A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

RELIGION: THE FINE ARTS: LITERATURE

A good many people contemplate the future of the world with an alarmed feeling that vast material progress and enlarged knowledge of the visible and tangible universe are likely to be accompanied by intellectual developments dangerous to the religious spirit in mankind. But to consider thus is to overlook the manifest trend of human thought at the present time. Of the two influences named, material progress and enlarged information about the universe, the former is probably much more directly liable to affect religious feeling adversely than the latter. Epochs of high civilisation and great luxury have often accompanied a general tendency to scepticism, and these conditions are also perhaps (and for the same reasons) not highly favourable to the highest developments of poetry. There have been periods of scientific discovery which have coincided with the spread of irreligion. During the second half of the nineteenth century there was, for instance, no doubt a great increase of popular scepticism arising out of popular deductions (or supposed deductions) from science. Religion unquestionably lost ground in the sense that dogmatic irreligion became rather fashionable. When the people began to learn that geological research had entirely upset the Biblical chronology, and that biological research had proved the development of animal life by evolutionary processes not compatible with a literal acceptance of the account of the creation in Genesis; when knowledge of the developments of language proved that the various tongues of mankind could not possibly have been the subject of a sudden, cataclysmal “confusion” at Babel or elsewhere, and when it became common knowledge that the sun and stars were not suddenly produced for the convenience of man, but were, on the contrary, for the most part much older, as suns and stars, than the earth itself; it is not surprising that minds untrained in philosophical deduction leaped towards atheism, although, of course, none of these discoveries has any more to do with religion, as religion, than, say, chemistry has to do with music. Unless one takes a highly anthropomorphic view of the subject they are not even inimical to revelation. Of course it is open to anyone who chooses, to say that if the statements in the Bible, said to be inspired, are incorrect, the Creator (and Inspirer) either did not know how He had done His work, or told untruths about it; and consequently that scientific discovery has disproved revelation. But that is what I have called a highly anthropomorphic argument, and it may safely be left to the apologists to demolish. Assuredly it is not a sort of argument likely to be met with in the cultured and logical future. But it was an argument which commended itself very widely to the uncultured and illogical past, and great efforts were made to deal with it. These efforts were really inimical to religious faith. Religion having been declared to rest upon the irrefragable rock of Holy Scripture, there appeared to many excellent people an urgent necessity that science should be set right, that the theory of Evolution (by which was meant, for these thinkers, Darwinism) must be disproved: otherwise all faith must go by the board, and the world must descend into pure materialism. The Biblical criticism produced in Germany, and apparently received in the very heart of the Christian camp, seemed to plain men not merely to assail this irrefragable rock but to strike at the roots of religion itself. Atheism, having become unfashionable, was exchanged from an “agnosticism” of which the popular conception was not a great deal more philosophical. The whole question of religion was conceived to hang together. The Bible was the Word of God: if the Bible could not stand, God must fall. And the stability of the Bible was considered to rest upon scientific accuracy. A miscellaneous collection of writings, certainly of great, but of variously computed antiquity, was to be absolutely right (which no other documents of anything like the same age have ever been) on scientific facts; otherwise it could not be retained as a text-book of the churches. The latter (sometimes themselves claiming inspiration) had declared the Bible to be directly inspired: and by some people inspiration was taken to imply literal and detailed truth, though literal and detailed truth would certainly have made the collection utterly incomprehensible by the persons who have used it during all but the last comparatively insignificant portion of its existence, and to most persons even then. Evidently such a conception of the Bible, accompanied by the opinion that religion could only exist on the basis of the Bible, was dangerous to popular religion in proportion as the opinions here summarised met with public support.

Hardly less dangerous was the endeavour of some apologists to assist the difficulty of belief by attenuating the minimum required of it. The exposure of their rather circular arguments—basing Faith on the inspired Bible, and the inspiration of the Bible on its internal evidence—titillated in the untrained thinker who had rejected (as he was encouraged to reject) the claim of the Church to be the repository of inspired tradition, a sense of his own logical acuteness. With a warm glow of self-approval he abandoned the ancient shibboleths and left off going to church, being convinced that no really well-informed intelligence could tolerate the mutual contradiction of science and religion. With no more ability to understand the arguments which supported the one than the philosophy which lay at the root of the other, and quite unaware that religious belief is capable of development and is as much a product of evolution as any material phenomenon, he considered according to temperament that religion was either a mischievous invention calculated to clog the progress of the world, or a pardonable aberration of amiable minds seeking consolation in superstition of one sort or another. The religiously-minded thinker of the same calibre welcomed with enthusiasm the antagonisms of scientific schools discovered for him by the less wary of his teachers, and decided that Darwin was wrong, that Huxley was following false scents, and that science would have to revise all its later conclusions. In neither case (naturally) was

... “divine philosophy,

Not harsh and crabbèd as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo’s lute,”

called into the assize. “Mistakes of Moses,” to be either proved or justified, were popularly supposed to be the touchstone of religion’s fate. Meanwhile, though the combatants in the popular arena were quite unaware of it, the true thinkers were realising vast depths which science had left still unexplored, and the very investigations undertaken to account for the beginnings of life on this planet were proving the belief in the spontaneous generation of life a figment. Whatever effect science may have had upon myth, it was doing nothing to assail the ultimate mystery which is the basic fact of religion.

By degrees, too, the philosophical untenableness of materialism began to be popularised, and although it is a great deal easier to accept (or decline) scientific discoveries without understanding the evidence for or against them than to grasp such abstract considerations as the subjectivity of phenomena, popular scepticism began to be directed into new channels. If we could only know phenomena we really know nothing; and it was just as likely that the most absurd myths of the hagiologist might be true as that they might be false—since one could know nothing. Towards the end of the century there is no doubt that among the masses of the people the incomprehensibleness of things in general had the effect of popularising a certain tolerance of Christianity among the class which, a little earlier, had been repudiating it altogether; and if church-going, Sabbath-keeping and other formal acts of religion continued to be mentioned by the clergy and their adherents as the subject of lamentable negligence, the habits thus deplored arose, less and less from conviction and more and more from taste. People stayed away from church not because they rejected Christianity but because church-going bored them. If the clergy saw their congregations dwindle they had themselves to thank for it. The atrocious dulness of nearly all sermons drove away more churchmen than were lured from their pews by militant irreligion. There is not the smallest reason to believe that “free thought” propaganda had any really important part in producing the indifference denounced by the churches. The simple fact is that a growing appetite for amusements, athletic and other, and an intolerance of the boredom inflicted by preachers too indolent or too imperfectly educated to make their discourses tolerable by an active mind, robbed the churches of their visitors. A good preacher never lacked a crowded congregation even in the middle of a week-day in the city of London; nor are such congregations lacking now.

No doubt the form of education generally adopted in non-Catholic countries has been a great cause of indifferentism. The fostering of parental indolence by States which profess to relieve it of the duty of religious as well as the expense of other teaching, cannot tend to promote religious education. To take our own country for an example, fathers, who would make it a duty to instil as well as they were able the principles of their own faith into the minds of their children if the board schools were not supposed to teach Christianity, doubtless neglect that task in the existing conditions, a fact which makes it quite easy to understand why congregations are so largely made up of elderly people, while boys and girls, not young enough to be haled unwillingly to the parental pew, and young men and maidens, young wives and husbands “educated” on the prevailing system, tend more and more to amuse themselves, not in irreligion but in indifference. The squabbles of the sects have made it impossible to invest Christianity in board schools, unless the law be flagrantly violated, with any of the importance necessary to the foundation of a genuinely religious spirit; and the very children find that religion is treated as a thing of much less importance than sums or a good handwriting. No one struggles and wrangles about the right way to do long division. Long division, therefore, is a settled thing and important. But everybody quarrels and snarls as to who shall teach his particular kind of religion. Religion, therefore, is a doubtful sort of thing, about which even grown-up people do not agree. It cannot be of much importance. If you ask father about it, he says it is the teacher’s business to answer you. And in school, it has to be attended to at a certain time so as not to interfere with the real business of the day. Clearly it doesn’t much matter; and the child resolves, as soon as it is old enough, to escape from the weekly boredom of sitting still for two hours in a stuffy church or chapel, saying the same things over and over again, and listening to a dull man in a sort of elevated and ornamented witness-box talking in a patronising tone about things not easy to understand, and not in the least practically useful when heard.

Of course this is not the only sort of influence which has been at work to produce a result likely to affect the attitude of the present century towards the question. If the facts are as I have stated them (which I do not think anyone will dispute) we see one very good reason why the younger generation is just now somewhat irreligious. I do not believe it is nearly as irreligious as many good people (on both sides) think. But I do believe that we, at all events, have as a nation been doing every thing we can to make it so. There is no surer way of preventing a thing’s being done than for the State to make a show of doing it and then neglect it. If the school boards had not assumed the duty of teaching children Christianity, parents would have attended to the matter, and probably done it a great deal better than the boards could possibly have done it, even in the best conditions. And if anyone says that you can’t teach Christianity, the reply is, that in the sort of conditions which exist in England at the present time, the religious spirit is not favoured unless religion is taught. I said at the beginning that the sort of life we lead now, and that we are likely to go on living during the next hundred years, is probably more unfavourable to the spirit than any directly irreligious influence of science or discovery. People who are crowded into towns, where they are out of constant touch with Nature and the immensities of space, and lead a hurried, busy existence unfavourable to deep thought and mysticism, are much less liable to yearn for some explanation of the vast incomprehensible universe, the profound misgivings of the soul, than people who have other opportunities, who know the massive face of solitude and have lain under the inscrutable stars. The very frequency of terrible experience, when death stalks in the streets and a funeral procession is so common a sight that men hardly turn their unbared heads to look upon it, blunts the sense of awe; and in the cheap Press the alleged humorist finds it a choice subject for joking. A hundred years hence, though I hope our humorous Press won’t be quite so ghastly, still more of us will have lived always in cities, and been rarely intimate with Nature. Unless, therefore, some new influences supervene, it is likely that the new age will be even less religiously inclined than the age we live in. Is it probable that such an influence will arise? Or will the next century have turned its face altogether from faith and given up in despair the world-old riddle of the universe?