During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Christianity passed through a fire of criticism which rocked it to its foundation. To those who lived at that time, the transition from the older, and more dogmatic, form was accompanied by spiritual and moral struggles which seem to us exaggerated. The very indifference of the present age shows that the atmosphere has cleared and that new values have come to the front. A short while since, I picked up Hutton's once famous book, Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith, and read his analysis of the life of Cardinal Newman and his interesting criticism of Matthew Arnold. I must confess that the time-spirit of which Arnold made so much has done its work. The scene is shifting from a religion which stresses a peculiar form of salvation and a career in another world to social and economic conditions and ideals. Is there not something Byronic in much of Arnold's religious poetry? Is there not too much of the pageant of the bleeding heart in his sighs of regret and farewell? Yet he realized that the old faith was dying and that man had not yet found that which could fill its place. It takes time to make an adjustment in these matters, just as it is time alone that softens the griefs of unrequited love or the loss of dear ones. And it is usually only the next generation, which has been able to make a genuinely fresh start, that settles into a new way of life.
Change is a great physician because it is able to introduce new factors into the situation, and it has been at work since Arnold's day. There are, nevertheless, prophecies in his poems of another world which would before long take the place of the one that was dying; and some of us believe that, in the new democracy which is stirring into life throughout the earth, this new and more creative world is being born:
"The millions suffer still and grieve,
And what can helpers heal
With old-world cures men half believe
For woes they wholly feel?
"And yet men have such need of joy!
But joy whose grounds are true;
And joy that should all hearts employ
As when the past was new."
In the figure of Jesus, ethical and æsthetic idealization guided by religious emotion has created a personality of a peculiarly appealing type well fitted to remain as an ideal to foster and strengthen the noblest tendencies. But this ideal has become practically self-supporting apart from its mythical scaffolding. Its real foundation to-day is in its appeal to sympathies, natural to social beings, which the spiritual evolution of humanity has developed and given content to. When man succeeds in applying these sympathies rationally, in a social fashion, he may bring upon this sad old earth some measure of that kingdom for which Jesus longed. But Christianity has stood and, on the whole, still stands for certain beliefs in regard to the universe as a whole and the relation of man to it, which only patient reflection and inductive investigation can settle. By their very nature, these beliefs cannot have an historical justification although they have had an historical origin. Taking these beliefs in their simplest form and separating them from all connection with the figure of Jesus and the developed ethics whose stimulus goes back to him, they become an acceptance of an ethical God, a special providence and immortality. Remove these postulates, and it is doubtful whether theology has not also disappeared. It behooves us to examine the validity of these postulates in the light of modern science and philosophy.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY
The conviction that there is a deep-seated conflict between the religious view the world, characteristic of the past, and the outlook which has been shaping under the guiding hands of science and philosophy is held by an ever increasing number. Those who deny this conflict are judged to be either willing self-deceivers or postponers of the evil day of confession. Many books have been written to detail the warfare between the champions of orthodoxy and the leaders of the advance guard of science. The persecution of Galileo, the burning of Bruno, the bitter attacks upon the founders of the theory of organic evolution are cited as examples of the unavoidable warfare. For the nonce, there is a lull in the battle which was waged so fiercely by Tyndall and Huxley; but this lull does not signify that a treaty of peace has been signed, but only that the combatants have shifted their ground. The forces of orthodoxy have sullenly retreated to another line of entrenchments. The objective observer can entertain little doubt that the intellectual forces of orthodoxy have been worsted in the open field and have become disheartened by the growing revelation of the number and strength and persistence of the workers in the service of science. The prestige of science bids fair to equal, if not to surpass, that of the church. Hence, the desire of the theologian is to avoid a renewal of the conflict, or else to change the mode of the warfare.