religious doctrine which is entirely unknown to times of simple tradition. And in these days the critical tendency has received a novel stimulus from the successive suggestions of scientific discovery. No one who, like your son, fully shares in the intellectual life of the times in which he lives, can live as if this criticism did not exist. If he affected to ignore it, as an objection already answered, there would be disingenuousness in the affectation. Fifty years ago, even twenty or thirty years ago, a highly intellectual young man might have hardened into the fixed convictions of middle age without any external disturbance, except such as might have been easily avoided. The criticism existed then, in certain circles; but it was not in the air, as it is now. The life of mankind resembles that of a brook which has its times of tranquillity, but farther on its times of trouble and unrest. Our immediate forefathers had the peaceful time for their lot; those who went before them had passed over very rough ground at the Reformation. For us, in our turn, comes the recurrent restlessness, though not in the same place. What we are going to, who can tell? What we suffer just now, you and many others know too accurately. There are gulfs of separation in homes of the most perfect love. Our only hope of preserving what is best in that purest of earthly felicities lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours, and a deep trust that the loyal pursuit of truth cannot but be in perfect accordance with the intentions of the Creator, who endowed the noblest races of mankind with the indefatigable curiosity of science. Not to inquire was possible for our forefathers, but it is not possible for us. With our intellectual growth has come an irrepressible anxiety to possess the highest truth attainable by us. This desire is not sinful, not presumptuous, but really one of the best and purest of our instincts, being nothing else than the sterling honesty of the intellect, seeking the harmony of concordant truth, and utterly disinterested.