The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

The Church of Rome, to meet the storm, reorganized herself at the Council of Trent on lines practically traced for her by the Jesuit. A comparison of Suarez with Thomas Aquinas shows the change which took place in spirit as plainly as a comparison of the Jesuit’s meretricious fane with the Gothic churches shows the change in religious taste. Papal autocracy was strengthened at the expense of the episcopate, and furnished at once with a guard and a propagandist machinery of extraordinary power in the Order of Loyola. That the plenary inspiration of the Bible in the Vulgate version, and including the Apocrypha, should be reaffirmed was a secondary matter, inasmuch as the Church of Rome holds that it is not she who derives her credentials from Scripture, but Scripture which depends for the attestation of its authority upon her. She now allied herself more closely than before with the Catholic kings, with Philip II., and afterwards with Louis XIV., who paid her for her support of political absolutism by sanguinary persecution of heretics. She hereby parted with her Hildebrandic supremacy over the powers of the world, though she did not, like the Anglican Church, recognize the divine right of kings. The liberal and peace-making movements which had been set on foot, or were afterwards set on foot, within her pale, such as the Oratory of Divine Love, which held justification by faith and wished to compromise with the Protestants, were effectually put down. Jansenism, when it appeared, with its half-Calvinistic theory of Grace, shared the same fate. Gallicanism afterwards, having nationality to back it, was more successful. But it brought no freedom of conscience; it was merely a repartition of the despotic power over conscience between the King and the Pope.

In Spain, and for the most part in Italy, Rome, by the aid of the Jesuit and the Inquisition, completely succeeded in killing free-thought. In France, where there was no Inquisition, her triumph was not so complete. She succeeded only in driving scepticism into disguise and subterfuge. The Commonwealth of Holland did France and the world in general the immense service of affording a printing house for free-thought which was on the confines of France, but beyond the reach of the French government. Descartes, without directly assailing the faith of the Church, planted in her face the standard of thorough-going reason and entitled himself to a place in the Index. Growing sensuality and love of pleasure brought with them laxity of belief and impatience of priestly control. The authority of the clergy was impaired by their scandalous wealth and vice, which at the same time enhanced the odium of their persecuting tyranny. At last came Voltaire, Diderot, the Encyclopædia, and Rousseau. With literary cleverness unmatched and an incomparable genius for subtle attack, combined with a winning philanthropy, Voltaire converted and drew into the work of demolition, to them suicidal, the thrones of Louis XV., or rather of the Pompadour, of Catherine, and Frederick. The influence extended even to Spain, where Aranda, and to Portugal, where Pombal reigned. The Pope was constrained to dissolve the Order of Jesus. As Voltaire demolished in the name of Reason, Rousseau demolished in the name of Nature, taking an artificial society by storm. Helvétius went to the length of extreme materialism; but Voltaire, the master-spirit of the movement, remained a theist, and Rousseau was even for compulsory theism as the foundation of the state. The Revolution also, when it came, though violently and profanely anti-Christian, was in the main theist, and in the midst of the Terror held its Feast of the Supreme Being, with Robespierre for high priest. Atheism, in the persons of Chaumette and Anacharsis Clootz, went to the guillotine.

One hardly knows what to say about the Last Will and Testament of Jean Meslier, the priest who after thirty years’ service as a country curé bequeathed to his parishioners a profession of atheism. The work appears to have passed through the hands of Voltaire. It urges the arguments against natural theology in a very forcible as well as thorough-going way. But it seems, when it appeared, to have made little impression and can be mentioned historically only as an indication of the masked ferment of the time.

England had a series of deists, Toland, Tindal, Collins, Chubb, and the rest, not men of much mark, though seekers of truth after their measure and in their day. The ecclesiastical polity of England was comparatively mild, and there was nothing to provoke indignant resistance to clerical tyranny like that which was provoked by the cases of Calas and LaBarre. Shaftesbury, a deist of a higher stamp, was, with his “moral taste,” a philosopher for men of taste, and could little stir the common world. In defence of orthodoxy came forth Bishop Butler, with a work which will be memorable forever as a model of earnest and solemn inquiry into the deepest questions, though its fundamental assumption is unwarrantable, since we should expect the difficulties of natural theology not to be reproduced but to be dispelled by revelation. Butler’s tone in discussion was an effective rebuke to those who had treated Christianity with levity as an obsolete interference with the pleasures of the world. His profound analysis of the moral nature of man in like manner rebuked the shallow and cynical theories which resolved everything into self-love; though here again his assumption of the authority of conscience as a divinely implanted monitor has by modern investigation been disallowed. Butler, however, with all his piety and his orthodox conclusions, must essentially be reckoned among rationalists. He frankly admits that the use of our reason is the only means we have of arriving at truth, never appealing from it to Church authority. He who recognizes reason as supreme must be deemed rationalist, let his own reason lead him or mislead him as it may. This is the vital line of cleavage which runs through the whole religious history and divides the religious world at the present day.

Butler had a popular shield-bearer in Paley, an extremely acute and effective though not profound writer. Paley’s supposed proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator from the design visible in creation told greatly at the time and long continued to tell; though we now see that the universe, unlike the watch, presents terrible proofs of undesign as well as apparent proofs of design; not to mention that in the case of the universe, though adaptation is visible, the aim is not revealed. Paley’s Horae Paulinae, however, is about the only piece of historical apologetics which has in any degree survived the destructive influence of modern criticism.

Warburton hardly calls for mention. In his Divine Legation he is right enough in saying that Moses did not teach the immortality of the soul; but the notion that the Mosaic dispensation must have had divine support because it could afford to dispense with that doctrine would now only provoke a smile.

Among literary apologists we can scarcely reckon Johnson. Yet he was a living defence, intellectual as well as moral, of his religion. That he speculated, we cannot doubt, and we know that he was not satisfied with the proofs of the immortality of the soul; but he suppressed doubt in himself and frowned it down in others. He was well justified in treating with contempt the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, which have not the slightest force or value beyond their literary form. Bolingbroke’s scepticism, however, had a certain effect if it inspired Pope’s Universal Prayer.

In Hume, on the other hand, we have the mightiest of all sceptics in the literal sense of the term, inasmuch as he was purely a doubter and seems hardly to have felt the desire of arriving at any positive result. He who has given rise to so much controversy was himself uncontroversial. His writings, considered as the vehicle of his opinions, are the perfection of literary art. Over common minds the teacher who merely suspends judgment, seeming not to be in quest of positive truth, can never have much influence; but Hume had great influence over cultivated men of the world. His argument against the credibility of miracles, though it became as standard on one side as Paley’s apologue of the watch upon the other, will hardly bear examination. Assuming the existence of God and His care for man as His work, which Hume does not openly deny, there is no presumption against His revelation of Himself in the only conceivable way, which is by an interruption of the general course of things; there is rather a presumption that He would so reveal Himself. Nor can it be maintained that no degree of evidence, say that of a multitude of scientific men, after providing all possible safeguards against deception, would satisfy us of the fact.

Gibbon’s great work is instinct with the tendency of men of the world in the generation of Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and Hume. Its spirit is identical with that of Hume’s philosophy and history. It is of first-rate importance in the religious controversy as having opened the trenches historically against revealed religion in undertaking to account for the success of Christianity by natural causes. But its cynical treatment of that which, on any hypothesis, was the prevailing and formative force is unphilosophical and detracts largely from the value of the work. He who could imagine that man had been happiest in the Roman Empire under the Antonines was an apt partisan of Lord North. Gibbon no doubt imagined himself a rich patrician of his golden era. Would he have liked to be a Roman slave? Conyers Middleton in his Free Inquiry into the ecclesiastical miracles glanced at the credibility of the Gospel miracles and had thus partly paved the way for Gibbon.

Among the disintegrating forces may be counted Unitarianism, which was growing among thinkers, and probably before very long became the mask for profounder scepticism in Protestant Europe as it did afterwards in New England. We find it in England on the eve of the French Revolution, combined with science in Priestley and with mathematics and philosophy in Price.