The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

The Roman Catholic Church has not suffered from criticism—historical, literary, or scientific—in the same way as the Protestant Churches, that is, internally, because it depends not so much on intellectual conviction as on ecclesiastical organization, and rests comparatively little on the authority of the Bible. Its priesthood has not been affected like the clergy of the Church of England or the ministries of the Protestant Churches. But it has everywhere been losing the educated classes, or retained a part of them, not so much from conviction—still less from speculative conviction—as because its alliance is congenial to political and social reaction. Its inability to come to terms with science has been shown by the recent case of St. George Mivart, and scientific eminence among Roman Catholics is rare. In Italy, the centre of the system, while the poorer classes still flock to the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples or the exudation of the bones of St. Andrew at Amalfi, still climb the Holy Staircase on their knees or make pilgrimages to the House of Loretto, the general tone of intelligence is described as sceptical, though aristocratic families, more especially those of Papal creation, adhere to the Papacy on political and social rather than on religious grounds. Near to the shrine of Ignatius Loyola stands the statue of Giordano Bruno, on the spot of his martyrdom by fire, “dedicated to him by the age which he foresaw.” Attempts have been made to liberalize the Church of Rome and enable it to float with the current of the day, but they have failed. Pio Nono for a time put himself at the head of the popular and liberal movement in Italy. But he soon found, as Carlyle said, that it was an alarming undertaking. Lamennais’s attempt at liberalization ended, after a long intellectual agony, in his own secession. The combined attempt of Lacordaire to liberalize ecclesiastically, and of Montalembert to liberalize politically, had a scarcely less melancholy result; both of them died under the shadow of Papal displeasure or of that of the Jesuit party, by which the Papacy was controlled. The defiantly reactionary spirit of Ultramontanism de Maistre has prevailed. The Jesuit has ruled at the Vatican. Under his guidance the Papacy has proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, thus breaking completely and finally with reason and with all who, like the “Old Catholics” in Germany, remained in some degree within that pale. It has gained in its own despite in respectability and influence by deprivation of its temporal power, against which the Prisoner of the Vatican still hopelessly protests.

In France the national religion, abolished and persecuted by the Jacobins, was restored for a political purpose by Napoleon. The new Charlemagne was requited with the degradation of the Pope, who came to Paris to crown him on the morrow of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien and broke the best traditions of the Holy See by failing to veto the divorce from Josephine. Identified with political reaction under the restored Bourbons, the Church nearly suffered wreck in the revolution by which they were overthrown. She remained the object of intense and persecuting hatred to the revolutionary and republican party. Plaintively, when the Orleans monarchy fell, she chanted Domine salvum fac populum. Joyously, when the Empire succeeded, she chanted Domine salvum fac Imperatorem. But the Empire in its turn fell. The Church has continued to ally herself with political reaction and aristocratic hostility to the Republic, though she has latterly been receiving hints from the Vatican that the Republic is strong, that the monarchical and imperial pretenders both are weak. The consequence is a violence of hostility on the part of the Radicals and Socialists which assails not only monastic fraternities, but educational institutions and even charitable institutions in clerical hands, and has produced an infidel literature carrying blasphemy to the height almost of frenzy and culminating in a comic Life of Christ. The official world of France is almost formally infidel, and a religious expression would be very injurious to a politician. On the other hand, the Church braves and exasperates public reason with apparitions of the Virgin and the miracles of Lourdes. Over most of the women, the priest still holds sway. Of the men, not many are seen in churches. The general attitude of the educated towards religion seems to be not so much that of hostility as that of total indifference, a state of estrangement more hopeless than hostility itself.

There is in France a Protestant Church, of which Guizot was an eminent member, and which in his time was renewing its life. But there was a schism in it between an evangelical party and a party which was entirely rationalist, Guizot belonging to the first, his son-in-law to the second; and rationalism seems to have prevailed. With the Protestant party of France was allied an evangelical party in Switzerland, of which Vinet was the most eloquent divine. But in Vinet, as in liberal divines generally, we find an inclination to rest on the spiritual rather than on the supernatural. In the city of Calvin generally opinions appear to reign more opposed to the religion of Calvin than those for which he burned Servetus.

But of the disintegrating forces criticism—the Higher Criticism as it is the fashion to call it—has by no means been the only one. Another, and perhaps in recent times the more powerful, has been science, from which Voltaire and the earlier sceptics received little or no assistance in their attacks; for they were unable to meet even the supposed testimony of fossils to the Flood. It is curious that the bearing of the Newtonian astronomy on the Biblical cosmography should not have been before perceived; most curious that it should have escaped Newton himself. His system plainly contravened the idea which made the earth the centre of the universe, with heaven above and hell below it, and by which the cosmography alike of the Old and the New Testament is pervaded. Yet the Star of Bethlehem remained little disturbed as an article of faith. The first destructive blow from the region of science was perhaps dealt by geology, which showed that the earth had been gradually formed, not suddenly created, that its antiquity immeasurably transcended the orthodox chronology, and that death had come into the world long before man. Geologists, scared by the echoes of their own teaching, were fain to shelter themselves under allegorical interpretations of Genesis totally foreign to the intentions of the writer; making out the “days” of Creation to be æons, a version which, even if accepted, would not have accounted for the entrance of death into the world before the creation of man. Those who attended the lectures of Buckland and other geologists of that generation well recollect the shifts to which science had recourse in its efforts to avoid collision with the cosmogony supposed to have been dictated by the Creator to the reputed author of the Pentateuch. That the narrative of Genesis could hold its ground so long against science was due at once to its dignity, which earned for it the praise of Longinus, and to its approximation to scientific truth in describing the universe as the work of a single mind. These characteristics have even in the day of geology and Darwin raised up for it such an apologist as Mr. Gladstone, whose defence, however, amounts to this, that the Creator, in giving an account of his own work to Moses, came remarkably near the truth.

The grand catastrophe, however, was the discovery of Darwin. This assailed the belief that man was a distinct creation, apart from all other animals, with an immortal soul specially breathed into him by the author of his being. It showed that he had been developed by a natural process out of lower forms of life. It showed that instead of a fall of man there had been a gradual rise, thus cutting away the ground of the Redemption and the Incarnation, the fundamental doctrines of the orthodox creed. For the hypothesis of creation generally was substituted that of evolution by some unknown but natural force.

Not only to revealed or supernatural but to natural religion a heavy blow was dealt by the disclosure of wasted æons and abortive species which seem to preclude the idea of an intelligent and omnipotent designer.

The chief interpreters of science in its bearing on religion were, in England, Tyndall and Huxley. Tyndall always declared himself a materialist, though no one could less deserve the name if it implied anything like grossness or disregard of the higher sentiments. He startled the world by his declaration that matter contained the potentiality of all life, an assertion which, though it has been found difficult to prove experimentally, there can be less difficulty in accepting, since we see life in rudimentary forms and in different stages of development. Huxley wielded a trenchant pen and was an uncompromising servant of truth. A bitter controversy between him and Owen arose out of Owen’s tendency to compromise. He came at one time to the extreme conclusion that man was an automaton, which would have settled all religious and moral questions out of hand; but in this he seemed afterwards to feel that he had gone too far. An automaton automatically reflecting on its automatic character is a being which seems to defy conception. The connection of action with motive, of motive with character and circumstance, is what nobody doubts; but the precise nature of the connection, as it is not subject, like a physical connection, to our inspection, defies scrutiny, and our consciousness, which is our only informant, tells us that our agency in some qualified sense is free.

Materialists or physicists such as Tyndall and Huxley, or their counterparts on the Continent, would console us for the loss of religion by substituting the majesty of law. But the idea of law implies a law-giver or an intelligent and authoritative imponent of some kind. There is no majesty in a mere sequence, even the most invariable and on the largest scale, the existence of which alone physical science can prove.

The all-embracing philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer excludes not only the supernatural but theism in its ordinary form. Yet theism in a subtle form may be thought to lurk in it. “By continually seeking,” he says, “to know, and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the Unknowable.” In this and subsequent passages he evidently looks upon the Unknowable as an object of reverence, otherwise it would hardly be our highest duty to regard it as that through which all things exist, or to maintain any particular attitude towards it. But Unknowableness in itself excites no reverence, even though it be supposed infinite and eternal. Nothing excites our reverence but a person, or at least a Moral Being. There lingers in Mr. Spencer’s mind the belief that the present limit of our knowledge is the veil of the Deity.

Had the Darwinian discoveries been known to Schopenhauer they would have conspired with the earlier discoveries of science and with his pitiless survey of the human lot to confirm him in the belief that this was the worst of all possible worlds. Amid the general distraction even pessimism has found adherents, and a European version of Buddhism promising final relief from the miseries of conscious existence has been accepted as an anodyne by troubled minds.