The Map of Life / Conduct and Character

by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

CHAPTER XI

The necessities for moral compromise I have traced in the army, in the law, and in the fields of politics may be found in another form not less conspicuously in the Church. The members, and still more the ministers, of an ancient Church bound to formularies and creeds that were drawn up in long bygone centuries, are continually met by the difficulties of reconciling these forms with the changed conditions of human knowledge, and there are periods when the pressure of these difficulties is felt with more than common force. Such, for example, were the periods of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when changes in the intellectual condition of Europe produced a widespread conviction of the vast amount of imposture and delusion which had received the sanction of a Church that claimed to be infallible, the result being in some countries a silent evanescence of all religious belief among the educated class, even including a large number of the leaders of the Church, and in other countries a great outburst of religious zeal aiming at the restoration of Christianity to its primitive form and a repudiation of the accretions of superstition that had gathered around it. The Copernican theory proving that our world is not, as was long believed, the centre of the universe, but a single planet moving with many others around a central sun, and the discovery, by the instrumentality of the telescope, of the infinitesimally small place which our globe occupies in the universe, altered men's measure of probability and affected widely, though indirectly, their theological beliefs.

A similar change was gradually produced by the Newtonian discovery that the whole system of the universe was pervaded by one great law, and by the steady growth of scientific knowledge, proving that vast numbers of phenomena which were once attributed to isolated and capricious acts of spiritual intervention were regulated by invariable, inexorable, all-pervasive law. Many of the formularies by which we still express our religious beliefs date from periods when comets and eclipses were believed to have been sent to portend calamity; when every great meteorological change was attributed to some isolated spiritual agency; when witchcraft and diabolical possession, supernatural diseases, and supernatural cures were deemed indubitable facts: and when accounts of contemporary miracles, Divine or Satanic, carried with them no sense of strangeness or improbability. It is scarcely surprising that these formularies sometimes seem incongruous with an age when the scientific spirit has introduced very different conceptions of the government of the universe, and when the miraculous, if it is not absolutely discredited, is, at least in the eyes of most educated men, relegated to a distant past.

The present century has seen some powerful reactions towards older religious beliefs, but it has also been to an unusual extent fertile in the kind of changes that most deeply affect them. Not many years have passed since the whole drama of the world's history was believed to have been comprised in the framework of 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained.' Man appeared in the universe a faultless being in a faultless world, but he soon fell from his first estate, and his fall entailed world-wide consequences. It introduced into our globe sin, death, suffering, disease, imperfection and decay; all the mischievous and ferocious instincts and tendencies of man and beast; all the multitudinous forms of struggle, terror, anxiety and grief; all that makes life bitter to any living being, and, even as the Fathers were accustomed to say, the briars and weeds and sterility of the earth. Paradise Regained was believed to be indissolubly connected with Paradise Lost. The one was the explanation of the other. The one introduced the disease, the other provided the remedy.

It is idle to deny that the main outlines of this picture have been wholly changed. First came the discovery that the existence of our globe stretches far beyond the period once assigned to the Creation, and that for countless ages before the time when Adam was believed to have lost Paradise, death had been its most familiar fact and its inexorable law; that the animals who inhabited it preyed upon and devoured each other as at present, their claws and teeth being specially adapted for that purpose. Even their half-digested remains have been preserved in fossil.

'Death,' wrote a Pagan philosopher, in sharp contrast to the teaching of the Church, 'is a law and not a punishment,' and geology has fully justified his assertion.

Then came decisive evidence showing that for many thousands of years before his supposed origin man had lived and died upon our globe—a being, as far as can be judged from the remains that have been preserved, not superior but greatly inferior to ourselves, whose almost only art was the manufacture of rude instruments for killing, who appears in structure and in life to have approximated closely to the lowest existing forms of savage life.

Then came the Darwinian theory maintaining that the whole history of the living world is a history of slow and continuous evolution, chiefly by means of incessant strife, from lower to higher forms; that man himself had in this way gradually emerged from the humblest forms of the animal world; that most of the moral deflections which were attributed to the apple in Eden are the remains and traditions of the earlier and lower stages of his existence. The theory of continuous ascent from a lower to a higher stage took the place of the theory of the Fall as the explanation of human history. It is a doctrine which is certainly not without hope for the human race. It gives no explanation of the ultimate origin of things, and it is in no degree inconsistent with the belief either in a Divine and Creative origin or in a settled and Providential plan. But it is as far as possible removed from the conception of human history and human nature which Christendom during eighteen centuries accepted as fundamental truth.

With these things have come influences of another kind. Comparative Mythology has accumulated a vast amount of evidence, showing how myths and miracles are the natural product of certain stages of human history, of certain primitive misconceptions of the course of nature; how legends essentially of the same kind, though with some varieties of detail, have sprung up in many different quarters, and how they have migrated and interacted on each other. Biblical criticism has at the same time decomposed and analysed the Jewish writings, assigning to them dates and degrees of authority very different from those recognised by the Church. It has certainly not impaired their significance as records of successive developments of religious and moral progress, nor has it diminished their value as expressions of the loftiest and most enduring religious sentiments of mankind; but in the eyes of a great section of the educated world it has deprived them of the authoritative and infallible character that was once attributed to them. At the same time historical criticism has brought with it severer standards of proof, more efficient means of distinguishing the historical from the fabulous. It has traced the phases and variations of religions, and the influences that governed them, with a fulness of knowledge and an independence of judgment unknown in the past, and it has led its votaries to regard in these matters a sceptical and hesitating spirit as a virtue, and credulity and easiness of belief as a vice.

This is not a book of theology, and I have no intention of dilating on these things. It must, however, be manifest to all who are acquainted with contemporary thought how largely these influences have displaced theological beliefs among great numbers of educated men; how many things that were once widely believed have become absolutely incredible; how many that were once supposed to rest on the plane of certainty have now sunk to the lower plane of mere probability or perhaps possibility. From the time of Galileo downwards, these changes have been denounced as incompatible with the whole structure of Christian belief. No less an apologist than Bishop Berkeley declared that the belief that the date of the existence of the world was approximately that which could be deduced from the book of Genesis was one of the fundamental beliefs which could not be given up.[58] When the traveller Brydone published his travels in Sicily in 1773, conjecturing, from the deposits of lava, that the world must be much older than the Mosaic cosmogony admitted, his work was denounced as subverting the foundations of the Christian faith. The same charges were brought against the earlier geologists, and in our own day against the early supporters of the Darwinian theory; and many now living can remember the outbursts of indignation against those who first introduced the principles of German criticism into English thought, and who impugned the historical character and the assumed authorship of the Pentateuch.