Is there a God, personal, distinct from nature? Or is nature the only god, and science her prophet? It is right here at this central point that men are dividing; it is here we must place ourselves, if we would view the two great armies that in all Christendom are gathering for a supreme conflict.
There is a form of infidelity in our day—and it is the one into which all unbelief must ultimately resolve itself—which starts with this assumption: “Whether or not there is a God must for ever remain unknown to man.” It reasons in this way: “This whole subject belongs within the region, not only of the unknown, but of the unknowable. It is an insoluble riddle, and the philosophies and theologies which have sought to unravel it, if only idle, might deserve nothing more than contempt; but they have been the bane of human thought, have soured all the sweetness of life, and therefore ought to be visited with the execration of mankind. Since religion is a subject about which nothing can be known, what is so absurd as to spend time upon it? What so absurd as to divert the thoughts of men from subjects in which thinking is fruitful to those in which it must for ever remain barren of all except evil results? What so absurd as to set them working for a future life, of which we can never know whether it exists at all, when we might at least teach them how to make the present one worth having? The paradise of the future, which the prophetic eye of science can already descry, is in the world, not beyond it; and to seek to hasten its approach is the highest and only worthy object in life.” As we take it, this is the creed of modern unbelief, to which as yet few will openly subscribe, but toward which all its hundred conflicting schools of thought are moving. Few men indeed are able to perceive the logical outcome of their opinions, and still fewer have the courage to confess what they more than half suspect.
This superstition is a return to the nature-worship of paganism, but under a different aspect. Of old, nature was worshipped as revealed to sense, and now as revealed to thought; then as beautiful, now as true or useful. The first was artistic, and form was its symbol; the last is scientific, and law is its expression. The religion of humanity is only a phase of this worship; for in it man is considered, not as the child of God, but as the product of nature.
And now what has this to do with the ideal of society or the wealth of nations? At the basis of all social organization lies morality, as it is by conduct that both individuals and nations are saved or lost. The history of the human race shows that religion and morality are intimately related. That there have been good atheists does not affect the truth of this proposition any more than that there have been bad Christians. Men are usually better or worse than their principles; practice and profession rarely accord; and this is remarked because it ought not to exist.
Conduct, to be rational, should be motived, and consequently referable to certain general principles by which it is justified. To be particular, a man who believes in God, the Creator, a Father as just as he is good, has fundamental motives of action which are wanting to the atheist. The one should seek to approve himself to his heavenly Father; the other cannot go farther than conform to the laws of nature. To the one this life, as compared with that which is to be, is of value only as it relates to it; to the other it is all in all. And since the ultimate end of society is the welfare of the associated, the one will regard this end from a transcendental point of view, taking in time and eternity; the other will consider it merely with reference to man’s present state. Their notions of life, of its ends, aims, and proper surroundings, will be radically different.
Suppose for a moment that religious beliefs are mere dreams, fancies of sick brains; is it not at once manifest that human life is a much poorer and sorrier thing than it is commonly thought to be? As the light of heaven fades away, do not all things grow dark, leaving us in the shadow of death, despairing or debauched, sullen or frantic? The poet’s dream, the mother’s fond hope, the heart’s deep yearning, the mind’s flight towards the infinite, all become flat, meaningless, and unprofitable. Men are simply animals chained to this clod, too happy if the heaven-seeking eye permitted them to see it alone. Trouble, danger, and physical pain are the only evils, and virtue is the sharp-sighted prudence which enables us to avoid them. Self-denial is not only useless, it is irrational. Our appetites are good and ought to be indulged. Nothing, of its own nature, is sinful; excess alone is wrong; all indulgence, provided it hurt no one, is good—nay, it is necessary. Whoever denies any one of his appetites the food it craves cripples himself, is maimed and incomplete. “He may be a monk; he may be a saint; but a man he is not.”
When these views are transferred to questions of political economy and social organization, they lead to materialistic and utilitarian theories. Society must be organized on the basis of positivism; the problem of the future is how to give to the greatest number of individuals the best opportunities of indulgence, the greatest amount of comfort, with the least amount of pain. This is the greatest-happiness principle of Bentham and Mill. Culture, of course, intellectual and æsthetic, as affording the purest pleasure, must form a feature of this society; but its distinctive characteristic is wealth, which is both the means and the opportunity of indulgence.
“We constantly hear of the evils of wealth,” says Buckle, “and of the sinfulness of loving money; although it is certain that, after the love of knowledge, there is no one passion which has done so much good to mankind as the love of money.”
“If we open our eyes,” says Strauss,[229] “and are honest enough to avow what they show us, we must acknowledge that the entire activity and aspiration of the civilized nations of our time is based on views of life which run directly counter to those entertained by Christ. The ratio of value between the here and the hereafter is exactly reversed; and this is by no means the result of the merely luxurious and so-called materialistic tendencies of our age, nor even of its marvellous progress in technical and industrial improvements.… All that is best and happiest which has been achieved by us has been attainable only on the basis of a conception which regarded this present world as by no means despicable, but rather as man’s proper field of labor, as the sum total of the aims to which his efforts should be directed. If, from the force of habit, a certain proportion of workers in this field still carry the belief in an hereafter along with them, it is nevertheless a mere shadow, which attends their footsteps without exercising any determining influence on their actions.”
This is the cosmic religion, which is preached as “the new faith, the religion of the future.” This world is all in all—let us make the most of it; or, as the pagans of old put it: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”