The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

“There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

This is the pervading spirit of Tennyson’s poems, and of such a work as Amiel’s diary, but it must manifestly be confined to a circle of minds such as those of Tennyson and Amiel. Agnosticism is the condition into which a large number of educated minds have been more or less consciously passing or drifting. But while in some of them a religious spirit still prevails and the hope is cherished of a new religious dawn, others seem to have finally settled in the conviction that theological inquiry is hopeless and that our knowledge must forever be bounded by that which our senses and science tell us about the laws or forces of our own world.

Reluctance to give up belief in the unseen world and perhaps still more unwillingness to think that the loved ones who are lost by death are lost forever have given birth to Spiritualism. It will hardly be thought necessary to comment on an illusion which has been so often and so decisively exposed. Its very name is belied when the spirits have to materialize before they can make their existence known or hold converse with those who evoke them. The alleged communications from the spirit world through such a medium as Planchette have been trivial, almost fatuous. It is now forgotten that the movement began with table-turning, as though spirits had a special affinity for tables.

Among the anti-theistic, or at least the anti-ecclesiastical, influences and the solvents of our religious system may be reckoned the foundation of systems of morality independent of the divine sanction. Paley’s definition of virtue is “the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This is the theistic view. Opposed to it is the Utilitarian system, generally connected with Bentham’s name, which finds the sole and sufficient motive and reward of virtue in the promotion of our well-being here. So long as a system aims at perfection and beauty of character which transcend temporal happiness there is in the philosophy a theistic element, patent or latent. But of perfection and beauty of character the Utilitarian philosophy in its thorough-going form takes no account.

The weakening of religious belief as a social influence on the conservative side is very marked and excites the fears of statesmen, some of whom, even if they are Protestants, are inclined to look with complacency on the Papacy as a bulwark against social revolution. The drudge rested in dull contentment with his lot while he could believe that hereafter the parts of Dives and Lazarus would be reversed and full amends would be made to him for his privations in this life. This hope having vanished, he is resolved, if he can, to have a share of the good things of the present world. That this sentiment helps to set seething the caldron of socialistic and communistic agitation, all who are familiar with labor literature must be aware. It would probably be found that anarchism and atheism generally went together.

As the natural consequence of the loosened hold of religion over the nations, there has been a general tendency in Europe towards disestablishment. In Italy, the seat of the Papacy, disestablishment is complete. In Spain, while Catholicism is still recognized as the exclusive religion of the nation, the immense revenues of the clergy have been secularized, monasteries have been dissolved, and religion has been almost reduced to a department of the state. In France the process has gone still further than in Spain, and religion may almost be said to be not only a department, but a despised department, of the state. In Ireland the state Church has been disestablished. A bill has been brought in for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, and in England disestablishment seems to be approaching, its advent being hastened by the collision of ritualism with the anti-Roman and anti-sacerdotal spirit of the nation. Popular education has everywhere been largely secularized, and that process is still going on. Sunday-schools or other secondary influences can scarcely countervail the general banishment of religion from the training of the child.

Religion passed from old to New England in the form of a refugee Protestantism of the most intensely Biblical and the most austere kind. It had, notably in Connecticut, a code of moral and social law which, if fully carried into effect, must have fearfully darkened life. It produced in Jonathan Edwards the philosopher of Calvinism, from the meshes of whose predestinarian logic it has been found difficult to escape, though all such reasonings are practically rebutted by our indefeasible consciousness of freedom of choice and of responsibility as attendant thereon. New England Puritanism was intolerant, even persecuting; but the religious founder and prophet of Rhode Island proclaimed the principles of perfect toleration and of the entire separation of the Church from the state. The ice of New England Puritanism was gradually thawed by commerce, non-Puritan immigration from the old country, and social influences, as much as by the force of intellectual emancipation; though in founding universities and schools it had in fact prepared for its own ultimate subversion. Unitarianism was a half-way house through which Massachusetts passed into thorough-going liberalism such as we find in Emerson, Thoreau, and the circle of Brook Farm; and afterwards into the iconoclasm of Ingersoll. The only Protestant Church of much importance to which the New World has given birth is the Universalist, a natural offspring of democratic humanity revolting against the belief in eternal fire. Enthusiasm unilluminated may still hold its camp-meetings and sing “Rock of Ages” in the grove under the stars.

The main support of orthodox Protestantism in the United States now is an off-shoot from the old country. It is Methodism, which, by the perfection of its organization, combining strong ministerial authority with a democratic participation of all members in the active service of the Church, has so far not only held its own but enlarged its borders and increased its power; its power, perhaps, rather than its spiritual influence, for the time comes when the fire of enthusiasm grows cold and class meetings lose their fervor. The membership is mostly drawn from a class little exposed to the disturbing influences of criticism or science; nor has the education of the ministers hitherto been generally such as to bring them into contact with the arguments of the sceptic.

The character and intensity of the movement in Europe have been greatly influenced by the existence of state Churches and the degrees of obnoxious privilege which the state Churches severally have possessed. Where the yoke of the establishment was heavy, as in France under the Bourbons, free-thought has been lashed into fury; where, as in England, the ecclesiastical polity has been comparatively mild, it has taken the gentler form of evangelical dissent. In the United States at the beginning of the last century there were faint relics of state Churches, Churches, that is, recognized and protected, though not endowed, by the state. But there has been little to irritate scepticism or provoke it to violence of any kind, and the transition has accordingly been tranquil. Speculation, however, has now arrived at a point at which its results in the minds of the more inquiring clergy come into collision with the dogmatic creeds of their Churches and their ordination tests. Especially does awakened conscience rebel against the ironclad Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. Hence attempts, hitherto baffled, to revise the creeds; hence heresy trials, scandalous and ineffective.

Who can undertake to say how far religion now influences the inner life of the American people? Outwardly life in the United States, in the Eastern States at least, is still religious. Churches are well maintained, congregations are full, offertories are liberal. It is still respectable to be a church-goer. Anglicanism, partly from its connection with the English hierarchy, is fashionable among the wealthy in cities. We note, however, that in all pulpits there is a tendency to glide from the spiritual into the social, if not into the material; to edge away from the pessimistic view of the present world with which the Gospels are instinct; to attend less exclusively to our future, and more to our present state. Social reunions, picnics, and side-shows are growing in importance as parts of the Church system. Jonathan Edwards, if he could now come among his people, would hardly find himself at home.