James, Card. Gibbons.
PROTESTANTISM
The motives which have acted upon religion in the nineteenth century, either by way of directly enhancing its power or by restricting its influence, are these: (1) Humanitarianism; (2) The Historical Spirit; (3) Science; (4) Nationalism. Although the course of religious history has varied somewhat in different countries as well as in the different Churches, yet it is possible to form an approximate picture of the resultant of these forces which will reveal the progress of the Kingdom of God in the world.
I
The first of these motives—humanitarianism—has powerfully influenced the Christian world by asserting the rights of man, liberty, equality and the spirit of fraternity, the sense of human brotherhood. The germs of the humanitarian movement may be traced in the eighteenth century, as in the teaching of Lessing and Herder and Rousseau; in religious movements like the Great Awakening in the United States, the revival in England under Wesley and Whitefield, in tentative efforts for the abolition of slavery (Hopkins and Clarkson), and prison reform (John Howard). But the nineteenth century has been distinguished above all the other Christian centuries in the results achieved by the sentiment of humanity. It has led to the abolition of slavery under English rule, in the United States, and in Russia; to many reform movements of every kind and degree, wherever there existed actual or latent tyranny, which robbed humanity of its inherent privileges.
The humanitarian sentiment is Christian in its origin, derived primarily from the conviction of the incarnation of God in Christ. Christ appears in history as the leader of humanity in the struggle for freedom. Slowly but surely ever since His advent, the world of man has been moving forward to the attainment of the ideal of humanity revealed in Him. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. And if the Son of God shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The progress towards freedom inspired by Him who taught the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men has been accomplished in the face of great hinderances and long reverses, overcoming obstacles which would have been insuperable without Christian faith. In the nineteenth century the movement towards human freedom seems almost to have reached its culmination. Within the sphere of religion the progress is most manifest in the spread of Christian missions, which stand out in any review of the century as one of its most extraordinary achievements. It might be justly designated as a missionary age. So intense and persistent has been its devotion to the gospel of Christ as essential for man that when the century closed it might be truly said that the round world had been girdled with Christian missions, whose results are more significant for civilization, as well as for religion, than any statistics can reveal. The missionary has been the pioneer, it is becoming increasingly evident, of momentous changes yet to appear.
The sentiment of humanity has operated as a motive in the study of human history, giving to historical inquiry a new interest and impetus. No age has been so fruitful in the results of historical research, with conclusions of vital importance for every department of life, but chiefly this, that an independent place has been vindicated for humanity, as having a life of its own distinct from and above the natural order of the physical world. The study of man as he appears in history has tended to strengthen faith in the essential truths of religion, opening up as it has done the deeper knowledge of the nature of man to which the religion of Christ appeals; for the modern method of studying history, as compared with earlier methods, consists in seeking for those inward subjective moods of the human soul which lie beneath creeds or institutions, and not solely in the accurate description of the objective fact. The facts of human life call for interpretation, and for this the historian must search. Thus has been born what is almost a new department of inquiry—the philosophy of history (Hegel and many others). Differ as do these attempts at a philosophy of history, they yet possess one ruling idea—the conviction of a development in the life of humanity when viewed as a whole. The idea of development controlled the higher intellectual life of the first half of the century. It was applied with important results to the study of ecclesiastical history, by Schleiermacher, Neander, Gieseler, Baur, Rothe, Bunsen, and many others, by the Roman Catholic Möhler, in his Symbolik, and by John Henry Newman, in however one-sided and imperfect manner. The doctrine of development found its classic formula in the lines of Tennyson:
“Yet, I doubt not through the ages
One increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened
With the process of the suns.”