“Now, it is plain that all this is going to have a great influence, a very great influence indeed, upon the religious conceptions of our day. We used to say, for example, ‘The soul exists after death.’ We can no longer say that; we have to reduce our thought, that is our thinkage, to simpler elements. We have to say, ‘It is thinkworthy that if that thing which we call the soul is thinkworthy at all, then that thinkworthiness is still thinkworthy after death.’ Try it over a few times, and you will find it quite easy. And do not suppose that because such a formula as that has a less absolute and a less defiant ring about it than our old formula, ‘The soul exists after death,’ therefore we have lost something, and are poorer than our forefathers. No, oh no, quite the contrary. For we know now, what they did not know, that thingness and thinkworthiness are one. It cannot be too often repeated; in thinking a thing we thing it: our thinkage—wonderful thought! I mean, wonderful thoughtage!—thinks thingness into the thing! It cannot be too often repeated, the man who thinks things things things!
“And another great advantage arises, once we have mastered this salutary doctrine. The old religious formulas were always trying to make our thoughts correspond with realities conceived as real, truths conceived as true, outside of and apart from ourselves. They were always saying, I believe in this, I believe in that—oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! A generation or so back, there was a slang phrase which was used to express incredulity; when you meant, ‘That is not true,’ you said, ‘I don’t think!’ My dear sisters and brothers, there was a vast deal of profound philosophy in that simple piece of slang! Mosenheim himself would not have had them express themselves otherwise. If there is no such thing as truth, and you may take it from me that there is not, except in a very special sense which it would take too long to explain to you now—if there is no such thing as truth, then we are not going to burn one another for denying that this or that is true. We are going to abandon Truth, and go forward boldly, none knows whither.
“What, then, is religion? The best definition that has been given of it is, I suppose, Poschling’s: ‘Religion is that realization of the Ego under the stimulus, real or apparent, of the Non-ego, which finds its hyper-egoization in de-egoization and its de-egoization in hyper-egoization.’ Let it stand at that. We will now return to the short-sighted policy of Baasha”—the rest of Bishop Dives’ sermon did not bear upon my immediate difficulties.
I confess I was somewhat troubled by the tone of Bishop Dives’ utterance. It seemed to me to show all his old grasp of philosophical subtleties, but less than his old confidence in the claims of the supernatural. Could it be, I asked myself, that my oracle had himself changed with the change of the years, and gave forth now a different note? I was so troubled by this thought that I wrote again, asking him quite frankly to tell me if he thought his views were the same as when I knew him at Oxford, or different; and, if different, whether they had now reached a standstill, or whether they were still developing, and if so in what direction? His answer was a candid avowal:
Dear Lady Porstock—
You have, with your usual directness and acumen, touched upon a point over which I have often questioned myself. Looking back over the years, it seems clear to me that my religious opinions have modified with time, and that, like the Greek poet long ago, “I grow old learning many things.” But, let it be observed, in these successive modifications of my point of view I am only following the example of what you and I recognize as being the Holy Catholic Church, which has learnt much, and, I think we may say, learned to forget much, since those early days when it seemed to dominate the world in the positiveness and self-assuredness of its youth.
Now, picture to yourself some acrobat who finds it necessary, in the exercise of his profession, to walk every day, before an audience of neck-craning yokels, from one point to another over a tight-rope. He finds it easier to accomplish this (owing to a simple but interesting law of physics) if he carries with him a heavy pole that assures his balance. By degrees he finds that his skill is becoming greater; habit has made his task light to him. What does he do? He has six inches chopped off either end of his pole, so that his performance becomes at once more hazardous and more remarkable. Six months later, he finds that he can afford to shorten it once more. And so on, my dear Lady Porstock, and so on, until the pole in his hand is but a short stump, hardly more significant than the staff with which Babylonian fancy pictured Jacob as having crossed over Jordan.
Is not that, if we will look into the facts closely, the position of the Church? It sets before itself one paramount object, the achievement of the Christian ideal; you and I will not quarrel, I think, as to what we mean by that. It is a difficult and a delicate task that it has set before itself; and it may well face the prospect with not much less misgiving than the acrobat who sees stretching before him the gossamer causeway of the tight-rope. And it starts out with a burden of dogmas and beliefs which encumbers it, and yet in encumbering it steadies its progress. And then, just as the acrobat, growing more steady on his narrow bridge of rope, finds himself capable of walking with less and less of pole to balance him, so the Church finds that with less and less of dogma, less and less of belief, it can walk along the narrow path prescribed for it to tread. Until the Reformation, it was able to steady itself by means of three things, tradition, the Bible, and human reason; the Reformation was the moment at which it decided that it could steady itself without tradition. In the nineteenth century, faced with the important claims of the evolutionary doctrine, it found that it could make a further advance still, and it cast aside the Bible as it had cast aside tradition, content to steady itself by human reason alone. It has been left to us in this century to learn that the human reason itself is an untrustworthy thing, on which it is fatal to repose any reliance; we are now learning, consequently, to dispense with the human reason equally.
What, then, is the end of this process, or has it an end at all? For myself, I am content to believe that it has not. From century to century, it seems to me, we learn to get on with less and less of belief in supernatural things to encourage or to justify us, and I see no limit to that development. I go further, and say that I do not wish to see any limit to that development. The less we believe, clearly, the more creditable it is in us to call ourselves Christians still. Our object, therefore, at all times must be to reduce belief to its irreducible minimum; we must believe as little as we can, and be constantly on the lookout for some method by which we may be enabled to believe even less. It is not easy, this search of ours; like hill-climbers, we are bounded by our own horizon, and cannot yet see the full possibilities of disbelief that lie ahead of us. And just as, surely, we do not blame Luther because, with his limited perspective, he failed to disbelieve in the Bible; just as we do not blame Kant because he could not see how to disbelieve in the human reason; so, let us hope, our descendants will not be too hard on us because here and there we were guilty, through mere shortsightedness, of setting limits to our incredulity.
And thus we come down to the very interesting question, Is there a vanishing-point? Will there come a time when we are able to call ourselves Christians without believing anything at all? For myself, I confess that I do not think so. It seems to me that it is an integral part of our Christian probation, this perpetual struggle to disbelieve; that, consequently, the residuum of belief must be conceived, not as a difference which will sooner or later disappear as the result of successive subtractions, but as a quotient with an infinite divisibility. To the last end of time, it seems to me, we shall be able to continue offering up the old prayer, that we may be helped in our unbelief.