The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

Among the apologetic and defensive forces may be numbered the practical vindication of Christianity by a certain revival of piety in the Anglican Church which produced Wilberforce, Cowper, and the Evangelicals, and still more by the religious crusade of John Wesley. Wesley’s achievements, however, were among the poor and illiterate, and were consequently demonstrations of the power of Christianity rather than of its truth. His Church had the advantage of being born, not like other Protestant Churches in doctrinal controversy, but in evangelical reaction against the impiety and vice of the age. It was, however, not undogmatic; besides what might be called the dogma of sudden conversion, it implicitly accepted not only the literal inspiration of Scripture, but the bulk of the Anglican Articles, to which was afterwards added, as an ordination test, general agreement with the more important of Wesley’s sermons.

The French Revolution brought on a strong reaction against the free-thought which had been hideously travestied in the blasphemous follies, and sullied by the crimes, of the Jacobins. In England the Tory mob, with true instinct, sacked the library and laboratory of Priestley. Coleridge, who, like other young men of intellect, had hailed the revolutionary dawn, shared the reaction, and combining in a curious way German metaphysic with English orthodoxy and Establishmentarianism, produced a religious system which perhaps entitles him to high place among English theologians in the proper sense of that term, as denoting a philosophic inquirer into the nature of the Deity and the relations between the Deity and man; though, as his guiding light was philosophy, not authority or tradition, he may in that respect be numbered among the promoters of free-thought and of the results to which it was ultimately to lead. Such free-thinking as there was naturally took a turn answering in violence to the repression. Tom Paine assailed orthodoxy, not with freedom only, but with enmity the most virulent. Though far from an attractive, he is by no means an unimportant figure. His criticisms of the credibility and morality of Scripture, unlearned and coarse as they were, went, not over the heads of the people like the high-flying and metaphysical speculations, but straight to their understandings and their hearts. It was difficult for apologetic fencers to parry such home thrusts. The same sort of effect has been produced by the irreverent frankness of Ingersoll in our own day. Shelley rushed from the religion of Eldon into what he took for Satanism; though his Satan is really the power of good, while the God of Eldon, as viewed by him, is the Devil.

Wrecked, body and soul, by the Thirty Years’ war, and afterwards stifled under a group of petty despotisms, Germany was for a time lost to intellectual progress. Her churches and their clergy, the Lutheran clergy at least, were in a very low condition. When her intellect began to work again, it was in a recluse and highly speculative way, the natural consequence of its exclusion from politics and other fields of action, together with the complete severance of the academical element from the people. Hence, from Leibnitz and Lessing onward, there was a train of metaphysical philosophies, each of them professing to find in our consciousness a key to the mystery of Being and an account of God, of His counsels, and of the relation between Him and man. In derision of such speculations it was said that to the French belonged the land, to the English the sea, to the Germans the air. Essentially incapable of verification, these theories went on shifting in nebulous succession and, with the exception of that of Kant, may now be said to have vanished, leaving scarce a rack behind. Even of the great Hegel little remains. Leibnitz, with his “best of all possible worlds,” hardly survived Candide. Still, we must speak with respect and gratitude of these efforts of minds, powerful in their way and devoted to truth, to solve for us the great mystery. Speculation so free could not fail to promote general freedom of thought, and the treatment by these thinkers of the popular and established religion was as philosophic as possible, though, with the exception of Feuerbach, they were theists. By Lessing much was done for the recognition of all religions and the promotion of universal toleration.

Presently, however, came direct criticism of the Bible, the way to which, long before, had been lighted by Spinoza. It assumed a strange form in the work of Paulus, who applied to the Gospel miracles a solvent something like that which Euhemerus had applied to the Pagan Pantheon, reducing them to natural occurrences turned into miracles by a devout imagination. The miraculous fish with the coin in its mouth was a fish which would sell for the coin. The miraculous feeding of the five thousand was brought within the compass of belief by supposing that they were not fasting, but had only gone without a regular meal. Christ’s walking on the water was his holding out a hand from the shore to Peter who had leaped into the water to ascertain whether it was really Christ that was walking on the shore.

Far more serious, and a startling blow to orthodoxy, was the Life of Jesus, by Strauss, who undertook to explain the Gospels on the mythical theory, showing that the reputed incidents of the life of Jesus and his miracles were mythical fulfilments of Old Testament prophecies and aspirations. From this, his first theory, Strauss afterwards partly receded, and in his second Life of Jesus, after a critical examination of the authorities, he comes to the conclusion that “few great men have existed of whose history we have so unsatisfactory a knowledge as that we have of Jesus.” The figure of Socrates, he thinks, though four hundred years older, is beyond all comparison more distinct. The momentous step, however, had been taken. Jesus had become the subject of a biography founded on critical examination of the materials, and Strauss is right in saying, as he does in his second Life, that when the biography was seriously taken up the doom of the theological conception was sealed. Lives of Christ, including even the most popular of them, however they may pretend and struggle to be orthodox, are really, as Strauss says, destructive of the theological conception, while they do not help to confirm our loyalty to historical truth. Ferdinand Christian Baur and his Tübingen school applied historical criticism to the early Christian Church, showing the conflict in it of the Pauline with the Petrine tendency, and bringing it altogether, as well as its source, within the pale of human history. Historical criticism of the Gospels was furthered by the progress of historical criticism in general, shown by such a work as Niebuhr’s History of Rome. Wolf’s treatment of the Homeric poems had already marked the birth of a critical spirit, which was aided by historical and archæological discoveries of all kinds, as well as by the growing influence of science on the methods of religious and anthropological speculation.

There was an evangelical reaction against rationalism in Germany with a train of controversialists and commentators reputed as orthodox. Yet even in these, more or less of a rationalist undertone is perceived. There is a tendency more or less apparent to minimize the supernatural, to throw the miracles into the background, and dwell rather on the spiritual significance of Christ’s character and words. This is very conspicuous in Neander, the head of the line. An orthodox English divine such as Mr. Rose might well, after a survey of German theology, make a rather mournful report.

In Holland, ever the land of free speculation, criticism advanced without fear, and at last by the pen of Kuenen arraigns the authenticity, antiquity, and authority of the historical books of the Old Testament to an extent totally subversive of their character as records of a primeval history, much more as organs of a divine revelation.

German philosophy had mingled with English theology through Coleridge. German criticism of the Bible did not lag much behind. Milman’s History of the Jews, dealing with the subject in the spirit of an ordinary history, treating patriarchs as Arab sheiks and minimizing miracles, gave a serious shock to orthodox sentiment in England. Even what was deemed orthodox in Germany appeared rationalistic to the Anglican divines. To the evangelicals especially, whose leader was Simeon, and who occupied many of the fashionable pulpits, anything like critical treatment of the sacred history seemed impiety. Yet they, with their inward persuasion of conversion and spiritual union with the Saviour, as well as the Quaker with his inner light, or the Roman Catholic with his implicit faith in the Church, were really beyond the critic’s reach.

A long line of British leaders of thought and controversialists succeeds. Rationalist and heterodox in different degrees were Thomas Arnold, Frederick Maurice, Stanley, Jowett, the writers of Essays and Reviews, and Robertson, of Brighton. Decidedly sceptical were Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, and James Anthony Froude. Reaction on the High Church side found leaders in Pusey, Newman, and Hurrell Froude. The evangelical pulpit combated at once rationalism and High Church. The state Church was awakened from its long torpor, and under the inspiration of its High Church party strove to reanimate its Convocation.

Frederick Maurice impressed more by his character than by his writings, which were fatally obscure. He was rationalist enough to be deprived of his professorship in an Anglican college. At the same time he could persuade himself that subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was no bondage but a security for free thought. To his yoke-fellow, Kingsley, is to be traced “muscular Christianity,” a rather suspicious adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount to our times. But the pair exercised more influence as social missionaries, striving, in conjunction with Thomas Hughes, to give the labor movement a religious turn, than as religious philosophers or critics.