And yet, poor man, he was happy enough when his disciples hailed him as the greatest philosopher of the age, the clearest intellect on the planet; and nothing is more touching than to witness how, as his influence grew, and he emerged from neglect, his faith in human nature brightened. Had he lived a little longer and risen still higher in esteem—had the powers that be crowned him, and the world applauded him, he too, like Hegel, would doubtless have added to his creed a corollary that, though there is no God, religion is an excellent thing; that though there is no goodness, virtue is the only living truth!
Be that as it may, I am thoroughly convinced that there is no via media between Christ’s Christianity and Schopenhauer’s pessimism; and these two religions, like the gods of good and evil, are just now preparing for a final struggle on the battle-field of European thought. Just at present I feel almost a pessimist myself, and inclined to laugh more than ever at poor Kingsley’s feeble twaddle about this ‘singularly well-constructed world.’ Every face I see, whether of Jew or Gentile, is scribbled like the ledger with figures of addition and subtraction; every eye is crowsfooted with tables of compound interest; and the moneybags waddle up and down the streets, and look out of the country house windows, like things without a soul. But across the river, at Sachsenhausen, there are trees, in which the birds sing, and pretty children, and lovers talking in the summer shade. I go there in the summer afternoons and smoke my pipe, and think over the problem of the time. Think you, dearest, that Schopenhauer was right, and that there is no gladness or goodness in the world? Is the deathblow of foolish supernaturalism the destruction also of heavenly love and hope? Nay, God forbid! But this hideous pessimism is the natural revolt of the human heart, after centuries of optimistic lies. Perhaps, when another century has fled, mankind may thank God for Schopenhauer, who proved the potency of materialistic Will, and for Strauss, who has shown the fallacy of human judgment. The Germans have given us these two men as types of their own degradation; and when we have thoroughly digested their bitter gospel, we shall know how little hope for humanity lies that way. Meantime, the Divine Ideal, the spiritual Christ survives—the master of the secret of sorrow, the lord of the shadowy land of hope. He turns his back upon the temple erected in his name; he averts his sweet eyes from those who deny He is, or ever was. He is patient, knowing that his kingdom must some day come.
More than ever now do I feel what a power the Church might be if it would only reconstruct itself by the light of the new knowledge. Without it, both France and Germany are plunged into darkness and spiritual death. As if man, constituted as he is, can exist without religion! As if the creed of cakes and ale, or the gospel of Deutschthum and Sauer-kraut were in any true sense of the word religion at all! No, the hope and salvation of the human race lies now, as it lay eighteen hundred years ago, in the Christian promise. If this life were all, if this world were the play and not the prelude, then the new Buddha would have conquered, and nothing be left us but Nirwâna. But the Spirit of Man, which has created Christ and imagined God, knows better. It trusts its own deathless instinct, and by the same law through which the swallow wings its way, it prepares for flight to a sunnier zone.
Pray, my Alma, that even this holy instinct is not merely a dream! Pray that God may keep us together till the time comes to follow the summer of our love to its bright and heavenly home!—Yours till death, and after death,
Ambrose Bradley.
VII.
Alma Craik to Ambrose Bradley.
Your last letter, dearest Ambrose, has reached me here in London, where I am staying for a short time with Agatha Combe. Everybody is out of town, and even the Grosvenor Club (where I am writing this letter) is quite deserted.
I never like London so much as when it is empty of everybody that one knows.
And so you find the Germans as shallow as the French, and as far away from the living truth it is your dream to preach? For my own part, I think they must be rather a stupid people, in spite of their philosophic airs. Agatha has persuaded me lately to read a book by a man called Haeckel, who is constructing the whole history of Evolution as children make drawings, out of his own head; and when the silly man is at a loss for a link in the chain, he invents one, and calls it by a Latin name! I suppose Evolution is true (and I know you believe in it), but if I may trust my poor woman’s wit, it proves nothing whatever. The mystery of life remains just the same when all is said and done; and I see as great a miracle in a drop of albumen passing through endless progressions till it flowers in sense and soul, as in the creation of all things at the fiat of an omnipotent personal God and Father. The poor purblind German abolishes God altogether!