The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

Positivism, the work of Comte, totally discards belief in God and treats theism in all its forms as merely a mode of contemplating phenomena and a step in the course of human progress. Yet the Positivist feels the need of a religion, and for the worship of God he substitutes the worship of Humanity. Humanity is an abstraction and an imperfect abstraction, the course of the human race having not yet been run. It cannot hear prayer or respond in any way to adoration. The adherents of Comte’s religion, therefore, are few, though those of his philosophy are more numerous, and the religious Comtists appear to be rather enthusiasts of Humanity than worshippers of the abstraction.

A conspicuous though equivocal place among the defenders of revealed religion in England was held by Mansel, professor of moral and metaphysical philosophy at Oxford and afterwards dean of St. Paul’s. Attempting in his Bampton lectures to make philosophy fall on its own sword, he fell on his own sword in the attempt. He maintained that God, being absolute, could not be apprehended by the finite intelligence of man, and that the finite morality of man was not the same as the absolute morality of God. Hence the passages of the Bible which seemed to conflict with human morality really transcended it and were moral miracles. In this Mansel was reviving the theory of Archbishop King and Bishop Browne, who had maintained that our knowledge of God was not actual, but merely analogous. The inference was promptly drawn by Mansel’s opponents that what could not be apprehended could not be matter of belief, and that he had therefore cut away the possibility of belief in God. They even contended that he was too anti-theistic, since he did away with all possibility of reverence for the Unknown. To deny the identity of human with divine morality and assert that what was immoral with man was moral with God was to sever the moral relation between God and man, and, in effect, to destroy morality altogether. We could conceive of only one morality, and acts ascribed to God which violated that morality must be to us immoral. “If,” said John Stuart Mill in the fervor of ethical protest, “an Almighty Being tells me that I shall call that righteous which is wicked or go to hell, to hell I will go.”

To meet the inroads of science on Biblical cosmogony and cosmography recourse was had to allegorical interpretation. But allegorical interpretation cannot be forced upon a writer when it manifestly is not in his mind. The writer or writers of Genesis undeniably intended his or their statements to be taken literally. They meant that the earth was really created in six days, as the Fourth Commandment assumes; that the formation of Eve out of a rib of Adam, the temptation of Eve by the serpent, and all the actions of the anthropomorphic God, who walks in the garden at evening and makes garments for Adam and Eve, were actual events. To foist upon them allegorical interpretation is to falsify their testimony. Besides, instead of having the facts of the creation revealed to us we are left to interpret allegory at a venture.

Recourse has been had to the theory of partial inspiration, admitting historical and even moral errors in Scripture, but setting them down to the human element in the composition, which has to be recognized without prejudice to that element which remains divine. Such a collaboration of infallibility with fallibility, both historical and moral, is a desperate hypothesis, especially when the object was to reveal vital truths to man. Nor could man distinguish the human element from the divine without being himself inspired and thus above the need of revelation. A condescension of the divine to the primitive shortcomings and aberrations of humanity is a solution surely opposed to any conceivable purpose of revelation.

Another line of defence has been the hypothesis, which may be called quasi-inspiration, reducing the inspiration of the Scriptures to a supreme degree of the same sort of inspiration which we recognize in a great poet or a great author of any kind. This is mere playing with the term “inspiration,” and little better than an equivoque. It may be, and we hope it is, true that the Author of our being manifests Himself in whatever is morally grand and elevating. But this belief is very different from a belief in the special inspiration of the Bible.

Evolution, again, which at first was repelled as atheistic, is now adopted by some as the key to revelation and the solution of all difficulties connected with it. This would make God in His revelation of Himself to man, without apparent motive, subject Himself to a physical or quasi-physical law, the knowledge of which has been withheld from man till the present time. An imperfect revelation of the divine character, one for example which should exhibit the justice of God without His mercy, would be a deception of man instead of a revelation. Besides, evolution repels finality, and we could have no assurance that the manifestation of the divine nature in Christ and the Gospel would be final.

It is needless to say how manifestly all these theories have their origin in controversial necessity, how totally alien they are to the view taken hitherto by the Christian Churches of the Scriptures, and how unlikely it is that God, in revealing Himself to man for the purpose of human salvation, should have chosen a method such as would entail inevitable misconstruction for many centuries and postpone the true interpretation of His character and dealings to an age of human criticism and science.

The ethics of Christianity have hitherto comparatively escaped systematic criticism and are still generally and officially professed. An appeal to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount continues to command formal respect. But Christ’s view of this world as evil and his renunciation of it for the Kingdom of God have been practically laid aside by all but specially religious men. Christ’s moral code was, in its direct bearing, only personal or social, politics and commerce not having come within the view of the teacher of Galilee. In regard to public and international concerns, the abjuration of his principles is most striking. In that sphere Christian meekness, mercy, and self-sacrifice are being openly superseded by maxims drawn from the Darwinian Struggle for Existence and by avowals of the right of the strong. Even professed ministers of Christ have been pandering to Imperialism and the lust of war. In truth, by a strange turn of events, Christian ethics, in questions between nation and nation and in questions concerning humanity at large, have been passing out of the hands of the orthodox teachers of supernatural Christianity into those of men who recognize only the human character and ethical teachings of life.

Professor Seeley in his earlier days had made a great impression with his Ecce Homo, an attempt to bring the character of Christ nearer to the heart of humanity. The work was decidedly pietist; yet a rationalizing tendency was scented in it by the Evangelicals, whose leader, Lord Shaftesbury, denounced it. Its author promised a theology. But when, after years of reflection and subjection to the influences of a moving time, the theology came, under the title of Natural Religion, it was a total disappointment. Religion was reduced by it to enthusiasm, not exclusively Christian or even theistic, but of any kind, such as enthusiastic love of country or of art.

Minds of the finer cast have preserved the religious spirit, while they have thrown off the shackles of creed and even regarded the whole religious question as matter of doubt and suspense.