NATUKAL KELIGION 
 
NATURAL RELIGION 
 
 BY THE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ECCE HOMO 
 
 . 
 
 "We live by admiration." 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Honlron : 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1882 
 
 The Right of Translation and Reproduction Is reserved. 
 
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. & BON 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PKESS. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 A number of papers bearing the title Natural 
 Religion were contributed by the present writer to 
 Macmillan's Magazine at irregular intervals from 1875 
 to 1878. Upon those papers this work is founded, but 
 it is by no means a reprint of them. About two thirds 
 of it may be said to be a reprint in respect of substance, 
 though even here correction has been applied through- 
 out, large additions and omissions made, and in some 
 parts the original matter completely recast. The re- 
 maining third part is wholly new in substance as well 
 as in style. 
 
 The reader must be cautioned not to enter upon 
 this book with the expectation of finding in it anything 
 calculated to promote either orthodoxy or heterodoxy. 
 The author is one of those simpletons who believe that, 
 alike in politics and religion, there are truths outside 
 the region of party debate, and that these truths are 
 more important than the contending parties will easily 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 be induced to believe. In both departments the reader 
 will discover that to this author they are scarcely two 
 departments, but almost one and the same he watches 
 with a kind of despair the infatuation of party-spirit 
 gradually surrendering the whole area to dispute and 
 denial and despising as insipid whatever is not contro- 
 vertible, until perhaps at last, when the brawl subsides 
 from mere exhaustion, a third party is heard proclaim- 
 ing that when eleven men differ so much and so long, 
 it is evident that nothing can be known, and possible 
 even that there is nothing to know. In religion the 
 evil is far more inveterate than in politics and all the 
 greater is the difficulty of the present attempt ; indeed 
 we see religion suffering veritably the catastrophe of 
 Poland, which found such a fatal enjoyment in quarrel- 
 ling and quarrelled so long, that a day came at last 
 when there was no Poland any more, and then the 
 quarrelling ceased. 
 
 May, 1882. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 GOD IN NATURE 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM' 25 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE WORDS 'THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION' .... 45 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THREE KINDS OF RELIGION ... 72 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE . on 
 
 7V 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 RELIGION AND THE WORLD 117 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 RELIGION AND CULTURE . . . . . . * . 138 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 NATURAL CHRISTIANITY 157 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 NATURAL RELIGION AND THE STATE 180 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 NATURAL RELIGION AND THE CHURCH 212 
 
 RECAPITULATION ..... 235 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 GOD IN NATURE. 
 
 WHEN we listen to the newest school of the ex- 
 pounders of science we sometimes hear with surprise 
 phrases which remind us of the peculiar dialect of 
 Christianity. This happens when the subject is learn- 
 ing and learned men. Who does not remember St 
 Paul's contempt for "the wisdom of the world," for 
 the Greeks to whom the Gospel was foolishness, and 
 how the Apostle's contempt for learning has been 
 echoed wherever Christian feeling has been vigorous, 
 so that even learned Christians have despised their 
 own learning and have taken a pleasure in placing 
 themselves on a level with the ignorant ? Who does 
 not know how at the same time Christianity has 
 contrasted the learning which it contemns with another 
 kind of knowledge which it prizes infinitely ? Wealth, 
 power, everything that is counted desirable, Christians 
 despise in comparison with a certain kind of know- 
 ledge. It is among these things comparatively despic- 
 able that they class what is commonly called learning. 
 They despise it not as learning, but as learning com- 
 paratively worthless in quality, a counterfeit of the 
 
 i 
 
2 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 true learning which it is happiness and salvation to 
 possess. 
 
 Now in this respect scientific men now hold the 
 very same language. They resemble Christians in treat- 
 ing with great contempt what goes by the name of 
 learning and philosophy, in comparison with another 
 sort of wisdom which they believe themselves to pos- 
 sess. In praise of knowledge they grow eloquent, and 
 use language of scriptural elevation. It is their un- 
 ceasing cry that all good is to be expected from the 
 increase of true knowledge ; that the happiness both of 
 the race and individuals depends upon the advance 
 of real science, and the application of it to human 
 life. Yet they have a contempt for learning, which is 
 just as Christian in its tone as their love for know- 
 ledge. " Erudition" and "philosophy" are terms of con- 
 tempt in their mouths. They denounce the former as 
 a busy idleness, and the latter as a sham wisdom, con- 
 sisting mainly of empty words, and offering solutions 
 either imaginary or unintelligible of problems which are 
 either imaginary or unintelligible themselves. All mem- 
 bers of the modern school are, it is true, not equally 
 plain-spoken; some will profess to admire scholarship 
 and erudition, speaking of it as a graceful accomplish- 
 ment; and it is only in unguarded moments that they 
 betray their conviction that it is nothing more; but 
 others proclaim it loudly, and a few even wish to bring 
 public opinion to bear upon the matter, so as to sup- 
 press as an immorality the acquiring of useless know- 
 ledge. 
 
 Thus the old religious school, and that new school 
 whose convictions we see now gradually acquiring the 
 
 
character 
 
 GOD IN NATURE. 
 
 haracter of a religion, agree in combining a passionate 
 love for what they believe true knowledge with a 
 contempt for so-called learning and philosophy. The 
 common enemy of both is what the one school calls, and 
 the other might well call, "the wisdom of the world." 
 But though agreeing so far, these two schools hate 
 their common enemy much less than they hate each 
 other. For each regards the "true wisdom" of the 
 other as worse and more mischievous than the wisdom 
 of the world which each rejects. To the scientific school 
 the Christian " hidden wisdom " is a mystical super- 
 stition, compared with which "learning and philosophy" 
 are science itself. To the Christian, modern science is 
 a darkness compared with which the science that St 
 Paul rejected might almost be called Christianity. 
 
 Nothing is so terrible as this clashing of opposite 
 religions. Differences on subjects of the first im- 
 portance are always painful, but the direct shock of 
 contrary enthusiasms has something appalling about it. 
 That one man's highest truth should be another man's 
 deadliest falsehood ; that one man should be ready to 
 die in disinterested self-devotion for a cause which 
 another man is equally ready to oppose at the sacrifice 
 of his life ; this is a horror which is none the less hor- 
 rible because it has often been witnessed on our per- 
 plexed planet. But often it has been perceived, long 
 after the conflict was over, that there had been misap- 
 prehension, that the difference of opinion was not 
 really anything like so complete as it seemed. Nay, 
 it has often happened that a later generation has seen 
 the difference to be very small indeed, and has wonder- 
 ed that so much could have been made of it. In such 
 
4 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 cases the mind is relieved of that fancy of a radical dis- 
 cord in human nature. We see that self-devotions 
 have not really clashed in such fell antagonism. We 
 recognise that self-devotion may be alloyed with less 
 noble feelings, with some that are blamable and some 
 that are even ludicrous, with mere pugnacity, with 
 the passion of gratifying self-importance, with the half 
 noble pleasure that there is in fighting, and the ignoble 
 pleasure that there is in giving pain. 
 
 It would certainly be hard enough to shew that the 
 present strife between Christianity and Science is one 
 in which insignificant differences are magnified by the 
 imagination of the combatants. The question is no- 
 thing less than this, whether we are to regard the 
 grave with assured hope, and the ties between human 
 beings as indissoluble by death; or, on the other hand, 
 to dismiss the hope of a future life as too doubtful 
 to be worth considering, even if not absolutely chimeri- 
 cal. No reasoning can make such a difference into a 
 small one. But even where the differences are so 
 great, it may still be worth while to call attention to 
 the points of agreement. If there is some truth, how- 
 ever small, upon which all can agree, then there is 
 some action upon which all can unite ; and who can 
 tell how much may be done by anything so rare as 
 absolute unanimity ? Moreover, if we look below the 
 surface of controversy, we shall commonly find more 
 agreement and less disagreement than we had expected. 
 Agreement is slow of speech and attracts little notice, 
 disagreement has always plenty to say for itself. 
 Agreement utters chiefly platitudes and truisms. And 
 yet, though platitudes and truisms do not work up 
 
 
GOD IN NATURE. 5 
 
 into interesting books, if our object is to accomplish 
 something for human life, we shall scarcely find any 
 truth serviceable that has not been rubbed into a truism, 
 and scarcely any maxim that has not been worn into a 
 platitude. Let the attempt then be made for once to 
 apply this principle in the greatest and most radical of 
 all controversies. Let us put religion by the side of 
 science in its latest most aggressive form, with the 
 view not of trying the question between them, but 
 simply of measuring how much ground is common 
 to both. In their tone, in their attitude towards 
 philosophy and learning there seems some resemblance. 
 Let us examine this resemblance more closely. 
 
 We are all familiar with the language used by 
 Christians in disparagement of learning. God, they 
 say, has revealed to men all that is essential for them 
 to know. By the side of revealed knowledge what 
 the human intellect can discover for itself is of little 
 importance. If it seem to clash with revelation it is 
 mischievous ; if not, it may be useful in a subordinate 
 degree. But at the best it is contemptible by the side 
 of the " one tiling needful ; " and the greatest dis- 
 coverer that ever lived is a trifler compared with the 
 most simple-minded Christian who has studied to 
 fulfil the requirements of the Gospel. 
 
 There is indeed a true erudition and a true 
 philosophy, the subject of which is God's revelation 
 itself. Scholars, profoundly read in the sources of 
 theology, whether they be supposed to be the Bible or 
 Christian Antiquity, philosophers who have made the 
 Christian revelation their basis, or have collected and 
 elucidated the evidences of it these are truly wise, 
 
<> NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 and escape the censure of frivolity under which 
 secular learning lies ; but even these, illustrious and 
 venerable as they may be, will acknowledge that 
 there is a wisdom beyond their own, which the 
 humblest Christian may possess, the wisdom of simple 
 belief and love. 
 
 We are less familiar as yet with the invectives of 
 scientific men against what has long passed for learn- 
 ing and philosophy in the world. Different sections of 
 the scientific school bring the accusation in different 
 language. Yet the same feeling, the same strong and 
 contemptuous conviction, pervades the whole school. 
 What they assail seems to be, in two words, know- 
 ledge based on authority, and knowledge wanting an 
 inductive basis. 
 
 That the utterances *of great and famous philoso- 
 phers are to be taken as truth, that in philosophy as in 
 the civil law, the responsa prudentum have a binding 
 force, has been accepted in some departments of 
 knowledge up to the present day. Long after the 
 authority of Aristotle had been shaken new thinkers 
 were allowed to occupy a similar place in some branches, 
 and from Descartes to Hegel a sort of monarchical rule 
 has prevailed in metaphysics. Science as distinguished 
 from philosophy has always been more republican. Not 
 that it refuses to reverence superior minds, not per- 
 haps that it is altogether incapable of yielding to the 
 temptation of trusting a particular authority for a while 
 too much, or following a temporary fashion. But as a 
 general rule it rejects as a superstition the notion that 
 the most superior mind is at all infallible ; it dissents 
 without scruple from those whom it reverences most ; 
 
GOD IN NATURE. 7 
 
 and on the other hand the most eminent members of it 
 encourage this freedom, are well pleased to be con- 
 tradicted, and avoid assuming an oracular style as a 
 mark of charlatanry. We see now the regime of science 
 established in philosophy also ; the autocracy of Hegel 
 comes to an end, not by the accession of a new monarch, 
 but rather by the proclamation of a republic in German 
 philosophy. 
 
 It is a change of system in the intellectual world, 
 by which much established doctrine is branded with 
 the mark of spuriousness. In theology, metaphysics, 
 moral and political philosophy, history, the principle of 
 authority has reigned hitherto with more or less ex- 
 clusiveness, and the repudiation of it makes a revolution 
 in those departments of knowledge. Authoritative 
 treatises are consigned to oblivion, ancient controversies 
 cease, the whole store of learning hived up in many 
 capacious memories becomes worthless. The change 
 throws discredit at the same time upon the very name 
 of erudition ; not as such, for there is a kind of eru- 
 dition much appreciated by the scientific school ; but 
 because erudition, as hitherto understood, has com- 
 monly gone along with, has in a great degree grown 
 out of, an excessive reverence for the opinions of famous 
 men. All that part of erudition, in particular, which 
 may be called in a word "commentatorship," begins to 
 seem superstitious and childish, when the general esti- 
 mate of human wisdom so decidedly sinks. 
 
 But the more important change is in the extension 
 of the methods of physical science to the whole domain 
 of knowledge. While one part of the "wisdom of the 
 world" has been discredited as resting solely on 
 
8 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 authority, another large division of it is now rejected 
 as resting on insufficient induction, and another as 
 resting on groundless assumptions, disguised under the 
 name of necessary truths, truths of the reason, truths 
 given in consciousness, &c. No one needs to be told 
 what havoc this physical method is making with re- 
 ceived systems, and it produces a sceptical disposition 
 of mind towards primary principles which have been 
 thought to lie deeper than all systems. Those current 
 abstractions, which make up all the morality and all the 
 philosophy of most people, have been brought under sus- 
 picion. Mind and matter, duties and rights, morality 
 and expediency, honour and interest, virtue and vice, 
 all these words, which seemed once to express elemen- 
 tary and certain realities, now strike us as just the 
 words which, thrown into the scientific crucible, might 
 dissolve at once. It is thus not merely philosophy 
 which is discredited, but just that homely and popular 
 wisdom by which common life is guided. This too, it 
 appears, instead of being the sterling product of 
 plain experience, is the overflow of an immature phi- 
 losophy, the redundance of the uncontrolled specula- 
 tions of thinkers who were unacquainted with scientific 
 method. 
 
 This second change leads to self-distrust, as the 
 first led to distrust of other men. As we learn not to 
 take our truth at second-hand from other thinkers, so 
 we learn that we must not take it, if the expression 
 may be used, from ourselves. Truth is not what we 
 think, any more than it is what famous men have 
 thought. That which irresistibly strikes us as true, 
 that which seems self-evident, that which commends 
 
un 
 
 
 
 ifi 
 
 GOD IN NATURE. 9 
 
 itself to us, may nevertheless, we learn, not be true at 
 all. It is not enough to judge for ourselves, to 
 examine the facts independently. We must examine 
 the facts according to a rigorous method, which has 
 been elaborated by a long series of investigators, and 
 without which neither candour nor impartiality would 
 save us either from seeing wrong, or from receiving 
 unsound evidence, or from generalising too fast, or from 
 owing some delusive name to come between us and 
 he reality. Distrust of others, distrust of ourselves 
 if the first of these two factors of the scientific spirit 
 were separated from the second, the result would be 
 mere self-conceit, mere irreverence. As it is, the 
 scientific spirit is simply a jealous watchfulness against 
 that tendency of human nature to read itself into the 
 Universe, which is both natural to each individual and 
 may mislead the very greatest investigators, and which 
 can only be controlled by rigorously adhering to a fixed 
 process, and rigidly verifying the work of others by the 
 same. 
 
 Such untested knowledge might very fitly be 
 called by the name which Christianity uses. It might 
 be called "human knowledge/' or "the wisdom of the 
 world." For the difference between it and genuine 
 knowledge is just this, that it is adulterated by a 
 human element. It is not the result of a contact be- 
 tween the universe and the naked human intelligence. 
 The perceiving mind has mixed itself up with the 
 thing perceived, and not merely in the way in which 
 it always must, in the way which constitutes cog- 
 nition, but in quite other and arbitrary ways, by 
 wishes, by prejudices, by crotchets, by dreams. Such 
 
 , UNIVERSITY , 
 
 v J 
 
10 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 humanised views of the Universe have a peculiar 
 though cheap attractiveness. They naturally please 
 the human mind, because, in fact, they were expressly 
 contrived to do so. They adapt themselves readily to 
 rhetoric and poetry, because, in fact, they are rhetoric 
 and poetry in disguise. To reject them is to mortify 
 human nature ; it is an act of vigorous asceticism. It 
 is to renounce the world as truly as the Christian does 
 when he protests against fashionable vices. It is to 
 reject a pleasant thing on the ground that it is in- 
 sincere; that it is not in fact what it professes to be. 
 The moral attitude of the man who does it is just such 
 as Hebrew prophets assumed towards the flattering 
 and lying court-prophets of their day; just such as 
 the earliest Christianity assumed towards Pharisaism ; 
 just such as Luther and Knox assumed towards the 
 secularised Church of the later Middle Age. It is an 
 attitude of indignant sincerity, an attitude marking an 
 inward determination to accept the truth of the Uni- 
 verse, however disagreeable, and not to allow it to be 
 adulterated and drugged, so as to suit our human 
 feebleness. If we cannot produce from the Scriptures of 
 our religion texts directly sanctioning it, this is because 
 the particular problem was not presented in ancient 
 times to the Jewish nation. Those Scriptures are full 
 of passages expressing in poetic forms and in language 
 suited to another age the spirit of modern science. 
 Notably, the book of Job, not in occasional passages 
 only, but as its main object and drift, contrasts the 
 conventional, and, as it were, orthodox view of the 
 Universe, with the view which those obtain who are 
 prepared to face its awfulness directly. 
 
GOD IN NATUHE. 11 
 
 Thus the religious view and the scientific view of 
 the Universe, which are thought to be so opposite, 
 agree in this important point. Both protest earnestly 
 against human wisdom. Both wait for a message 
 which is' to come to them from without. Religion says, 
 "Let man be silent, and listen when God speaks." 
 Science says, "Let us interrogate Nature, and let us be 
 sure that the answer we get is really Nature's, and not 
 a mere echo of our own voice. " Now whether or not 
 religion and science agree in what they recommend, 
 it is evident that they agree in what they denounce. 
 They agree in denouncing that pride of the human 
 intellect which supposes it knows everything, which is 
 not passive enough in the presence of reality, but 
 deceives itself with pompous words instead of things, 
 and with flattering eloquence instead of sober truth. 
 
 Here, however, it will be said, the agreement 
 between religion and science ends, and even this 
 agreement is only apparent. Science protests against 
 the idols or delusions of the human intellect, in order 
 that it may substitute for them the reality of Nature ; 
 religion sacrifices all those idols to the greatest of them 
 all, which is God. For what is God so the argument 
 runs but a hypothesis, which religious men have 
 mistaken for a demonstrated reality? And is it not 
 precisely against such premature hypotheses that 
 science most strenuously protests? That a Personal 
 Will is the cause of the Universe this might stand 
 very well as a hypothesis to work with, until facts 
 should either confirm it, or force it to give way to 
 another either different or at least modified. That this 
 Personal Will is benevolent, and is shown to be so by 
 
12 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 the facts of the Universe, which evince a providential 
 care for man and other animals this is just one of 
 those plausibilities, which passed muster before scien- 
 tific method was understood but modern science 
 rejects it as unproved. Modern science holds that 
 there may be design in the Universe, but that to 
 penetrate the design is, and probably always will be, 
 beyond the power of the human understanding. That 
 this Personal Will has on particular occasions revealed 
 itself by breaking through the customary order of the 
 Universe, and performing what are called miracles 
 this it is said is one of those legends of which 
 histories were full, until a stricter view of evidence was 
 introduced, and the modern critical spirit sifted tho- 
 roughly the annals of the world. But if modern science 
 be right in these opinions, the very notion of God seems 
 to be removed altogether from the domain of practical 
 life. So long as God appeared certainly to exist, He 
 necessarily eclipsed and reduced to insignificance all 
 other existences. So long as it w r as held possible to 
 discover His will and mind, all other inquiries might 
 reasonably be pronounced frivolous. But all is changed 
 as soon as we begin to regard His existence as a mere 
 hypothesis, and His will as inscrutable and beyond the 
 reach of the human understanding. Not only is all 
 changed, but all is reversed. Instead of being the one 
 important question, God's will now becomes the one 
 ^important question because the one question which 
 it is essentially impossible to answer. Whereas before 
 we might charge men with frivolity who neglected this 
 inquiry for inquiries the most important in themselves, 
 now we may pronounce the shallowest dilettante, the 
 
GOD IN NATURE. 13 
 
 most laboriously idle antiquary, a solid and sensible man 
 compared to the theologian. They pursue, to be sure, 
 very minute objects, but they do or may attain them; 
 the theologian attempts an impossibility he is like the 
 child who tries to reach the beginning of the rainbow. 
 
 It would appear, then, that that which I have called 
 " human wisdom/' and which is the butt at the same 
 time of theology and science, is so because it is a kind 
 of middle party between two mortally hostile factions. 
 It is like the Girondins between the Royalists and the 
 Jacobins; both may oppose, and may even in a 
 particular case combine to oppose it, and yet they 
 may feel not the slightest sympathy with each other. 
 And the middle party once crushed, there will follow 
 no reconciliation, but a mortal contest between the ex- 
 tremes. 
 
 Is this so or is it otherwise ? The question is 
 whether the statement given above of .the theological 
 view of the Universe is exhaustive or not ? Is it all 
 summed up in the three propositions that a Personal 
 Will is the cause of the Universe, that that Will is 
 perfectly benevolent, that that Will has sometimes 
 interfered by miracles with the order of the Universe? 
 If these propositions exhaust it, and science throws 
 discredit upon all of them, evidently theology and 
 science are irreconcilable, and the contest between them 
 must end in the destruction of one or the other. 
 
 It may be remarked, in the first place, that these 
 propositions are not so much an abstract of theology 
 as of the particular theology now current. That God 
 is perfectly benevolent is a maxim of popular Christi- 
 anity, and it may be supported by Biblical texts. But 
 
U NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 it is not necessary to theology or religion as such. 
 Many nations have believed in gods of mixed or posi- 
 tively malignant character. Other nations have indeed 
 ascribed to their deities all the admirable qualities they 
 could conceive, but benevolence was not one of these. 
 They have believed in gods that were beautiful, power- 
 ful, immortal, happy, but not benevolent. It may even 
 be said that the Bible and Christianity itself have not 
 uniformly represented God as perfectly benevolent. 
 In the Old Testament He is described as just, but at 
 the same time terrible and pitiless against the wicked 
 and even the children of the wicked ; and at least one 
 form of modern Christianity, Calvinism, takes a view 
 of the divine character which it is impossible to recon- 
 cile with infinite benevolence. Moreover, if almost all 
 theologies have introduced what we should describe as 
 miracle, yet it would be very incorrect to class many 
 of them in this respect with that current view of 
 Christianity which represents God as demonstrating 
 His existence by occasional interruptions of the order, 
 otherwise invariable, of Nature. Probably, in the ma- 
 jority of theologies, no other law of nature, except the 
 will of God, is recognized; miracle when it is intro- 
 duced is not regarded as breaking through any order ; 
 the very notion implied in the word "supernatural" is 
 unacknowledged ; miraculous occurrences are not dis- 
 tinguished from ordinary ones, except as being rarer, 
 and are not distinguished from rare occurrences at all. 
 To an ancient Jew probably an earthquake and the 
 staying of the sun on Gibeon were occurrences of pre- 
 cisely the same character, and not distinguished as 
 they are in our minds, the one as rare but natural, the 
 
0, 
 
 : 
 
 GOD IN NATU21E. 15 
 
 oilier as supernatural and miraculous. All that was 
 miraculous might .have been removed from the creed 
 of an ancient Jew without shaking his theology. 
 
 Two out of the three propositions then are not ne- 
 ssary to the theological view of the Universe. But 
 surely the third is. Surely all theology implies that a 
 Personal Will is the cause of the Universe. Well, but 
 how? In the first place it is a very shallow view of 
 theologies which represents them as having in all cases 
 rung from speculation about causes. True that we can 
 race this speculation in our own religion. The pheno- 
 mena of the world are accounted for very manifestly in 
 the book of Genesis by the fiat of a Personal Will. But 
 this is not at all an invariable character of theology. 
 The Deity of a thing is often regarded in theologies not 
 at all as the cause of it, but in quite another way, 
 perhaps I might say as the unity of it. No one has 
 ever supposed that the Greeks regarded Poseidon 
 as the cause of the sea. Athena may have been 
 suggested to them by the sky, but she is not the cause 
 of the sky. And it would be easy to conceive a 
 theology whichllid not occupy itself at all with causes, 
 but which at the same time conceived the separate 
 phenomena of the Universe, or the Universe itself alto- 
 gether personally. 
 
 " Yes, personally ! Here then at any rate we have 
 the invariable characteristic of theology, namely, in the 
 use it makes of personality. Not necessarily as a 
 cause, but in some way as an explanation or at least as 
 a help to conception, theologies introduce personality 
 where science sees only impersonal force." Even this 
 statement is loose enough. Personality entire has 
 
16 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 never been attributed in any theology to deities. 
 Personality, as we know it, involves mortality. 
 Deities are usually supposed immortal. Personality 
 involves a body. The highest theologies have de- 
 clared God to be incorporeal. May we then fall back 
 npon the will and say, Theologies attribute to deities a 
 will like that of human beings ? But again the 
 highest theologies assert that the Divine Will is high 
 above the human; that there is "no searching" of it; 
 "that as the heaven is high above the earth, so are 
 His ways than our ways, and His thoughts than our 
 thoughts. " 
 
 If the possibility of miracles were entirely given up, 
 and the order of nature decided to be as invariable as 
 science inclines to consider it; if all the appearances of 
 benevolent design in the Universe were explained 
 away, it might be true that the belief in God would 
 cease to be consoling. Instead of being a spring of life 
 and activity, it might I am not now saying it would 
 become a depressing and overwhelming influence. 
 And this, no doubt, is what people mean when they 
 identify, as they commonly do, the belief in God with 
 belief in an overruling Benevolence and in the super- 
 natural. They mean to say, not exactly that the belief 
 in God is necessarily this, but that to be in any way 
 useful or beneficial it must necessarily be this. But 
 for my present purpose it is important to distinguish 
 between the God in whom ordinary people at the 
 present day believe and a God of another character in 
 whom they might conceivably believe. I desire to 
 insist upon the point that when science speaks of God 
 as a myth or a hypothesis, and declares the existence of 
 
GOD IN NATURE. 17 
 
 God to be doubtful and destined always to remain 
 doubtful, it is speaking of a particular conception of 
 God, of God conceived as benevolent, as outside of 
 nature, as personal, as the cause of phenomena. Do 
 these attributes of benevolence, personality, &c,, exhaust 
 the idea of God ? Are they not merely the most im- 
 portant, the most consoling of His attributes, but the 
 only ones ? By denying them do we cease not merely 
 to be orthodox Christians but to be theists ? 
 
 Science opposes to God Nature. When it denies 
 God it denies the existence of any power beyond or 
 superior to Nature ; and it may deny at the same time 
 anything like a cause of Nature. It believes in certain 
 laws of co- existence and sequence in phenomena, and in 
 denying God it means to deny that anything further 
 can be known. God and Nature then express notions 
 which are different in an important particular. But it 
 is evident enough that these notions are not the opposites 
 that controversy would represent them to be. On the 
 contrary, they coincide up to a certain point. Those 
 who believe in Nature may deny God, but those who 
 believe in God, believe, as a matter of course, in Nature 
 also, since God includes Nature, as the whole includes 
 the part. It is no doubt fashionable to represent the- 
 ology as disregarding Nature, as passing by the laws 
 which govern the Universe, and occupying itself solely 
 with occasional suspensions of them, or with ulterior, 
 inscrutable causes. But this conception of theology is 
 derived from a partial view of it. It answers well 
 enough to a modern phase into which theology has 
 passed since it was expelled from the domain of Nature 
 by the rival and victorious method of physical science. 
 s. 2 
 
18 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 To the older theologies it is wholly inapplicable. They 
 occupied themselves quite as much with laws as with 
 causes; so far from being opposed to science, they were 
 in fact themselves science in a rudimentary form ; so 
 far from neglecting the natural for the supernatural, 
 they scarcely recognized any distinction between them. 
 The true object of theology at the beginning was to 
 throw light upon natural laws; it used no doubt a crude 
 method, and in some cases it attempted problems 
 which modern science calls insoluble. Then, when a 
 new method was introduced, theology stuck obstinately 
 to its old one, and when the new method proved itself 
 successful, theology gradually withdrew into those 
 domains where as yet the old method was not threat- 
 ened, and might still reign without opposition. Thus it 
 began to be supposed that law appertained to science, 
 and suspension of law or miracle to theology; that 
 the one was concerned with Nature, and the other 
 with that which was above Nature. Gradually the 
 name of God began to be associated with the super- 
 natural, until scientific men began to say they had 
 nothing to do with God, and theologians to find some- 
 thing alien to them in the word Nature. 
 
 Yet theology can never go further than this in 
 repudiating Nature. It can never deny that Nature 
 is an ordinance of God; it can never question that 
 the laws of Nature are among the laws of God. It 
 may indeed treat them as His less important laws, or 
 as a revelation of Him which is not precisely the reve- 
 lation we want. But it cannot and does not deny that 
 Nature too is a revelation of God ; it ought not to 
 deny that there is a theology which may be called 
 
GOD IN NATURE. 19 
 
 natural, and which does not consist in a collection of 
 the evidences of benevolent design in the Universe, 
 but in a true deduction of the laws which govern 
 the Universe, whatever those laws may be, and what- 
 ever they may seem to indicate concerning the character 
 of God. 
 
 But if, on the one hand, the study of Nature be 
 one part of the study of God, is it not true, on the 
 other, that he who believes only in Nature is a theist, 
 and has a theology ? Men slide easily from the most 
 momentous controversies into the most contemptible 
 logomachies. If we will look at things, and not merely 
 at words, we shall soon see that the scientific man 
 has a theology and a God, a most impressive theology, 
 a most awful and glorious God. I say that man 
 believes in a God who feels himself in the presence 
 of a Power which is not himself and is immeasurably 
 above himself, a Power in the contemplation of which he 
 is absorbed, in the knowledge of which he finds safety 
 and happiness. And such now is Nature to the scien- 
 tific man. I do not now say that it is good or satis- 
 fying to worship such a God, but I say that no class 
 of men since the world began have ever more truly 
 believed in a God, or more ardently, or with more 
 conviction, worshipped Him. Comparing their religion 
 in its fresh youth to the present confused forms of 
 Christianity, I think a bystander would say that 
 though Christianity had in it something far higher and 
 deeper and more ennobling, yet the average scien- 
 tific man worships just at present a more awful, and, 
 as it were, a greater Deity than the average Christian. 
 In so many Christians the idea of God has been 
 
 22 
 
20 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 degraded by childish and little-minded teaching ; the 
 Eternal and the Infinite and the All-embracing has 
 been represented as the head of the clerical interest, 
 as a sort of clergyman, as a sort of schoolmaster, as a 
 sort of philanthropist. But the scientific man knows 
 Him to be eternal; in astronomy, in geology, he be- 
 comes familiar with the countless millenniums of His 
 lifetime. The scientific man strains his mind actually 
 to realize God's infinity. As far off as the fixed stars 
 he traces Him, "distance inexpressible by numbers 
 that have name." Meanwhile, to the theologian, 
 infinity and eternity are very much of empty words 
 when applied to the Object of his worship. He does 
 not realize them in actual facts and definite compu- 
 tations. 
 
 But it is not merely because he realizes a stupen- 
 dous Power that I call the scientific man a theist. A 
 true theist should recognize his Deity as giving him 
 the law to which his life ought to be conformed. Now 
 here it is that the resemblance of modern science to 
 theology comes out most manifestly. There is no 
 stronger conviction in this age than the conviction of 
 the scientific man, that all happiness depends upon the 
 knowledge of the laws of Nature, and the careful 
 adaptation of human life to them. Of this I have 
 spoken before. Luther and Calvin were not more 
 jealous of the Church tradition that had obscured 
 the true word of God in the Scriptures than the 
 modern man of science is of the metaphysics and con- 
 ventional philosophy that have beguiled men away 
 from Nature and her laws. They want to remodel 
 all education, all preaching, so that the laws of Nature 
 

 GOD IN NATURE. 21 
 
 may become known to every man, and that every one 
 may be in a condition to find his happiness in obeying 
 them. They chafe at the notion of men studying 
 anything else. They behave towards those who do not 
 know Nature with the same sort of impatient inso- 
 lence with which a Christian behaved towards the 
 worshippers of the Emperor or a Mohammedan towards 
 idolaters. As I sympathise very partially with the 
 Mohammedan, and not quite perfectly with the early 
 Christian, so I find the modern scientific zeal some- 
 times narrow and fanatical; but I recognize that it is 
 zeal of the same kind as theirs, that, like theirs, it 
 is theological. 
 
 An infinite Power will inspire awe and an anxious 
 desire to avoid a collision with it. But such awe and 
 fear, it may be said, do not constitute worship ; worship 
 implies admiration, and something which may be called 
 love. Now it is true that the scientific man cannot 
 feel for Nature such love as a pious mind may feel 
 for the God of Christians. The highest love is in- 
 spired by love, or by justice and goodness, and of these 
 qualities science as yet discerns little or nothing in 
 Nature. But a very genuine love, though of a lower 
 kind, is felt by the contemplator of Nature. Nature, 
 even if we hesitate to call it good, is infinitely inter- 
 esting, infinitely beautiful. He who studies it has 
 continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half 
 discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer 
 through an appearance of confusion ; analogies between 
 phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and 
 set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted 
 with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or 
 
22 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 nameable. There is food for contemplation which never 
 runs short ; you gaze at an object which is always 
 growing clearer, and yet always, in the very act of 
 growing clearer, presenting new mysteries. And this 
 arresting and absorbing spectacle, so fascinating by 
 its variety, is at the same time overwhelming by its 
 greatness ; so that those who have devoted their lives 
 to the contemplation scarcely ever fail to testify to the 
 endless delight it gives them, and also to the over- 
 powering awe with which from time to time it surprises 
 them. 
 
 There is one more feeling which a worshipper 
 should have for his Deity, a sense of personal con- 
 nexion, and, as it were, relationship. The last verse 
 of a hymn of praise is very appropriately this " for 
 this God is our God for ever and ever ; He will be 
 our guide even unto death." This feeling, too, the 
 worshipper of Nature has. He cannot separate himself 
 from that which he contemplates. Though he has 
 the power of gazing upon it as something outside 
 himself, yet he knows himself to be a part of it. The 
 same laws whose operations he w r atches in the Uni- 
 verse he may study in his own body. Heat and light 
 and gravitation govern himself as they govern plants 
 and heavenly bodies. " In Him," may the worshipper 
 of this Deity say with intimate conviction, " in Him 
 we live and move and have our being." When men 
 whose minds are possessed with a thought like this, 
 and whose lives are devoted to such a contemplation, 
 say, " As for God, we know nothing of Him ; science 
 knows nothing of Him ; it is a name belonging to 
 an extinct system of philosophy;" I think they are 
 

 GOD IN NATURE. 23 
 
 
 playing with words. By what name they call the 
 object of their contemplation is in itself a matter of 
 little importance. Whether they say God, or prefer 
 to say Nature, the important thing is that their minds 
 are filled with the sense of a Power to all appearance 
 infinite and eternal, a Power to which their own being 
 is inseparably connected, in the knowledge of whose 
 ways alone is safety and well-being, in the contempla- 
 tion of which they find a beatific vision. 
 
 Well ! this God is also the God of Christians, 
 at the God of Christians is something more does 
 not affect this fact. Nature, according to all systems 
 of Christian theology, is God's ordinance. Whether with 
 science you stop short at Nature, or with Christianity 
 believe in a God who is the author of Nature, in either 
 case Nature is divine, for it is either God or the 
 work of God. This whole domain is common to science 
 and theology. When theology says, Let us give up 
 the wisdom of men and listen to the voice of God, 
 and when science says, Let us give up human authori- 
 ty and hollow a priori knowledge and let us listen to 
 Nature, they aye agreed to the whole extent of the 
 narrower proposition, i.e., theology ought to admit al] 
 that science says, though science admits only a part of 
 what theology says. Theology cannot say the laws of 
 Nature are not divine; all it can say is, they are not 
 the most important of the divine laws. Perhaps not, 
 but they gain an importance from the fact that they 
 are laws upon which all can agree. Making the 
 largest allowance for discoveries about which science 
 may be too confident, there remains a vast mass of 
 natural knowledge which no one questions. This to 
 
24 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 the Christian is so much knowledge about God, and 
 he ought to exult quite as much as the man of 
 science in the rigorous method by which it has been 
 separated from the human prejudice and hasty inge- 
 nuity and delusive rhetoric or poetry, which might 
 have adulterated it. By this means we have been 
 enabled to hear a voice which is unmistakably God's. 
 And if it seems to be God speaking about matters 
 not the most important, still perhaps it may be as 
 well to listen. So much, at least, reverence would 
 dictate; and if it did not, the urgent necessity for 
 more agreement on fundamental questions would 
 dictate it imperiously. 
 
CHAPTEE II. 
 
 THE ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM.' 
 
 I HAVE suggested the thought of a God revealed in 
 Nature, not by any means because such a view of God 
 seems to me satisfactory, or worthy to replace the 
 Christian view, or even as a commencement from which 
 we must rise by logical necessity to the Christian view. 
 I have suggested it because this is the God Whom the 
 present age actually does, and, in spite of all opposition, 
 certainly will worship, also because this aspect of God 
 is common to all theologies, however much in some it 
 may be slighted or depreciated, and lastly, because I 
 do not believe that any theology can be real or satisfy- 
 ing that does not make it prominent as well as admit 
 it. I can conceive no religion as satisfactory that falls 
 short of Christianity, but, on the other hand, I cannot 
 believe any religion to be healthy that does not start 
 from Nature-worship. It is in the free and instinctive 
 admiration of human beings for the glory of heaven, 
 earth and sea, that religion so far as religion is the 
 name of a good and healthy thing begins, and I 
 cannot imagine but as morbid a religion which has 
 ceased to admire them. 
 
 But many religious men will probably think that 
 riot much is to be hoped from dwelling on this subject. 
 
26 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 " We know very well that the Universe is glorious, 
 but when you have said that, there is an end of the 
 matter. We want to make atheists believe in God, 
 and you do it not by changing their minds, but by 
 changing the meaning of the word God. It is not a 
 verbal controversy that rages between atheists and 
 Christians ; it is the great controversy of the age. 
 Two opposite theories of the Universe are in conflict. 
 On the one side is the greatest of all affirmations, on 
 the other the most fatal of all negations. There never 
 yet was a controversy which was not trivial in com- 
 parison with this. It is cruel trifling to speak of com- 
 promise, it is waste of time to draw verbal distinctions. 
 Let atheism be atheism, and ' darkness keep her raven 
 gloss'! Away with the plausible definitions which 
 would make it impossible for any rational being ever to 
 be an atheist ! " 
 
 Now why should we be so wilful as to forget that 
 the error of monstrously over-estimating doctrinal dif- 
 ferences has been all along the plague of theology ? 
 There can be no greater mistake than to measure the 
 real importance of a dispute by the excitement of the 
 disputants. It has often been remarked of theological 
 controversies, that they are never conducted more 
 bitterly than when the difference between the rival 
 doctrines is very small. This is nearly correct, but 
 not quite. If you want to see the true white heat 
 of controversial passion, if you want to see men fling 
 away the very thought of reconciliation, and close in 
 internecine conflict, you should look at controversialists 
 who do not differ at all, but who have adopted different 
 words to express the same opinion. 
 
Tn fk 
 
 ABUSE OF THE WORD l ATHEISM: 27 
 
 In the controversy which now fills the world and 
 seems not unlikely to give a lurid tinge to the setting 
 of the nineteenth century, there is surely a fair propor- 
 tion of the old misconception and bewilderment. The 
 real issue is no doubt a great one, but it is not so great 
 as the issue between theism and atheism. That a 
 party calls itself atheistic matters little ; when did any 
 party name itself accurately ? These so-called atheists 
 do not always appear to be divided from plain people 
 by the whole diameter. Some of them are so, but 
 others are not so. This must be because they have 
 been misnamed. 
 
 An atheist in the proper sense of the word is not a 
 man who disbelieves in the goodness of God, or in His 
 distinctness from Nature, or in His personality. These 
 disbeliefs may be as serious in their way as atheism, 
 but they are different. Atheism is a disbelief in the 
 existence of God that is, a disbelief in any regularity 
 in the Universe to which a man must conform himself 
 under penalties. Such a disbelief is speculatively 
 monstrous ; it is a kind of mental deficiency or perver- 
 sion, but so commonly are the false views which lead 
 to immoral action. 
 
 There is an atheism which is a mere speculative 
 crotchet, and there is an atheism which is a great moral 
 disease. Let me illustrate the latter, which is the real 
 atheism, by some specimens. 
 
 The purest form of such real atheism might be called 
 by the general name of wilfulness. All human activity 
 is a transaction with Nature. It is the arrangement of 
 a compromise between what we want on the one hand, 
 and what Nature has decreed on the other. Something 
 
28 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 of our own wishes we have almost always to give up ; 
 but by carefully considering the power outside our- 
 selves, the necessity that conditions all our actions, we 
 may make better terms than we could otherwise, and 
 reduce to a minimum what we are obliged to renounce. 
 Now we may either underrate or overrate the force of 
 our own wills. The first is the extravagance of theism ; 
 it is that fatalism which steals so naturally upon those 
 who have dwelt much upon the thought of God, which 
 is said to paralyze, for example, the whole soul of the 
 Mussulman. But the opposite mistake is a deficiency 
 of theism ; a touch of it often marks the hero, but the 
 fulness of it is that kind of blind infatuation which 
 poets have represented under the image of the giants 
 who tried to storm heaven. Not to recognize any- 
 thing but your own will, to fancy anything within your 
 reach if you only will strongly enough, to acknowledge 
 no superior Power outside yourself which must be 
 considered and in some way propitiated if you would 
 succeed in any undertaking ; this is complete wil- 
 fulness, or, in other words, pure atheism. It may 
 also be called childishness, for the child naturally dis- 
 covers the force within it sooner than the resisting 
 necessity outside. Not without a few falls in the 
 wrestle with Nature do we learn the limits of our own 
 power and the pitiless immensity of the power that is 
 not ours. But there are many who cannot learn this 
 lesson even from experience, who forget every defeat 
 they suffer, and always refuse to see any power in the 
 Universe but their own wills. Sometimes, indeed, they 
 discover their mistake too late. Many barbarous races 
 are in this condition. In their childishness they have 
 
ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM: 29 
 
 engaged themselves in a direct conflict with Nature. 
 Instead of negotiating with her, they have declared a 
 blind war. They have adopted habits which they 
 gradually discover to be leading them to destruction ; 
 but they discover it too late and when they are too 
 deeply compromised. Then we see the despair of the 
 atheistic nation, and its wild struggles as it feels itself 
 caught in the whirlpool ; then, a little later, we find 
 that no such nation exists, and on the map its seat 
 begins to be covered with names belonging to another 
 language. Less extreme and unredeemed, the same 
 Titanism may sometimes be remarked in races called 
 civilized. Races might be named that are undergoing 
 punishments little less severe for this insensate atheism. 
 "Sedet seternumque sedebit," that unhappy Poland, 
 not indeed extinguished but partitioned, and every 
 thirty years decimated anew. She expiates the crime 
 of atheistic wilfulness, the fatal pleasure of unbounded 
 individual liberty, which rose up against the very 
 nature of things. And other nations we know that 
 expect all successes from the mere blind fury of willing, 
 that declare the word impossible unknown to their 
 language. They colour their infatuation sometimes 
 with the name of self-sacrifice, and fancy they can 
 change the divine laws by offering up themselves as 
 victims to their own vanity; they "fling themselves 
 against the bars of fate;" they die in theatrical atti- 
 tudes, and little know how "the abyss is wreathed in 
 scorn" of such cheap martyrdom. 
 
 A wrong belief about God, however fatal it may 
 be, is not atheism. Mr Buckle tried to shew that the 
 Spanish empire fell through a false conception of the 
 
30 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 order of the Universe ; and it seems clear that the rigid 
 Catholic view of the world is dangerous in this age to 
 every nation that adopts it. These are the effects of false 
 theology. But there is a state of mind which, though 
 very far removed from the wilfulness I have been 
 describing, and often accompanied with a strong and 
 anxious religiousness, may nevertheless be practically 
 regarded as a form of atheism. It is the state of 
 those minds which, fully believing in an order of the 
 Universe, yet have such a poor and paltry conception 
 of it that they might almost as well have none- 
 at all. 
 
 Men are sometimes led to this state by a very rea- 
 sonable and excusable process of thought. Naturally 
 modest and distrustful of their own powers, they 
 despair of understanding the order of the Universe ; 
 they do not presume to attempt to understand 
 it. Wisely distrustful of any knowledge that is not 
 precise, they avert their eyes instinctively from every- 
 thing which cannot be made the subject of such 
 knowledge. In all their transactions with Nature, 
 to use my former phrase, they make it a rule to be 
 unambitious. They aim at objects very definite and 
 very near. Whatever they gain they make it a rule 
 not to expose to any further risk. They avoid, as it 
 were, meeting the Universe in front, and endeavour 
 to overcome it in detail. For its immediate purpose 
 this plan is the best that can be pursued. If in all 
 our actions we allowed ourselves to remember the 
 greatness of the power with which we have to do, 
 we should accomplish nothing; if because Nature's 
 laws are large and comprehensive, we never acted 
 
ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM: 31 
 
 except on the largest principles, we should either fall 
 a prey to unsound generalisations, the more ruinous 
 because of their grandeur, or we should become para- 
 lyzed with a Turkish fatalism. Far better, no doubt, 
 to make the utmost use of what precise know- 
 ledge we have, however little may be the amount of 
 it, and not to suffer our minds to be bewildered by 
 coping too freely with an adversary whose play is 
 beyond us. It is these humble, cautiously inductive 
 people that prosper most in the world up to a certain 
 point. To them belong the large populations, the 
 thriving communities, the stable politics. They never 
 dream of defying Nature ; they win an endless series 
 of small victories over her. 
 
 There is no reason why this cautiousness should 
 necessarily degenerate into littlemindedness. It does 
 not take its beginning in any deficiency of the feeling 
 for what is great. On the contrary, it is the direct 
 result of an overwhelming sense of the greatness and, 
 so to speak, the dangerousness of Nature. Those who 
 proceed thus warily, probing Nature as they go, may 
 with most reason expect to penetrate far and to 
 elevate their minds gradually until they can venture 
 to cope with the grandeur of the world and become 
 familiar with great ideas. And when this is done they 
 will have escaped the danger of atheism. Their minds 
 will become the mirror of an Infinite Being, and 
 their whole natures will be conformed to His. But 
 in the earlier stages of such a process the temp- 
 tation to a kind of atheism is strong. From the 
 habit of leaving out of account all larger considera- 
 tions in every problem, on the ground that they are 
 
32 NATURAL RELIGION'. 
 
 vague and not precisely calculable, they are led easily 
 to forget the very existence of such considerations. 
 The habit of never suffering the mind to dwell on 
 anything great produces often an atheism of the 
 most pitiable and helpless kind. The soul of man 
 lives upon the contemplation of laws or principles; 
 it is made to be constantly assimilating such susten- 
 ance from the Universe ; this is its food ; not by bread 
 only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
 of God doth man live. What then must be the moral 
 starvation of the man who, from an excess of caution, 
 turns away from everything of the kind, until from, 
 want of habit he can no longer see such things ; and 
 forgets their very existence ; so that for him there is 
 no longer any glory in the universe ? For all beauty 
 or glory is but the presence of law ; and the universe 
 to him has ceased to be a scene of law and has become 
 an infinite litter of detail, a rubbish-heap of confused 
 particulars, a mere worry and weariness to the imagi- 
 nation. I have been describing the Philistine, the 
 abject slave of details, who worships a humiliated, 
 dissected and abject deity, a mere Dagon, "fallen flat 
 upon the grundsel-edge, and shaming his worship- 
 pers." 
 
 There is a particular extreme form of conventional- 
 ism which all men who observe it instinctively call by 
 the name of atheism. Who has not said to himself, in 
 reading the history of the French Revolution, that 
 possibly the most genuine atheist where so many 
 professed atheism may have been among the orthodox 
 defenders of the old regime ? Of the Revolutionists 
 we are disposed to say that surely they must have had 
 

 AKUSE OF THE WORD * ATHEISM: 33 
 
 some kind of belief, else whence came their energy ? 
 but among the crowd of Voltairian Abbe's we can 
 fancy some in whom the conflict between inherited and 
 imbibed ways of thinking may have destroyed belief 
 and energy alike. Those who live in the decay of 
 Churches and systems of life are exposed to such a 
 paralysis. They have been made all that they are by 
 the system ; their mode of thought and feeling, their 
 very morality has grown out of it. But at a given 
 moment the system is struck with decay. It falls out 
 of the current of life and thought. Then the faith 
 which had long been genuine, even if mistaken, which 
 had actually inspired vigorous action and eloquent 
 speech, begins to ebb. The vigour begins to be spas- 
 modic, the eloquence to ring hollow, the loyalty to have 
 an air of hopeless self-sacrifice. Faith gradually passes 
 into conventionalism. A later stage comes when the 
 1 depression, the uneasiness, the misgiving3, have aug- 
 mented tenfold. It is then that in an individual here 
 and there the moral paralysis sets in. In the ardour of 
 conflict they have pushed into the foreground all the 
 weakest parts of their creed, and have learnt the habit 
 i of asserting most vehemently just what they doubt most, 
 i because it is what is most denied. As their own belief 
 ebbs away from them they are precluded from learning 
 a new one, because they are too deeply pledged, have 
 promised too much, asseverated too much, and involved 
 too many others with themselves. Happy those in 
 such a situation who either are not too clear-sighted 
 or cling to a system not entirely corrupt ! There is 
 an extreme case when what is upheld as divine has 
 really become a source of moral evil, while the cham- 
 s. 3 
 
 
34 NATURAL RELIGION, 
 
 pion is one who cannot help seeing clearly. As he 
 becomes reluctantly enlightened, as his advocacy grows 
 first a little forced, then by degrees consciously hypo- 
 critical, until in the end he secretly confesses himself 
 to be on the wrong side, what a moral dissolution ! 
 Henceforth he sees in the Universe nothing but a chaos. 
 The law which once he fancied he discerned there, he 
 can recognize no longer, and yet is forbidden by his 
 situation from recognizing any other. The link that 
 bound him to the Universe is snapped ; the motive 
 that inspired his actions is gone, and his actions have 
 become meaningless, mechanical, galvanic. He is an 
 Atheist, without a God because without a law. Such 
 men may often be noted among the most intelligent ad- 
 herents of expiring causes, demoralised soldiers, power- 
 less for good, though sometimes capable of mischief. 
 
 These are specimens of what seems to be properly 
 atheism. The common characteristic of all such 
 states of mind is feebleness. In the first example 
 you have violent feebleness, impotence ; in the second 
 cautious feebleness ; in the third, cynical feebleness 
 but in all cases feebleness springing from a conscious 
 want of any clue to the order of the Universe 
 These specimens are all such as may be furnished by 
 men of great natural vigour. The cynical atheist has 
 often an extreme subtlety of intellect, the Philistine 
 commonly begins with a great grasp of reality, a greal 
 superiority to illusions; the wilful atheist has often 
 much imagination and energy. Where a character 
 wanting in energy is infected by atheism you have 
 those ap,i>7]i>a Kapyva of which the world is at all times' 
 full. By the side of the profound cynic you have th< 
 
ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM: 35 
 
 lounger, who can take an interest in nothing, 
 all whose thoughts are hearsays, never verified, never 
 realised, not believed, not worthy of the name of pre- 
 judices echoes of prejudices, imitations of hypocrisy. 
 He moves about embarrassed and paralyzed by the 
 hollowness of all he knows; conscious that nothing that 
 he has in his mind would bear the smallest criticism 
 or probation, knowing no way to anything better, and 
 meanwhile ingenuously confessing his own inanity. By 
 the side of the overjudicious Philistine, who has fallen 
 into feebleness through an excessive dread of general- 
 ising hastily, there may be seen the born Philistine, 
 who does not know, and has never heard, what gene- 
 ralising is, who becomes uncomfortable when he hears 
 a principle enunciated, as if he had been addressed by 
 a foreigner in some language unknown to him, and 
 whose homely talk never willingly travels beyond what 
 time the train starts, and whether it happened on 
 Monday or on Tuesday. Lastly, by the side of the 
 brilliant Utopian, who overlooks the greatness of the 
 Necessity with which he has to contend, there is the 
 Utopian without brilliancy, the enrage, the mere rest- 
 less disturber. 
 
 As Atheism is but another name for feebleness, so 
 the universal characteristic of Theology if we put aside 
 for the present the belief, rare till lately, in an utterly 
 hostile or thwarting Deity is energy. He who has 
 a faith, we know well, is twice himself. The world, 
 the conventional or temporary order of things, goes 
 down before the weapons of faith, before the energy 
 of those who have a glimpse, or only think they have 
 a glimpse, of the eternal or normal order of things. 
 
 32 
 
36 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 And this vigour of Theism does not much depend on 
 the nature of the God in whom the theist believes. 
 Just as Atheism does not consist in a bad theory ol 
 the Universe, but in the want of any theory, so Theism 
 consists not in possessing a meritorious or true or 
 consoling theory, but simply in possessing a theory 
 of the Universe. He who has such a theory acts with 
 confidence and decision, he who has no such theory is 
 paralyzed. One of the rudest of all theories of the 
 Universe is that propounded by Mohammed, yet it 
 raised up a dispersed nation to vigour, union, 
 and empire. Calvinism presents assuredly a view 
 of the Universe which is not in any way consoling, 
 yet this creed too has given vigour and heroism. 
 The creed of the earliest Romans rested upon no basis 
 which could for a moment pass for philosophical, yet 
 while it was believed it gave order to the state, sanc- 
 tion to morality, victory to the armies. Whatever 
 kind of Theology be in question, so long as it is truly 
 believed, the only danger is of its inspiring too much 
 energy, of its absorbing its votaries too much, and 
 driving them into extreme courses. 
 
 And so if the Nature recognized by Science be 
 not benevolent, and have provided no future life for 
 men, it does not follow that her votaries are not 
 theologians, and it is quite clear that their theology 
 gives them energy. Many theologies have admitted 
 no future life indeed our own, in its earlier Judaic 
 form, laid no stress upon any future life. And it 
 is not the benevolence of. his Deity which gives so 
 much energy and confidence to the convinced theist ; it 
 is rather the assurance that he has the secret of pro- 
 
ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM.* 37 
 
 pitiating his Deity. It was not because Jupiter or 
 Mars were benevolent beings that the Roman went 
 out to battle confiding in their protection. It was 
 because all sacrifices had been performed which the 
 Pontiffs or the Sibylline Books prescribed. Just of the 
 same kind is the theistic vigour which we see in 
 modern Science. Science also has its procuratio pro- 
 digiorum. It does not believe that Nature is benevo- 
 lent, and yet it has all the confidence of Moham- 
 ledans or Crusaders. This is because it believes that 
 it understands the laws of Nature, and that it knows 
 how to deal so that Nature shall favour its operations. 
 Not by the Sibylline Books, but by experiment, not 
 by supplications but by scientific precautions and ope- 
 rations it discovers and propitiates the mind of its 
 Deity. 
 
 The advance of Science then is by no means equiva- 
 lent to the advance of Atheism. But what shall we 
 say of that other advancing Power which terrifies 
 religious men, and which calls itself the Revolution ? 
 The Revolution in Europe delights in declaring itself 
 atheistic. So far as it is really so, by being Titanic, it 
 is doomed to failure. But beyond this its invectives 
 against God and against religion do not prove that it is 
 atheistic but only that it thinks itself so. And why 
 does it think itself so ? Because God and religion are 
 identified in its view with the Catholic Church, and the 
 Catholic Church is a thing so very redoubtable that we 
 need scarcely inquire why it is passionately hated and 
 feared. But then the Catholic Church is not really 
 identical with theism or even with Christianity. We 
 cannot expect an angry party to draw these distinctions, 
 
38 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 but they are so plain that there remains nothing to dis- 
 cuss. There is plenty in the Catholic Church of what is 
 oppressive and repugnant to the modern spirit, even if 
 we make abstraction of all its Christianity. And when 
 we hear the charges which the Revolution brings against 
 it, such as affinity with despotism, with aristocratic 
 privilege, with sacerdotalism or with militarism, we see 
 plainly that it is not hated even for its Christianity, 
 much less for its theism. Christianity in its original 
 character had an evident analogy with that modern 
 liberal movement which assails Catholicism. It 
 breathed something of the spirit of equality and still 
 more of the spirit of fraternity ; it took its rise in a 
 bold rebellion against sacerdotal authority. But even 
 if this were otherwise, it would remain true that the 
 Revolution assails not theology itself but only a parti- 
 cular theology embodied in a particular institution. For 
 another theology is quite conceivable which so far 
 from thwarting the Revolution might embody all its 
 aspirations. 
 
 Equality, brotherhood between classes and nations, 
 are these ideas so radically inconsistent with theology 
 that they cannot be realised until theology has been swept 
 away ? So far from it that if we did not know historically 
 by what process Catholic theology became allied with 
 caste and privilege so far as to compromise itself, we 
 should have thought such an unnatural alliance scarcely 
 possible. In France theology was found on the side of 
 privilege, but in the Moslem East the equality of man- 
 kind has been preached, and successfully, in the name 
 of theology. If a Christian preacher had been inspired 
 to do so, he might with perfect warrant from his re- 
 

 ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM: 39 
 
 ligion have proclaimed Equality in France. Indeed this 
 was to some extent what actually happened. Rousseau 
 spoke partly in the name of theology, and even of 
 Christian theology ; one school among the revolution- 
 ists was fond of remarking the analogy between the 
 revolutionary doctrine and early Christianity ; and it 
 was not until the sceptical foundation had been in a 
 manner abandoned, and an appeal made to religion, 
 that the spirit of political change awoke. 
 
 But the Revolution has also, no doubt, a quarrel 
 with theology as a doctrine. ' Theology/ it says, 'even 
 if not exactly opposed to social improvement, is a 
 superstition, and as such allied to ignorance and con- 
 servatism. Granting that its precepts are good, it 
 enforces them by legends and fictitious stories which 
 can only influence the uneducated, and therefore in 
 order to preserve its influence it must needs oppose 
 education. Nor are these stories a mere excrescence of 
 theology, but theology itself. For theology is neither 
 more nor less than a doctrine of the supernatural. It 
 proclaims a power behind nature which occasionally 
 interferes with natural laws. It proclaims another 
 world quite different from this in which we live, a 
 world into which what is called the soul is believed 
 to pass at death. It believes, in short, in a number 
 of things which students of nature know nothing 
 about and which science puts aside either with respect 
 or with contempt. These supernatural doctrines are 
 not merely a part of theology, still less separable 
 from theology, but theology consists exclusively of 
 them. Take away the supernatural Person, miracles, 
 and the spiritual world, you take away theology at the 
 
40 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 same time, and nothing is left but simple Nature and 
 simple Science.' Thus theology comes to be used in 
 the sense of supernaturalism, and in this view also 
 excites the hostility of the age. Not merely scientific 
 men themselves, for of these I am not now speaking, 
 but Liberals in general, all those who have any tinc- 
 ture of science, all whose minds have in any degree 
 taken the scientific stamp, a vast number already, and, 
 as education spreads, likely to become co-extensive 
 with civilised mankind, form a habit of thought with 
 which they are led to consider theology irreconcilable. 
 
 It is a singular coincidence which has combined in 
 apparent opposition to theology the two mightiest 
 forces of the present age, that is, the Revolution 
 and Science. But it is only a coincidence, though 
 ready theorists, will never be content to see nothing 
 more in it. They will not admit that theology 
 has been undeservedly charged with all the sins of 
 that ancient corporation called the Catholic Church, 
 with which sins in reality it had nothing whatever 
 to do. It is much more interesting to imagine the 
 Church as the body of which theology is the soul, 
 and to trace all the body's actions to the natural dis- 
 position of the informing soul. By this easy process 
 we arrive at the conclusion that theology is an essen- 
 tially conservative and stagnant principle, with the 
 strongest natural affinity for despotism, privilege, re- 
 spectability, and every kind of antiquated pretension, 
 that, in short, it is a way of viewing the Universe 
 which inevitably leads to all the vices peculiar to old 
 endowed corporations. And that an institution which 
 is opposed to the Revolution should be at the same 
 
ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM.* 41 
 
 time at war with Science will never be thought a mere 
 coincidence. Party-spirit will be adroit enough to 
 make it out that Science and Revolution are as soul 
 and body on the one side, as theology and conserva- 
 tism are on the other ; that people who believe in 
 miracles must necessarily side with capital against 
 labour, and that large standing armies follow logically 
 from a belief in benevolent design. 
 
 As to the mistake which lies in confounding theo- 
 logy with supernaturalism it is not necessary here to 
 do more than repeat shortly what was said in the first 
 chapter. First, then, there is no necessary connexion 
 between theology and supernaturalism. It is quite 
 possible to believe in a God, and even a personal God, 
 of whom Nature is the complete and only manifesta- 
 tion. Supernaturalism is part of the reigning theology, 
 but it is not any necessary part of theology, as such. 
 Secondly, when supernaturalism is said to be identical 
 with theology, this is not true at all, even of the reign- 
 ing theology. It is simply a mistake which has arisen 
 from taking literally an abbreviated form of expression 
 by which in controversy the controversialist is identified 
 with the thesis he happens to be maintaining for the 
 moment. He is said to fall when his thesis falls, 
 though in reality he may remain as prosperous as ever. 
 Thus Catholicism is identified in controversy with certain 
 doctrines which Protestantism disputes, transubstantia- 
 tion, worship of the Virgin, &c., and yet if these 
 doctrines were to fall it is quite conceivable that the 
 Catholic Church, so far from falling, might flourish 
 more than ever. In the same way, in controversy 
 with science the reigning theology and supernaturalism 
 
42 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 are convertible terms. That is to say, if supernatu- 
 ralism is refuted, science wins and the reigning theo- 
 logy loses in the particular controversy in which 
 they are engaged. In the controversial sense this is 
 the destruction of theology, but only in the contro- 
 versial sense. For when the worship of God outside 
 Nature is taken away the worship of God in Nature 
 remains. Whether this residue is important or un- 
 important will be considered later; at any rate it is 
 there ; and it would not be surprising if it should turn 
 out more considerable than controversialists believe, 
 when we remember how habitual it is for controver- 
 sialists to exaggerate their differences. 
 
 At any rate, it is evident that the theology of the 
 book of Job, of many of the Psalms, e.g., the 104th, of 
 many passages in the Prophets, of many discourses of 
 Christ, of many passages in the Epistles, would remain 
 unaffected if Supernaturalism were entirely abandoned. 
 No more need be said at this stage. 
 
 I conclude then that the prevalent opinion about 
 the advance of atheism rests upon an abuse of the 
 word ' atheism/ The threatening alliance between 
 Science and the Revolution is not really directed in 
 favour of atheism nor against theology. For the 
 antagonist of Science is only supernaturalism and not 
 theology as such, while Science itself has all the 
 character of a theology, such as theologies were at 
 the first, being capable of inspiring a fanatical zeal 
 and bearing in its hand a budget of practical reforms ; 
 and moreover the Deity it proclaims is not different 
 from the Deity of Christians, but only a too much dis- 
 regarded aspect of Him. As to the Revolution, its 
 
ABUSE OF THE WORD 'ATHEISM: 43 
 
 antagonist is not theology at all, nor even superna- 
 turalism, except in a secondary degree. The Revolu- 
 tion is infuriated against an ancient corporation, the 
 greatest by far of all corporate bodies ever known, 
 on the ground that in addition to its formidable power 
 it has something antiquated in its constitution, 
 shelters many abuses, and has in the latest centuries 
 made common cause with other declining institu- 
 tions. This corporation happens to be the deposi- 
 tary of a theology partly supernaturalistic, but we can 
 see plainly that had it been the depositary of modern 
 science itself it would have excited just the same 
 animosity, nay, probably very much more, for in fact 
 its creed in some aspects is in most remarkable agree- 
 ment with the revolutionary creed itself. 
 
 On the other hand, of atheism, that demoralising 
 palsy of human nature, which consists in the inability 
 to discern in the Universe any law by which human life 
 may be guided, there is in the present age less danger 
 than ever, and it is daily made more and more impos- 
 sible by science itself : of revolt against the Christian 
 law of Fraternity, there is also less than ever in this 
 age, and that redemption of the poor and that pacifi- 
 cation of nations which Christianity first suggested 
 are more prominent than ever among the aspirations 
 of mankind. At the same time the organisation of the 
 Church seems ill-adapted to the age, and seems to 
 expose it to the greatest danger; and, what is far more 
 serious, the old elevating communion with God, which 
 Christianity introduced, seems threatened by the new 
 scientific theology, which while presenting to us deeper 
 views than ever of His infinite and awful greatness, 
 
44 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 and more fascinating views than ever of His eternal 
 beauty and glory, denies for the present to Him that 
 human tenderness, justice and benevolence which 
 Christ taught us to see in Him. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE WORDS 'THEOLOGY* AND 'RELIGION: 
 
 INSTEAD of Atheism then, we find that the result 
 of cancelling superiiaturalism and submitting to Science 
 is a theology in which all men, whether they consider 
 it or not, do actually agree that which is concerned 
 with God in Nature. I do not here raise the ques- 
 tion of causes or laws; let it be allowed that Nature 
 is merely the collective name of a number of coexis- 
 tences and sequences, and that God is merely a 
 synonym for Nature. Let all this be allowed, or 
 let the contrary of this be allowed. Such contro- 
 versies may be raised about the human as well as 
 about the Divine Being. Some may consider the 
 human body as the habitation of a soul distinct and 
 separable from it; others may refuse to recognize any 
 such distinction: some may maintain that man is 
 merely the collective name for a number of processes: 
 some may consider the human being as possessing 
 a free will and as being independent of circumstances; 
 others may regard him as the necessary product of a 
 long series of physical influences. All these differences 
 may be almost as important as they seem to the dis- 
 putants who are occupied about them, but after all 
 
 UNIVERSITY . 
 
46 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 they do not affect the fact that the human being is 
 there, and they do not prevent us from regarding him 
 with strong feelings. The same is true of the Divine 
 Being. Whatever may be questioned, it is certain 
 that we are in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal 
 Being ; except through some of those perversions 
 which I described in the last chapter, we cannot 
 help the awe and admiration with which we contem- 
 plate Him ; we cannot help recognizing that our well- 
 being depends on taking a right view of His nature. 
 
 But if theology in a certain sense of the word would 
 survive the disappearance of supernaturalism, how would 
 it be with religion ? Are we to regard religion as 
 identical with theology, or are we to suppose that the 
 popular instinct, which is keenly alive to all that affects 
 religion, but at the same time pretty indifferent to the 
 fate of theology, is right in drawing so broad a distinc- 
 tion between them ? 
 
 There are two ways in which the mind apprehends 
 any object, two sorts of knowledge which combine to 
 make complete and satisfactory knowledge. The one 
 may be called theoretic or scientific knowledge; the 
 other practical, familiar, or imaginative knowledge. 
 The greatest trial of human nature lies in the difficulty 
 of reconciling these two kinds of knowledge, of pre- 
 venting them from interfering with one another, of 
 arranging satisfactory relations between them. In 
 order of time the second kind of knowledge has the 
 precedence, and avails itself of this advantage to delay 
 and impede the arrival of the first kind. Before the 
 stars, the winds, the trees and plants could be grasped 
 scientifically and the laws which govern them ascertained, 
 
'THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION: 47 
 
 they had been grasped, and as it were appropriated, 
 by the human mind experimentally and imaginatively. 
 The latter kind of knowledge was in some respects 
 better than the former. It was more intimate and 
 realised, so that, as far as it was true, it was more 
 available. For practical purposes, accurate scientific 
 knowledge of a thing is seldom sufficient. To ob- 
 tain complete practical command over it you must 
 take possession of it with the imagination and feel- 
 ings as well as the reason, and it will often happen 
 that this imaginative knowledge, helped very slightly 
 by scientific knowledge, carries a man practically 
 further than a very perfect scientific knowledge by 
 itself Witness the instinctive, as we say, and un- 
 analysable skill sometimes possessed by savages. More- 
 over, this kind of knowledge is more attractive and 
 interesting, and so has a more powerful modifying 
 influence upon its possessor than the other kind, for 
 the simple reason that it takes hold of the most plastic 
 side of his nature. But just because it is so fascinat- 
 ing, and is at the same time not by itself trustworthy, 
 it has certain mischievous consequences when it comes, 
 as it generally "does, first. Then it fills the mind with 
 prejudices, hasty misconceptions, which, seizing upon 
 the imagination, are stereotyped in the form of super- 
 stitions; and these sometimes exercise by themselves 
 a most pernicious influence, and in any case close the 
 mind against the entrance of the sounder scientific 
 knowledge. When this imaginative medley of obser- 
 vation and prejudice has long had possession, Science 
 arrives. There follows a contest between the two kinds 
 of knowledge, in which the human being suffers much. 
 
48 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 Truth cannot in the long run be resisted, and so, after 
 whatever defence, the fortress is carried and the phan- 
 tom garrison of superstition is driven out. The mind 
 passes now under a new set of impressions, and places 
 itself in a new relation to the Universe. Its victory 
 over superstition has been won by placing a careful 
 restraint upon imagination and feeling.. In order not 
 to be misled by feeling, it has been forced artificially 
 to deaden feeling; lest the judgment should be over- 
 whelmed by the impressiveness of the universe, it arms 
 itself with callousness; it turns away from Nature the 
 sensitive side, and receives the shock upon the adaman- 
 tine shield of the sceptical reason. In this way it sub- 
 stitutes one imperfect kind of knowledge for another. 
 Before, it realised strongly, but scarcely analysed at 
 all; now, it analyses most carefully, but ceases in 
 return to realise. As the victory of the scientific spirit 
 becomes more and more decided, there passes a deep 
 shudder of discomfort through the whole world of 
 those whose business is with realising, and not with 
 testing, knowledge. Heligion is struck first, because 
 the whole work of realising presupposes faith, and 
 yet, as the testing process comes late, faith is almost 
 always more or less premature. But poetry and art 
 suffer in their turn. How full has modern poetry 
 been of this complaint ! One poet laments that 
 t( Science withdraws the veil of enchantment from 
 Nature;" one exclaims that "there was an awful rain- 
 bow once in heaven," but that Science has destroyed it; 
 another declares that "we murder to dissect," that we 
 should not be always seeking, but use "a wise passive- 
 ness" in the presence of Nature; another "that Nature 
 
 
< THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION: 40 
 
 made undivine is now seen slavishly obeying the law 
 of gravitation;" another buries himself in past ages 
 " when men could still hear from God heavenly truth 
 in earthly speech, and did not rack their brains." 
 
 And yet to complain of the march of the scientific 
 spirit seems as idle as to complain of the law of 
 gravitation itself. It cannot be prevented, even if we 
 were able to shew that it ought to be prevented ; it 
 cannot much be retarded, even though some danger 
 might be saved by putting the drag upon the wheels 
 of discovery. The ardour of investigation, the fanati- 
 cism of truth-worship, make men deaf to such prudential 
 considerations, and they are seconded by all the ill-will 
 that the reigning system has provoked during its long 
 predominance and by all the eager ambitions which the 
 prospect of a revolutionary change awakens. But we 
 may look forward to a time when this transition shall 
 be over, and when a new reconciliation shall have 
 taken place between the two sorts of knowledge. 
 In that happier age true knowledge, scientific, not arti- 
 ficially humanised, will reign without opposition, but 
 the claims of Science once for all allowed, the mind 
 will also apprehend the Universe imaginatively, 
 realising what it knows. 
 
 That kind of imaginative eclipse which an object 
 suffers when the shadow of science passes over it has 
 obscured in turn the material universe and Man and 
 God. Natural mythology has become almost incompre- 
 hensible to us. The "fair humanities of old religion/' 
 which found objects of love in trees and streams, and 
 covered the celestial map with fantastic living shapes- 
 all this has long ago disappeared. More recently Man 
 s. 4 
 
50 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 has been subjected to the analysing process. The me- 
 chanical laws which were traced in the physical world, 
 it was long hoped, would never suffice to explain the 
 human being ; he at least would remain always myste- 
 rious, spiritual, sacred. But now Man begins to 
 reckon his own being among things more than half 
 explained ; nerve-force, he thinks, is a sort of elec- 
 tricity; man differs greatly indeed, but not generically, 
 from the brutes. All this has, for the time at least, the 
 effect of desecrating human nature. To the imagina- 
 tion human nature becomes a thing blurred and 
 spoiled, not really because the new view of it is in 
 itself degrading, but because the imagination had 
 realised it otherwise, and cannot in any short time 
 either part with the old realising or perfect a new 
 one. Lastly, science turns her smoked eye-glass upon 
 God, deliberately diminishing the glory of what she 
 looks at that she may distinguish better. Here too 
 she sees mechanism where will, purpose, and love had 
 been supposed before ; she drops the name God, and 
 takes up the less awful name of Nature instead. 
 
 This disenchantment more than any other has made 
 us ask ourselves whether analysis is not a kind of 
 sacrilege, and perhaps not merely because in this 
 instance it strikes the highest object, but for another 
 reason. Science cannot easily destroy our feeling for 
 human beings. We are in such close contact with our 
 own kind, our imagination and affections take such 
 fast hold of our fellowmen as to defy physiology. If 
 it were otherwise we should want a word Anan- 
 thropism to answer to Atheism. The thing is indeed 
 sometimes to be seen, and alarm has lately been, ex- 
 
'THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION? 51 
 
 pressed in Germany at the havoc which devotion, 
 probably too exclusive and ambitious, to physical science 
 may make with the feelings. But hitherto the scien- 
 tific disbelief in Humanity for so it may be called 
 has been rare. As for the material universe, that indeed 
 has long been almost completely desecrated, so that 
 sympathy, communion with the forms of Nature, is 
 pretty well confined to poets, and is generally sup- 
 posed to be an amiable madness in them. But this 
 evil had another origin. Not analysis but rather 
 religion itself, and especially monasticism, is responsible 
 for it. In the ages called 'of faith' it was felt even 
 more painfully than now, so that Chaucer complains 
 of the preachings and bannings of " lirnitours and other 
 holy freres," which according to him had banished the 
 fairies from the land. Nature had been made not 
 merely a dead thing, but a disgusting and hideous 
 thing, by superstitions of imps, witches, and demons ; 
 so much so that Goethe celebrates science as having 
 actually restored Nature to the imagination and driven 
 away the Walpurgis-nacht of the middle ages ; and, 
 indeed, by turning attention upon the natural world, 
 and inducing many to become familiar with its beauties, 
 Science may have given back to the imagination, in this 
 department, as much as it has taken away. 
 
 But the conception of God is so vast and elevated 
 that the human mind easily sinks altogether below it. 
 The task of realising what is too great to be realised, 
 of reaching with the imagination and growing with 
 the affections to a reality almost too high for the one, 
 and almost too awful for the other, is in itself excep- 
 tionally difficult. To do this, and yet at the same 
 
 42 
 
52 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 time carefully to restrain the imagination and feelings 
 as Science prescribes, is almost impossible; yet those 
 who perpetually study Nature, if they study in a 
 healthy and natural manner, will always in some sense 
 feel the presence of God. The unity of what they study 
 will sometimes come home to them and give a sense 
 of awe and delight, if not of love. But upon those 
 who do not study Nature the advance of Science and 
 the rumour of its discoveries can have no other effect 
 than to root out of their minds the very conception 
 of God. The negative effect is not counterbalanced 
 by any positive one. To their apprehensions, if the 
 supernatural Person whose will holds the Universe 
 together is taken away, the Universe falls at once to 
 pieces. No other unity takes His place, and out of 
 the human mind there perishes the most elevating 
 thought, and out of human life the chief and princi- 
 pal sacredness. The remedy for this is to be found in 
 the study of Nature becoming universal. Let all be 
 made acquainted with natural laws; let all form the 
 habit of contemplating them, and atheism in its full 
 sense will become a thing impossible, when no mind 
 shall be altogether without the sense, at once inspiring 
 and sobering, of an eternal order. 
 
 But these remarks on the difficulty of harmonising 
 the scientific with the imaginative knowledge of things, 
 are by way of digression. Our business at present is 
 with the fact that knowledge is of these two kinds, 
 and that the complete or satisfactory knowledge of 
 anything comes from combining them. When the 
 object of knowledge is God, the first kind of know- 
 ledge is called theology, and the second may be called 
 
'THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION.' 53 
 
 religion. By theology the nature of God is ascer- 
 tained and false views of it eradicated from the 
 understanding ; by religion the truths thus obtained 
 are turned over in the mind and assimilated by the 
 imagination and the feelings. 
 
 When it is said, as we hear it said so commonly 
 now, that the knowledge of God is impossible to man, 
 and therefore that theology is no true science, of 
 course the word God is used in that peculiar sense 
 of which I have spoken above. Nature every one 
 admits that we know or may know; but of any occult 
 cause of phenomena, or of any supernatural being 
 accomplishing his purpose through natural laws or sus- 
 pending the course of them, it is denied that we can 
 know anything. Nevertheless since every sort of theo- 
 logy agrees that the laws of nature are the laws of 
 God, it is evident that in knowing Nature we do 
 precisely to the same extent know God. Regarded in 
 this way, we may say of God that so far from being 
 beyond knowledge, He is the one object of knowledge, 
 and that everything we can know, every proposition 
 we can frame,^relates to Him. 
 
 It has long been customary, especially with the 
 religious party, to put aside this distinction as per- 
 fectly idle. * It is pantheism ' they cry, ' and pantheism 
 is practically not distinguishable from atheism. A 
 distinction merely speculative has no concern with the 
 most momentous of all practical controversies. Was it 
 not the old maxim of theology that the knowledge of 
 God was life and the ignorance of Him darkness and 
 death ? Try and adapt this maxim to your Universe- 
 God. It either loses its meaning altogether, or sinks 
 
54 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 into some frigid platitude to the effect that all know- 
 ledge is valuable, or that the more things you know 
 the more dangers you will be in a condition to avoid/ 
 
 But here we are reminded of that coincidence be- 
 tween the language of theology and the language 
 lately adopted by science which was our starting point. 
 Scientific men do now tell us in the very language of 
 theology that all hope, that all happiness lies in the 
 knowledge of Nature, and by Nature they mean the Uni- 
 verse. Spontaneously, and in the very act of opposing 
 theology they create theology anew. For they shew 
 us that it is not necessary to look beyond Nature or 
 beyond experience in order to find that unique Object 
 of which theology speaks. They themselves have 
 found Him in Nature itself, where the religious 
 party tell us it is vain to look for Him. The con- 
 ception of Nature or of the Universe has now acquired 
 distinctness, so that the study of it may be compared 
 with other studies and recommended as specially impor- 
 tant. 
 
 But how can the conception of the Universe have 
 distinctness, since the Universe includes everything ? 
 How can the study of it be compared with other studies ? 
 
 ' What is there, then, that can possibly be studied 
 besides the Universe ? ' 
 
 There is in the first place a would-be reflexion of the 
 Universe, which it is possible to study as if it were the 
 Universe itself; that is, the multitude of traditional 
 unscientific opinions about the Universe. In one sense, 
 these opinions are part of the Universe, and to study 
 them from the historic point of view is to study the 
 Universe ; but when they are accepted and studied as a 
 
< THEOLOGY 1 AND 'RELIGION? 55 
 
 trustworthy counterpart, as they are by all the votaries 
 of authority or tradition, then they may be regarded 
 as a spurious Universe outside the real one, and such 
 students of opinion may be said to study and yet not 
 to study the Universe. 
 
 This spurious Universe is almost as great as the 
 genuine one. There are many profoundly learned men 
 whose thoughts are solely occupied with it and have no 
 concern whatever with reality. The simplest peasant 
 who from living much in the open air has found for him- 
 self, unconsciously, some rules to guide him in divining 
 the weather, knows something about the real Universe ; 
 but an indefatigable student who has stored a prodigious 
 memory with what the schoolmen have thought, what 
 the philosophers have thought, what the Fathers have 
 thought, may yet have no real knowledge; he may 
 have been busy only with the reflected Universe. 
 Not that the thoughts of dead thinkers stored up in 
 books are not part of the Universe as much as wind 
 and rain; not that they may not repay study quite 
 as well; they are deposits of the human mind, and 
 by studying them much may be discovered about the 
 human mind, the ways of its operation, the stages of 
 its development. As a reflexion too, imperfect yet not 
 wholly unfaithful, of the Universe they may tell much 
 about it. But they become a spurious Universe, and 
 the knowledge of them becomes a false knowledge, 
 when they are studied for themselves only or are con- 
 founded with the true Universe. Those who confound 
 commentatorship with philosophy and mistake erudition 
 for science, may be said to study, but not to study the 
 Universe. 
 
56 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 There are other classes of men of whom much the 
 same may be said. The scientific school, when they 
 recommend the study of Nature, do not mean, for 
 example, the mere collecting of facts however authen- 
 tic. Nature with them is not a heap of phenomena, 
 but laws discerned in phenomena, and by a knowledge 
 of Nature they mean a just conception of laws much 
 more than an ample store of information about phe- 
 nomena. Again, in an age like the present, when 
 methods of inquiry have been laid down and tested 
 by large experience, they do not dignify with the name 
 of the study of Nature any investigation, however 
 earnest or fresh, of the facts of the world, which does 
 not conform to these methods, or shew reason for not 
 doing so. 
 
 Knowledge of Nature understood in this sense, and 
 obtained in this manner, is now recommended as the 
 only true wisdom. And assuredly it deserves to be 
 called in the strictest sense Theology. If God be the 
 Ruler of the world, as the orthodox theology teaches, 
 the laws of Nature are the laws by which He rules 
 it. If you prefer the Pantheistic view, they are the 
 very manifestations of the Divine Nature. In any case 
 the knowledge of Nature, if only it be properly sifted 
 from the corrupting mixture of mere opinion, is the 
 knowledge of God. That there may be another and 
 deeper knowledge of God beyond it does not affect this 
 fact. 
 
 All this is said in answer to the religious party 
 which denies that there is any practical difference 
 between pantheism (for so they call the doctrine of a 
 God revealed in Nature) and atheism. It is an answer 
 
1 THEOLOGY* AND 'RELIGION.' 57 
 
 which may seem to treat theology as a mere synonym 
 for science. 
 
 But we may distinguish a particular aspect of science 
 which more than other aspects deserves to be called 
 theological. 
 
 Considered in its practical bearings upon human 
 life, the study of Nature resolves itself into the study 
 of two things, a force within the human being, and a 
 necessity without him. Life, in short, is like a mechani- 
 cal problem, in which a power is required to be so advan- 
 tageously applied as to overcome a weight which is 
 greater than itself. The power is the human will, the 
 weight is Nature, the motive of the struggle between 
 them is certain ideals which man instinctively puts 
 before himself an ideal of happiness, or an ideal of 
 perfection. By means of Science he is enabled to 
 apply the power in the most advantageous manner. 
 Every piece of knowledge he acquires helps him in his 
 undertaking. Every special science which he perfects 
 removes a new set of obstacles, procures him a new set 
 of resources. And in his conflict with natural diffi- 
 culties his energy and hope are in proportion to his 
 power of measuring the force he has, and the resist- 
 ance he w r ill meet with. When he is able to measure 
 this precisely, his hope becomes confidence, even in 
 circumstances which might seem the most alarming. 
 We allow ourselves to be hurried through the air at the 
 rate of fifty miles an hour, with a noise and impetus 
 appalling to a bystander, and all the while read or sleep 
 comfortably. Why ? Because the forces we have set 
 in motion are all accurately measured, the obstacles to 
 be met fully known. When the measurement is only 
 
58 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 approximate, there is not confidence, but only hope pre- 
 dominating over fear. The experienced sailor feels this ; 
 he trusts himself to the perils of the sea, because he knows 
 that he is pretty well matched against the necessity he 
 provokes, though he cannot know that he is the superior, 
 because he can calculate a good many of the dangers, 
 though not all. 
 
 Thus it is in each of the separate undertakings 
 that make up life. To each of them belongs its appro- 
 priate knowledge, upon which our equanimity and 
 repose of mind, as far as the particular undertaking is 
 concerned, depend. But life itself, taken as a whole, 
 is an undertaking. Life itself has its objects which 
 make it interesting to us, which lead us to bear the 
 burden of it. These objects, like those minor ones, are 
 only to be attained by a struggle between the power 
 Will and the weight Nature, and in this struggle also 
 both success and the hope of success depend upon a cer- 
 tain knowledge which may enable us to apply the power 
 with advantage. But the knowledge required in this 
 case is of a more general kind; it is not a knowledge con- 
 fined to certain sets of phenomena, and giving us a power 
 correspondingly limited, but it is a general knowledge 
 of the relation in which human life stands to the Uni- 
 verse, and of the means by which life may be brought 
 into the most satisfactory adaptation to it. Now, by 
 what name shall we call this knowledge ? 
 
 Every one has his general views of human life, which 
 are more or less distinct. Upon these general views 
 more than upon anything else connected with the un- 
 derstanding moral character depends. For though 
 theoretically morality may be independent of all such 
 
'THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION: 59 
 
 views, practically and in the long run it varies with 
 them. ' What has life to give ? How far does it lend 
 itself to our ideals ? ' These questions lie outside moral 
 philosophy, and yet they are as vital to morality as any 
 that lie within it. They are also quite as important to 
 human happiness as all particular measures contrived to 
 increase human happiness. No man fights with any 
 heart if he thinks he has Nature against him. He who 
 believes that men are not made to be happy, will lose 
 the energy to do even what can be done for their 
 happiness ; he who meets with more than a certain 
 degree of discouragement in the pursuit of virtue, will 
 give it up. 
 
 Of an unfavourable view of human life there are 
 three principal consequences crime, languor, and 
 suicide. The majority of crimes, and still more of 
 meannesses, perhaps, are not committed from bad 
 intentions, but from a despair of human life. " I am 
 sorry, but I must do it ; I am driven to it ; everybody 
 has to do it ; we must look at things as they are ; " 
 these are the reflexions which lead men into violations 
 of morality. The feeling that life will not always 
 allow us to do what is right, faint perhaps in 
 each individual mind, grows strong when many who 
 share it come together ; it grows stronger by being 
 uttered, stronger still by being acted upon ; it creates 
 an atmosphere of laxity ; morality retires more and 
 more out of view ; until the thought of crime itself, 
 and even of enormous crime, becomes familiar, and at 
 last is carried almost unconsciously into act. It is 
 not, then, from want of morality that men do wrong, 
 but from want of another sort of knowledge. They 
 
60 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 know what is right and what is wrong ; it is not 
 from overlooking this distinction that they fall into 
 the wrong, nor would they escape the danger by 
 reflecting upon it ever so much. What determines 
 their action is a belief in some sort of necessity, some 
 fatality with which it is vain to struggle ; it is a 
 general view of human life as unfavourable to ideals. 
 
 Another such general view of human life produces 
 apathy. A man who has persuaded himself that we 
 are the creatures of circumstance, or that we are the 
 victims of a necessity with which it is impossible for 
 us to cope, will give up the battle with Nature and do 
 nothing. Perhaps he has his head full of instances of 
 the best endeavours after improvement failing entirely, 
 or by some fatality producing extreme unhappiness ; of 
 the purest and noblest labours causing mischief which 
 complete inactivity would have avoided ; how Queen 
 Isabella introduced the Inquisition; how Las Casas 
 initiated the slave-trade ; how pauperism has been over 
 and over again fostered by philanthropy ; how the 
 Prince of Peace himself, according to his own saying, 
 brought a sword upon the earth. He may think that 
 human life, as it runs on naturally, is not a bad thing, 
 but that all attempts to control it or improve it are 
 hopeless ; that all high ideals are merely ambitious ; 
 that purpose and, still more, system and all sophistica- 
 tion of life are mischievous. And so he may come to 
 renounce all free-will, he may yield to the current of 
 ordinary affairs, and become a mere conventionalist, 
 accommodating himself to whatever he does not like, 
 and learning gradually to tolerate with complete in- 
 difference the most enormous evils. Against such a 
 
< THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION? 61 
 
 perversion of mind morality is no defence ; what is 
 needed is not a new view of what ought to be such a 
 man knows well enough what ought to be but a new 
 view of what can or may be, a more encouraging view 
 of the Universe. 
 
 Sometimes the despair of human life goes to a much 
 greater length. Life is a game at which we are 
 not forced to play ; we may at any time throw up the 
 cards. That only a few do so proves that more or less 
 consciously most of us have a general view of life not 
 altogether unfavourable. We are for the most part 
 hardly aware of this general view, because it is always 
 the same. We should become painfully aware of it if it 
 were suddenly to change. There is, as it were, a suicide- 
 mark below which our philosophy is always liable to 
 sink. If we came to think life irreconcilably opposed 
 to our ideals, and at the same time were enthusiastically 
 devoted to them, life would become intolerable to 
 us. If our sense of the misery or emptiness of life 
 became for some reason much more keen than it is, 
 life w r ould at last become intolerable to us. Individuals 
 are constantly travelling by both roads to this goal, and 
 there is no reason why whole societies or nations should 
 not in like manner cease to think life valuable. Some- 
 thing of the kind happened with the Stoics of the 
 imperial period. Their philosophy was only just above 
 suicide-mark, and was continually dropping below it. 
 In Asia the same is true of whole populations, with 
 whom the value of life has sunk to the very lowest point. 
 
 Of all these classes of men we say justly that they 
 want faith. Their criminality or languor or despair 
 are the consequences of their having no faith. But we 
 
G2 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 sometimes express the same thing differently, and say 
 that they have no God, no theology. With our Chris- 
 tian habit of connecting God with goodness and love, 
 we confuse together the notions of a theology and a 
 faith. Let us reflect that it is quite possible to have a 
 theology without having a faith. We may believe in a 
 God, but a God unfavourable, hostile, or indifferent to 
 us. In the same way we may believe in a God neither 
 altogether friendly nor altogether the reverse. Many 
 Pagan theologies were of this kind, and even many 
 Christian sects, while nominally holding the perfect 
 benevolence of God, have practically worshipped a 
 Being who in this respect did not differ from the 
 Pagan deities. 
 
 It would be legitimate to call such general views of 
 the relation of Nature to our ideals by the name of 
 theology in all cases, and not merely those particular 
 general views which are encouraging. If we believe 
 that Nature helps us in our strivings, we have both a 
 theology and a faith ; if we believe that Nature is in- 
 different to us or hostile to us, we have no faith, but we 
 have still a theology, for we have still a definite notion 
 of God's dealings with us. And this use of the word 
 is not only justified by its etymology ; it is much more 
 conformable to actual usage. To identify theology with 
 the doctrine of the supernatural is, as I have pointed 
 out, to narrow the meaning of the word unnaturally, 
 and to appropriate it to .a particular part of a par- 
 ticular theological system. A deception is produced 
 by giving this technical sense to .a word which in the 
 common understanding has ,a much larger meaning. 
 When those who reject the .supernatural declare 
 
'THEOLOGY* AND 'RELIGION: 63 
 
 theology to be exploded, they are commonly under- 
 stood to mean that a vast mass of doctrine, partly 
 moral, partly historical, partly physical, in which the 
 supernatural is mixed up, is exploded, whereas all they 
 really say is that just that part is exploded which is 
 supported only by the evidence of the supernatural. 
 In like manner it is but a small part of what is com- 
 monly understood by theology that has to do with final 
 causes, and yet those who consider final causes not 
 objects of knowledge are fond of drawing the inference 
 that all theological systems must be systems of spurious 
 knowledge. Sometimes this juggle which is practised 
 with the word theology becomes grotesquely apparent, 
 and a sceptic will tell us in the same breath that theo- 
 logy deals with matters entirely beyond the range of 
 human intellect, and that theology has been refuted by 
 the discoveries of modern science ! 
 
 The questions which we all understand to be theo- 
 logical are such as these : Is there a reward for virtue ? 
 Is there a compensation for undeserved misery ? Is 
 there a sure retribution for crime ? Is there hope that 
 the vicious marLmay become virtuous ? Are there means 
 by which the pressure upon the conscience produced by 
 wrong-doing may be removed? Are there means by 
 which the mind disposed to virtue may defend itself 
 from temptation ? In one word, is life worth having, 
 and the Universe a habitable place for one in whom 
 the sense of duty has been awakened ? These questions 
 are answered in different ways by different men. But 
 they are answered in some way by all men, even by 
 those who consider themselves to have no theology at 
 all. Christianity is the system which answers them in 
 
64 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 the most encouraging way. It says that virtue in the 
 long run will be happy partly in this life, but much 
 more in a life beyond the grave. It says that misery is 
 partly the punishment of crime, partly the probation of 
 virtue ; but in the inexhaustible future which belongs 
 to each individual man there are equivalents and over- 
 payments for all that part of it which is undeserved. 
 It says that virtue, when tried, may count upon help, 
 secret refreshings that come in answer to prayer - 
 friends providentially sent, perhaps guardian angels. 
 It says that souls entangled in wrong- doing may raise 
 themselves out of it by a mystic union with Christ, and 
 burdened consciences be relieved by sharing in the 
 infinite merit of His self-sacrifice. If you ask on what 
 so happy and inspiring a belief rests, the evidence pro- 
 duced is in part supernatural. 
 
 This is not only a theology but a faith, the most 
 triumphant of all faiths. But those who do not heartily 
 share it or who consciously reject it, yet give some 
 answer to these questions. They have a theology as 
 much as Christians ; they must even have a faith of 
 some sort, otherwise they would renounce human life. 
 It may be stated perhaps much as follows : 
 
 " We have not much reason to believe in any future 
 state. We are content to look at human life as it lies 
 visibly before us. Surveying it so, we find that it is 
 indeed very different from what we could wish it to be. 
 It is full of failures and miseries. Multitudes die 
 without knowing anything that can be called happiness, 
 while almost all know too well what is meant by 
 misery. The pains that men endure are frightfully 
 intense, their enjoyments for the most part moderate. 
 
'THEOLOGY* AND ^ RELIGION \ 65 
 
 They are seldom aware of happiness while it is present, 
 so very delicate a thing is it. When it is past they 
 recognize for the first time, or perhaps fancy, that it was 
 present. If we could measure all the happiness there 
 is in the world, we should perhaps be rather pained 
 than gladdened by discovering the amount of it ; if we 
 could measure all the misery we should be appalled be- 
 yond description. When from happiness we pass to the 
 moral ideal, again we find the world disappointing. It 
 is not a sacred place any more than it is a happy place. 
 Vice and crime very frequently prosper in it. Some 
 of the worst of men are objects of enthusiastic admira- 
 tion and emulation. Some of the best have been hated 
 and persecuted. Much virtue passes away entirely 
 unacknowledged; much flagrant hypocrisy escapes 
 detection. 
 
 " Still on the whole we find life worth having. The 
 misery we find ourselves able to forget, or callously 
 live through. It is but not thinking, which is always 
 easy, and we become insensible to whatever evil does 
 not affect ourselves. And though the happiness is not 
 great, the variety is. Life is interesting, if not happy. 
 Moreover in spite of all the injustice of destiny, all the 
 inequality with which fortune is meted out, yet it 
 may be discerned that, at least in the more fortunate 
 societies, justice is the rule and injustice the exception. 
 There are laws by which definite crimes are punished, 
 there is a force of opinion which reaches vaguer offences 
 and visits even the disposition to vice with a certain 
 penalty. Virtue seldom goes without some reward, 
 however inadequate ; if it is not recognized generally or 
 publicly, it finds here and there an admirer, it gathers 
 s. 5 
 
66 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 round it a little circle of love; when even this is 
 wanting it often shews a strange power of rewarding 
 itself. On the whole, we are sustained and reconciled 
 to life by a certain feeling of hope, by a belief, resting 
 upon real evidence, that things improve and better 
 themselves around us." 
 
 This is certainly a very different faith from Chris- 
 tianity. Whether it deserves to be called a faith at all, 
 whether it justifies men in living and in calling others 
 into life, may be doubted. But it is just as much a 
 theology as Christianity. It deals with just the same 
 questions and gives an answer to them, though a diffe- 
 rent answer. Both views, whatever may be professed, 
 are views about God. Christianity regards God as a 
 friend; it says that He is Love. The other view regards 
 Him as awful, distant, inhuman, yet not radically hostile. 
 
 Of course such views of human life, while they 
 remain thus vague and loose, have nothing scientific 
 about them. But if they ceased to be vague, if preci- 
 sion were given to them, we should have a science of 
 the relation of the Universe to human ideals. Such 
 a science is constructing itself fast. The more men 
 come to know Nature and to feel confidence in their 
 knowledge, the more eagerly they will consider what 
 is the attitude of Nature towards human beings. 
 This question is not one which is in any way removed 
 from human knowledge, it is not one which it can 
 be considered morbid to betray curiosity about. Yet 
 this is the question of theology. Not only is it the 
 only question with which theology ought to be con- 
 cerned; it is the only question with which theology 
 ever has been concerned. The theologies of the 
 
'THEOLOGY' AND 'RELIGION'. 67 
 
 world are merely different attempts to answer it. 
 If they have for the most part trespassed upon the 
 ground of the supernatural, this has not been because 
 theology is necessarily concerned with the super- 
 natural, but in some cases because the line between 
 the natural and supernatural had not been clearly 
 drawn, in some cases because it was honestly believed 
 that supernatural occurrences had happened and 
 could be authenticated, and that such occurrences were 
 calculated to throw new light upon the relation of God 
 to man. If this belief was a delusion, theology must 
 learn to confine itself to Nature. It may have to alter 
 its idea of God, it may have to regard Him with fear 
 and cold awe as in the days before the Gospel was 
 published ; it may even cease to be a faith, and may 
 become an incubus, a scientific superstition. But 
 theology will remain notwithstanding a perfectly legiti- 
 mate study, one which, under that or under some 
 other name, men will always pursue with an interest 
 they can feel in no other, one which stands in a more 
 intimate relation than any other to morality, and must 
 always be taught in conjunction with morality. 
 
 We arrive then at the conclusion that there is a 
 natural theology which inquires into the relation of the 
 Universe to human ideals. But here we must beware 
 of a common misconception. It is often said that when 
 you substitute Nature for God you take a thing 
 heartless and pitiless instead of love and goodness. 
 Undoubtedly much less of love and goodness can 
 be discovered in Nature than Christians see in God. 
 But when it is said that there are no such qualities in 
 Nature, that Nature consists of relentless and ruthless 
 
 52 
 
68 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 laws, that Nature knows nothing of forgiveness, and 
 inexorably exacts the utmost penalty for every trans- 
 gression, a confusion is made between two different 
 meanings which may be given to the word Nature. We 
 are concerned here with Nature as opposed to that 
 which is above Nature, not with Nature as opposed to 
 man. We use it as a name comprehending all the 
 uniform laws of the Universe as known in our experi- 
 ence, and excluding such laws as are inferred from ex- 
 periences so exceptional and isolated as to be difficult of 
 verification. In this sense Nature is not heartless or 
 unrelenting; to say so would be equivalent to saying 
 that pity and forgiveness are in all cases supernatural. 
 It may be true that the law of gravitation is quite 
 pitiless, that it will destroy the most innocent and 
 amiable person with as little hesitation as the wrong- 
 doer. But there are other laws which are not pitiless. 
 There are laws under which human beings form them- 
 selves into communities, and set up courts in which 
 the claims of individuals are weighed with careful skill. 
 There are laws under which churches and philan- 
 thropical societies are formed, under which misery is 
 sought out and relieved and every evil that can be dis- 
 covered in the world is redressed. Nature, in the 
 sense in which we are now using the word, in eludes 
 humanity, and therefore, so far from being pitiless, 
 includes all the pity that belongs to the whole human 
 family, and all the pity that they have accumulated 
 and, as it were, capitalised in institutions, political, 
 social, and ecclesiastical, through countless generations. 
 If we abandoned our belief in the supernatural it 
 would not be only inanimate Nature that would be left 
 
'THEOLOGY* AND 'RELIGION*. 69 
 
 to us; we should not give ourselves over, as it is often 
 rhetorically described, to the mercy of merciless powers 
 winds and waves, earthquakes, volcanoes and fire. 
 The God we should believe in would not be a pas- 
 sionless, utterly inhuman power. He would indeed 
 be a God often neglecting us in our need, a God 
 often deaf to prayers. Nature including Humanity 
 would be our God. We should read His character 
 not merely in the earthquake and fire, but also in 
 the still small voice; not merely in the destroying 
 powers of the world, but, as Mohammed said, in 
 the compassion that we feel for one another; not 
 merely in the storm that threatens the sailor with 
 death, but in the lifeboat and the Grace Darling that 
 put out from shore to the rescue ; not merely in the 
 intricate laws that confound our prudence, but in the 
 science that penetrates them and the art which makes 
 them subservient to our purposes; not merely in the 
 social evils that fill our towns with misery and cover 
 our frontiers with war, but in the St Francis that 
 makes himself the brother of the miserable, and in the 
 Fox and PemTthat proclaim principles of peace. 
 
 Let us take one of the principal doctrines of the 
 supernatural theology, and observe how it is modi- 
 fied by the rejection of supernaturalism. The eternal 
 happiness reserved for the just is one of these doctrines. 
 No natural evidence can establish it, nor even the 
 future life involved in it. Even when the Psalmist, 
 speaking merely of the present life, wrote, "I have 
 been young, and now am old, and yet saw I never 
 the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their 
 bread," he perhaps thought of supernatural inter- 
 
70 tfAVURAL RELIGION. 
 
 positions by which evil was averted from the just 
 man. Suppose now that we repudiate all such beliefs, 
 and confine ourselves strictly to the facts of Nature as 
 we discover them from uniform experience. Let us 
 suppose that the ordinary laws of Nature govern the 
 lot of the just man, and that no exemptions are made 
 in his favour. Do we find that these ordinary laws 
 take no account of his justice, and that his prospects 
 are in no respect different from those of the unjust 
 man 1 Is Nature, as distinguished from the super- 
 natural, regardless of the distinction between virtue 
 and vice ? No doubt Nature is not a perfectly just 
 judge. The just man has misfortunes like the unjust; 
 he may suffer from accident or disease. His justice 
 may be denied; he may suffer the penalties of injustice. 
 All this may happen in particular cases, and yet no 
 one doubts that on the whole the just man reaps a 
 reward for his justice. A very simple law operates 
 to reward him. By his justice he benefits the com- 
 munity, and the community, partly out of gratitude, 
 partly out of an interested calculation, repay him for 
 the service he has done. This law fails of its effect in 
 a good number of cases, but in the majority of cases 
 it does not fail. And when it fails, it seldom fails 
 altogether. There is generally some reward for justice, 
 if not always an adequate reward. Accordingly, not 
 only Christians, or those who believe in something 
 more than Nature, but those whose only God is 
 Nature, and even those whose knowledge of Nature 
 is very superficial, fully recognize that virtue is re- 
 warded. "Honesty is the best policy" has become 
 a proverb, and hypocrites have come into existence 
 
'THJZOLOGY' AND RELIGION*. 71 
 
 hoping to secure the reward without deserving it. 
 We see, then, that those who believe in Nature only 
 may be said to believe not only in a God, but, in 
 some sense, in a personal God. Their God, at least, 
 has so much of personality that He takes account of 
 the distinction of virtue and vice, that He punishes 
 crime, and that He relieves distress. 
 
 "It is quite true," says Maudsley writing purely as 
 a physiologist, "that the just man is supported by 
 everlasting arms." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 ,, 
 
 THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 
 
 As theology is to be distinguished from religion, a 
 great dominant system such as Christianity, which is 
 both a theology and a religion, has naturally two dis- 
 tinct classes of opponents. Hitherto I have spoken of 
 those who oppose it as it is a theology, that is, the 
 scientific school, and incidentally I have referred to the 
 Revolution (which sees in Christianity properly neither 
 a theology nor a religion, but a great social and poli- 
 tical organisation), in order to shew how purely casual 
 is its coalition with Science. It remains to consider 
 the opposition which, is made to Christianity as it is a 
 religion. 
 
 The scientific school, as such, contents itself with 
 criticism and makes no affirmation in respect of reli- 
 gion. Individual members of it in many cases look 
 forward to nothing but the downfall of religion. 
 Wholly distinct from this school is the party which, 
 while it rejects Christianity, proclaims religion to be the 
 highest of all things and looks forward to a great re- 
 newal of its influence. But again we find this party 
 divided within itself as soon as we inquire what the 
 religion is which they regard as destined to replace 
 
THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 73 
 
 Christianity. One section says that Humanity will be 
 in future the object of worship, but meanwhile for 
 many generations past a long line of insinuators have 
 been repeating under their breath that the time would 
 come when Pantheism would prevail, when the super- 
 natural tyrant of the Universe would give way to the 
 Universe itself. There are further differences of opinion 
 as to the form which this Pantheism will take, and 
 often it may be observed that the purer sweeter wor- 
 ship which is promised to us is pictured as a revival of 
 Greek Paganism. 
 
 I have tried to shew that what is commonly called 
 Atheism may be less shocking, because less atheistic, 
 than it seems. In like manner the new experiments 
 in worship may be less subversive of the old worship 
 than they seem to be. That we ought to worship 
 Man, that St Paul at Athens assailed true and not 
 false deities, are propositions which may after all convey 
 nothing so impious. The words religion and worship 
 are commonly and conveniently appropriated to the 
 feelings with which we regard God. But those 
 feelings love," awe, admiration, which together make 
 up worship are felt in various combinations for human 
 beings, and even for inanimate objects. It is not 
 exclusively but only par excellence that religion is 
 directed towards God. When feelings of admiration 
 are very strong they find vent in some act ; when they 
 are strong and at the same time serious and permanent, 
 they express themselves in recurring acts, and hence 
 arises ritual, liturgy, and whatever the multitude 
 identifies with religion. But without ritual, religion 
 may exist in its elementary state, and this elementary 
 
74 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 state of religion is what may be described as habitual 
 and permanent admiration. 
 
 Now it is surely not to be supposed that every 
 higher form of religion ought to supersede and drive 
 out the lower forms. Difficult no doubt it is to restrain 
 religious feeling from such intolerance. Eeligious feeling 
 in its exaltation delights to repeat that worship paid 
 to any but the highest object is sin and is apostasy. 
 But this is a way of speaking which involves a some- 
 what arbitrary restriction upon the meaning of the 
 word worship. Feelings of admiration and devotion 
 are of various degrees, and are excited by various 
 objects. Such feelings may be called by the general 
 name of worship, and we may be said, without offence, 
 to regard an official as worshipful, to worship a wife, to 
 worship heroes. But the same word may also be used 
 in a special and technical sense to denote the par- 
 ticular sort of devotion paid to the highest object we 
 recognize, and it is in this sense alone that the word 
 is used when religion forbids worship to be paid to 
 whatever is in any degree worshipful. Churches how- 
 ever are often intolerant in pushing this way of speak- 
 ing beyond bounds. The greatest religious revolution 
 in history is, in the main, simply a reaction against 
 such intolerance, when the right of .ideal humanity 
 to receive worship was asserted in the heart of a 
 people devoted to the exclusive worship of Deity. 
 And in modern history there are many evidences of 
 a reaction secretly in progress against the absorption 
 of that earlier and lower form of religion which may 
 be called physical by the higher forms. Paganism 
 itself, many think and why should it not be true ? 
 

 THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 75 
 
 was too intolerantly put down. Even if the intole- 
 rance of a necessary and beneficent revolution is par- 
 donable, that is no reason why it should not be 
 repaired in later and quieter times. The horror of 
 physical nature which marked the middle ages has 
 passed away from the modern mind ; the iconoclasm 
 which raged against Greek art and heathen learning is 
 no more necessary to Christianity than the hatred of 
 painted windows is to Protestantism. The worship of 
 natural forms has gradually revived. They now receive 
 a secondary and inferior sort of homage, and so much 
 in this respect has the world advanced that there is 
 little danger of any worship we may pay to natural 
 beauty blunting our sense of the higher reverence due 
 to moral goodness. 
 
 It thus appears that, as usual, the vague horror 
 with which the religious world hears of the worship of 
 Humanity or of a sort of revival of Paganism has been 
 partly caused by the double meaning of a word. The 
 worship of Humanity, it is plain, belongs to the very 
 essence of Christianity itself, and only becomes heretical 
 in the modern system by being separated from the wor- 
 ship of Deity. As to the worship of natural forms, 
 verbally no doubt nothing can be more plainly opposed 
 both to Judaism and Christianity. It is even true that 
 not merely the excess of it or the substitution of it for 
 a higher worship, but the worship itself in all forms, is 
 denounced in the Jewish Scriptures. But to those who 
 take the free historical view of Hebrew prophecy it is 
 not difficult at the same time to revere its denuncia- 
 tions of idolatry, and to sympathise warmly with Greek 
 nature-worship. For it is easy to understand that 
 
76 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 nature-worship as a practical system known to the 
 Hebrews might be degrading and pernicious, and yet 
 that in itself it might contain some healthy elements 
 which in exceptional conditions beyond the observation 
 of Hebrew prophecy might take a beautiful develop- 
 ment, and become a necessary part of the religion of 
 mankind. We might without difficulty adopt the idea 
 of a sort of Higher Paganism. Still more readily 
 might Christians reconcile themselves to the worship 
 of Humanity. That which may reasonably excite 
 alarm in these new systems is not their affirmations 
 but their negations, not the new worships in them- 
 selves but the repudiation of the ancient worship 
 of God. 
 
 And thus we are led to ask in respect to the con- 
 troversy between Christianity and these rival religions, 
 the same question which we asked at the outset in 
 respect to the dispute between Christianity and Science, 
 Is the difference really as radical as it seems ? And 
 again the same answer suggests itself, viz., that these 
 rival schools of religion also have identified Christianity 
 and Theism far too much with the doctrine of the 
 Supernatural. Both alike have inquired what religion 
 would be possible to man if he ceased to believe in 
 anything beyond Nature. They have agreed that all 
 the Semitic religions would necessarily fall, but they 
 have formed different notions of the religion which 
 would take their place. One school has imagined a 
 revival of the original Paganism, which had something 
 of the character of nature- worship. The other has held 
 that one element of Christianity would be disengaged 
 from the Christian system to become the germ of a new 
 
THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 77 
 
 religion, while all of Christianity that has to do with 
 Deity would perish. 
 
 But however a certain modified Paganism might 
 seem in itself not inadmissible, it is a mere vague literary 
 fancy, which will bear no examination, to imagine this 
 as taking the place of supernatural religion, if super- 
 natural religion should fall. Nothing can be more 
 untrue than that Natural Religion is identical with 
 classical Paganism, and that to adopt it would be 
 to revive the " golden years " Shelley sings of, to sub- 
 stitute a Madre Natura for the Christian Church, 
 and Pan or Apollo for Christ. This is the opposite 
 misconception to that which pictures Nature as piti- 
 less. Nature as opposed to the Supernatural is no 
 more rustically innocent than it is pitiless. For as it 
 is wholly different from Nature as opposed to Man so 
 again it is wholly different from that Nature which 
 may be roughly said to be worshipped in classical 
 Paganism. When we consider that Greek Paganism 
 is as full of supernatural personages and occurrences as 
 the most superstitious forms of medieval Christianity, 
 we may well wonder that such a mistake could be 
 made. But as Greek Paganism is the only religion 
 besides Christianity which has had any chance of taking 
 hold of our imaginations, we cannot help reverting to it. 
 whenever the disappearance of Christianity is prophesied. 
 Then as it is graceful, as we have never been frightened 
 by it as we have been frightened by Christianity, and 
 as it is called a natural religion, we conclude by an 
 easy inadvertence that something like it would revive 
 if the supernatural religion which suppressed it should 
 pass away. But it is a natural religion in a wholly 
 
78 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 different sense, rather as not being moral than as not 
 being supernatural. The fascination of the Fauns and 
 Nymphs of Greek art, the bewitching gaiety of the 
 Pagan hymn in the Adoniazusae, do not arise from the 
 absence of the Supernatural for the Supernatural is 
 present but from the absence of morality and self- 
 consciousness, from a certain infancy of the mind which 
 seems to have been lost in the progress of civilisa- 
 tion. 
 
 It was not the invasion of a Semitic religion that 
 put to flight these bright visions, but the natural pro- 
 gress of human development, giving birth to reflexion, 
 philosophy, morality. And therefore no conceivable 
 decay of Christianity could bring back a primitive 
 way of thinking which had been outgrown long before 
 Christianity appeared. We may indeed, as I have 
 said, admit a sort of Higher Paganism, that is, we may 
 admit that there was an element in the Greek nature- 
 worship which is imperishable. But we may be certain 
 at the same time that the moral ideas which were 
 never incorporated in Greek religion because Greek 
 religion had been struck with decay before their ap- 
 pearance, those ideas of justice, duty, love, and self- 
 sacrifice, many of which are embodied in Christianity, 
 are not less imperishable and are of a higher rank. 
 Nature, considered as the residuum which is left after 
 the elimination of everything supernatural, compre- 
 hends man with all his thoughts and aspirations not 
 less than the forms of the material world. Accordingly 
 the natural religion of which we are in search will 
 certainly include a religion of Humanity as well as a 
 religion of material things. It will retain at least the 
 
THR$E KINDS OF RELIGION. 79 
 
 kernel of Christianity, even if it rejects the shell. It 
 will concern itself with questions of right and wrong, 
 it will run the same risk as Christianity of falling into 
 excesses of introspection and asceticism. But along 
 with this transfigured Christianity, only in a subor- 
 dinate rank, it will include the Higher Paganism or in 
 other words the purified worship of natural forms. 
 
 The rejection of supernaturalism then is not equiva- 
 lent to a rejection of Semitic for Hellenic religion. 
 Hather we find both sorts of religion alike flourishing 
 most freely in an atmosphere of supernaturalism, and 
 both alike languishing at the breath of science, but 
 also we find both sorts of religion acclimatising them- 
 selves with an effort in the scientific atmosphere. The 
 one sort may be more sensuous and the other more 
 moral, but both alike admit of being rationalised. 
 Sensuous religion was supernatural in Greece. The 
 feelings excited in the Greek by the sight of a tree 
 or a fountain did not end where they began, in admira- 
 tion, delight and love; they transformed the natural 
 phenomenon into a marvellous quasi-human being. 
 But the same feelings in the mind of Wordsworth 
 produced a new religion of sense, and this was a natural 
 religion. He worships trees and fountains and flowers 
 for themselves and as they are ; if his imagination 
 at times plays with them, he does not mistake the play 
 for earnest. The daisy, after all, is a flower, and it 
 is as a flower that he likes best to worship it. "Let 
 good men feel the soul of Nature and see things as they 
 are." In like manner moral religion has taken two 
 forms. Christianity (from which we need not here 
 separate Judaism) is to a certain extent a supernatural 
 
80 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 religion, but rationalistic forms of it have sprung up ; 
 attempts have been made to disentangle the religious 
 principle which is at the bottom of it from the super- 
 natural element with which it is mixed. The religion 
 of Humanity which has been springing up in Europe 
 since the middle of the last century seems the most 
 comprehensive and the least artificial of these forms. 
 
 Some such rationalised Christianity then, or religion 
 of Humanity, we may conceive as surviving the fall of 
 the supernatural system. And beside it, reconciled 
 to it, we may imagine the sensuous Hellenic religion. 
 But would this be all ? Is it so evident that all which 
 relates to Deity would pass away ? Is there not some- 
 thing wholly independent of marvel or miracle in that 
 idea of Unity, of Eternity? May not this also take 
 two forms according as it is associated with super- 
 naturalism or divorced from it ? Our innovators in 
 religion seem scarcely to conceive the possibility of 
 this. And no wonder, for if all religion loves miracle, 
 the religion of God must do so in an especial man- 
 ner. Our experience of a limited physical phenome- 
 non may be some measure of its powers ; we may 
 feel sure that we know the utmost it can do. But 
 who can place any limits to Nature or to the Universe ? 
 We may indeed require rigid proof of whatever trans- 
 cends our experience, but it is not only Orientals who 
 say that "with God all things are possible ;" the most 
 scientific men are the most willing to admit that our 
 experience is no measure of Nature, and that it is mere 
 ignorance to pronounce a priori anything to be impos- 
 sible. Accordingly those religions which have had for 
 their object the Unity of the Universe, or what we call 
 
THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 81 
 
 par excellence, God, as distinguished from gods many 
 and lords many, have generally been most lavish of 
 miracle. They have delighted to believe in whatever 
 is most improbable, as best displaying the greatness of 
 their Divinity. Credo quia impossibile is a paradox 
 specially belonging to the religion of God. 
 
 But does it follow, because miracles gather natu- 
 rally round the idea of God, that the idea itself requires 
 them and cannot dispense with them ? Let us imagine 
 all miracles exploded, and the word ' miracle ' itself, 
 except in the sense of a phenomenon as yet unex- 
 plained, dismissed to the vocabulary of poetry. Would 
 the word 'miracle/ thus passing out of serious use, 
 carry with it the word ' God ' ? 
 
 Who does not call to mind those passages in the 
 New Testament in which so strangely to those whose 
 faith rests on Paley's Evidences the demand for 
 miracles is treated with contempt ? Such passages 
 shew that even in a scheme of religion in which 
 miracle plays a considerable part it is not regarded as 
 the only mode of divine action, but rather as the sign 
 of some important change in the mode of divine action, 
 some new dispensation. They shew that the great 
 founders of Semitic religion worshipped rather the God 
 who habitually maintains his laws than the God who 
 occasionally suspends them. 
 
 The question here proposed is not whether, if the 
 evidence of miracles were exploded, there would still 
 remain other grounds for believing in a God beyond 
 Nature and even in a God holding communication with 
 us otherwise than through Nature. This has often 
 been maintained, and demonstrations of various kinds, 
 s, 6 
 
82 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 metaphysical, moral, and mystical, of the existence of 
 such a God have been offered. But the present ques- 
 tion relates not to any God who is beyond Nature, but 
 to a God who is only Nature called by another name. 
 And the question is whether any worship worth calling 
 worship can be offered to such a Deity. 
 
 This form of religion is commonly called Pantheism, 
 but it is seldom thought -of seriously. By the orthodox 
 it has been treated as the mere phantom of a religion, 
 while the innovators have preferred the speculation of 
 a religion of humanity. Hence it has been left to a 
 few poets, who misled by the idyllic associations of the 
 word Nature and the syllable Pan, have indulged in 
 the irrelevant fancies criticised above. The God in 
 Nature with whom we are here- concerned is no rustic 
 Pan. If there be, as we have held, a legitimate form 
 of Paganism, it does not belong here. That is a religion 
 of natural forms ; it is just the freshness of feeling with 
 which the healthy mind admires and grows to the living 
 things around it ; of all religions it is the easiest, 
 simplest, most childlike. But this religion is in the 
 other extreme ; it is austere, abstract, sublime. It 
 worships, not the individual forms of Nature, but 
 Nature itself considered as a unity. It may indeed 
 be called out by the same objects, a tree or a flower, 
 the sky or the sea. But in that case what it worships 
 is as little as possible the object itself, for this religion 
 looks through and beyond visible things as naturally 
 as Paganism rests in them. The infant and the man of 
 science may admire the same flower, but while the 
 former babbles his Pagan hymn to the form and the 
 colour, the latter loses both in the law which he sees 
 

 THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 83 
 
 behind them, loses the individual in the kind, and the 
 kind itself in the vista of higher unities above it. Or 
 may we not illustrate the difference as well by contrast- 
 ing the Hebrew poet's Psalm of Nature with Homer's 
 descriptions. While the latter touches in turn the sea, the 
 clouds, the wind, with some bright epithet that marks 
 his enjoyment, the former instinctively collects them all 
 under one grand unity Who layeth the beams of his 
 chambers in the waters, who maketh the clouds his 
 chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the wind. 
 
 This worship of the Unity in the Universe is to be 
 found in most historic religions conjoined with other 
 worships which are in some cases much more prominent, 
 The simplest form of it perhaps is Mohammedanism, 
 which not only contemplates a unity of the world, but 
 seems almost indifferent to the phenomena themselves, 
 the unity of which it contemplates. Absorbed in the 
 idea of the greatness of God it loses its interest in the 
 visible evidences of His greatness. But in most cases 
 this religion of unity is combined with one or both of 
 the other religions. The unity worshipped is not an 
 abstract unity, but a unity either of the physical or of 
 the moral world or of both. In Paganism the physical 
 world is not worshipped simply for itself, but a feeble 
 attempt is made to establish some unity among its 
 phenomena by setting up a supreme Jove over the 
 multitude of deities. In the moral religions the ten- 
 dency to unity is still stronger. Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity are at once religions of humanity and religions 
 of God, and the former at least is primarily a religion 
 of God and only secondarily a religion of humanity. 
 
 This worship is not less necessary than the others. 
 
 62 
 
81 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 When natural objects have had their due, when virtue 
 and duty have been fully reverenced, is there not a 
 further and greater object of reverence, whose existence 
 we must recognize, even though we believe in nothing 
 supernatural, even though we indulge in no subtle 
 psychological analysis ? It is certain that the thought 
 of a Supreme Being, which is so natural to man, is not 
 excited only by occasional suspensions of law nor only 
 by secret unaccountable monitions felt in the con- 
 science. It is excited at least as much by law itself 
 as by the suspension of law; it is excited quite as 
 much by looking around as by looking within. It is 
 quite distinct also this is no less certain from the 
 thought of ideal humanity. Linnaeus fell on his knees 
 when he saw the gorse in blossom ; Goethe, gazing 
 from the Brocken, said, "Lord, what is man that 
 thou art mindful of him?" Kant felt the same awe 
 in looking at the starry heaven as in considering 
 the moral principle ; Wordsworth is inspired rather 
 among mountains than among human beings ; in solitude 
 Byron felt the rapture which ' purified from self/ It is 
 a paradox which will convince few that ' the heavens 
 declare no glory but that of Kepler and of Newton/ 
 
 Who is there that is not conscious of a feeling of 
 awe when he realizes the greatness of the Universe ? 
 When from thinking of this thing and that thing he 
 rises to the thought of the sum and system of 
 things ? 
 
 But now it is an error to suppose that to identify 
 this natural awe with the worship of God is necessarily 
 Pantheism. 
 
 Pantheism asserts an immanent cause, the creed 
 
THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 85 
 
 called orthodox, a transcendent one. But how does 
 this difference, important as it may be in itself, affect 
 the religious awe I speak of? That will remain the 
 same, in whichever way we prefer to conceive the 
 Universe. The two theories agree in this, that they 
 give a unity, though a different kind of unity, to 
 the Universe. Now religious feeling is excited by 
 thinking of the Universe as a unity and not merely 
 by the particular form in which we give it unity in our 
 minds. 
 
 Why should our feeling towards universal nature 
 vary with our theories about it, any more than our 
 feeling towards human nature I The Man, like the 
 Universe, is a highly complex phenomenon, which we 
 conceive as a unity. About the Man, as about the 
 Universe, there are two theories. Has he a soul, which 
 dwells in his body as an inmate until it is expelled by 
 death ? Or is this but a hypothesis and a useless one ? 
 Few questions can be more important. Nevertheless, 
 we do not find that those who reject the hypothesis 
 are as if they did not believe in the human being at 
 all. Their feelings towards the human being may be 
 just as lively as if they believed him to have a separ- 
 able soul. And there may be a third class of people 
 who do not even raise the question, who have no 
 opinion whatever on the controverted point, and whose 
 feelings towards human beings may also be not less 
 lively, or may even be more lively than those of 
 either of the warring parties. 
 
 It is, in fact, neither the separable soul of a man, 
 nor yet the body of a man that excites our feelings 
 of respect or dislike, friendship or enmity ; it is the 
 
8G NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 man himself, in other words, it is the unity of all 
 the organs composing him, the single total to which 
 we give that name. Not otherwise is it with the 
 Universe. When we realize it as one we utter the 
 name God, and in doing so we do not pledge 
 ourselves to the doctrine that God is the Universe, 
 nor yet to the doctrine that He is distinct from 
 it. 
 
 * But why say God, if you merely mean Universe 
 or World or Nature ? Would it not be better to reserve 
 the name God for the distinct, invisible, eternal Cause 
 of the Universe which is supposed in most religions, 
 which is denied in Pantheism, and put aside as an 
 unverified hypothesis in Positivism 1 ?' 
 
 This is indeed only a verbal question, for we do 
 not alter the nature of the Object of our worship 
 when we alter the name by which we describe it. 
 Whatever feelings it legitimately excites will be 
 excited as much under one name as under another. 
 Still if a name can ever be important, the name by 
 which we habitually indicate the Eternal Being will 
 be so. Instinctively we attach so much sacredness 
 to that name that we can scarcely bear that it 
 should give place to another, even if another could 
 be found more appropriate. It is the name God 
 which has acquired everywhere this sacredness ; it is 
 the name God to which poetry and religion cling, and 
 certainly very strong reasons ought to be shown before 
 we can be expected to tear that name from our hearts 
 and replace it by some other hallowed as yet by no 
 associations. 
 
 Shall we abandon it for the term Universe ? That 
 
THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 87 
 
 expresses not indeed etymologically but in usage 
 the total of things arrived at, as it were, by mere 
 collection or addition. But we are thinking of the 
 unity which all things compose in virtue of the uni- 
 versal presence of the same laws. The word World 
 has also associations which render it ineligible. In the 
 first place, it has been conveniently adopted to express 
 the very opposite of what we want to express. The 
 artificial, conventional order which communities esta- 
 blish among themselves an order unnatural, transitory, 
 and tending to corruption has been called World, and 
 has been contrasted by poets with Nature and by theo- 
 logians with God. Even when the word is used 
 otherwise, and is a mere synonym for Universe, it still 
 conveys rather the notion of a place in which we live, 
 of an immense residence or house, than the notion 
 of an infinite Being, with which we are connected 
 as the part is connected with the whole, or as the 
 member with the body. 
 
 Moreover, it is to be observed that by using these 
 words we seem to close the very question we wish to 
 leave open ; for- both seem adapted to express only 
 the pantheistic view, both seem implicitly to deny 
 the other view. It is as if we were to insist upon 
 calling the human being by the name Body, The 
 opposite objection cannot be made to the name God : 
 it cannot be said that this name excludes the pan- 
 theistic view. The etymology of the word Pantheism 
 is sufficient by itself to prove that it does not. Nor 
 is it solely in connexion with the theory opposite to 
 Pantheism that the word God has gained its peculiar 
 sacredness and awfulness. From the Bible itself it 
 
88 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 is easy to quote pantheistic language " In whom we 
 live and move and have our being." Both in Judaism 
 and Christianity the word is used for the most part 
 in the large indeterminate sense. Texts of Scripture 
 may be quoted no doubt in support of either view, but 
 on both sides alike they would be misquoted, for their 
 language, as others have forcibly urged, is not scientific 
 but practical, or what on such subjects is the same 
 thing poetical. Many have found that they received 
 a new revelation of the sublimity of the Bible when 
 first they learnt to use the word 'God' in what may 
 be called its natural sense. 
 
 It is the word Nature which science, in its tra- 
 ditional aversion to theological language, most willingly 
 adopts. There can be no objection to using it, and 
 on most occasions one would choose it in preference 
 to a word which, no doubt, is too sacred to be intro- 
 duced unnecessarily too sacred, in short, to be worked 
 with. But it is well known to be one of the most 
 ambiguous of words. Nature, as the word has hitherto 
 been used by scientific men, excludes the whole domain 
 of human feeling, will and morality. Nevertheless, in 
 contemplating the relation of the Universe to ourselves 
 and to our destiny, or again in contemplating it as a 
 subject of admiration and worship, the human side 
 of the Universe is the more important side to us. 
 Our destiny is affected by the society in which we 
 live more than by the natural conditions which sur- 
 round us, and the moral virtues are higher objects of 
 worship than natural beauty and glory. Accordingly 
 the word Nature suggests but a part, and the less 
 important part, of the idea for which we are seeking an 
 
THREE KINDS OF RELIGION. 89 
 
 expression. Nature presents herself to us as a goddess 
 of unweariable vigour and unclouded happiness, but 
 without any trouble or any compunction in her eye, 
 without a conscience or a heart. But God, as the 
 word is used by ancient prophets and modern poets 
 God, if the word have not lost in our ears some of its 
 meaning through the feebleness of the preachers who 
 have undertaken to interpret it, conveys all this beauty 
 and greatness and glory, and conveys besides whatever 
 more awful forces stir within the human heart, what- 
 ever binds men in families, and orders them in states. 
 He is the Inspirer of kings, the Revealer of laws, the 
 Reconciler of nations, the Redeemer of labour, the 
 Queller of tyrants, the Reformer of churches, the Guide 
 of the human race towards an unknown goal. 
 
CHAPTER Y. 
 
 NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 
 
 " BUT what consolation is to be found in such a wor- 
 ship ? What is the use of believing in such a God I" 
 This is the objection that may be looked for. It is true 
 that the conception of God in Nature, however evi- 
 dently great, sublime, and glorious, is at the same time 
 a painful and oppressive conception to us. The thought 
 of the unity of the Universe is not felt by all to 
 be inspiring ; the belief in it is not necessarily a faith. 
 For we must look at the bad side of the Universe as 
 well as the good. The Power we contemplate is the 
 power of death as well as life, of decay as well as of 
 vigour ; in human affairs He is the power of reaction 
 as well as of progress, of barbarism as well as of 
 civilization, of corruption as well as of reform, of im- 
 mobility as well as of movement, of the past as well 
 as of the future. In one of the grandest hymns ever 
 addressed to Him, this mixed feeling of terror and 
 fascination with which we naturally regard Him is 
 strongly marked : "Thou turnest man to destruction; 
 again Thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men. 
 For we consume away in Thine anger, and in Thy 
 wrath we are troubled." Bearing this in mind, it has 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE, 91 
 
 become a habit with us to say that God thus con- 
 ceived is not God at all, and to treat belief in God as 
 equivalent to a belief in something beyond these 
 appearances, something which gives the preponderance 
 to good and makes the evil evanescent in comparison 
 with it. If we cannot grasp this belief in something 
 beyond, it is thought that what is visible on the face 
 of the Universe is a mere nightmare, "Call it God, 
 if you will ; but it is a God upon whose face no man 
 can look and live ; from such a God it is well to turn 
 away our eyes. What is the use of such a God ? " 
 
 But meanwhile He is there. Though the heart 
 ache to contemplate Him, He is there. Can we turn 
 our eyes away from Him \ In which direction should 
 we turn them ? 
 
 No doubt however many have found it possible to 
 look upon the Universe and see no such Being. They 
 have thought only of each thing as it came ; they have 
 refrained from viewing things in the whole which they 
 constitute. And though others have denounced such 
 Philistinism, and the 'disconnexion dull and spiritless ' 
 of Philistine conceptions, yet no doubt a certain peace 
 of mind is gained by such modesty. No doubt the 
 religious man will ofttimes be disconcerted, as Bobert 
 Hall was disconcerted by reading Miss Austen's novels, 
 when he realises the contentment that may attend a 
 finished secularity, and the charm that may be given 
 in description to a Philistine world. But the content- 
 ment after all is a ' want-begotten rest/ and the charm 
 is that of still life. The mind that is truly awake will 
 perceive the great Unity; at least, if it is possible to 
 remain a stranger to the thought, it is scarcely possible 
 
92 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 to lose it after having been once enlightened, after 
 having once admitted a conception which so rapidly 
 modifies the mind into which it enters. 
 
 But is this conception really so efficacious to modify 
 the mind ? Is it of any practical value I Is it not too 
 large and vague ? Or if its power over minds in a 
 certain stage cannot be denied, if the wonderful effect 
 it has had, even in its rudest shape, over the nations 
 that have been converted to Mohammedanism must be 
 acknowledged, yet is there any reason to believe that 
 civilised minds retain flexibility enough to be moulded 
 by such influences ? The question, when examined, re- 
 solves itself into two, of which only one is at all 
 difficult to answer. That such a conception may exert 
 a practical empire only too absolute, inspire a practical 
 energy only too intense and an iconoclasm only too 
 intolerant, is precisely what the new attitude of Science 
 shows us. That reign of Science which is announced in 
 these days as a kind of ultimate Reformation, what is it 
 but the general diffusion and the acceptance as a prac- 
 tical rule of this very conception of God in nature? 
 Nothing but the vast slowness and intricacy of the pro- 
 cess, drawn out through centuries, by which it has 
 become dominant, with the constant appeal it made to 
 toleration as long as it was weak, could have prevented 
 us from seeing how masterful and rigorous the concep- 
 tion itself is and how intolerant it may become in the 
 day of its power. There is no danger that the new 
 system, considered as a theology, will be tame or 
 colourless. But what will it be, considered as a re- 
 ligion 7 ? That the religion of Unity may exist and be 
 effective without the help of the Supernatural, has been 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 93 
 
 shown. But it remains to show that in the advanced 
 stages of human culture this religion can take posses- 
 sion of the mind and shape it with a power like that 
 which other religions have wielded in other ages. 
 
 Religious men tell us that God, viewed in Nature 
 alone, appears so awful, so devoid of moral perfections, 
 as to be no proper object of worship. 
 
 Unquestionably there is some real foundation for 
 this opinion. That God is too awful to be wor- 
 shipped has been at times almost admitted by those 
 who have worshipped Him most. Prophets used to 
 speak of entering into the rocks and hiding in the 
 dust for fear of Him. It is only because they were 
 able to perceive dimly that which reassured them, that 
 which mitigated the terror and made the greatness 
 less insufferable, that religious men have been able to 
 retain religious feelings. But for this they would 
 have felt nothing but a stony stupefaction ; they would 
 have armed their hearts with callousness, and have 
 encountered life with stoic apathy. Religious men 
 have always been in danger of that scorching of the 
 brain which leads to fanaticism and inhumanity. It 
 is not without danger that the brain tampers with so 
 vast a thought, as on the other hand it can only 
 keep aloof from it by resigning itself to a contemptible 
 littleness. What means there are of escaping this 
 danger is a separate question, but as soon as it is 
 escaped, terror and astonishment pass at once into wor- 
 ship. Apart from pessimism there is nothing to prevent 
 the most exclusive votary of science from worshipping. 
 Not at any rate because there is no God to worship 
 is science tempted to renounce worsjbip, but it may 
 
 ^Sf%x 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 ^ C 
 
94: NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 be tempted by the necessity of concentration, by the 
 absorbing passion of analysis, by prudential limita- 
 tion of the sphere of study, by a mistaken fear of the 
 snares of the imagination. 
 
 It may be thought that too much weight ought not 
 to be allowed to the declarations of scientific men that 
 their pursuit leads to worship, particularly as such 
 declarations are now less frequently made than formerly. 
 Let us then adduce another proof. 
 
 Worship expresses itself naturally in poetry. And 
 again where a deity is recognized there are votaries, 
 there are those who dedicate their lives to the worship 
 of him. Now, is it true that God viewed in Nature 
 has received the homage of no poetry ? Is it true 
 that Nature has made no votaries, has inspired no one ? 
 Has the Universe always appeared either so awful as 
 to shut the mouths of those who contemplated it, or, 
 on the other hand, so devoid of unity as to excite no 
 single or distinct feeling ? 
 
 It would certainly be of little use to say, Here is 
 God worship Him ! to those at least who have been 
 gazing upon the object all their lives, and yet have 
 seen nothing to worship there ; unless we could show 
 historically that the same contemplation has led 
 others to worship. But this is easy. Ever since the 
 worship of God founded too exclusively on super- 
 naturalism began to decay, the worship of God in 
 nature has shown signs of reviving. Poetry and art in 
 recent times have uniformly, and especially where 
 they have been most hostile to the Church, pointed 
 towards a new form of religion, towards a new wor- 
 ship of God. How striking a phenomenon is the 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 95 
 
 appearance, since the middle of the last century, 
 of the word Nature in all theories of literature 
 and art! 
 
 As worship usually finds its expression in art, 
 calling in architecture to design the temples of its 
 Divinity and painting to embellish them, and invoking 
 him by the aid of the poet and of the musical com- 
 poser, so, on the other hand, art is never really inspired 
 by anything but worship. The true artist is he who 
 worships, for worship is habitual admiration. It is 
 the enthusiastic appreciation of something, and such 
 enthusiastic appreciation is the qualification without 
 which an artist cannot even be conceived. Wherever, 
 therefore, art is, there is religion ; but the religion may 
 be what has been described above as Pagan. It may 
 be a mere appreciation of material and individual 
 beauty. To become religion in the complete sense, it 
 must appreciate the unity in things ; and even of such 
 religion there is a higher and a lower form. The 
 lower form is that which, while it perceives a unity 
 in nature, yet takes at the same time an inadequate 
 view of nature^ not including in its view, or not 
 making sufficiently prominent, what is highest in 
 nature that is, the moral principle. Such religion may 
 be said to worship a mere Jove ; but if morality receives 
 its due place, such religion is, in a worthy sense, the 
 worship of God. Now there took place towards the 
 end of the last century a remarkable revolution in 
 art. For the first time artists began to perceive the 
 unity of what they contemplated ; and for the first 
 time, in consequence, they began to feel that their 
 pursuit w r as no desultory amusement, but an elevating 
 
96 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 worship. Such a thought scarcely entered into the 
 mind of the poets of the seventeenth century. Milton 
 is indeed haunted by the sense of something priestly 
 or prophetic in his vocation, but the conception in its 
 clearness belongs to the age of Goethe and Words- 
 worth, and it has had most manifestly the effect of 
 increasing the self-respect of artists ever since. Here 
 ia the best answer to the question whether God con- 
 sidered purely in Nature is an object of worship. No 
 terror, and still less any hopeless incomprehensibility 
 in Nature, prevented these poets from rendering a 
 worship by which their own lives were dignified, and 
 in a manner hallowed. 
 
 Many names from many countries might be quoted 
 in illustration of this, for it was characteristic of that 
 age that everywhere the men of sensibility, the artists, 
 and especially the poets, as using the instrument of 
 greatest compass, assumed a high and commanding 
 tone. The function of the prophet was then revived, 
 and poets for the first time aspired to teach the art of 
 life, and founded schools. The greatest poets in earlier 
 times had aimed at nothing of this sort ; but from 
 the time of Rousseau, through that of Goethe, Schiller, 
 Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, 
 down to our own age, poets have helped to make 
 opinions, have influenced philosophy, social institutions, 
 and politics. But let us think for a moment of the two 
 greatest of these names. 
 
 Goethe has always been an object of peculiar horror 
 to the religious world, so tranquil was his indifference 
 to all that they called Christianity. Not only Christi- 
 anity but morality itself, as it is commonly understood, 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 97 
 
 was not much favoured in his writings nor perhaps in 
 his life. There could be no greater stumbling-block 
 to all who were in the habit of assuming that conven- 
 tional Christianity is the one form, and conventional 
 morality the one evidence, of true religion. Indeed 
 so incredible did it seem that a great genius could be 
 absolutely independent of religion, that such persons 
 were driven to the shift of denying Goethe to have 
 genius. But in the first place it was not to be ex- 
 pected that a religion independent of traditional creeds 
 and inspired by no supernatural beliefs would produce 
 moral results precisely similar to the fruits of orthodox 
 Christianity, nor again is it to be assumed that such 
 an independent religion would not produce other results 
 altogether bayond the sphere of morality. We have 
 not yet inquired what is the precise relation of Natural 
 Religion either to Christianity or to morality. Goethe 
 is called into court at this point only to prove that 
 Natural Religion may be a living influence, and that 
 its fruits may be rich and vigorous, not to show that 
 they are precisely what we could wish or what we had 
 expected. It may be affirmed then that the power and 
 genius of Goethe was intimately connected with his 
 religion, that his religion gave his life unity and dignity 
 and made it a perpetual regulated energy of the feel- 
 ings, and that God in Nature was the chief object of 
 his worship. Not this or that class of phenomena, but 
 the unity that is visible in all was the thought that 
 possessed him. He felt, as he says, the whole six 
 days' work go on within him. To know this by 
 science, and to realize, appropriate, and assimilate it 
 in art, was his task and his happiness. When I call 
 s. 7 
 
98 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 this perpetual rapt contemplation by the name of 
 religion, I am not interpreting his feelings into a 
 new language. I am using his own language ; it is 
 Goethe himself who calls it so. 'Who has science and 
 art, he says, has religion V 
 
 As to the attacks which were made upon him by 
 the pietists and the conventional moralists, it might be 
 easy to defend him in general by denying that the 
 religious mode of a given time and place is to be 
 identified with Christianity or that received proprieties 
 are an infallible standard of morality. It would cer- 
 tainly be easy to show that he had not merely genius 
 but great and rare virtues, some of which, his inde- 
 fatigable industry, his superiority to sordid or frivolous 
 or envious thoughts, were made easy to him by his 
 religion of nature. There remains the fact that the 
 idea of duty and self-sacrifice appears not to be very 
 sacred in his mind rather, perhaps, to be irritating, 
 embarrassing, odious to him. But it is difficult to 
 trace the connexion so often asserted between this 
 moral indifference and the so-called Pantheism of 
 Goethe. If Hindoos have been known to push Pan- 
 theism to a denial of moral responsibility, what real 
 analogy is there between their rude primitive belief 
 and his energetic nature-worship? If Goethe thought 
 of God mainly as the creative Artist, and did not 
 much associate the ideas of duty or of self-sacrifice 
 with Him, and if he showed an epicurean indifference 
 on some occasions which seemed to call for energy, 
 
 1 Wer Wissenschaft und Kimst besitzt 
 
 Hat auch Religion ! 
 Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt 
 Der habe Religion ! Zahme Xenien. 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 99 
 
 there is no such difficulty in explaining this fact by 
 the circumstances of his life that we should be driven 
 to accuse his religion. Many have seen in the moral 
 principle the highest thing in the universe, who never- 
 theless have recognized nothing beyond Nature. He 
 who identifies God with Nature will assuredly not omit 
 from his idea of God that which he thinks highest in 
 Nature. 
 
 No similar attacks were ever made upon Words- 
 worth. Up to a certain point Wordsworth and Goethe 
 agree in their way of regarding the universe. Both 
 begin with a warm and perfectly healthy Paganism. 
 They refuse worship to nothing that has a right to it. 
 Their sympathies take hold of everything, and with so 
 much warmth, that they have made the old mytholo- 
 gies intelligible to us by their poetry, and brought back 
 the days of nymphs and river-gods. At the same time 
 they agree in setting the whole above the parts, in 
 worshipping the unity of things much more than the 
 things themselves. Their service of adoration rises 
 gradually to the highest object, and closes in the 
 Hebrew manner with, " Among the gods there is none 
 like unto Thee, O God." Yet who can charge Words- 
 worth with laxity or even with any alarming boldness 
 in his treatment of moral subjects ? He is an ardent 
 and at the same time a somewhat conservative moralist. 
 If it is just to call him a pantheist, all that can be 
 said is : In that case pantheism has not the effect 
 commonly attributed to it of cutting the sinews of 
 virtue. 
 
 It is easier in some respects to discern the practical 
 working Qf Natural Religion in such a life as Words- 
 
 72 
 
100 NATURAL RELIGION'. 
 
 worth's than in that of Goethe. For Words wort] i's 
 life was simple and unworldly, and betrays under its 
 transparent surface every impulse that moved it. We 
 may ask then why the religious world should refuse as 
 they do 'to treat Wordsworth's professions of religious 
 feeling seriously. ' Oh, yes ! ' they say, ' he made for 
 himself a sort of poetical religion/ and they imply that 
 it had no more reality than the conventional heathenism 
 of other poets, or the Arcadia of modern pastoral. Most 
 of them would be utterly disconcerted to hear him 
 called the most religious man, and the greatest reviver 
 of religion, of his age. And yet it is somewhat 
 unsatisfactory to account for the religiousness of his 
 poetry by the conventionalism of poetic language, 
 when we consider that he was precisely the reformer 
 who put down this conventionalism, and gave new 
 life to poetry by making it sincere. This writer then, 
 being under a sort of vow to use no insincere language, 
 declares himself a worshipper of Nature, and in the 
 most deliberate manner asserts over and over again 
 that in this worship he found all the satisfaction, the 
 lasting inward peace, the occasional rapture, that can 
 flow from the best religion. He has no happiness, he 
 assures us, and he can conceive no happiness, out of 
 this religion. This assurance he reiterates with a 
 monotonous prolixity, which is natural and impressive 
 in devotional writings, but was likely to prove, and has 
 proved, fatal to his popularity as a poet. What better 
 guarantee could he give of his seriousness ? How few 
 writings commonly called devotional have such strong 
 marks of genuineness as these, or are so uniformly clear 
 of the suspicion of having been written less to give 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 101 
 
 expression to a feeling than to give existence to a 
 feeling by expression ! And what is there in the poet's 
 life which should lead us o suspect his professions of 
 insincerity ? Did he not really rest content with that 
 treasure which he professed to value above all the 
 riches of the world ? Did he not remain faithful to 
 his choice ? 
 
 He may be called the saint of the religion of Nature 
 on account of the unworldliness both of his life and of 
 his writings, which refuse to be tried by a mere literary 
 standard. And why should we refuse to admit that 
 Natural Religion has in this instance produced its 
 saint ? To the religious world no doubt such * natural 
 piety' seems unreal ; the fixed ecclesiastical tradition 
 rejects the alien type. Not only a dogmatic creed, 
 but either devoted philanthropy or else asceticism, 
 a c visage marred ' by some contact with pain is indis- 
 pensable to the ecclesiastical conception of the saint. 
 Wordsworth's life was not passed in philanthropic 
 undertakings ; he neither mortified nor devoted him- 
 self ; his happiness was enormous and never clouded. 
 Here again hfe lot has been similar to that of Goethe, 
 who has lost men's sympathies, partly because he 
 was exempt from suffering. Wordsworth's prosperity 
 was of a much more modest kind, but it was equally 
 uniform. Neither of these men knew much of the 
 darker side of human life. Goethe, we know, shunned 
 the sight of whatever was painful with a care that 
 wore the appearance of selfishness. Wordsworth had 
 none of this Epicureanism ; but, accustomed as we 
 are to picture the saint as in the very thick of human 
 misery, as surrounded with distresses with which he 
 
102 .NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 identifies himself, and which he devotes his life to 
 comforting or remedying, we do not readily imagine it 
 possible for a saint to pass his life in a perpetual course 
 of lonely enjoyment as Wordsworth did among the 
 lakes and mountains, the objects of his passion. 
 
 The type is no doubt somewhat different, yet less 
 different than it seems. Enjoyment was always held 
 to be in the lot of the saint, but enjoyment such as the 
 world cannot understand ; if it became him to encounter 
 the pain of sacrifice and to be ' acquainted with grief,' 
 it behoved him also to triumph over both. Now the 
 happiness of Wordsworth was of an unworldly kind, 
 and if it strikes the eye more than his self-denial, more 
 than his want of wealth and of success in his pursuit, 
 this is just as it should be, 'this is the victory that 
 overcometh the world/ At the cost of popularity and 
 in spite of ridicule he was sincere in his work, and he 
 had his reward in the ' cheerful heart,' the ' soaring 
 spirit' of which he himself spoke. That art of plain 
 living, which moralists in all ages have prized so much, 
 was mastered completely by Wordsworth. He found 
 the secret of victory where alone it can be found. He 
 surrendered the wealth that is earned by labour, trade, 
 speculation, in exchange for the wealth that is given 
 away. Others might purchase and hoard and set up 
 fences, calling it property to exclude others from enjoy- 
 ment. To his share fell what all alike may take, all 
 those things that have no economical value, and that 
 are therefore denied to industry, in short the goodly 
 universe to which " he was wedded in love and holy 
 passion." 
 
 The completeness of his victory over adverse fortune 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 103 
 
 creates in fact a sort of illusion as if there had never 
 been a struggle. And yet there was matter for a 
 tragedy in his ill-success. It was such as has driven 
 many men to suicide, many to settled despondency, 
 many to cynicism, and many to abandonment of their 
 enterprise. But his healthy strength of heart triumphs 
 so easily that we lose the moral of the story. We 
 become as careless of the injustice he suffered as he 
 was himself, and forget the brutal dulness against 
 which he had to contend, when we see that it did not 
 affect for a moment his happiness or his temper or the 
 soundness of his judgment. This triumphant force of 
 character came to him from his religion. From the 
 Eternal Being among whose mountains he wandered, 
 there came to his heart steadfastness, stillness, a sort of 
 reflected or reproduced eternity. 
 
 Here is virtue in a form very unlike the busy and 
 philanthropic Christianity to which we are most accus- 
 tomed, of which it is the characteristic mark to seek 
 out distress, and bestow time and trouble upon the relief 
 of it. But it is less unlike some older manifestations of 
 the Christian life. We owe to Christianity itself the 
 story of Martha and Mary. And though the Middle 
 Ages may have been too monastic in their notions of 
 the religious life, yet perhaps there was something 
 in the notion of the hermit ; more things certainly are 
 done by solitary worship than the world dreams of. 
 If work is worship, it is implied in this proverb that 
 worship is at least work. It was not for nothing that 
 our " glorious eremite " sacrificed work for worship; that 
 the Symeon Stylites of the God in nature, stood there 
 so long "on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake." No 
 
104 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 modern Englishman has done more to redeem our life 
 from vulgarity. 
 
 What the religious world calls mere Pantheism 
 science may perhaps be disposed to treat as mere dis- 
 guised Christianity. No doubt Wordsworth's worship 
 of the God in Nature was blended with Christian 
 ideas. A Christian faith in redemption and reconcilia- 
 tion neutralized his sense of the evil which is in the 
 world, and preserved him from the pessimism which is 
 the besetting difficulty of Natural Religion. Let us 
 remark however that he himself always declares that 
 his optimism came to him not from Christianity but 
 from Nature. He takes pains, again and again, to 
 make it clear that revealed religion does not seem to 
 him to supply a defect in natural religion, but only, 
 one would really think somewhat superfluously, to tell 
 over again, and to his mind less impressively, what is 
 told by nature. The doctrine of a future life, which he 
 calls "the head and mighty paramount of truths," is at 
 the same time, he says, to one who lives among the 
 mountains a perfectly plain tale. He reverences the 
 volume that declares the mystery, the life that cannot 
 die ; but in the mountains does he feel his faith, which 
 means, beyond mistake, that the gospel of the visible 
 universe is not only in harmony with the written gospel, 
 but is far more explicit and convincing. There may, 
 perhaps, be something embarrassed and confused in 
 the joining of his views, but this only makes the 
 strength and depth of his natural religion appear more 
 clearly. 
 
 And yet it is not the "argument from design" 
 which influences Wordsworth, though he may have 
 

 NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 105 
 
 accepted that argument, and occasionally urged it 
 himself. It was not upon curious evidence industriously 
 collected, and slightly overweighing when summed up 
 the evidence which could be produced on the other side, 
 that his faith was founded. Nature, taken in the large, 
 inspired him with faith, because the contemplation of 
 it filled him with a happiness his mind could scarcely 
 contain. As the scepticism of most men is founded 
 upon their experience that the universe does not supply 
 their wants, does not seem to have in view their happi- 
 ness, so the faith of Wordsworth was founded upon his 
 own happy contrary experience. He has unbounded 
 trust in Nature, because he has always found her out- 
 running his expectations, overpaying every loss, un- 
 fathomably provident and beneficent. 
 
 His sneers at experimental science, at the botanist 
 and geologist who invaded his solitudes, are not sug- 
 gested by any misgiving that his view of Nature will 
 not bear examination. We may think, if we will, that 
 he ought to have had such misgivings, but it is certain 
 that his voice is always given for truth at any price, 
 for unsparing examination. And the example of Goethe 
 shows us that without Wordsworth's optimism the 
 religion of Nature can live. No one is less subject to 
 illusions than Goethe, no one more alive to the painful 
 limitations which Nature imposes on our ideals. He 
 at least does not blind himself, and accordingly he is 
 the passionate student, as well as the poet, of Nature. 
 
 Nevertheless this horror of experiment is most 
 characteristic of the religious way of viewing Nature. 
 It is the horror of synthesis for analysis, of life for 
 death, of youth and love for the dissecting-room and the 
 
106 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 charnel-house Wordsworth's quarrel is not with the 
 sceptic but with the analyst ; it is the paralysis of 
 feeling that he dreads, and not any unwelcome dis- 
 coveries. He protests against those who would ' creep 
 and botanise upon a mother's grave/ such characters as 
 the philosopher whom Balzac has since shown us 
 decomposing a wife's tears 1 . For according to Words- 
 worth so far from taking pains to pulverize into their 
 invisible elements the great unities that act upon our 
 feelings, so far from studying to put pounds of flesh and 
 pints of blood in place of friends and relations, we ought 
 rather to recover and reanimate the great unities we 
 have already lost by this suicidal process. We ought 
 not to think of the sea as a vast quantity of water, no, 
 but as ' a mighty being.' On this principle how, let us 
 ask, ought we to think of the Universe ? It was 
 therefore those who had no God, in whose minds 
 nothing bound together the whole multitude of impres- 
 sions that visit us, and whose feelings therefore had 
 no coherence or unity, that he denounced as men who 
 
 "Viewing all things unremittingly, 
 In disconnexion dull and spiritless, 
 Break down all grandeur; still unsatisfied 
 With the perverse attempt while littleness 
 May yet become more little." 
 
 If we see here religion in its fresh untrammelled 
 operation, we see at the same time its invaluable use. 
 For the higher literature was reformed in England by 
 this man's fidelity to the object of his worship. A 
 
 1 " Tiens, dit-il, en voyant les pleurs de sa femme, j'ai decompose 
 les larmes. Les larmes contiennent un pen de phosphate de chaux, 
 de chlorure de sodium, du mucus et de 1'eau." BALZAC, La Recherche 
 de VAbsolu. 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 107 
 
 flush of life passing through poetry, a new sense 
 awakened in many individuals, made life richer and 
 purer. His very austerity and monotony, his want of 
 all popular talent, make him the more striking as an 
 example of the power of religion. If he had had the 
 brilliancy of some other poets we might have attributed 
 his influence to mere literary skill. His clumsiness, 
 what is called his heaviness, set his sincerity in stronger 
 relief. What he is commissioned to tell appears all 
 the more weighty from the slowness and embarrassment 
 of the speaker. 
 
 But for such examples the dignity and the highest 
 use of literature would be lost. This danger is 
 especially great in an age like the present, when the 
 state of letters is a very democratic republic, when the 
 literary Emperors and Prime Ministers are chosen by 
 universal suffrage. Such an age cannot but abound, 
 as Sainte Beuve remarks of the present age, in literary 
 charlatanry, when it is an accepted maxim that the 
 greatest author, at any rate the greatest poet, is he 
 who writes what the greatest number of people like to 
 read. A kind t)f literary Utilitarianism sets in, of 
 which the watchword is ' the greatest pleasure of the 
 greatest number.' The power of a poet is then measured 
 simply by his control over the sources of laughter and 
 tears. Public taste may go very far along this road 
 before it discovers its mistake. All seems lively and 
 busy in the literary world while Waverley Novels and 
 Childe Harolds take the public by storm, while we 
 remark with admiration that this author's characters 
 are as familiar to every one as his own personal friends 
 and that author's sayings become proverbs in the 
 
108 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 general mouth. In the midst of such a literary ferment 
 how pale and cold seems the poetry of a Wordsworth ! 
 How dull he is ! And how dull would Goethe seem too 
 if only Goethe had not written the First Part of Faust ! 
 Naturally ! Such authors do not care much to make 
 their readers laugh or weep. " To stir the blood I have 
 no cunning art," says Wordsworth. Acli die zcirtlicken 
 Herzen ! ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu ruhren ! says 
 Goethe. Nor do such authors make it their study to 
 say what the public will like to hear. Ihr sollt ivas 
 lernen, I meant to teach you something, says Goethe 
 again. They deal not in popular falsehoods but in 
 unpopular truths. They are attracted by topics which 
 the popular writer instinctively avoids, saying, Oh ! the 
 public will never attend to that ! And indeed the 
 public often receive their gifts but sullenly. It was 
 overawed by Goethe, but Wordsworth it regards now 
 as it regarded him at first with steadfast indifference 
 and contempt. 
 
 These are the writers who enrich the literature of a 
 nation, who save it from the nation itself, its natural 
 enemy. And to sustain such writers in their arduous 
 course they must have religion in the sense which has 
 here been given to the word. In the long run nothing 
 less than religion will bear them through, though an 
 aristocracy or a learned class may occasionally suffice. 
 But an aristocracy imposes fetters of its own for those 
 which it strikes off, and a learned class will appreciate 
 indeed certain thoughts to which the multitude are 
 indifferent, but not wholly new thoughts, not thoughts 
 foreign to its learning. Religion alone some absorbing 
 contemplation, some spiritual object more necessary than 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 109 
 
 livelihood, more precious than fame preserves origi- 
 nality and thus feeds literature. It alone can give an 
 author that happy arrogance of Wordsworth, whose 
 admirers complained that he was scarcely as grateful as 
 he should have been for their efforts in the cause of his 
 fame, so happy was he without fame in the serene 
 temple of his worship. 
 
 The result of the movement in art which was repre- 
 sented abroad by Goethe, and in England principally 
 by Wordsworth, is still plainly perceptible both in the 
 art and even to some extent in the religion of the 
 present age. An age which is called atheistic, and in 
 which atheism is loudly professed, shows in all its 
 imaginative literature a religiousness a sense of the 
 Divine which was wanting in the more orthodox ages. 
 Before Church traditions had been freely tested, there 
 was one rigid way of thinking about God one definite 
 channel through which Divine grace alone could pass 
 the channel guarded by the Church He had founded 
 " As if they would confine the Interminable, and tie 
 Him to His own prescript ! " Accordingly, when doubt 
 was thrown upon the doctrines of the Church, there 
 seemed an imminent danger of atheism, and we have 
 still the habit of denoting by this name the denial of 
 that conception of God which the Church has conse- 
 crated. But by the side of this gradual obscuring of the 
 ecclesiastical view of God, there has gone on a gradual 
 rediscovery of Him in another aspect. The total effect 
 of this simultaneous obscuration of one part of the orb 
 and revelation of the other has been to set before us 
 God in an aspect rather Judaic than Christian. 
 We see Him less as an object of love, and more as an 
 
110 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 object of terror, mixed with delight. Much indeed has 
 been lost it is to be hoped not finally but something 
 also has been gained. For the modern views of God, 
 so far as they go, have a reality a freshness that the 
 others wanted. In orthodox times the name of God 
 was almost confined to definitely religious writings, or 
 was used as part of a conventional language. But now, 
 either under the name of God, or under that of Nature, 
 or under that of Science, or under that of Law, the 
 conception works freshly and powerfully in a multitude 
 of minds. It is an idea indeed that causes much 
 unhappiness, much depression. Men now reason with 
 God as Job did, or feel crushed before Him as Moses, 
 or wrestle with Him as Jacob, or blaspheme Him ; 
 they do not so easily attain the Christian hope. But 
 with whatever confusion and astonishment, His pre- 
 sence is felt really and not merely asserted in hollow 
 professions ; it inspires poetry much more than in 
 orthodox times. It may be confidently said that in 
 this modern time when the complaint is so often heard, 
 verstorben ist der Herrgott oben, and after those most 
 recent discoveries which in the surprise caused by their 
 novelty and vastness seem to dissipate all ancient faiths 
 at a blow, the conception of God lives with an intensity 
 which it never had before. This very conception indeed 
 it is which now depresses us with its crushing weight. 
 The overwhelming sense of littleness and helplessness 
 of which we complain is not atheism, though atheism 
 has similar symptoms. It is that very thought, 'As 
 for man his days are as grass/ which is suggested by 
 the contemplation of the Eternal, it is the prostration 
 caused by a greatness in which we are lost, it is what 
 
NATURAL RELIGION IN PRACTICE. 
 
 Ill 
 
 we might venture perhaps to call the superstition of 
 the true God. 
 
 If men can add once more the Christian confidence 
 to the Hebraic awe, the Christianity that will result 
 will be of a far higher kind than that which passes too 
 often for Christianity now, which, so far from being love 
 added to fear, and casting out fear, is a presumptuous 
 and effeminate love that never knew fear. 
 
PART II. 
 
 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 s. 
 
"But has all this any practical bearing? 
 
 " When a religion such as Christianity loses its hold 
 " after having possessed the minds of men for centuries, 
 " as a matter of course a sort of phantom of it will 
 " haunt the earth for a time. Its doctrines, rejected 
 (( as doctrines, will be retained for 'a while as rhetoric 
 " and imagery ; even the feelings ivliich grew out of those 
 " doctrines will for a while survive them. A Neochris- 
 " tianism must inevitably arise, which will console for a 
 "short interval some feeble minds, while stronger logi- 
 " dans refrain in contemptuous pity from telling them 
 " their steed's a mock-horse, and they really carry what 
 " they say carries them. 
 
 " To such pious dreamers the plain English intellect 
 " loves to apply a practical test. To see whether what 
 "they call their religion has any real existence, it 
 "scrutinizes their conduct, asks whether and in what 
 " respects they lead a different life from others who do 
 "not profess to be religious, what religious practices 
 " they have, and especially ivhat they sacrifice for their 
 " religion. 
 
 82 
 
" Often this test ivories so effectively as to save the 
 "trouble of all further discussion. The Neochristian, 
 " who was perhaps prepared for argument, if he is not 
 "provoked by argument, gradually forgets his crotchet. 
 " He does not cease to think it true, but he ceases to find 
 " it important. He ceases gradually to use its phraseo- 
 " logy, because he feels after all that it is only phraseo- 
 " logy. Tlie large interpretation, the metaphorical sense, 
 "which at first seemed to save the doctrine, is discovered 
 "after all only to save appearances ; and down this 
 "inclined plane the passage is made, not out of one 
 "religion into another similar to it, but out of religion 
 " itself into the secular life, not out of the old Church into 
 "a new and grander Church but out of the Church into 
 "the World. 
 
 "Another still plainer test is often applied, ivhich 
 " may be called the statistical test. ' You call your- 
 " self a religion. Good! how many churches have you 
 " built, and how many people attend them ? Where are 
 "your missionary societies, and how much money do 
 "they raise per annum?' This test too, though it may 
 "seem rude, serves to dissipate much sentimental il- 
 " lusion." 
 
 Such are the criticisms which are, and always have 
 been, applied to schemes of Natural Religion. Let us 
 inquire then whether the system is strong and sub- 
 stantial enough to withstand them. Let us turn from 
 theory to practice. 
 
CHAPTEE I. 
 
 RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 
 
 THE practical question of the present day is how to 
 defend the very principle of religion against naked 
 secularity. It was not so in the last age, when 
 scepticism was much nearer in tone and temper to 
 religion than it is now. In those days the cry was 
 not so much against religion itself as against alleged 
 corruptions of it. It was asserted that the grand 
 simple truths of religion had been sophisticated, ob- 
 scured by incomprehensible dogmas and unnecessary 
 ritual. If religious practices and ways of thinking, 
 the grovelling" fears of the devotee and his servile 
 anxiety to save his soul, were derided, the derision 
 was mixed with respect, for such feelings were held to 
 be proofs of man's greatness and of the Infinite that he 
 carries within him. It was a favourite position that 
 religious dogmas might almost be called true, so long 
 as they were not spoiled by being taken too literally. 
 Much was said of the infinite nature of duty, of the 
 infinite difference between right and wrong; it was 
 admitted that religion deserved all respect for teaching, 
 however imperfectly, these all-important truths, and 
 
118 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 that much more than respect was due to the great 
 Teachers and Prophets who first awakened men to the 
 perception of them, who first taught that " one thing 
 is needful/ 3 and " that it profits a man nothing if he 
 should gain the whole world and lose his own soul." 
 
 So long as there was so much agreement between 
 the orthodox and the philosophers, so long as all alike 
 exhorted us simply to do our duty and to believe that 
 in the path of duty, which by some arrangement 
 providential or other was always easy to find, no harm 
 either in this world or the next could happen to us, 
 we felt a firm foundation under our feet. But what has 
 become of that foundation now ? Can we gather from 
 what we overhear of the discussions of philosophers 
 that they still approve, even in a general way, the 
 established teaching? We find that they have ana- 
 lysed the idea of duty in a manner highly satisfactory 
 to themselves, but the result is that all its mysterious- 
 ness has disappeared. They have inquired what it is 
 that makes the voice of conscience sound so very 
 authoritative ; is their conclusion likely to satisfy the 
 almost infinite number of people who feel quite helpless 
 till they hear an imperative command, and who, having 
 lost the Pope and since that the Bible, have trusted 
 that at least the inner voice could never lose its 
 authority ? " The infinite nature of duty," with all 
 such mouthfilling phrases, has passed out of fashion. 
 The Law of Duty remains indeed authoritative, but 
 its authority seems scarcely so awful and unique as 
 formerly. 
 
 And will its decrees remain unaltered in their 
 tenor ? A curious opinion which cannot be dis- 
 
/"n nr/%/-f 
 
 RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 119 
 
 cussed here is current that when all our religious 
 beliefs have been shaken our principles of morality will 
 remain unaltered. Nevertheless it is evident that 
 denials of the received morality and revolutionary 
 views of morality have appeared perhaps only by a 
 coincidence at the time and in the circles where 
 religious belief has been shaken most violently. 
 Secularism is in itself no new thing, and its negations 
 might long be disregarded as the result of ignorance ; 
 but may they not take a new character when they are 
 combined with the negations of the reigning philo- 
 sophy ? And on this tide do we not drift down to an 
 ocean of absolute secularity ? Can we not foresee a 
 time when religion shall confess itself beaten in fair 
 argument by its old antagonist the world ? 
 
 It was in great part by supernaturalism that 
 religion used to maintain the contest. " You would 
 be right/' so ran the argument, " if this world were all. 
 In that case, to be sure, why should we trouble our- 
 selves? Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ! 
 Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus ! But there is 
 another world t" And then followed all the familiar 
 proofs, which were not indeed exclusively founded on 
 stories of miracle, but still drew from such stories most 
 of the practical force, the vividness which made that 
 other world something more than a mere possibility. 
 Are we not then brought perilously near the secularist 
 conclusion when the fashion of thought sets so strongly 
 as it does now against supernaturalism ? Is not St 
 Paul's argument suddenly turned round so as to 
 tell the same way as that of Catullus ? 
 
 At the present moment therefore everything de- 
 
120 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 pends on the question whether there is a Natural 
 Religion. May we without pledging ourselves to any 
 belief in miracles or in an invisible, supernatural 
 world continue to protest against secularity, continue 
 to affirm that "one thing is needful,' 7 and to ask, 
 "What does it profit a man if he should gain the 
 whole world and lose his own soul?" 
 
 The party which most openly professes secularity 
 does not itself use the brutal language we might 
 expect. On the contrary, it adopts a high-flown 
 style rife with such words as brotherhood. The truth 
 is that, like all vast confused masses of men, this 
 party can scarcely speak without contradicting itself. 
 It cannot be reasoned with, because it holds no 
 definite position but rather tries to hold all positions 
 at once. It exaggerates selfishness and exaggerates 
 self-sacrifice, and mixes them together in inextricable 
 confusion. If then we would discover any principles 
 of secularity, we must look where we may find them 
 more distinctly and logically stated. 
 
 There seem to be two reasoned ideals of life which 
 have risen out of the rebellion against Christianity, 
 which are not mere modifications of the old system 
 but adverse to it, so as to appear at first sight 
 directly irreligious. 
 
 First, there is the ideal of the artist. He has long 
 cherished a secret grudge against morality. The 
 prudery of virtue is his great hindrance. He believes 
 that it is our morality which prevents the modern 
 world from rivalling the arts of Greece. He finds 
 that even the individual artist seems corrupted and 
 spoiled for his business if he allows morality to get 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 121 
 
 too much control over him. The great masters, he 
 notices, show a certain indifference, a certain supe- 
 riority to it ; often they audaciously defy it. The vir- 
 tuous artists are mostly to be looked for in the second 
 class, into which moreover it is doubtful whether they 
 have not been admitted by favour. Hence he becomes 
 most seriously and unaffectedly sceptical about the 
 unapproachable sovereignty of the law of Duty. He 
 does not in his soul believe that the mischief it does to 
 art is compensated by any good done to society. He 
 remarks the mistakes made by Christian philanthropy, 
 the evils caused by Roman virtue, the homeliness of 
 honesty, the primness of purity. He sides with the 
 Medicean world against Savonarola, with the theatre 
 against the Puritans or Jeremy Collier. He does not 
 in any sense admit the current platitudes, and he 
 would rather on his deathbed have it to reflect that 
 he had painted a really good picture, or written a 
 really good poem, than that he had done his duty 
 under great temptations and at great sacrifices. He 
 had rather leave the world enriched and embellished, 
 than do some dismal deed of virtue which perhaps, like 
 the majority of really virtuous deeds, would not even 
 prove a good subject for a poem or a novel. 
 
 Next there is the ideal of the scientific investigator. 
 How much better, thinks he, to have advanced our 
 knowledge of the laws of the universe only by a step 
 than to have lived the most virtuous life or died the 
 most self-sacrificing death ! The struggles of virtuous 
 men in so many cases are thrown away ; their active 
 heroism or active philanthropy is only far too active! 
 How much better if they could only curb this restless- 
 
122 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 ness and be content to " sit still in a room " ! As he 
 looks at it from the opposite point of view to the artist, 
 the man of science may think the career of virtue at- 
 tractive enough indeed, for it has more variety and inci- 
 dent than his own uniform labour in the study or the 
 laboratory, but he despises it as popular, and distrusts 
 its results. All such action strikes him as premature, 
 the convictions on which it is based as unscientific. 
 " We must understand " so he reasons "more than 
 we do about sociology before we can sacrifice either 
 our energies or our time to the reform or to the 
 conservation of any existing system, political or social. 
 In the present state of our knowledge it is mere 
 charlatanry to take a part ; it is a proof of philo- 
 sophic incapacity to allow our judgment to incline 
 to one side rather than to the other. The laws of 
 the universe can actually be, to an indefinite extent, 
 unveiled ; the process is going on rapidly, and in- 
 finitely more labourers are wanted to gather in the 
 harvest. In these circumstances it is a kind of sin 
 to occupy oneself in any other task. We have no- 
 thing to do but think, observe, and write." And thus 
 he enters upon a life to which the platitudes current 
 about virtue have no application. To the student 
 consumed by the passion of research, right and wrong 
 become to a great extent meaningless words. He has 
 little time for any tasks into which morality could 
 possibly enter. Instead of "conduct" making up, as 
 we have been told, four-fifths or five-sixths of life, 
 to such a person it makes a most inconsiderable 
 fraction of life. He has his occupation, which consumes 
 his time and his powers. There may be virtue in the 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 123 
 
 choice of such a life at the first in preference to one 
 more worldly or selfish. But when once he has made 
 the choice, the activity of virtue in his daily life is 
 reduced to a minimum. His pursuit stands to him 
 in the place of friends, so that he has but few and 
 slight ties to society. And the pursuit itself may be 
 a solitary one, not leading him to have associates in 
 his working hours. But though so solitary, such a life 
 may be to him, if not satisfying, yet preferable beyond 
 comparison, and on the most solid grounds, to any 
 other life he knows of. It may be full of an occupation 
 for the thoughts, so inexhaustibly interesting as to 
 make ennui, in such a man's life, an extinct and almost 
 fabulous form of evil ; at the same time it may be full 
 of the sense of progress made both by the individual 
 himself and by the race through his labours. And 
 yet, though so peaceful and, compared with most lives, 
 so happy, such a life may be almost entirely out of 
 relation alike to virtue and to vice. Instead of that 
 painful conflict with temptation which moralists de- 
 scribe, there may be an almost unbroken peace arising 
 from the absence of temptation ; instead of the gradual 
 formation of virtuous habits, there may be the gradual 
 disuse of all habits except the habit of thought and 
 study ; there may be perpetual self-absorption without 
 what is commonly called selfishness, total disregard of 
 other people, together with an unceasing labour for 
 the human race ; a life in short like that of the vestal, 
 " the world forgetting, by the world forgot," yet with- 
 out any love or heavenly communion. 
 
 Here are two ideals of life which may seem at first 
 sight wholly irreligious or secular. They derive no- 
 
124 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 tiling either from theology or from any spiritualist phi- 
 losophy. The one is a mere enthusiasm for beauty, 
 while the votaries of the other can see indeed an in- 
 finite difference between truth and error, and astonish 
 the moralist himself by the emphasis with which they 
 denounce what is unscientific or unverified ; but as to 
 right and wrong, it is a distinction they very sel- 
 dom have occasion for, and which scarcely seems to 
 them to deserve the solemnity with which moralists 
 invest it. 
 
 These heresies are not stated here that they may be 
 refuted. We are not about to undertake to show 
 that after all the moral principle is that which is 
 highest in man, or point out what bad effects follow 
 in communities when either Art or Science usurp the 
 honours which belong to virtuous action. Much might 
 be said on these topics, but what we remark here is 
 that such heresies, so far from implying any deprecia- 
 tion of religion as such, tacitly presuppose its unique 
 importance, and so far from tending to show that 
 religion is after all not the one thing needful, derive 
 all their plausibility from the assumption that it is. 
 For what is it that is alleged in behalf of Art and 
 Science by those who take such high views of them ? 
 Is it alleged that they are sufficient for human life 
 in spite of having no affinity with religion ? Or is it 
 not rather for the contrary reason that they are them- 
 selves of the nature of religion ! The artist does not 
 say to the moralist, " I am as good as you, though you 
 worship and I do not:" but he says, "It is because 
 you are so narrow-minded that you charge me with 
 having no religion. I do not admit the charge ; and 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 125 
 
 it is just because I feel that I have a religion as truly 
 as you, though of a different kind, that I question your 
 superiority. Yours is the religion of right, mine is 
 the religion of beauty ; they differ, no doubt, as their 
 objects differ, but they agree in having the nature 
 of religion. Elevated feelings, feelings that lift man 
 above himself, admiration become habitual and raised 
 into a principle of life, a lively sensitiveness when 
 disrespect or indifference are shown towards the object 
 of our worship, these are common to both.'' Not less 
 does the man of science value himself on having a 
 religion ; it is the religion of law and of truth. Nay, 
 he for his part is often disposed to regard himself as 
 not only more religious, but actually more virtuous 
 than the moralist. For he believes that his love of 
 truth is more simple, more unreserved, and more en- 
 tirely self-sacrificing than that of the moralist, whom 
 he suspects occasionally of suppressing or disguising 
 truth for fear of weakening social institutions or of 
 offending weak brethren. It is evident then that if 
 the same men say at other times that they care nothing 
 for religion, or that they disbelieve religion, they are 
 not to be taken as speaking of religion as such, but of 
 the particular religion which prevails in their neighbour- 
 hood. The popular Christianity of the day, in short, is 
 for the artist too melancholy and sedate, and for the 
 man of science too sentimental and superficial ; in short 
 it is too melancholy for the one and not melancholy 
 enough for the other. They become, therefore, dissen- 
 ters from the existing religion ; sympathising too little 
 with the popular worship, they worship by themselves 
 and dispense with outward forms. But they protest at 
 
126 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 the same time that in strictness they separate from the 
 religious bodies around them only because they them- 
 selves know of a purer or a happier religion. 
 
 After all then the old maxim stands fast, and 
 man has a soul, which if he lose it will be of small 
 profit to him to gain the whole world. For say to 
 the artist, " Never mind the moralists who affront 
 you by their solemn airs ; what do you think of the 
 man who neither worships with them nor yet with 
 you, who is insensible to beauty as well as to right ? " 
 In a moment he who but now was carping at 
 your language will turn round and borrow it. " The 
 man," he will say, " whose heart never goes forth in 
 yearnings or in blessings towards beautiful things, 
 before whom all forms pass and leave him as cold as 
 before, who simply labels things or prices them for the 
 market, but never worships or loves ; of such a man 
 we may say that he has no soul; and however fortunate 
 he may be esteemed, or may esteem himself, he remains 
 always essentially poor and miserable. " More sublime 
 still is and always has been the contempt of philosophy, 
 which now we call science, for those who merely live 
 from hand to mouth without an object or a plan, the 
 " curvae in terras animeB, et ccelestium inanes." Neither 
 school yield in any degree to the moralist in the 
 emphasis with which they brand the mere worldling, 
 or by whatever name they distinguish the man who 
 is devoted to nothing, who has no religion and no soul, 
 Philistine or hireling or dilettante. Only in the tone 
 of their censure there is a certain difference ; the artist, 
 except when he rises to the height of a Blake, does 
 not get beyond irritation and annoyance ; the philo- 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 127 
 
 sopher smites them with cold sarcasm ; the moralist, 
 or he whom in the narrower sense we call religious, 
 assails them by turns with solemn denunciation and 
 pathetic entreaty. This last alone, when it crosses 
 his mind, and he realises for a moment what is to him 
 so incredible, that there are those who "mind earthly 
 things," says it "even weeping!' 
 
 The modern phase of opinion then does not lead to 
 secularity but to new forms of religion, for the systems 
 of life which spring out of it are based on the ideals of 
 Art and Science. Now Art and Science are not secular, 
 and it is a fundamental error to call them so ; they 
 have the nature of religion. 
 
 Here is the first practical application of the prin- 
 ciples which were laid down above. Among the re- 
 ligions of the world we distinguished three as enshrining 
 in archaic forms principles of eternal value, which may 
 commend themselves to the most rationalistic age. 
 There was the religion of visible things, or Paganism, 
 which though generally a low type of religion, yet in 
 its classical form became the nursing mother of art ; 
 there was the religion of humanity in its various forms, 
 of which the most conspicuous is Christianity ; lastly, 
 there was the religion of God, which worships a unity 
 conceived in one way or another as holding the universe 
 together. We found that these forms of religion, 
 though theoretically distinguishable, seldom appear 
 in their distinctness, and that in particular Christi- 
 anity, pre-eminently the religion of humanity, is yet 
 also a religion of Deity. Now if we apply these 
 categories to the controversies of our own time, we 
 shall say that we see the ancient religion of humanity, 
 
128 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 which has so long reigned among us under the name 
 of Christianity, assailed on the one side by the 
 Higher Paganism, under the name of Art, and on the 
 other side by a peculiarly severe and stern form of 
 Theism, under the name of Science. And when we 
 look back over the history of the Church we see that 
 it has always been struggling with these two rival 
 religions, and that the only peculiarity of our own age 
 is the confident and triumphant manner in which the 
 two enemies advance to the attack from opposite sides. 
 But whatever may be the merits of this contro- 
 versy (which after all is but a struggle for inde- 
 pendence and for a frontier, since Christianity has 
 never altogether denied but only extenuated the 
 claims of Art and Science), it is but a rivalry of religions 
 among themselves. Against irreligion, against secu- 
 larity, Art, Science and Christianity are or ought to be 
 united. That which opposes Christianity is not neces- 
 sarily irreligion ; it may be another sort of religion. In 
 that case we may think it false and mischievous, but 
 religion does not become by being false a whit more 
 like irreligion. Nor does its opposition to Christianity 
 prove it not to be a religion, but rather the contrary, 
 as a rival is the bitterest enemy, as antipathy is rather 
 between likes than unlikes. False religion indeed may 
 in certain cases be worse than secularity, as in the 
 religious wars of the sixteenth century the cynic who 
 cared for neither party, even though his indifference 
 sprang from mere sordidness of nature, may at times 
 have been less mischievous than the enthusiast. But 
 whether worse or better, irreligion is always essentially 
 and entirely unlike religion, while false and true religions 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 129 
 
 are always like each other just so far as they are religions. 
 Without some ardent condition of the feelings religion 
 is not to be conceived, and it has been defined here as 
 habitual and regulated admiration; if the object of such 
 admiration be unworthy we have a religion positively 
 bad and false ; if it be not the highest object we have 
 an inadequate religion ; but irreligion consists in the 
 absence of such habitual admiration, and in a state of 
 the feelings not ardent, but cold and torpid. 
 
 What irreligion or secularity is we can best learn 
 from the New Testament, and especially from the 
 Gospels. There we see the rise of a fresh religious 
 spirit in a community, and we see at the same time 
 what is its essential opposite. Not any rival conviction, 
 not some fresh vigorous impulse crossing the path of 
 the new religion, but the want of conviction, the 
 absence of impulse. 
 
 The World is described to us there, and what is the 
 World ? It is a kind of conspiracy of prejudices, or 
 union of all that is stagnant, inert, mechanical, and 
 automatic into a coherent tyrannous power and jealous 
 consentient opinion. Conventionalism, indeed, is the 
 modern name for that which stands here for the 
 opposite of religion ; and we can judge from this in 
 what way religion itself was conceived, for the 
 opposite of conventionalism is freshness of feeling, 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 We may observe that in the New Testament 
 Christianity is never brought into contact with anything 
 vigorous or enthusiastic. No artist lost in the worship 
 of sensuous beauty crosses the stage, no philosopher 
 consumed with the thirst for truth. How such cha- 
 s. 9 
 
130 NATURAL EELIG10N APPLIED. 
 
 racters would have been treated by Christianity in its 
 earliest days we cannot tell, perhaps with something 
 of repugnance or hostility. But they could never 
 have been classed with those whom it actually at- 
 tacked, the demure slaves of fashion and convention. 
 They might be thought to be addicted to a false or 
 dangerous religion, but they could not be called world- 
 lings. Possibly they would have been judged with 
 favour, for it accords with the fundamental character- 
 istic of the Gospel to extol vitality at the expense of 
 propriety those who love much, Magdalens, publicans, 
 prodigals, at the expense of those most honoured by 
 public opinion. 
 
 Irreligion, then, is life without worship, and the 
 World is the collective character of those who do not 
 worship. When worship is eliminated from life, what 
 remains ? There are animal wants to be satisfied, a 
 number of dull cravings to be indulged, and paltry 
 fears to be appeased ; moreover, because worship is 
 never really quite dead, but only feeble, there is some 
 poor convention in place of an ideal, and a few prudish 
 crotchets in place of virtues. Yet a society may live 
 on in this condition, if political 9r physical conditions 
 are favourable, without falling into any enormous cor- 
 ruptions, and may often in its moral statistics contrast 
 favourably with one which some great but perverted 
 enthusiasm has hurried into evil. Its fault is simply 
 that it has no soul, or to use the old Biblical phrase, 
 has no salt in itself; or again, to use the modern 
 German paraphrase, has no soul to save the expense 
 of salt. Now it is against this condition, against irre- 
 ligion pure and simple as distinguished from any forms 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 131 
 
 of false religion, that there always has been, and is 
 particularly in our own time, a remarkable agreement 
 of authorities. 
 
 It may, indeed, often appear that the disregard 
 of animal wants and the renunciation of the world 
 preached in the New Testament, are exaggerated. 
 Animal wants in our northern climates, cares of liveli- 
 hood since slavery was disused, have become more im- 
 perious than they were in ancient times, and the edu- 
 cation of recent centuries has led us to approve a cer- 
 tain kind and degree of worldliness. Even prejudices, 
 social conventions, and decorums may no doubt be con- 
 demned too unreservedly. But granting all this by 
 way of abatement, the general truth of the New 
 Testament doctrine is clearer now than it has been in 
 many ages (so called) of religious agreement. There 
 has never been a time when the necessity of religion, 
 in the broad sense of the word, has been so clear, if 
 there has never been a time when its value in the 
 narrow sense has been so much disputed. If, now 
 that Art and Science have attained complete in- 
 dependence of ihe Church, and the monopoly even of 
 moral influence is withdrawn from her by systems of 
 independent morality, secular education and the like, 
 we give the name of religion to that confined domain 
 which is still left to the Church, it will seem as in- 
 significant as the States of the Church have been in 
 our time compared to the dominion held by Hilde- 
 brand or Innocent. But if we understand that all 
 culture alike rests upon religion, religion being not 
 simple, but threefold, and consisting of that worship 
 of visible things which leads to art, that worship of 
 
 92 
 
132 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 humanity which leads to all moral disciplines, and 
 principally the Christian, and that worship of God 
 which is the soul of all philosophy and science ; if we 
 recognize, on the other hand, that secularity is 
 the absence not of one of these kinds of worship, 
 but of all in other words, that it is the paralysis 
 of the power of admiration, and as a consequence, 
 the predominance of the animal wants and the 
 substitution of automatic custom for living will and 
 intelligence, then we shall recognize, that it is not 
 favoured but very emphatically repudiated by the 
 spirit of the present time. 
 
 If we adopt this principle, that is, if we consider 
 morality to be something different from mere decorum, 
 and religion to be something different from mere 
 orthodoxy, if we consider the basis of both to be 
 sincerity of life, we shall scarcely be so much alarmed 
 as many religionists are at the turn which opinion 
 is taking. Who that has seen the new generation 
 of scientists at their work does not delight in their 
 healthy and manly vigour, even when most he feels 
 their iconoclasm to be fanatical? No great harm surely 
 can come in the end from that frank victorious ardour! 
 As for the opposite enthusiasm of Art, certainly we 
 cannot honour it with such epithets as frank, manly, 
 vigorous, or healthy; and yet here too there is life, 
 a determination to deal honestly with the question of 
 pleasure, to have real enjoyment and of the best kind 
 rather than the dull pretence of gladness, the mock- 
 pleasure and mock-happiness which so plainly indicate 
 something hollow in our well-being. These on the 
 whole are movements which indicate rather revival 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 133 
 
 than decay, rather life than death. For Art and 
 
 Jience are not of the world, though the world may 
 :nipt them ; they have the nature of religion. When 
 crefore we see them shaking off the fetters of the 
 reigning religion, we may be anxious, but we are not 
 to call this an outbreak of secularity ; it is the appear- 
 ance of new forms of religion, which if they threaten 
 orthodoxy threaten secularity quite as much. Now 
 secularity is the English vice, and we may rejoice 
 to see it attacked. It ought to be the beginning 
 of a new life for England that the heavy materialism 
 which has so long weighed upon her is shaken at last. 
 We have been perhaps little aware of it, as one is 
 usually little aware of the atmosphere one has long 
 breathed. We have been aware only of an energetic 
 industrialism. We have been proud of our national 
 "self-help," of our industry and solvency, and have 
 taken as but the due reward of these virtues our good 
 fortune in politics and colonisation. We have even 
 framed for ourselves a sort of Deuteronomic religion 
 which is a great comfort to us ; it teaches that because 
 we are honest aad peaceable and industrious, therefore 
 our Jehovah gives us wealth in abundance, and our 
 exports and imports swell and our debt diminishes and 
 our emigrants people half the globe. The creed is too 
 primitive ! Ought well-being to be so absolutely con- 
 founded with wealth ? Is life but a livelihood ? We 
 may no doubt think ourselves happy, in not being 
 misled, like so many nations, by false ideals. On the 
 other hand have we any ideal at all ? Does not this 
 eternal question of a livelihood keep us at a level from 
 which no ideal is visible ? In old biographies we read 
 
134 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 of high and generous feelings, the love of fame, the 
 ambition of great achievements, not to speak of higher 
 feelings yet. We neither have such feelings nor yet 
 any bitter regret to think that we cannot have them. 
 We are too tame for either aspirations or regrets, or if 
 we have them we know as a matter of course that they 
 cannot be indulged. Money must be made first and a 
 good deal of it ; comfort not to say luxury cannot 
 be dispensed with, for the very thought of any kind of 
 self-denial is too medieval; then comes pleasure, of 
 which we can scarcely have enough. When all these 
 claims are satisfied, the balance of our time may be 
 given to our ideal, if we have one at all ; we are 
 perhaps aware that so much will not suffice, but then 
 we are humble and do not even in our dreams expect 
 to accomplish much. 
 
 Where there is the perception of an ideal we may 
 expect to find the sense of a vocation. England surely 
 is the country where the largest number of people lead, 
 for mere superfluous wealth, a life that they them- 
 selves despise; the country where vocations are oftenest 
 deliberately disobeyed or trifled with, where artists 
 oftenest paint falsely and literary men write hastily 
 for money, and where men born to be philosophers, or 
 scientific discoverers, or moral reformers, oftenest end 
 igiiorniniously in large practice at the bar. 
 
 Again, where there is the perception of an ideal we 
 may expect to find high and original views of education. 
 Children are, as it were, fresh blocks of marble in 
 which if we have any ideal we have a new chance of 
 realizing it after we have failed in ourselves. Look, 
 then, how the English people treat their children. 
 
RELIGION AND THE WOULD. 135 
 
 Try and discover from the way they train them, from 
 the education they give them, what they wish them 
 to be. They have ceased, almost consciously ceased, 
 to have any ideal at all. Traces may still be observed 
 of an old ideal not quite forgotten : here and there a 
 vague notion of instilling hardihood, a really decided 
 wish to teach frankness and honesty, and, in a large 
 class, also good manners ; but these after all are 
 negative virtues. What do they wish their children to 
 aim at? What pursuits do they desire for them? 
 Except that when they grow up they are to make or 
 have a livelihood, and take a satisfactory position in 
 society, and in the meanwhile that it would be hard 
 for them not to enjoy themselves heartily, most parents 
 would be puzzled to say what they wish for their 
 children. And, whatever they wish, they wish so 
 languidly that they entrust the realization of it almost 
 entirely to strangers, being themselves, so they say 
 and indeed the Philistine or irreligious person always 
 is much engaged. The parent, from sheer embarrass- 
 ment and want of an ideal, has in a manner abdicated, 
 and it has become necessary to set apart a special class 
 for the cultivation of parental feelings and duties. The 
 modern schoolmaster should change his name, for he 
 has become a kind of standing or professional parent. 
 
 The Christian Church, one would think, is here to 
 cure all this. It is here, and has by no means lost 
 its hold on the community. Wonderful is the effect 
 produced by any religious utterance which seems to ring 
 true. But its system is full of survivals, its text-books 
 have been left too long without revision, its teaching is 
 so archaic as to be in great part scarcely intelligible 
 
136 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 without the aid of ancient history, while the method of 
 tests and exclusions has drained it of intellectual 
 vigour and has left it mainly under the control of 
 anxious, nerveless minds; so that it is hardly listened 
 to by men of the world except on the ground that 
 Anility and Puerility after all are forces, and might do 
 untold mischief if they were needlessly provoked. 
 The religious world, which ought, one would suppose, 
 to cherish the high ideal that the community wants, 
 has in fact an ideal almost lower than that of the com- 
 munity. It applies the rudest standards, such as the 
 Hebrew prophets denounced in the infancy of the world. 
 Unblushingly it pronounces a man religious because 
 he practises religious observances, figures in religious 
 societies, talks much and unctuously about religion. 
 " Thousands of rams," as the prophet would say, " and 
 ten thousands of rivers of oil" ! But real religiousness, 
 which, as he tells us, shuns parade, which in fact con- 
 sists mainly in a quiet devotion to the sort of work 
 which is permanently useful and an infinite solicitude 
 to do such work as well as possible, does not pass 
 with the religious world for religiousness at all. 
 
 Meanwhile the great writers who, often indifferent 
 or hostile to orthodoxy, have been the prophets 
 of the present age, have denounced secularity as 
 earnestly as the prophets of old time. Insincerity 
 and conventionalism have been the objects of their 
 attack, cant in religion, dilettantism in art, shams in 
 society, party common-places in politics, in all depart- 
 ments the tyranny of opinion destroying individuality. 
 But to have an individuality is to have an ideal, and 
 to have an ideal is to have an object of worship, it is 
 
RELIGION AND THE WORLD. 
 
 137 
 
 to have a religion. Thus it is that modern teaching 
 does but repeat, in these days when it is said there is 
 no agreement about religion, the maxims which have 
 always made the basis of the religion of Christen- 
 dom that "there is one thing needful," and that "it 
 shall profit a man nothing if he gain the whole world 
 and lose his own soul." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 RELIGION AND CULTURE. 
 
 AND thus in real life, no less than in speculation, we 
 meet with Natural Religion . When we go where the 
 Christian tradition has most completely lost its hold, 
 where clerical influence is extinct, where to reject 
 miracles is a point of honour and the very conception 
 of a spiritual world is at least put on one side, we do 
 not find that we have left religion behind us. We 
 still recognize the feelings, we still hear the peculiar 
 rhetoric, of religion. We find men still falling into 
 two classes, still struggling over something they treat 
 as infinitely important. Among men who profess 
 alike to be materialists one is found excommuni- 
 cating the other, shrinking from him with the horror 
 of a Pharisee for a publican, and even pitying him 
 with the pity of an apostle for a heathen. These 
 feelings not only appear to have the nature of 
 religion, but they are in no degree weak or faint. 
 On the contrary they are fresh, and easily become 
 violent. They by no means appear to be the 
 mere survival of an extinct system of religion, but 
 seem rather capable of becoming the germ of a 
 new system. 
 
 
Ift 
 
 RELIGION AND CULTURE. 139 
 
 If then religion is here, working as fully and 
 vigorously as ever, it follows that we have a religious 
 question. For in what relation does this religion stand 
 to our Christianity, to our Churches and religious 
 denominations ? 
 
 As the religion is at the present time intolerant 
 of supernaturalism, it has a difficulty in identifying 
 itself with any of the organised systems. In these 
 circumstances a plausible course suggests itself, which 
 is easily accepted by most of the more moderate 
 representatives of modern free thought. It is said that 
 the substance of all religion evidently is morality, 
 "he can't be wrong whose life is in the right" and 
 that accordingly all we have to do is to draw attention 
 principally to the moral part of Christianity, sinking 
 the supernatural and mysterious element as much as 
 possible. By this means, it is thought, all the sub- 
 stantial uses of religion may be served ; men may learn 
 to love each other ; and in consideration of this grand 
 point gained a little superstition may be tolerated 
 until the progress of education shall have made super- 
 naturalism as incredible to the great mass of the people 
 as it is already to the instructed few. 
 
 No doubt it is a plausible view, since there is evi- 
 dently a ground of Natural Religion which is common 
 to Christian and Sceptic, that here a religion might be 
 founded which should be influential in modern life and 
 yet should avoid the arrogance of calling itself new. 
 For it may well seem possible to avoid the burning 
 question of miracles, so long as the chief authorities on 
 both sides vie with one another in asserting that the 
 essence of religion is not in dogma but in something 
 
140 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 else, whether they call it 'life' in opposition to ' forms 
 of creed' or ' charity' in opposition to knowledge or by 
 some other name. But yet in practice the hope is 
 always disappointed. The Christians on the one side, 
 in spite of the parable of the Good Samaritan, decide that 
 after all supernatural dogmas are necessary, and by the 
 rationalists too the profession of reverence for religion 
 seems to be dropped as soon as it has served its purpose. 
 After all it is discovered that by religion they did not 
 really mean religion. And so the compromise breaks 
 down, and the irreconcilable quarrel between religion 
 and modern thought begins again with no other prospect 
 but of the destruction of one or the other. 
 
 At this point it is, at this disappointing identification 
 of religion with morality, that the breach takes place. 
 'Can then religion mean no more than that we 
 should pay our debts, keep our engagements, and not 
 be too hard on our enemies ? For nothing more than 
 this have so many temples been built, so many psalms 
 been sung, so many penitents retired from the world, 
 so many saints and prophets wrestled with their own 
 souls, so many martyrs sacrificed their lives ? Would 
 that invisible choir be satisfied now with the fruit of 
 its labours could it but see mankind made moral, the 
 planet inhabited by well-behaved people with their 
 passions under control, leading intelligent and reason- 
 able lives ? And this result once attained, would the 
 world be absolved from all religious duties for the 
 future ? Will the civilised community of the future, 
 furnished with the school and the press, see the eutha- 
 nasia of religion in the old sense, and look back upon 
 its historic splendours as on the mere transient sunrise 
 of a calm day V 
 
RELIGION AND CULTURE. 141 
 
 We have entered here upon another road. In the 
 residuum left after the elimination of miracle we have 
 seen no mere morality, but something which has all 
 the greatness and sublimity of the old religion. Not 
 morality, but worship; not an influence dormant so 
 long as no temptation arises, helping us only in our 
 work and deserting us in our leisure, but a principle of 
 life possessing the whole imagination and heart. 
 
 According to the view here taken too much is 
 said by modern rationalists of morality and too little 
 of art and science, since these are related no less 
 closely to religion and must be taken with morality 
 to make up the higher life. This view indeed regards 
 the very word morality and the way of thinking which 
 leads to a frequent use of the word with the same sort 
 of impatience which the Pauline writings show towards 
 the law. In any description of an ideal community 
 which might be given in accordance with this view not 
 much stress would be laid on its moral purity. This 
 would rather be taken for granted as the natural 
 result of the healthy working of the higher life. The 
 peculiarity most strongly marked would be rather that 
 what we call genius would be of ordinary occurrence in 
 such a community. Every one there would be alive. 
 The cares of livelihood would not absorb the mind, 
 taming all impulse, clogging all flight, depressing the 
 spirit with a base anxiety, smothering all social inter- 
 course with languid fatigue, destroying men's interest 
 in each other and making friendship impossible. Every 
 one would worship, that is, every one would have some 
 object of habitual contemplation, which would make life 
 rich and bright to him, and of which he would think 
 
142 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 and speak with ardour. Every one would have some 
 supreme interest, to which he would be proud to 
 sacrifice every kind of pelf, and by which he would be 
 bound in the highest kind of friendship to those who 
 shared it. The Higher Life in all hearts would be as a 
 soil out of which many fair growths would spring; mora- 
 lity would be one of these ; but it would appear in a form 
 so fresh that no such name would seem appropriate to it. 
 
 In history we meet with examples of such Natural 
 Religion. Nations have sometimes their moment when 
 this Higher Life grows so strong in them that it breaks 
 out in visible manifestations, so that they do original 
 and immortal things, and after times look back fondly 
 upon the Golden Age, hoping to revive it by imitation 
 and commentatorship. But in history this appears as 
 'a spirit which bloweth where it listeth/ and no one has 
 inquired upon what causes its awakening may depend. 
 Nevertheless this is the problem of those who discuss 
 Natural Religion. 
 
 In order to arrive at this view we begin by denying 
 the position that the essential part of all religion is 
 morality. Instead of this we lay it down that there 
 is indeed a kind of religion which is intimately con- 
 nected with morality, but that there are also other 
 kinds which manifest themselves in quite other 
 ways and yet are truly religions, essential to the 
 higher life of man. From such a proposition it will 
 follow that the plan of insisting mainly on the moral 
 part of Christianity is insufficient and does not 
 meet the wants of the age. For the age calls not 
 merely for a revival of the essential spirit of Christi- 
 anity, though this too is needed, but for new elements 
 
RELIGION AND CULTURE. 143 
 
 of religion which, though not opposed to Christianity, 
 are yet scarcely to be discovered in it. We shall see 
 this if we pursue the line of thought to which the last 
 chapter introduced us, and examine more closely that 
 spirit of opposition to secularity which we see awaken- 
 ing around us. In this opposition there is much which 
 does not seem to have been inspired by Christianity. 
 And as it developes and organises itself, we do not see 
 it assume the name of Christianity, nor even of religion 
 at all ; it prefers to call itself culture. 
 
 What is this new thing f culture/ and what relation 
 does it bear to the old familiar thing 'religion'? If we 
 might judge by the utterances of its adherents it is not 
 dissimilar nor unfriendly to religion, but somehow more 
 enlightened and modern, so that it speaks another 
 dialect even when it would express the same truths. 
 Moreover it is understood to be much more compre- 
 hensive, and in fact to deal principally with matters of 
 a different kind. It is concerned more with art and 
 science than with self-sacrifice or charity. 
 
 This view might be correct if religion were identical 
 with ecclesiastical Christianity. But if we take a 
 larger and juster view of religion, it will not seem to us 
 less enlightened or less comprehensive than culture, or 
 indeed different from it in any way. It will seem to 
 be merely the alias which the Natural Religion of the 
 modern world has adopted, being forbidden by ortho- 
 doxy to use the name that properly belongs to it. 
 For it is a general rule that the orthodox system has 
 kept to itself the vocabulary of belief and has thus 
 forced all other systems to appear as non-religious, if 
 not irreligious. These systems themselves too, soured 
 
144 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 by opposition, have taken some pleasure in avoiding 
 the old phrases; which, though in themselves natural 
 and poetic, had lost their charm, had been stiffened by 
 too much definition, cheapened by too much use, worn 
 by too much controversy. New phrases therefore have 
 been coined even for notions borrowed from the re- 
 ligious tradition. Thus it was that at the very moment 
 when men began to dare to call themselves Atheists 
 they began to use the language of religious worship 
 towards Nature. Poets were inspired with hymns in 
 praise of Nature, philosophers began to study Nature 
 with a new kind of ardour and devotion ; and in course 
 of time through this new worship the old Hebrew sub- 
 limity returned to poetry, the old Hebrew indignation 
 at anthropomorphism showed itself in science; and 
 still it was long so completely was the phraseology 
 of worship pre-occupied by the Church before it was 
 understood that these feelings were really, and not 
 in mere metaphor, worship; long, too, before the object 
 of this worship was perceived to be none other than 
 He who was worshipped from the beginning, the 
 ancient God, " our dwelling-place in all generations." 
 About the same time, too, when men began to confess 
 their repugnance to theology, their contempt for a 
 science so unprogressive and so quarrelsome, they 
 began, on the other hand, to imagine the possibility 
 of drawing a rule for human life from the new and 
 vast views of the universe that were opening with the 
 progress of science ; but still they called theology their 
 enemy, and did not perceive that to aim at such a 
 new synthesis was to aim at reviving theology. Once 
 more it is worth noticing how from the beginning of 
 

 RELIGION AND CULTURE. 145 
 
 the period of denial the word Humanity has haunted 
 men almost as much as the word Nature ; and all this 
 while they have pursued Christianity as an enemy 
 upon whose destruction they were bent, refusing to 
 see that the worship of humanity is as truly the 
 revival of specific New Testament Christianity as the 
 scientific view of the universe is the revival of the 
 austere Jewish theism. 
 
 On the same principle Religion has been revived 
 under the artificial name of Culture. 
 
 Thus instead of saying that the substance of re- 
 ligion is morality and the effect of it moral goodness 
 we lay it down that the substance of religion is culture 
 and the fruit of it the higher life. And it is in the 
 growth of the doctrine and theory of culture in the 
 modern world rather than in any mere signs of reviving 
 activity in religious bodies that we see the true revival 
 of religion and the true antidote of secularity. 
 
 Not that the word is a good one. It is a misfortune 
 that those who now say * culture ' do not say ( religion. 
 The word religion makes us think of feelings, emotions 
 and convictions or the acts which flow immediately out 
 of these, but the word culture suggests rather the 
 machinery of training, art-schools, academies, uni- 
 versities. Culture is properly a direction given to the 
 development of life, but religion is the principle of life 
 itself. Now it is not by any system of training but 
 only by a principle of life that secularity can be resisted 
 Culture again is a word which seems to describe the 
 privilege of a favoured few, and yet to withstand 
 secularity we need a mighty popular force. Nothing 
 perhaps could contribute so much to mislead the rising 
 s. 10 
 
146 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 religious movement of the modern world as such a name, 
 which seems to condemn it beforehand to formality, ex- 
 clusiveness and pedantry. The very word brings before 
 the mind everything that belongs to the school, the 
 clique, the exclusive profession, in fact all those evils of 
 excessive organisation under which religion has always 
 suffered. 
 
 But though the name is unfortunate, the thing 
 realises precisely that large conception of religion after 
 which we have been feeling. For culture is not ' mere 
 morality' but embraces a larger field, while it never- 
 theless includes morality. If we look at the history of 
 the modern theory of culture we shall perceive that its 
 characteristic feature is precisely the assertion of the 
 religious dignity of Art and Science. That German 
 Gospel which the Puritan Carlyle preached to us with 
 a solemnity which seemed scarcely appropriate to it, 
 was an assertion of Beauty and Truth as deserving to 
 be worshipped along with Duty. Goethe and Schiller 
 habitually apply the language of religion to Art, and 
 in the whole school which they represent may be 
 traced an impulse to create a new organisation for the 
 worship of Beauty and Truth, worships omitted, as 
 they held, in Christianity. They turn their backs on 
 the church and study to make the theatre and the 
 university into centres of the higher life. And yet 
 it is quite alien to their way of thinking to undervalue 
 moral goodness, or even to treat the Church, so far as it 
 is the organ of moral influence, with any hostility. In 
 their minds Beauty, Truth and Goodness are of one 
 family ; only they oppose the puritanism which sets 
 Goodness at an unapproachable height above its sisters 
 
RELIGION AND CULTURE. 147 
 
 and they are disposed rather to give the highest place 
 to Beauty. 
 
 Their view was probably extreme so far as it was 
 the result of a reaction. But their fundamental con- 
 ception, to which they gave the name of Culture, is of 
 a threefold religion such as has been set forth here. 
 Culture is summed up by Goethe in the formula, Life 
 in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beautiful. Here 
 Morality, under the name of Life in the Good, stands 
 between Art, which is Life in the Beautiful, and 
 Science, or the knowledge of the law of the universe, 
 which is Life in the Whole. 
 
 When one religion is set up against another there 
 begin controversies and embarrassments. But when the 
 principle of all religion is compared with the opposite 
 principle, when the life inspired by admiration and de- 
 votion is compared with the life that begins and ends 
 in mere acquisition, then there is no controversy at all 
 among those whose opinions are valuable. Looked at 
 so, religion is seen to be entirely beyond dispute and 
 to be only another name for the higher life, the life 
 of the soul. When on the scene of history religion 
 appears in some partial, one-sided form, it often 
 works mischievously; again and again a drop of it 
 falling at a critical moment into the cauldron of 
 political or social strife has caused the most terrible 
 combustion. It has been easy for philosophers preaching 
 on the text tantum religio potuit, &c., to make out 
 religion itself a mischievous principle and that it ought 
 to be a main object to moderate, if we cannot hope to 
 kill, this unfortunate propensity in human nature. But 
 almost everything else that is highest in man might be 
 
 102 
 
148 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 looked at in the same way. Nothing troubles social 
 life so much as originality, or political life so much as 
 the spirit of liberty. Of these intractable forces the 
 greatest by far is religion. If only it could be extin- 
 guished ! In that case we might picture the human family 
 entering upon the happiness which has no history, be- 
 ginning a career chequered by nothing that could be 
 called incident, and varied only by the gradations of 
 progress, a career the annals of which would consist only 
 of the ever improving statistics of production and 
 enjoyment; in short, "feeding like horses when you 
 hear them feed ! " But indeed such a consummation 
 would be only a kind of euthanasia of human nature. 
 It is precisely these impulses and emotions which are 
 so hard to control that give dignity and worth to life. 
 It is for their sakes that we produce and consume. 
 And so it is a more hopeful course to consider whether 
 those sinister workings of the higher life may not 
 be as happily prevented by giving it a full and harmo- 
 nious development as by vainly trying to extinguish 
 it. 
 
 The position taken up in this chapter is that eccle- 
 siastical Christianity has a certain onesidedness, which 
 has made it oppressive to other forms of religion and has 
 provoked them to a rebellion which may look like a 
 rebellion against religion itself ; but that by the side of 
 the rebellion there has been a constructive effort, so that 
 we have now under the name of culture a system which, 
 however imperfect in other respects, is free from such 
 onesidedness, and reconciles the three elements which 
 have hitherto done so much mischief by their discord. 
 
 These three forms of religion have a sort of corre- 
 
RELIGION AND CULTURE. 149 
 
 spondence to the three stages of human life. The Higher 
 Paganism may be called the childhood of the higher 
 life, and so when continued too long and not duly 
 subordinated, it is the childishness and frivolity of it. 
 Primitive Christianity is its youth, its phase of en- 
 thusiasm and unbounded faith both in man and the 
 universe ; this, too, if it stands too much alone, 
 degrades into sentimentalism. Science is the later 
 phase, when reality is firmly faced, when the sombre 
 greatness of the law under which we live, and 
 at the same the limitations it imposes on us and 
 the patience it requires from us, are manfully con- 
 fessed ; but this also taken alone is no more than the 
 cynical old age of the higher life. For it is essential 
 to its completeness not only to have acquired what 
 comes latest, but also to retain and not to lose what 
 came earlier. Humanity must constantly renew its 
 childhood and its youth as well as advance in ex- 
 perience. At the same time that it observes and 
 reasons with scientific rigour, it must learn to hope 
 with Christian enthusiasm, and also to enjoy with 
 Pagan freshness. 
 
 How different does Paganism look when we con- 
 template it in the age of Pericles, or that of Scipio, 
 when it began to be quietly left behind, and again in 
 the days of the final triumph of Christianity when it 
 was aggressively destroyed ! In the one case we see 
 with contempt its childish absurdity ; in the other we 
 mark with some regret its freshness and brightness. 
 In the great Athenian age a few artists still with 
 studied conservatism cling to it; and we may indeed 
 observe that when this is no longer possible the great 
 
150 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 imaginative poets come no more ; but to the majority 
 of intelligent men it has become a mass of absurdity no 
 more credible than Brahminism to the young Bengal 
 of to-day. With still more decisive contempt do the 
 strong prosaic intellects of Rome put aside and utterly 
 forget their old Italian religion. All this seems to us, 
 when we read of it, neither avoidable nor to be re- 
 grettable ; what was absurd could not but appear to 
 be so sooner or later. But when, after many centuries, 
 the Revolution has gone much further; when the 
 Church has rooted out of the minds of the common 
 people what then only dropped quietly out of the 
 belief of philosophers ; when the temples of the gods 
 are thrown down and their names held abominable ; 
 when a completely new page of history begins, and 
 all such ways of thinking are decisively left behind, 
 some sort of revulsion takes place in our feelings. 
 The new world appears too monastic, too much tor- 
 mented with conscience, not spontaneous or natural 
 enough. We delight to see the old Pagan fire break 
 out sometimes in Caedmon, and are inclined to wish 
 it had free way, and that there were no Christianity 
 near to smother it. How much we prize what glimpses 
 we can get of those old beliefs ; how much it dis- 
 appoints us when the writings of those times are silent 
 about them, and give us instead merely Christianity and 
 monotonous lives of saints ! In some cases we are 
 disposed to complain even that the native genius of 
 a nation has been killed by the foreign faith, when we 
 find a literature, after perhaps a promising commence- 
 ment, paralysed for long ages by ecclesiastical in- 
 fluence. Then it is that we see the other side of 
 

 RELIGION AND CULTURE. 151 
 
 Paganism, and what before appeared childish we are 
 now disposed rather to describe as childlike. We are 
 struck now by the free zest and relish of the world 
 that went to the making of those frivolous creeds ; 
 here and there perhaps we see in them the rudiments 
 of a true philosophy. We are angry that this vigorous 
 play of mind should be brought to an end, and that 
 not by a truer philosophy of nature, but by a timid 
 morality which looks only within, and is afraid to 
 philosophise on nature at all. In fact, we have just 
 the same feelings as when in an individual we see 
 childhood come to an end, and the merry, boisterous 
 boy turned into the awkward, perhaps self-conscious 
 and sickly youth. 
 
 Hence the reaction which steadily and more or less 
 secretly has for so many centuries gone on under the 
 name of Renaissance. It is analogous to the growth 
 in cheerfulness and healthy worldliness which comes 
 to the youth as he grows accustomed to manhood. The 
 self-conscious youth of humanity was long and trying. 
 Its Pagan childhood was artificially prolonged till it 
 was more like ^dotage than childhood, and when the 
 new feelings of self-sacrifice, duty, enthusiasm came, 
 instead of quietly controlling and modifying the old 
 feelings, they began a violent war against them. One 
 extreme was substituted for another for the Pagan 
 view of life, the Christian view heightened by monasti- 
 cism. The renunciation of selfishness was violent in 
 proportion to the intensity with which it had been in- 
 dulged ; the world was hated as much as it had been 
 loved ; the extremes of self-devotion were explored 
 with the eagerness natural to a first discovery. These 
 
152 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 excesses are outlived in time, and youth ripens into 
 manhood by recovering something of the child. And 
 thus the Renaissance is not merely the revival of 
 ancient arts, the adoption of ancient models, it is the 
 revival in proper degree and subordination of the 
 ancient religion. It is the restoration of the worship 
 of the forms of nature. This worship returns, purified, 
 of course, from all mixture of delusion, purified from 
 superstition, and, what is still more important, sub- 
 ordinated duly to other worships infinitely higher and 
 more solemn, but none the less a worship, an admira- 
 tion which may become unbounded in degree and rise 
 to ecstasy, and which is essential to the healthy vigour 
 of the higher life. 
 
 But manhood differs from youth, not merely in 
 having recovered something which youth had parted 
 with, but also in having gained something unknown 
 both to youth and childhood. Beyond the forms of 
 nature and the ideal of moral goodness there remains 
 another discovery to be made, the recognition of a Law 
 in the universe stronger than ourselves and different 
 from ourselves, and refusing to us not only the in- 
 dulgence of our desires but also, as we learn slowly 
 and with painful astonishment, the complete realization 
 of our ideals. It is not in the time when we are form- 
 ing those ideals that it is possible for us to recognise 
 the limitation imposed by Nature upon the fulfilment 
 of them, and yet until we can make the recognition 
 we shall be liable to constant mistake and disappoint- 
 ment. The special advantage of manhood over youth 
 lies in this recognition, in the sense of reality and 
 limitation. Youth is fantastic and Utopian compared 
 
RELIGION AND CULTURE. 153 
 
 to manhood, as it is melancholy compared both to 
 manhood and childhood. Here again the parallel holds 
 between primitive Christianity and youth. Nothing 
 can be more mistaken than the comparison made by 
 some of those who have regretted Paganism (Schiller, 
 for instance, in The Gods of Greece), between the 
 melancholy of Christianity and the melancholy which 
 is the mark of old age. Most evidently all that 
 has been morbid in Christian views of the world has 
 resembled the sickliness of early youth rather than 
 the decay of age. Old age is subject to cynical 
 melancholy, early youth to fantastic melancholy, and 
 assuredly it is the latter rather than the former that 
 has shown itself in Christianity. All the faults that 
 have ever been reasonably charged against the practical 
 working of Christianity (apart from those arising from 
 faulty organization) are the faults which in the in- 
 dividual we recognise as the faults of youth, a melan- 
 choly view of life, in morals a disposition to think 
 rather of purity than of justice, but principally 
 an intolerance of all limitation either in hope 
 or belief. "All things are possible to him that 
 believeth," is a glorious formula of philanthropic 
 heroism; the mistake of the Church, as the mistake 
 of young men, is to treat it as literally and prosaically 
 true. 
 
 Another maxim has to be learned in time, that 
 some things are impossible, and to master this is to 
 enter upon the manhood of the higher life. But it 
 ought not to be mastered as a mere depressing nega- 
 tion, but rather as a new religion. The law that is 
 independent of us and that conditions all our activity 
 
154 NATURAL RELJG10X APPLIED. 
 
 is not to be reluctantly acknowledged, but studied 
 with absorbing delight and awe. At the moment 
 when our own self- consciousness is liveliest, when our 
 own beliefs, hopes and purposes are most precious to 
 us, we are to acknowledge that the universe is greater 
 than ourselves, and that our wills are weak compared 
 with the law that governs it, and our purposes futile 
 except so far as they are in agreement with that law. 
 
 This assuredly is the transition which the world 
 is now making. It is throwing off at once the melan- 
 choly and the unmeasured imaginations of youth ; it 
 is recovering, as manhood does, something of the glee 
 of childhood and adding to that a new sense of reality. 
 Its return to childhood is called Renaissance, its acqui- 
 sition of the sense of reality is called Science. We 
 may be glad of both. Science will save us from those 
 heroic mistakes of which the Catholic centuries were 
 so fruitful, from unworldliness ending on the one hand 
 in squalor and pestilence, on the other in greedy men- 
 dicancy, from pity creating pauperism, and chastity 
 by reaction promoting vice. Renaissance will redeem 
 the lower levels of life from the bald barrenness of 
 money-getting, and give Humanity the fond gaillard 
 that may carry her through the trials in store for her. 
 We may take sides firmly with the modern world 
 against the Syllabus, against all unfortunate attempts 
 to preserve a justly-cherished ideal by denying and 
 repudiating reality, to protect against all subsequent 
 modification the first sublime exaggerations of the 
 newborn spirit of self-sacrifice, to banish criticism be- 
 cause it is cold, and philosophy because it is calm, and 
 to try and give the feelings of youth the one thing 
 
RELIGION AND CULTURE. 155 
 
 precisely which is most foreign to them infallibility 
 and unchanging permanence. 
 
 Nevertheless, the analogy that we have been 
 pursuing will suggest to us that the victory of the 
 modern spirit would be fatal if pressed too far, as 
 indeed it is essentially a melancholy triumph, and that 
 the youth of humanity, crushed out too ruthlessly, 
 would have a still more irresistible Renaissance than 
 its childhood. The sense of reality gives new force 
 when it comes in to correct the vagueness of our 
 ideals ; this is manhood ; but when it takes the place 
 or destroys the charm of them, this is the feebleness 
 of old age. Healthy manhood must continue to savour 
 of its youth as of its infancy, to be enthusiastic and 
 tender as well as to be buoyant. It must continue to 
 hope much and believe much ; we praise caution and 
 coolness in a youth, but a few stages on these qualities 
 cease to seem admirable, and the man begins to be 
 praised for the opposite qualities, for ardour, for 
 enthusiasm, in short for being still capable of that 
 of which youth is only too capable. But in the indi- 
 vidual we regard this persistent vitality as only 
 possible for a time. Old age sets in at last, when, if 
 enthusiasm still survive, it is not so much a merit 
 as a kind of prodigy. Is Humanity to verify the 
 analogy in this respect also ? When we have learnt to 
 recognise the limitations imposed on us, that we 
 cannot have everything as our enthusiasm would make 
 it, and that if our ideals are to be realised in any con- 
 siderable measure it must be by taking honest account 
 of the conditions of possibility ; when we have gone so 
 far, are we to advance another step and confess that 
 
156 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 the conditions of possibility are so rigorous that most of 
 our ideals must be given up, and that in fact humanity 
 has little to hope or to wish for? It need not be so 
 if, as was said above, the service of Necessity may be- 
 come freedom instead of bondage, if the Power above 
 us which so often checks our impatience and pours 
 contempt on our enthusiasms can be conceived as not 
 necessarily giving less than we hope for because it does 
 not give precisely what we hope for, but perhaps even 
 as giving infinitely more. On this hypothesis humanity 
 may preserve the vigour of its manhood. Otherwise, 
 if reality, when we acquire the power of distinguishing 
 it, turns out not merely different from what we expect 
 but much below what we expect ; if this universe, so 
 vast and glorious in itself, proves in relation to the 
 satisfaction of our desires narrow and ill-furnished, if it 
 disappoints not only our particular wishes but the very 
 faculty of wishing by furnishing no sufficient food, then 
 humanity has also its necessary old age. And if its 
 old age, then surely that which lies beyond old age. 
 We must not merely give up the immortality of the 
 individual soul which some have persuaded them- 
 selves they can afford to give up but we must learn 
 to think of humanity itself as mortal. We must 
 abandon ourselves to Pessimism. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII. * 
 
 NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 THE religious movement of the modern world has 
 been exhibited here as in great part independent of 
 Christianity. But are we not to look forward also to a 
 revival of the essential part of Christianity ? May we 
 not hope to see a religion arise which shall appeal to 
 the sense of duty as forcibly, preach righteousness and 
 truth, justice and mercy as solemnly and as exclusively 
 as Christianity- itself does, only so as not to shock 
 modern views of the Universe ? 
 
 This question has hitherto been intentionally 
 avoided. The truth is that if we would bring out 
 the idea of religion as such, we must take some pains to 
 look away from Christianity. We cannot find what 
 religion is in itself by contemplating a single religion 
 exclusively, for we cannot abstract from a single case. 
 And yet much is written in these days about the 
 essential nature of religion, about what it must be to 
 be religion at all, which clearly betrays that no religion 
 
158 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 but Christianity has been thought worthy of a moment's 
 attention. Hence what is peculiar to Christianity 
 among religions is mistakenly transferred to religion 
 as such. Hence also and this is more to the present 
 purpose a wrong notion is formed of what constitutes 
 Christianity a religion. 
 
 All concrete religions, Christianity included, are 
 composed of much beside religion. We have seen the 
 essence of religion in worship, and the fruits springing 
 most naturally out of it we have held to be art, science, 
 and morality. But morality, if connected on one side 
 with religion, is on another just as closely connected 
 with law. In concrete religions, which reflect for the 
 most part primitive, rudimentary, undifferentiated ideas, 
 law, morality and religion are blended inextricably 
 together. Hence mistakes may easily be made in the 
 attempt to draw from such religions a conception of 
 religion in the abstract. 
 
 We know that Christianity, like many other 
 religions, has upheld morality by a system of rewards 
 and punishments supposed to be administered by an 
 invisible Judge. But in doing so it has acted not as a 
 religion but as a law. 
 
 Undoubtedly much of the power of Christianity 
 under the reign of supernaturalism was derived from 
 the supernatural law-court, as Dante's poem, the very 
 culminating point of Christianity in literature, is suf- 
 ficient to prove. Nor did this power begin at once to 
 decline with the belief in the miraculous revelation. The 
 Deism of the last century retained rewards and punish- 
 ments, and Voltaire himself, as his friends complained, 
 could not rid himself of the belief in a Dieu remune- 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 159 
 
 rateur-vengeur, that God whom, if he did not exist 
 ' it would be necessary to invent.' Nor again is this 
 legal view of the Universe at all peculiar to Christianity 
 among religions. The invisible King or Judge seems 
 almost a necessary part of religion, though in some 
 systems he is regarded as ruling and judging in time 
 and on earth rather than in a remote eternity, and in 
 some too he judges rather the nation or tribe than 
 the individual. Everywhere too the doctrine is 
 most effective, if it be not absolutely indispensable, 
 during a certain phase of development. The moral 
 education of societies has perhaps been mainly con- 
 ducted by means of this artificial extension of law. 
 In primitive times, it may be, almost all virtue depended 
 upon the dread of a Judge who could neither be 
 deceived nor corrupted, and who punished the indi- 
 vidual with lightning and the community with plague 
 or famine. 
 
 Religion in its concrete form being thus usually 
 blended with a supernatural law, the supernatural 
 law is easily taken for the essence of religion. It is 
 supposed that religion comes in simply to supply the 
 sanctions of morality. Christianity is often spoken of 
 as a kind of thcologia civilis, or useful popular system 
 enshrining the substance of morality in the half-mythi- 
 cal, poetical form which recommends it to the multi- 
 tude, furnishing in short the necessary fiction without 
 which the popular mind could never pass from the idea 
 of legal to that of moral obligation. 
 
 But it is not in this form that Christianity is likely 
 just now to have a revival, since this is not Natural but 
 Supernatural Christianity. For it is a secondary form of 
 
160 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 supernaturalism when we suppose an invisible world 
 wholly separate from the visible one and so give up the 
 present life to nature while we reserve another life for 
 God. Natural Religion to suit the present phase of 
 thought must be wholly different from any Deism of 
 the eighteenth century ; it must contemplate its God 
 mainly in Nature and not mainly beyond it. God in 
 Nature is indeed very really a Judge, for human laws 
 are evidently a sort of reflexion of eternal laws in- 
 herent in the Universe, which have their own ways 
 of vindicating themselves. But the future heaven 
 and the future hell are reduced by this way of 
 thinking to probabilities not strong enough to drive 
 life into a course which it would not have taken with- 
 out them. 
 
 The hope of a future life is still strong in men's 
 minds and has perhaps been expressed with more ardour 
 in this age than in any other. But the legal and penal 
 ideas which used to be connected with it have almost 
 disappeared. 'In Memoriam' speaks in every line of a 
 future state, but of a future judgment it is absolutely 
 silent. In these circumstances religion ceases to act as 
 a supernatural law. We should consider it in these 
 days a mark of low cultivation, if any one avowed that he 
 only kept his engagements from fear of hell -fire. Thus 
 it is with a start of surprise at the change of thought 
 which has taken place in little more than a century 
 that we read Benjamin Franklin's description of the 
 effect which the scepticism of his time produced upon 
 himself, as a young man, and upon his friends. With 
 religion, he tells us, morality gave way at once, even to 
 common honesty and common decency, and it was only 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 161 
 
 after much reflexion that he began to suspect that 
 wrong was not wrong because it was forbidden, 
 but had been forbidden because it was wrong. 
 Such legal ideas now seem archaic, and the example 
 teaches us to realise what is now half forgotten 
 how potent the supernatural law once was, and that 
 not so long ago, and upon the shrewdest and most 
 independent minds. 
 
 If this be so, if Christianity no longer enforces 
 morality by those overwhelming visions of a future 
 judgment, the question will be asked 'What remains 
 of Christianity beyond mere morality itself? What 
 else can remain, unless it be a few majestic discourses 
 of the ancient Prophet who first taught the nations 
 of the West to reverence universal morality ? ' 
 
 It is time then to apply to Christianity the larger 
 conception of religion which has been expounded here 
 at so much length. Religion according to this is not 
 properly a supernatural law; it is worship. Natural 
 Religion is simply worship of whatever in the known 
 Universe appears worthy of worship. As to the prac- 
 tical utility and function of religion, we find that it 
 supplies all the vitality of the higher life, or in other 
 words that whatever in human activity is free, mag- 
 nanimous or elevated rests upon feelings of admira- 
 tion or warm unselfish interest. We have dwelt 
 upon the religion which is concealed under the name 
 of culture and which lies at the basis of all art and 
 science. But now is there not similarly a religion 
 hidden under morality, and may not this moral religion 
 be called Natural Christianity ? 
 
 Conventionalism is in all departments the opposite 
 s. 11 
 
162 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 of religion. Accordingly where religion is wanting 
 all the higher activities of man are conducted in a con- 
 ventional or lifeless, mechanical manner. This is true 
 in art or in science ; it is true not less in morality. 
 
 Everyone knows how subtle, and yet how all- 
 important in w^orks of art is genuine artistic quality. 
 In every art the distinction is felt and the critic has 
 scarcely anything to do but to point it out between 
 work that is merely clever or brilliant and work that is 
 really artistic. The difference, every earnest critic 
 protests, is like that between light and darkness, 
 almost like that between right and wrong. It is the 
 " one thing needful," this genuineness ; work in which 
 it is found has value ; other work has no right to exist, 
 and had better be destroyed. A distinction which 
 affects every single performance naturally appears 
 with the utmost prominence in the history of art. 
 Whole schools, whole periods are found to have lost 
 the inestimable secret, and therefore to have left 
 nothing behind that has permanent value ; other 
 schools and periods, in spite of great faults, are never- 
 theless found to possess the secret. At times not only 
 is the secret lost, but the very tradition of it is lost 
 too ; it is denied that such a secret exists ; and the 
 question is argued with great warmth in the critical 
 world. 
 
 In such a controversy the watchword of one side is 
 "rules ;" that of the other is "nature," or "genius," or 
 " inspiration." Yet those who withstand the appeal to 
 rules, and deny the authority of the rules cited against 
 them do not, when they are wise, deny that in good 
 works of art certain fixed rules will be found to be 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 163 
 
 observed. But they maintain that rules are liable to 
 continual change, and that only principles are in- 
 variable, or in other words that genius makes its 
 own rules ; or again that the only rule is to follow 
 nature. When the causes of this difference of view 
 are examined, it is found that the party of rules take 
 a far less exalted view of art than their opponents, 
 that they think of it as a sort of game of skill which 
 is in itself unimportant, but must be played according 
 to the rules or not at all, while the others set no bounds 
 to their estimate of its dignity, and habitually speak 
 of the pursuit of it as a religion, and of skill in it as 
 priesthood or inspiration. This is the fundamental 
 controversy of art. In the eighteenth century it was 
 brought into close connexion with the religious contro- 
 versy by the fact that the same man took the lead in 
 both disputes. Voltaire was as much bent on maintain- 
 ing the dramatic unities and the bienseances of literature 
 as he was bent on humbling the Church. In the two 
 controversies he had very opposite fortune. While the 
 Church and the ecclesiastical Christianity of the time 
 seemed almost helpless under his assaults, he saw his 
 opponents in criticism constantly gaining upon him and 
 the renown of Shakespeare looming nearer and nearer. 
 Before his "death the word "genius" had been passed 
 in Germany, and "rules" and "unities" had become 
 names of ridicule. Nor has the tide turned since. 
 Fifty years later the opposite principles prevailed 
 in his own country, and it is now felt to be impossible 
 to revive with any real success the names of the poets, 
 so illustrious a century ago, who wrote under the 
 system of rules. And yet in those days Frederick 
 
 112 
 
164 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 could say, " A dispassionate judge will acknowledge 
 that the Henriade is superior to the poems of Homer!" 
 
 But now does not the history of morals run parallel 
 to that of art ? Do we not find the same debate 
 raging here too ? nay, do we not find the same de- 
 bate equally prominent in the history of the subject? 
 Are there not in the department of morals also rules, 
 unities, bienseances, and is there not a party which can 
 see nothing beyond ? Is there not here too a genius 
 party, which speaks sometimes of " nature," some- 
 times of "the heart," and which is distinguished from 
 the other party by a profession of greater earnest- 
 ness or solemnity in their view of the subject, and by 
 habitually using the word " religion," and with it the 
 whole vocabulary of religion ? This use of words is 
 called metaphorical so long as the essence of religion is 
 supposed to lie in supernaturalism. It becomes literal 
 when religion is defined as here. The religion spoken 
 of in art becomes the Higher Paganism. What is the 
 corresponding religion which stands related to conduct 
 or morality as this religion is related to art ? 
 
 How does Addison's Cato differ from King Lear ? 
 Cato is blameless in the observance of certain rules and 
 decencies rules of grammar, rhetoric and metre, 
 decencies of the drawing-room ; the merit of Lear 
 springs out of a prodigious activity of imaginative and 
 sympathetic contemplation. Poetry then, it seems, 
 may be of two totally different kinds ; it may be pro- 
 duced in a comparatively languid state of the faculties 
 by almost automatic repetition of what has been writ- 
 ten by others ; it may also appear with strangely new 
 characteristics and only resembling what has been pro- 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 165 
 
 duced before so far as it is poetry, through an intense 
 observation and assimilation of something in nature. 
 To the eye of the true critic the difference between the 
 two sorts is infinite ; the latter sort he calls real and 
 precious, the former he passes by with indifference ; and 
 yet both are called poetry, both have excited admira- 
 tion, nay, it was, in this case, the hollow production 
 which was hailed with the loudest approval. 
 
 Life too, like the drama, may be conducted ac- 
 cording to rules ; it may also be conducted on the 
 method of free inspiration, in which case also rules 
 will be observed, but the rules will be different, 
 less stereotyped, adapting themselves more readily 
 to new circumstances, and moreover they will be 
 observed instinctively and not felt as a constraint. 
 And though this latter method may easily be abused, 
 though the inspiration may in particular cases be 
 feigned or forced, though individuals may pervert the 
 method to a loose antinornianism in morals, as in art it 
 has often been made the excuse of formlessness or 
 extravagance ; yet it remains the true method, the 
 only one whick keeps morality alive and prevents it 
 from becoming a prim convention the only system, 
 in short, under which moral Shakespeares can flourish. 
 
 But in what precisely does the difference between 
 the two methods consist ? In this, that the one 
 founds morality on religion, and the other does not. 
 For if religion be that higher life of man which is 
 sustained by admiration, if its essence be worship or 
 some kind of enthusiastic contemplation seeking for ex- 
 pression in outward acts, then we shall say of morality 
 that it is founded on religion if it arise out of enthusi- 
 
166 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 astic contemplation; and in like manner we shall call 
 art religious, if it have a similar origin. Now the point 
 of close resemblance between the genius school in art 
 and the anti-legal school in morals is precisely this, 
 that both consist of worshippers, both elevate their 
 minds by habitual admiration. Enough has been said 
 of the worship which lies at the root of genuine art. 
 It is not in empty metaphor that the true artist affects 
 so much the language of religion. The loving devotion 
 with which he traces the forms of nature has all the 
 character, and is attended by all the emotions, of 
 religion ; historically, Art has come down to us from 
 the temples of Greece almost as much as morality from 
 the temple of Jerusalem ; and when the true artist 
 stands out in contrast to the mere craftsman who 
 makes works of art by rule, he is distinguished by 
 nothing so plainly as by the religious feeling which he 
 mingles with his artistic industry. But let us now 
 consider the religion that lies also at the root of all 
 free morality. 
 
 The morality that simply keeps on the windy side 
 of the law has evidently no religion at the bottom of 
 it, but rests merely on prudence. If the constraining 
 force be not literally law, but something of equivalent 
 effect, such as a social opinion or expectation, the 
 morality that results will be of the same kind. It 
 must be of the same kind too if the law is transferred 
 to the supernatural region; the religion that wields 
 those supernatural terrors is not properly called religion ; 
 it is but law turning speculative or transcendental. 
 With such morality the higher life is not in any 
 way concerned ; but only that lower life whose 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 167 
 
 objects are wealth, safety, prosperity. The higher life 
 begins when something is worshipped, when some 
 object of enthusiastic contemplation is before the 
 soul. The fighting of a William Tell differs from that 
 of a mercenary in this, that the hero has his country 
 present to his mind and his heroic actions are of 
 the nature of sacrifices offered to that object of his 
 religion. And as martial heroism, so every virtue may 
 take two shapes, the one lower and the other higher ; 
 for every virtue may spring from calculation, and on 
 the other hand every act of virtue may be a religious 
 act arising out of some worship or devotion of the soul. 
 
 But now it is not every religion that prompts to 
 virtuous action, for, as we have said so often, one kind 
 of religion bears fruit in works of art. As virtue can 
 only show itself in our relations to our fellow-men, the 
 religion that leads to virtue must be a religion that 
 worships men. If in God Himself we did not believe 
 qualities analogous to the human to exist, the worship 
 of Him would not lead to virtue ; the worship of God 
 not as we believe Him, but as we see Him in non- 
 human nature, j^vould be likely, taken by itself, to 
 lead to pitiless fanaticism. 
 
 The two great moral religions of the world, 
 Christianity and Buddhism, agree in this, that both 
 centre in the worship of a Man. The truth is that 
 all virtue which is genuine and vital springs out 
 of the worship of Man in some form. Wherever the 
 higher morality shows itself, Humanity is worshipped. 
 It is worshipped under the form of country, or of 
 ancestors, or of heroes, or great men, or saints, or 
 virgins, or in individual lives, under the form of a 
 
168 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 friend, or mother, or wife, or any object of admiration, 
 who, once seizing the heart, made all humanity seem 
 sacred, and turned all dealings with men into a 
 religious service. It is worshipped most of all when, 
 passing by an act of faith beyond all that we 
 can know, we attribute all the perfections of ideal 
 humanity to the Power that made and sustains 
 the universe. 
 
 The entanglement oi these two wholly distinct 
 conceptions of moral religion, that of a supernatural law 
 and that of a worship of Man, is peculiarly obstinate 
 and difficult to unravel. The truth is that the two 
 views are the more easily confused because to a certain 
 extent they agree. According to both views religion 
 is a popular thing, meant for the multitude and not 
 merely for a few philosophers. The rules and prohi- 
 bitions of morality, taken by themselves, are ineffective, 
 but heaven and hell all can understand. And in like 
 manner all can be made to understand goodness when 
 it is presented living and lovely, as an object of 
 worship. The two views also are curiously interwoven 
 together in the system of Catholicism. When we 
 try to explain the fascination which that system 
 exerts, we say : " Catholicism is definite, has real 
 dogmas from which it does not flinch ; it exalts and 
 satisfies the soul, which the cold and prosaic Protestant 
 or rationalistic systems leave untouched." This is 
 the language used, but it confuses together two per- 
 fectly distinct advantages which Catholicism happens 
 to unite. Catholicism is powerful no doubt because it 
 does not explain away heaven and hell ; but its 
 warmth, its poetic charm, have nothing to do with 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 169 
 
 the inflexibility of its dogmas. These are owing to 
 something else. They are the reward of the firmness 
 with which it clings to the true idea of a religion, 
 basing its moral discipline upon true worship, enthu- 
 siastic and intimate contemplation of ideals of saintly 
 humanity. 
 
 There is then a religion at the basis of all true 
 morality, and we can conceive such a religion taking 
 definite shape and becoming organised. Is this a true 
 account of Christianity, or ought we rather to regard 
 Christianity as being a religion only in the other sense, 
 that is, as a supernatural law ? 
 
 Catholicism is both together, and both in a very 
 high degree ; this is the secret of its ascendency, 
 because with the one aspect it attracts tender and 
 poetical spirits, and with the other it overawes 
 rude ones. It is true that Catholicism has elements 
 which are not to be found in the original Christianity, 
 for it is specifically the religion of the Roman Empire 
 and may be said to spring from a marriage between 
 Rome and Jerusalem. But if it be at once worship 
 and law, we may presume that the feature it derives 
 from Rome is its legality. 
 
 Mr Mill refers with a touch of sarcasm to those who 
 fancy the Bible is all one book. It is a great mistake 
 to do so ; but it is perhaps a still greater mistake to 
 think that it is not one book, or that it has no unity. 
 The writings of which it is composed, allowing a few 
 exceptions, agree together and differ from most other 
 books in certain characteristics. Certain large matters 
 are always in question, and the action moves forward 
 with a slow evolution, like the denouement of a play, 
 
170 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 through a thousand years of history. The Founder of 
 the Christian Church believed his work to be the com- 
 pletion of the long history of his race, and therefore if 
 we can grasp successfully the kernel of the Bible, if we 
 can distinguish that with which the Bible from first to 
 last is principally concerned, we shall stand a good 
 chance of distinguishing that which is the substance of 
 Christianity, according to the original intention of its 
 Founder. 
 
 Now what in the main is the subject of the Bible ? 
 Nine people out of ten, reading it with all the prepos- 
 sessions of later Christianity, would say, ' It is the book 
 of heaven and hell, the book which teaches the little- 
 ness of this life and the greatness of the life to come. 
 Other books are secular, they tell us about the visible 
 world and our temporal life ; the Bible tells us of the 
 other world and of an eternal life'. But is this really 
 such a statement as would be given by any one who 
 read the book for the first time, and with an unpreju- 
 diced mind? 
 
 Let us consider. The Bible contains the history 
 of a tribe that grew into a nation, of its con- 
 quest of a particular country, of the institutions 
 which it created for itself, and of its fortunes through 
 several centuries. Through all these centuries we hear 
 little of heaven and hell. A divine revelation is 
 said to be given to this nation ; but it is a revelation 
 which is silent about a future state. The conspicuous 
 characters of many generations pass before us ; to all 
 appearance they do not differ from similar characters in 
 other nations by having a stronger belief in a future 
 state. Their hopes are for their descendants, for the 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 171 
 
 future of their country, rather than for themselves ; 
 occasionally they speak as, if they actually believed 
 in nothing after death. Then we pass from the 
 historical to the religious writings of this race, the 
 hymns of their temple, the discourses of their prophets. 
 Here, too, we do not soon meet with any clear 
 references to a future state. The imagination of this 
 people apparently does not care to deal with the 
 mysteries of another life. Such laboured pictures of 
 the state of the dead and the rewards and punishments 
 meted out to them as we find in Homer, Plato, Virgil, 
 are entirely absent from the literature of the Hebrews. 
 Not indeed that the belief in rewards and punishments 
 is wanting. The religion of the Bible in its earlier 
 form is, like most primitive religions, inextricably con- 
 fused with law ; nay, it continues so a long time, and no 
 fuller statement of a theologia civilis than the Book 
 of Deuteronomy can anywhere be found. But it is 
 observable in the first place that the rewards and 
 punishments contemplated are all purely temporal, and 
 in the next place that as time advances this view 
 of religion instead of being more and more firmly 
 announced is called in question, and at length seems 
 to be in a manner abandoned. It is admitted that the 
 bad prosper at times, and that the good at times suffer, 
 whether it be for trial of their virtue or to atone for 
 the sins of others. 
 
 In the latter parts of the book the notion of a 
 future state begins to appear ; it creeps in silently, and 
 seems to subsist for a time in the state of an admissible 
 speculation ; then in the New Testament it prevails and 
 becomes part of the teaching of the book. But to the 
 
172 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 end of the Bible there are to be found no such heaven 
 and hell as are put before us in Dante; the writers 
 do not fix their attention as he does upon a future state. 
 A few mysterious affirmations about it suffice them. 
 We find no descriptions, no labour of the prophetic 
 imagination upon the state of the dead. This is 
 the more to be noted because it is characteristic of the 
 Biblical writers both in the New and Old Testaments, 
 that they occupy themselves especially with the future. 
 The future is their study, but not this is almost as 
 true of the New Testament as of the Old not the 
 future after death. It is a kind of political future that 
 absorbs them, the fall of kingdoms and tyrants, of. 
 Babylon, Epiphanes, Nero, and the Roman Empire, the 
 future of Jerusalem, the expected return of Christ to 
 reign upon the earth. 
 
 The popular notion, then, which makes the Bible a 
 sort of Book of the Dead destroys its unity. Isolated 
 passages in the New Testament may be quoted to 
 support such a view ; but it is not a view which brings 
 together the earlier and later books of the Bible, so as 
 to make them seem parts of the same whole. Only by 
 desperate shifts of interpretation can the Old Testa- 
 ment, on this theory, be made to lead up to the New. 
 To those who think the present life a dream and the 
 future life alone worth consideration, the Old Testa- 
 ment prophets, absorbed in their Jerusalem and its 
 future, and careless to all appearance of their own 
 future, can scarcely seem edifying writers, and their 
 religion must seem not merely immature, but founded 
 on a radically wrong principle. 
 
 Thus, if religion be a supernatural law, the Bible 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 173 
 
 is not the religious book par excellence it is commonly 
 supposed to be. On the other hand, if we take the 
 other view of religion which has been presented 
 here, we shall find that of this religion the Bible 
 is the text-book as no other book is or can be. 
 Do we want an idea which shall give unity to the 
 Bible, which shall make Old Testament and New and 
 the separate writings composing both seem in the 
 main and roughly, for more is not to be expected to 
 belong together and to make up a great whole ? Just 
 as clearly as the idea of a future life is not this, the 
 idea of morality inspired and vivified by religion in the 
 manner above described is this. The idea of a future 
 life is one which we ourselves read into the Bible; the 
 idea which we find there, pervading it from first to last, 
 is one which belongs altogether to practical life, and 
 which must seem just as important to the sceptic as 
 to the most believing supernaturalist ; it is the idea 
 summed up in an antithesis which takes many forms, 
 the antithesis of letter and spirit, law and grace, works 
 and faith. 
 
 When we consider human action, whether theoreti- 
 cally or historically, we are always brought back to 
 this fundamental antithesis. Human action is either 
 mechanical or intelligent, either conventional or rational. 
 Either it follows custom or reason, either it is guided 
 by rules or by inspiration. In morals as in poetry you 
 must be of the school either of Boileau or of Shakespeare. 
 Either you must sedulously observe a number of regu- 
 lations you do not hope to understand, or you must 
 move freely towards an end you passionately conceive, 
 at times making new rules for yourself, at times re- 
 
174 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 jecting old ones, and allowing to convention only a 
 kind of provisional or presumptive validity. The great- 
 ness of trie Bible, its title to be called the Book par 
 excellence lies in this, that it grasps firmly this funda- 
 mental antithesis, expounds and illustrates it exhaust- 
 ively through a history of many centuries, and leaves 
 it in the act of revolutionising the world. It thus 
 becomes the unique Epic of Human Action, the Book 
 of Dead and Living Morality. 
 
 We associate this controversy of works and faith 
 principally with the name of St Paul and with that last 
 chapter of the Biblical history in which a national creed 
 was generalised, so as to be capable of becoming the 
 religion of the Roman Empire. But in reality the 
 fifth act of the drama does not differ from the earlier 
 acts, for the drama is one. That earlier rebellion 
 against the authority of Scribes and Pharisees was, 
 from the present point of view, another aspect of the 
 same controversy. It was parallel to those transitions 
 in literature or art when the commentatorial spirit is 
 renounced, when free inspiration moves again, the 
 yoke of authority is broken, and new leaders assert 
 their equality or superiority to the most venerated 
 names of the past. So too of the prophetic movement 
 of the old Monarchy. It is an effort to put life into a 
 mass of usages and ceremonies. Statutes, ordinances, 
 ceremonies, are brooded on till the mind of the lawgiver 
 is thought to be discerned in them. Then when the 
 system has been in this manner verified a principle of 
 progress begins to work, new obligations are discovered, 
 new statutes seem to issue from the invisible Source of 
 authority, until morality is set free from law and begins 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 175 
 
 to be independent of rewards and punishments. Nor is 
 the subject handled in a one-sided or fanatical spirit. It 
 is recognised not only that the stereotyped letter is 
 valuable, not only that it is to be protected at any 
 sacrifice against foreign admixtures, and guarded with 
 watchful zeal against neglect, but it is also admitted, 
 even by the leading champions of freedom, that there is a 
 period or stage of national life when law is predominant, 
 that the law is a pedagogue, and the like. And thus the 
 transition, in which Ezra takes the lead, is in favour of 
 the most punctilious legality, and a long period follows, 
 in which the commentatorial spirit rules, and the 
 stream of inspiration runs shallower, until it dries up 
 altogether. 
 
 When a great number of documents in different 
 styles and of different periods are presented to a 
 reader as one book, nothing is more natural than that 
 he should miss the clue to such a book, and find 
 it difficult to distinguish what is episodical or 
 accidental in it from what belongs to the main 
 subject. Thus some readers of the Bible fix upon 
 its revelations of a future state, and overlook the 
 striking silence about a future state which most 
 of the Biblical books preserve; others fix upon its 
 miracles, though it is easy to quote from the New 
 Testament passages in which the evidence of miracles 
 is spoken of slightingly. Sceptics deny that the 
 Bible has any unity at all, and no doubt we cannot 
 without assuming a miracle think to discover in the 
 Bible the same degree of unity as in a single treatise. 
 But each genuine national literature, compared 
 with other literatures, has a certain unity, and in 
 
176 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 Israel national consciousness was intense. What we 
 find, if we read without prepossession, is precisely what 
 we should expect. We find a history of the nation 
 much more intense and ideal than other histories, in 
 which therefore the fundamental lesson of history is 
 more successfully brought out, in which it is shown hpw 
 law disciplines those who are subject to it, until, after a 
 long course of generations, there springs up a morality 
 which is free, active, and energetic, because it is 
 founded upon the religion of ideal humanity. 
 
 We find then no 'mere morality', but a historical 
 religion with its classical literature. The influence of the 
 Greek and Latin classics is not now less than it was, 
 perhaps it is even greater; and yet criticism has cancelled 
 some centuries of the history of Greece and Borne as 
 untrustworthy, and has denied the personality of Homer, 
 while the authority of Aristotle has been long since 
 renounced in the schools and in the theatre, new 
 sciences and literatures have sprung up, and the last 
 traces of the Roman Empire have disappeared from the 
 system of Europe. Just as indestructible by criticism 
 or changes of opinion will the influence of the Hebrew 
 classics prove; and that which is peculiar to the Bible, 
 and has caused it to be spoken of as one book rather 
 than many, viz., the unity reigning through a work 
 upon which so many generations laboured, gives it 
 a vastness beyond comparison, so that the greatest 
 work of individual literary genius shows by the side 
 of it like some building of human hands beside the 
 Peak of Teneriffe. 
 
 There are some now living who after passing through 
 all the religious perplexities of their age, after doubting 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 177 
 
 whatever can be doubted, all that the Churches call 
 orthodoxy and all the supernatural claims that have 
 been made for the Bible, yet believe in the Bible 
 more than ever. They brood on it much more, they 
 learn from it much more, than they did while they 
 were afraid to suffer their minds to play upon its 
 contents. Nor do they regard it merely as a historic 
 document, valuable for the light it throws on the 
 growth of religious ideas but obsolete as a practical 
 manual. They find in it the same intense vitality as 
 in some Greek books, the vitality breathed from one of 
 the small antique states. They find the old Jewish 
 society in its hunger for righteousness going deeper 
 into the secrets of practical ethics than the modern 
 world goes, just as they find the modern wor]d sur- 
 passed by Athens and Florence in the sense for art. 
 
 It is thus that we arrive at a Christianity which is 
 independent of supernaturalism but at the same time 
 is historic not abstract, ,and does not in any way break 
 with the Christian tradition or discard the Christian 
 documents as obsolete. The miracles of the Bible, if 
 the world should ultimately decide to reject them, 
 would fall away, and in doing so would undoubtedly 
 damage the orthodox system. But the Natural Christi- 
 anity sketched in this chapter would not be damaged. 
 They would damage also the Bible considered as a 
 Koran or Sibylline Book but as a classical literature 
 and a history of the religion hidden under morality 
 it would not be damaged, as the legendary element in 
 the Greek literature does not dimmish but perhaps 
 rather enhances its value. 
 
 Let us not however blink the fact that classical 
 s. 12 
 
178 NATURAL RELIGION APPLIED. 
 
 books too may be abused. Thus we may sincerely 
 acknowledge the inestimable benefit that comes from 
 the kind of consecration which the Greek and Latin 
 writers have received, and yet we may hold that 
 the study of the classics keeps artificially alive a 
 great deal of obsolete sentiment. It is not every 
 reader of an ancient book that can make the proper 
 allowance for the lapse of two thousand years. This 
 drawback, we ought to admit, is more serious in the 
 case of the Bible than in that of the Greek and Latin 
 classics in proportion as the Bible is more universally 
 circulated and takes a stronger hold. The reader takes 
 every word as addressed to himself, whereas the first 
 condition of understanding it rightly is to be alive to 
 the fact that it was addressed to wholly different 
 people living in a different period of history. Hence 
 the wildest mistakes are made, and in every country in 
 which the Bible is universally read a large proportion 
 of the people is a prey to dangerous hallucinations 
 which sometimes disfigure the page even of public 
 history, as in the chapter of our Commonwealth. 
 
 Moreover the Bible is a fragment and standing alone 
 creates an illusion which has incalculable bad results. 
 The grand ideal narrative by stopping short suddenly 
 conveys an impression as if revelation itself had ceased 
 and the world had since lived under a different and less 
 divine law. Or if a later generation attempt, like the 
 Puritans, to rise once more to the same general view of 
 human affairs, they fail, because they have no clue 
 to the centuries immediately behind them, of which 
 no Bible has been written. 
 
 If the struggle between two sorts of morality 
 
 
NATURAL CHRISTIANITY. 179 
 
 recorded there be really so fundamental and universal 
 wherever human beings pretend to any morality 
 as we have represented it, evidently the record 
 ought to be continued so as to embrace modern times. 
 It ought to be related how the free morality, after 
 being successfully revealed to the world, became the 
 religion of races which were so far from being 
 ripe for it, that they were but just ready for the 
 legal stage; and how of necessity a new system of 
 Christian legalism arose which reigned for centuries; 
 how, after disciplining a barbarian world, this system, 
 so powerful, though so radically self-contradictory, 
 gave way, and the language of St Paul about faith 
 and liberty began to be intelligible again; how 
 the tyranny of a church gave place to the less in- 
 tolerable tyranny of a book, while the nations were 
 preparing themselves to take up once again the 
 freedom of those who live not by rules but by re- 
 ligion, the religion of ideal humanity. 
 
 122 
 
CHAPTEK IV. 
 
 NATURAL RELIGION AND THE STATE. 
 
 NATURAL Religion then is no mere dull morality, 
 for in the first place it is far wider than any morality, 
 being as wide as modern culture, and in the second 
 place so far as it is moral and bears fruit in morality, 
 even here it is no mere morality, but a historic religion 
 of humanity. A true religious life then so much per- 
 haps has been shown to be possible without aid from 
 supernaturalism. But a new objection makes itself 
 heard. ' Possible to whom ? To a few elect spirits more 
 finely gifted than the average of mankind, or to a few 
 fortunate people lifted above common cares and rich 
 enough to indulge in spiritual luxuries ? But religion in 
 the proper sense is no such delicate thing. Either it 
 is one of the great forces which sway whole communities 
 at once, or it is nothing. We may speak with all 
 respect of those refined systems which find an adherent 
 here and there among the thoughtful few, but we 
 should call them philosophy rather than religion. And 
 of this kind is every variety of rationalism, every 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 181 
 
 system of belief which excludes the supernatural. In 
 their place such systems may be respectable, but they 
 wear a disguise when they present themselves in the 
 character of religion.' 
 
 In the ecclesiastical world Natural Heligion is 
 commonly hooted down with a confused clamour of 
 Mere morality ! Mere philosophy ! as though these two 
 contemptuous epithets had much the same meaning. 
 But there is a great difference between them. The 
 charge of Mere morality ! has been examined, but it 
 remains to meet those who cry Mere philosophy ! 
 Natural Religion may be much more than a mere 
 morality, it may satisfy and elevate the soul as no 
 dead morality can do, but it may lack nevertheless 
 all popular power, it may be a mere philosophy, in- 
 curably cold and incomprehensible to the mass of man- 
 kind. 
 
 It is said that the theophilanthropist Larevellere- 
 Lepeaux once confided to Talleyrand his disappointment 
 at the ill-success of his attempt to bring into vogue a 
 sort of improved Christianity, a benevolent rationalism 
 which he had invented to meet the wants of a sceptical 
 age. 'His propaganda made no way/ he said, 'what 
 was he to do?' he asked. The ex-bishop politely con- 
 doled with him, feared it was indeed a difficult task to 
 found a new religion, more difficult than could be 
 imagined, so difficult that he hardly knew what to 
 advise! 'Still' so he went on after a moment's re- 
 flexion 'there is one plan which you might at least 
 try; I should recommend you to be crucified and to 
 rise again the third day? 
 
 Yes, indeed ! this is a lightning-flash that clears 
 
182 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 the air. It reminds us what religion was in the days 
 when religion was strong, what a robust unmis- 
 takeable thing, and how helplessly languid are these 
 modern imitations of it. It shows us how they strike 
 a statesman who has been accustomed to respect the 
 old genuine religion and to make Concordats with it, 
 but perceives at once that the modern religion will 
 never demand a Concordat. 
 
 The great religions of the world have been mighty 
 social and political forces. Often, as has been said 
 above, they have been but law under a disguise ; in 
 these cases naturally they have been closely connected 
 with the organisation of states. It has been laid down 
 here that in the sense of a supernatural law reli- 
 gion is not likely to revive in the modern world. 
 The question now is whether it follows from this admis- 
 sion that religion is henceforth to have no commanding 
 influence upon society at large or upon public affairs. 
 
 Before we inquire whether Natural Religion may 
 be expected to show this kind of commanding power, 
 it will be necessary to ask ourselves whether we should 
 desire it to do so. For indeed though we are in 
 general disposed to respect religion and to regret the 
 decline of it, yet we have in our minds a mild and some- 
 what feeble type. A strong religion, when it is clearly 
 put before us, causes us to shrink back with alarm. 
 Something more, no doubt, than a mere philosophy, 
 some sort of Church we are prepared to expect for 
 surely every variety of religious opinion must have its 
 organised society, the most isolated schismatic must 
 at least have his congregation but we are equally 
 convinced that it is the first duty of a Church to be 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 183 
 
 humble, modest, rather insignificant, to pretend to 
 no public character, to shrink with a kind of horror 
 from all connexion with politics. 'Religion/ so runs 
 the maxim, 'is an affair between man and his Maker/ 
 The modern view is that the State is the legitimate 
 authority, to which alone belongs the right of exacting 
 obedience, but that under the shield of the State, 
 wholly separate from it and regarded by it with 
 cold impartiality, there may properly exist modest 
 societies in which those who hold common opinions on 
 moral and religious subjects may meet for edification. 
 This is a practical view, the result of much bitter 
 experience of the excesses into which concrete religions 
 have fallen when they have had uncontrolled power. 
 The maxim that 'religion is an affair between man 
 and his Maker' has assuredly done a world of good, 
 and it has also an impressive sound. 
 
 But is it true? For it seems almost easier to 
 believe that religion is a mischievous thing than that 
 it is a good thing and yet requires to be so carefully 
 diluted. Does history exhibit religion as such a se- 
 condary influence, as rendering such very humble un- 
 obtrusive services to mankind ? 
 
 We may think so as long as we follow what 
 is the received method in religious discussion, treat- 
 ing Christianity as the only religion worthy of 
 notice, and every other religion as simply a hateful im- 
 posture. For this method confines our view absolutely 
 to the history of the Christian Church. It teaches us 
 for instance to put aside without the least hesitation 
 the example of complete union of Church and State 
 presented by Judaism, and never even to recollect other 
 
184 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 examples presented by heathen forms of religion. 
 In Christian history taken alone we do not to be 
 sure find the weight of evidence decidedly in favour of 
 the modern view. On the contrary for twelve centuries 
 out of eighteen the Christian Church was in close 
 connexion with the European States, and in those cen- 
 turies in which Christianity appears to the historian 
 most mighty and beneficent, when she was gathering 
 barbarous nations into the fold of civilisation, the 
 Church eclipsed and tended to absorb the State. But 
 this serious fact is supposed to be outweighed by the 
 agreement of the latest and most civilised with the 
 earliest and purest ages of Christianity in favour of a 
 more retiring kind of religion. The primitive Church 
 was a modest society in the bosom of an imperious 
 State, and such has the modern Church since the 
 eighteenth century under the light of civilisation 
 and science tended once more to become. 
 
 This consideration in itself seems hardly conclusive. 
 The twelve theocratic centuries of Christianity may 
 be thought to show its essential character more truly 
 than either those which came before or those which 
 have followed, because they offered fewer obstacles to 
 its development. If in the first ages its sphere was 
 narrow, this was evidently because it had not yet bulk 
 and substance enough for a larger one ; it assumed 
 power as soon as it was able to do so. Nor did 
 it begin to abandon this power again until it had be- 
 come weakened by division, for the plan of relegating 
 religion to the private sphere did not begin to be 
 adopted till the Reformation had introduced two 
 Christianities where there had been but one before. 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 185 
 
 But if we look beyond Christianity and form our 
 idea of religion by a comparison of the different forms 
 it has assumed, we shall be much more struck by its 
 social character and the organising power which it 
 exerts wherever it is powerful at all. Nay more, we 
 shall find that the contrast we make between Church 
 and State, as if they were two independent and rival 
 organisations, is scarcely historical and is founded upon 
 a very special experience. History does not confirm 
 the notion that men form one organisation for secular 
 purposes and another for spiritual union and that these 
 two organisations afterwards enter into rivalry. Rather 
 it shows us religion as the principal influence by 
 which men are organised in the communities which 
 afterwards ripen into states. Alliance and still more 
 rivalry between Church and State are late and acci- 
 dental developments; in the ordinary case the human 
 community may be called almost indifferently by the 
 name State or Church, though in the earliest periods 
 the name Church and in the latest the name State 
 seems usually most appropriate. Nor is this purely a 
 primitive phase of society, interesting only to students ; 
 nor again does it seem so clear that in civilised times 
 it necessarily gives place to a wholly different phase, 
 in which the State is supreme and purely secular, 
 but allows the existence of modest and insignificant 
 religious associations. 
 
 That primitive phase itself it is easy for us all to 
 realise because we know by heart the hymns of the old 
 Jewish religion. We can measure the intimate union 
 of Church and State in Israel by remarking the religious 
 character which belongs in that literature to such words 
 
186 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 as Jerusalem and Zion. The name of a City there sug- 
 gests not so much law-courts, or even a king's palace, as 
 the home of a God. To us it would be startling if 
 the name England were introduced in our hymns or 
 sung in our churches. What should we think then if 
 its name and its glories formed the staple of our re- 
 ligious worship, if our church-goers sang ' Oh pray for 
 the peace of England they shall prosper that love 
 thee. God is in the midst of her, she shall not be 
 
 moved Walk about and go round about her and 
 
 tell the towers thereof, For this God is our God for 
 
 ever and ever' ? But it may be answered by one party 
 that Jerusalem really was a sacred place but that 
 England is not, and by an opposite school that the 
 Jews were fanatics whose devotion to their own insti- 
 tutions caused their own ruin and misled the world. 
 Let us go then to the home of philosophy and art, 
 to Athens. Do we suppose that Church and State 
 were separated there, that the patriotism of the heroes 
 of Marathon and Salamis was a purely secular feeling, 
 that they were inspired not by feelings of religion but 
 by rational considerations of the indispensable value of 
 democracy to mankind ? Fortunately the voice of one 
 of the generation of the Mapa^w^o/^a^at is still heard 
 among mankind. To Aeschylus Athens is the place 
 where Athena comes to sit personally in judgment and 
 preside over the balloting of the jurors, where the Eu- 
 menides have been propitiated and condescend to live 
 among the citizens in their sacred cavern. Not less in 
 the mind of Sophocles are religion and patriotism indis- 
 tinguishably blended. In his ideal picture of Athens 
 which breathes such an exquisite tenderness it is not 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 187 
 
 institutions, new improvements or the like, that he 
 dwells on, but the presence of Gods. Titan Prometheus 
 1 has ' one district ; the neighbouring fields look up to 
 the horseman Colonus, and the whole is watched by 
 the ever-seeing orb of Morian Jove and by Athena. 
 Athena! yes, the Athenian scarcely knows whether 
 he is named after his goddess or his City; when 
 his mind dwells upon Athens, it dwells first and 
 principally upon the Power which makes its abode 
 there. 
 
 All this no doubt is primitive in its form ; but 
 are we right when we imagine that a new kind of 
 religion wholly different and of an essentially personal 
 and private character has since been introduced ? Is 
 it true that whereas the ancient religions including 
 the Jewish were closely connected with public and 
 national life, Christianity is different in kind, being 
 purely of the nature of a philosophy and intended 
 only as a guide to the individual conscience ? It has 
 no doubt occasionally taken this character, but all 
 religions alike must do so in certain adverse circum- 
 stances. The homogeneous community which is State 
 and Church at once may cease to be possible. This 
 will happen for instance when such communities are 
 blended or confused together by conquest, as in the 
 Roman Empire ; it will happen again, as in modern 
 Europe, when the natural unforced consent of opinion 
 which the old religions required has been destroyed 
 by schism and scepticism. Then will appear the pheno- 
 menon of private religion, scarcely distinguishable 
 from philosophy but capable of being represented as 
 pure and innocent just because it is weak. It does not 
 
188 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 appear that Christianity has ever wished or consented, 
 except under constraint, to be such a religion. Its 
 nature is misrepresented when it is reduced to a 
 set of philosophical or quasi-philosophical opinions, its 
 history is misrepresented when it is described as a 
 quiet spiritual influence, wholly removed from the 
 turmoil of public disturbances, and spreading invisibly 
 from heart to heart. Its rise and success are closely 
 connected with great political revolutions. It springs 
 up in the bosom of a primitive state-church or church- 
 state ; its birth-throes are like a nationality move- 
 ment, like the beginning of a war of liberation, so 
 much so that its Founder is charged with rebellion. 
 Its earliest controversy concerns the question of nation- 
 ality ; not opinions or dogmas but the acceptance of 
 the badge of a particular nation, this is the first test 
 we hear of in the history of Christianity. And when 
 we take a broad view of the gradual rise of this 
 religion to universal dominion we do not find it making 
 its way after the fashion of a scientific discovery, but 
 we see it taking advantage of peculiar circumstances 
 in the composition of the Roman Empire. One 
 of these circumstances was the wide diffusion of the 
 Jewish nationality, which helped the new doctrine 
 into notice everywhere at once. Another was the 
 hopeless decay of Roman religion and the difficulty of 
 holding the Empire together without the help of a 
 great spiritual force. For in spite of the striking 
 ability with which the Roman administrators applied 
 the conception of a purely secular system which should 
 be only a State and should contain Churches with- 
 out being a Church, the experiment did not in the 
 

 RELIGION AND THE STATE. 189 
 
 end succeed. The Roman Empire became in its 
 turn by the acceptance of Christianity, what ancient 
 Israel and ancient Athens had been, a city of God. 
 Most instructive is it to trace the process by which 
 amid the terrible storms of the fifth century this 
 change was thoroughly consolidated, the curious com- 
 promise between the Roman Empire and the Christian 
 Church by which Rome became the sacred centre 
 of a religion which had at the beginning regarded 
 Rome with abhorrence, the strange composite re- 
 ligion which was made by blending Christian ideas 
 with Roman maxims so as to oppose to the inroad 
 of barbarism the essence of ancient civilisation con- 
 centrated into a creed. The final result was the 
 Holy Roman Empire, a Charles crowned by the 
 Church, and standing forth in the attitude of David 
 as the head of a European theocracy. 
 
 Thus the first great experiment of a purely 
 secular State had failed. After this men lived 
 once more for centuries in one of those spiritual 
 fabrics which are State and Church alike, and this 
 time on a vast ^universal scale. Then in its turn the 
 theocratic Roman Empire decayed, though even now 
 it remains the most conspicuous fact about the 
 Christian Church that the name of the world- state 
 Rome is stamped upon the largest branch of it. But 
 the Roman Church stands there isolated and scarcely 
 intelligible to the modern world because it has lost the 
 Roman Empire to which it belongs. States founded 
 on a different principle, national States, have arisen on 
 the territory of the universal State, and the national 
 States in their turn strove for a long time to be Cities 
 
190 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 of God. In the seventeenth century Scotland repro- 
 duced all the characteristics and accustomed itself to 
 the phrases of the Jewish theocracy, and the world saw 
 again a covenanted people. 
 
 Even the French Revolution conceived religion as 
 public. It made two experiments in religion. At 
 first the church was to be Christian and Gallican. 
 This was the aim of the Constitution Civile. When 
 the times grew wilder Christianity was renounced, but 
 the idea of a national religion, some worship of the 
 Supreme Being or the Country, grounded on the theo- 
 cratic views of Rousseau, lingered in the French mind. 
 Since then however we have witnessed a powerful re- 
 vival of the secular State, as it was seen in the earlier 
 Roman Empire, and nothing henceforth can be more 
 unlikely than any revival of the old type of public 
 religion. But what was that old type ? For we are to 
 remember that religion may be conceived either as a 
 law or as a worship. Now it is as a law that public 
 religion is declining; not only have the punishments 
 of a future state lost much of their deterrent in- 
 fluence, but 'courts Christian' in this life, the whole 
 machinery of religious law, everything that connects 
 religion as such with the magistrate, is in the course 
 of being exploded. 
 
 But religion in the other sense remains. In this 
 sense may it not continue to be public and all-em- 
 bracing? Or must we needs allow religion to be 
 lost in the crowd of tenable opinions and to become 
 a mere philosophy ? The advocates of the secular state 
 and the private religion are unwilling to acknowledge 
 that they do this. They point to the primitive Church, 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 191 
 
 and they argue that their voluntary churches are no more 
 like mere philosophic schools than the voluntary in- 
 dependent churches of Corinth and Ephesus were like 
 the philosophic schools that may have flourished beside 
 these. That age, they tell us, was the purest age of the 
 Church ; we can desire nothing better than to restore 
 it. Let Truth confide in her own weapons ; she will 
 certainly prevail. 
 
 Prevail ! yes, but when once she has prevailed, this 
 state of things, which is evidently a state of unstable 
 equilibrium, must pass away. The age of Constantine 
 must come for Truth sooner or later, though a new 
 Constantine will use new machinery. Truth must 
 sooner or later be in some sense established, though by 
 no means in the old sense. 
 
 The modern imitation of the primitive Church is 
 unlike its model in this that it does not seriously 
 expect to triumph. It sees the ancient legal churches 
 decline, but it sees their place taken not by the 
 voluntary churches but by secularity or No Church. 
 Between this and the waning powers of the past 
 the sects or private religions occupy a modest po- 
 sition. They win small triumphs, but no one sup- 
 poses that the future belongs to them. Their field 
 of influence seems strictly limited. They speak of 
 freedom of thought, of the right of private judgment, 
 but they see with anxiety that private judgment is in- 
 clined in these days to reject supernaturalism, and with- 
 out supernaturalism they know no way of distinguish- 
 ing themselves from schools of ' mere philosophy. 7 The 
 primitive Church defied and vanquished philosophy; 
 its modern imitation retires before it. It parts with 
 
192 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 one mystery after another in compliance with the 
 spirit of the age, but parts insensibly at the same time 
 with all character and distinct tendency, as a river 
 broadening towards its mouth ceases to be a river and 
 to have an onward movement just when the banks 
 that confined it fall away on either side. 
 
 For us the question is whether, if the present 
 tendency prevails and supernaturalism dies out in 
 established and voluntary churches alike, there will 
 remain the materials out of which a church in the 
 public sense, that is, a great and commanding union of 
 hearts and minds, can be formed. Or must it be ad- 
 mitted that Natural Religion, whatever may be its 
 other advantages, cannot hold a church together ? 
 
 Let us remark that though those ancient religions 
 which had such a mighty authority rested usually upon 
 the belief in a divine intervention, the intervention 
 was not in quite all cases supernatural. Among the . 
 most powerful of those religions has been Moham- 
 medanism, and yet Mohammed professed to perform 
 no miracles. Here then is an example of Natural 
 Religion which nevertheless has been no mere phi- 
 losophy. And if miracles may be dispensed with we 
 may conceive that even the name of God may be dis- 
 pensed with provided the reality which answers to 
 that name is not wanting. That Eternal Law of 
 the Universe which has been treated here as equi- 
 valent to God might form the basis of a great re- 
 ligion if only it revealed itself by evidence as con- 
 vincing to the modern mind as that of miracles was to 
 the mind of antiquity. 
 
 When men say ' mere philosophy ' they mean some- 
 

 RELIGION AND THE STATE. 193 
 
 thing arguable, something deniable. Now the case is 
 altered when philosophy changes its name and becomes 
 science. No one says ' mere science.' 
 
 The God in whom the modern world believes has 
 a] so his Revelation. The solid methods by which truth 
 is separated from mere opinion and science winnowed out 
 of philosophy open a new fountain of prophecy, and give 
 once more a public, authoritative character to truth. 
 
 Private judgment is the cry which has been used 
 with success against the ancient churches. It has 
 been declared absurd to expect agreement of opinion 
 in large multitudes of men. Each individual, it is 
 said, thinks as he cannot help thinking, and that will 
 not be as his neighbour thinks quot homines tot 
 sententiae. This principle must no doubt be fatal to 
 churches as it must be fatal to all co-operation for 
 high purposes among men. If against churches it has 
 been successful, the reason is that as a matter of fact 
 their dogmas had come to seem only questionable opi- 
 nions and by no means certain truths. Now properly 
 speaking it is not a questionable opinion, but an un- 
 questionable one which a church guards ; it is an 
 opinion in which a community lives and which it 
 breathes as its atmosphere, an opinion or way of 
 viewing the universe which makes the community to 
 be a community and gives it the power to rule itself 
 and make laws for itself. That the dogmas of modern 
 churches are not of this kind is most true, but it is 
 most false that there has never been such an un- 
 questionable opinion, wholly different from mere phi- 
 losophy, and it is false also that there will never be 
 such an opinion again. 
 
 s. 13 
 
194 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 Is it true that the modern world has and can have no 
 such unquestioned universal opinion? The answer will be 
 ' Not upon religious or theological questions. On other 
 subjects there may be agreement, more perhaps than 
 in former periods ; but upon these questions we see 
 only increasing disagreement or increasing despair. 
 Among active minds there is either individual belief 
 and solitary worship, or else there is a reasoned opinion 
 that no theology is possible and that religion is obsolete.' 
 It has been urged here that this current view 
 proceeds upon an utterly loose definition, both of 
 religion and of theology, and that it is only true 
 of particular religions and theologies framed on the 
 received ecclesiastical pattern. It has been urged that 
 a new theology and a new religion have grown up 
 unobserved outside the ecclesiastical sphere. But is 
 this new system a ' mere philosophy ' ? in other words 
 is it a mere limited influence capable at the utmost 
 only of organising a new sect, or is it one of those 
 great prevalent ways of thinking in which whole 
 generations walk, one of those great atmospheres of 
 thought and feeling which embrace whole lands and 
 continents and furnish the breath of life to vast popu- 
 lations ? If it is the latter rather than the former, 
 and if it rests on evidence which though not super- 
 natural has equal cogency to the modern mind, then 
 the new religion is a religion in the old, grand, public 
 sense of the word. 
 
 Let us look again for a moment at that old, once 
 universally accepted, idea of religion. Surely in re- 
 cent times we have been misled by exceptional cir- 
 cumstances, by the religious disagreement that has 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 195 
 
 prevailed ever since the Reformation, to form a wrong 
 notion of the very province of religion. That province 
 is much more national and political, much less personal, 
 than is commonly supposed. Religion is not a man's 
 private philosophy, whether that be based on reason or 
 on revelation. It is the atmosphere of common thought 
 and feeling which surrounds a community; because all 
 at once breathe it and live on it, therefore it is a re- 
 ligion. Upon the history of religion this peculiarity is 
 written in characters so large that nothing but the 
 violent drift of modern society in an opposite direction 
 could have made us blind to it. But we are under 
 a prepossession which causes us to overlook the leading 
 part which nationalities have played in the great reli- 
 gious revolutions and to attribute everything to persons 
 and individual opinions. We imagine religions to make 
 their way either, like scientific doctrines, through their 
 truth, or else through some adaptation to human needs, 
 and do not perceive that commonly they are what may 
 be called nationalities in an idealized form. 
 
 Even in modern Europe we can observe the affinity 
 which exists between the spirit of nationality and that 
 of religion. ' Italy,' said Mazzini, 'is itself a religion.' 
 Yes! the view of life, the way of thinking which has 
 become characteristic of a nation, constitutes a sort of 
 atmosphere round the individual members of it, an 
 influence moulding the character of each successive 
 generation which arises to represent it. Any shock or 
 change which makes the individual aware of this atmo- 
 sphere about him, raises nationality into religion. 'By 
 the waters of Babylon' Jewish nationality is transformed 
 into Judaism. Not otherwise at this day the American 
 
 132 
 
196 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 who finds himself in Europe translates of sheer necessity 
 his American ways of thinking into a creed; he can 
 think and talk of nothing else; to every European he 
 preaches, like St Paul, ' in season and out of season/ 
 America, America. And when the shock has been 
 given by some tragic catastrophe, as in the case of 
 ancient Jerusalem or modern Italy, the creed of 
 nationality becomes solemn and intense, so that the 
 suffering patriot says in all seriousness that his country 
 is to him a religion. 
 
 This phenomenon so often recurring may almost 
 be called the key to religious history. We should find 
 it in every page of the Bible did we not carefully inter- 
 pret it away by giving an artificial meaning to all such 
 words as Israel, Zion, Jerusalem. We should see, if 
 we could forget the glosses, that we have before us the 
 long epic of the formation, growth, sufferings, death 
 and resurrection of a nationality. The nationality rises 
 again idealized and diffused in the form of a world-reli- 
 gion. How blind to see in the triumph of Christianity 
 merely the prevalence of certain doctrines about the 
 unseen world, merely the work of persons or the 
 success of a philosophy, and not rather the idealization 
 of the Jewish nationality! It is the extension of the 
 Jewish citizenship to the Gentiles. It is this so truly 
 that the nations of Europe actually adopt as their own 
 the entire history and literature of Israel, so that Jewish 
 traditions, heroes and poets supersede everywhere the 
 native treasure of memory. What more could Mazzini 
 desire for his Italy than that her Dante and Michael 
 Angelo should be for the world what the Jews have seen 
 their David and Isaiah become through Christianity? 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 197 
 
 Still more completely do we mistake the nature of 
 another religious revolution only less great than this 
 through our ignorance of the close connexion between 
 religion and nationality. The rise of Latin Christianity 
 and of the Papacy is an event, the grandeur of which is 
 utterly lost upon those who understand only private 
 religion. They can see nothing in it but a corruption 
 or perhaps a fraud. They do not see that the ship- 
 wreck of the Western Empire in the midst of the bar- 
 baric invasions was to the Roman world what the 
 Babylonish captivity was to the Jewish, and that as 
 the latter event created Judaism the former could not 
 but call into existence Romanism. They do not see 
 that the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages is to 
 Rome just what the Christian Church is to Judaism, 
 that it is the resurrection of a fallen nationality in an 
 idealized shape. 
 
 Look almost where you will in the wide field of 
 history, you find religion, whenever it works freely and 
 mightily, either giving birth to and sustaining states, 
 or else raising them up to a second life after their 
 destruction. Ik is a great state-builder in the hands 
 of Moses and Ulfilas and Gregory and Nicholas ; in the 
 ruder hands of Mohammed and many another tamer 
 and guide of gross populations down to the Prophet of 
 Utah it has the same character, the same too in the 
 hands of the almost forgotten Numas and propagators 
 of the Apollo -worship who laid the foundation of 
 Roman and Greek civilisation, and of the pilgrim 
 fathers who founded New England. In the East to 
 this day nationality and religion are almost convertible 
 terms ; the Scotch national character first awoke in the 
 
198 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 adoption of a new religion and afterwards expressed 
 itself more than once in national covenants ; the Re- 
 formation itself may be represented as coming out of 
 the German national consciousness, and it has been 
 proposed to call the various forms of Protestant- 
 ism by the collective name of Teutonic Christi- 
 anity. Lastly in Christianity itself, in Romanism and 
 partly also in Mohammedanism, we see religion in the 
 form of an aggressive or missionary nationality bringing 
 foreign nations into a new citizenship. 
 
 All this being overlooked, the very outlines of 
 European development disappear from our view. In 
 losing sight of the connexion between religion and 
 nationality we lose the clue to the struggle of Church 
 and State, which is the capital fact in the development 
 of Europe. As in the first part of the struggle we over- 
 look that the Church is but another aspect of the 
 Empire, and Catholicism but the embodiment of the 
 Roman nationality, so in the later stages of it, in the 
 modern struggle between Catholicism and that which 
 calls itself the State, we are blind to the fact that under 
 the so-called State there lurks a new, yet undeveloped 
 Church. For State and Church belong together and 
 the link between them is nationality. As the Church 
 without the State becomes a mere philosophical or quasi- 
 philosophical sect, so the State without the Church 
 (i.e. without a living conscious nationality) is a mere 
 administrative machine, the feebleness of which has 
 been brought to light in the revolutions of the nine- 
 teenth century. On the other hand a State animated 
 by a Church acquires a kind of nationality even when 
 nationality in the strictest sense is wanting to it, 
 

 RELIGION AND THE STATE. 199 
 
 Thus the Roman world was naturally but a congeries of 
 nations forced together by conquest, but religion made 
 it one, till the phrases Orbis Romanus and Populus 
 Christianus became convertible terms. And the modern 
 states which boast so loudly of their absolute secularity 
 or even of their hostility to religion are not content in 
 practice to be merely secular, as is shown by their 
 eagerness to get the control of education. ' They study 
 to form out of their own separate nationality a new 
 religion, to revive as far as they can the national 
 religions which gave so vivid a life to the states of 
 antiquity. 
 
 If these views are just, if under the modern State 
 there lurks an undeveloped Church and behind the 
 Catholic Church there remain traces of the ancient 
 imperial state, then the prevalent notion of the Church 
 as dying and the secular State as destined soon to prevail 
 against it is not less erroneous than we have found other 
 popular notions about religion to be. The momentary 
 evanescence of the Church in modern life is only caused 
 by the decay of one sort of church coinciding in time 
 with the infancy of another. In the ancient world the 
 Church of single nationalities was vigorous, in the 
 medieval world the Catholic Church of the Roman 
 world-state; in the modern world we see the de- 
 cline of the latter coinciding with the revival of the 
 former. But if so, what is to be expected ? That we 
 shall end where we began, that the last traces of a 
 universal Church will disappear and national religions 
 increase and compete against each other ? Surely not. 
 The revival of the separate nationality will be checked 
 after a certain point ; never again can the Nation 
 
200 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 eclipse Humanity; and in the modern world the na- 
 tional spirit, though it refuses to be suppressed, is too 
 narrow and provincial to play the first part. Already 
 we see the necessary reaction against it setting in, and 
 the complaint is heard that it has revived national 
 antipathies and has filled the world with gigantic 
 armies. 
 
 We may look then for a counter revival of that 
 cosmopolitan system which was represented in the 
 Middle Ages by the Empire-Church. The universal 
 nationality restored to vigour will once more embrace 
 the local nationalities, the provinces of humanity. 
 Such a universal nationality, like all nationalities, will 
 require both a State and a Church. What then will 
 be the Catholic Church of the future? 
 
 The Church, -according to the view here taken, is 
 the atmosphere of thought, feeling and belief that 
 surrounds the State ; it is in fact its civilisation made 
 more or less tangible and visible. What then is the 
 Universal Church but universal civilisation? When 
 a Universal Church stood out in visible shape before 
 men, that is, in the Middle Ages, what was it 
 but the embodiment of universal civilisation as then 
 understood ? A universal civilisation exists now not 
 less certainly. If it is less visibly embodied this is 
 perhaps because it suffers less pressure, because it is 
 not now in constant danger of destruction from Hun 
 and Arab, Turk and Mongol. 
 
 We can point to an example of such an unernbodied 
 religion which never attained to be regarded as anything 
 more than a form of civilisation. Among the idealised 
 nationalities enumerated just now one was omitted, in 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 
 
 201 
 
 some respects the most influential of all. Did then the 
 Greek nationality never assume an ideal form ? Assured- 
 ly it did. Hellenism is a phenomenon as conspicuous as 
 either Judaism or Romanism. But Judaism and Ro- 
 manism are the names of religions, whereas Hellenism 
 was never recognized as a religion but only as a form of 
 civilisation. Perhaps this was owing to the fact that 
 its diffusion in the world was not accompanied by any 
 tragedy or national agony exciting intense emotions. 
 In any case it has been an influence not less powerful 
 enduring and beneficial than that of most religions, and 
 it has been an influence of essentially the same kind. 
 
 It is possible that modern civilisation ought to be 
 content with an influence not more palpably embodied 
 than this. We cannot consider what a mighty force 
 religion has shown itself in creating and sustaining 
 states without recollecting at the same time what 
 terrible things it has done, and perhaps congratulating 
 ourselves that religion in that ancient sense of the word 
 seems now an exhausted volcano. A sane man cannot 
 wish back again the Church of the Middle Ages, even 
 though he may recognize all the grandeur and bene- 
 ficence of it in its place and time. The important 
 thing is not that we should have visible ecclesiastical 
 institutions, but that we should feel ourselves to have 
 our religion, although we call it only civilisation, that 
 the modern world too should be in its way a Jerusalem, 
 an Athens, and no mere secular Babel. 
 
 Religion in the individual was identified above with 
 culture ; religion in its public aspect now appears to be 
 identical with civilisation. And as culture was shown 
 to be a threefold devotion to Beauty, Goodness, and 
 
202 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 Truth, it will appear that the term civilisation expresses 
 the same threefold religion, shown on a larger scale in 
 the characters, institutions, and ways of life of nations. 
 
 When Western civilisation is confronted with the 
 races outside it or the classes that have sunk below it, 
 what does it feel irresistibly impelled to teach ? Science, 
 that is definiteness of conception, accuracy of obser- 
 vation and computation, intellectual conscientiousness 
 and patience, and closely connected with these, the 
 active spirit which rejects fatalism and believes that 
 man's condition can be bettered by his efforts. What 
 else ? Humanity, not limited by tribe or nation, and 
 including all principles affecting man's dealings with his 
 kind, respect for women, respect for individual liberty, 
 respect for misfortune. Again what else ? Delight and 
 confidence in nature, opposed alike to the superstitious 
 dread of idolatry and to the joylessness of monasticism 
 or puritanism. 
 
 This, then, is our civilisation ; and what is the re- 
 ligion that inspires it ? That scientific spirit of obser- 
 vation and method is the worship of God, whose ways 
 are not as our ways, but whose law is eternal, and 
 in the knowledge of whom alone is solid well-being. 
 That spirit of active humanity is Christianity, and it 
 is supplemented by several other forms of the worship 
 of Man which have grown up round it. Lastly, 
 that enjoyment of the visible world is a fragment 
 saved from the wreck of Paganism. It is the wor- 
 ship of the forms of Nature derived from Greece, 
 first widely diffused at the Renaissance, and welcomed 
 since and spread still more widely by artist natures 
 from age to age. 
 

 RELIGION AND THE STATE. 203 
 
 We have remarked that a civilisation or religion 
 which to those who live in the midst of it is imper- 
 ceptible as an atmosphere becomes distinctly visible 
 in contrast with the outer world. Greeks felt their 
 Hellenism in contact with barbarism and Jews their 
 election in contact with the Gentiles. When the 
 contrast becomes intense a condition of unstable equi- 
 librium is created; the religion becomes aggressive or 
 missionary, and one of those great spiritual movements 
 takes place which mark at long intervals the progress 
 of humanity, such as the conversion of all nations to 
 Judaism, to Romanism, to Hellenism. Now there never 
 was a time when the equilibrium was so unstable as it 
 is now between the great ruling civilisation of the 
 world, which is no longer the narrow civilisation of 
 some single city or tribe, but the great common 
 tradition of a brotherhood of great nations, and the 
 outlying peoples. Whereas in past times the better 
 civilisation had to protect itself from destruction and 
 became missionary in self-defence, now it is rather 
 tempted to be apathetic from too triumphant superi- 
 ority. It weighs the question whether barbarism 
 should not rather be exterminated than converted, 
 and while it does so the question answers itself, for 
 the nations are baptized with gin and the chaff of 
 humanity is burnt up with unquenchable fire-water. 
 
 Thus the modern religion finds a vast work 
 ready for its hands, a work which will compel it to 
 give itself some organisation. The children of modern 
 civilisation are called to follow in the footsteps of 
 Paul, of Gregory, of Boniface, of Xavier, Eliot, and 
 Livingstone ; but they must carry not merely Christi- 
 
204 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 anity in its narrow clerical sense but their whole 
 mass of spiritual treasures to those who want them. 
 Let us carry the true view of the universe, the true 
 astronomy, the true chemistry and the true physiology 
 to polytheists still lapped in mythological dreams; let 
 us carry progress and free-will to fatalist nations and 
 to nations cramped by the fetters of primitive custom ; 
 let us carry the doctrine of a rational liberty into the 
 heart of Oriental despotisms; in doing all this not 
 indeed suddenly or fanatically, nor yet pharisaically, 
 as if we ourselves had nothing to learn we shall 
 admit the outlying world into the great civilised com- 
 munity, into the modern City of God. 
 
 A phenomenon so unique as the marriage of 
 England and India ought, if anything can, to give 
 life and distinct shape to the religion of civilisa- 
 tion among us. India wants so much that England 
 has to give, even if we grant that there is much also 
 which we might learn from India. But what precisely 
 have we to give, and in what way precisely ought it to 
 be given ? For assuredly we have also much to give 
 that India does not want, that would be ruinous to her. 
 We are required therefore rigorously to test our own 
 civilisation, to ask ourselves what influence goes forth 
 from us, how far our spiritual contact is life-giving and 
 how far it may be noxious and noisome. And in thus 
 probing our civilisation we cannot but be led to perceive 
 that it is something wholly different from our mere 
 institutions, that it is a personal influence issuing at 
 the same time out of each individual Englishman, and 
 if we try to define it we shall be led at last to confess 
 that it is neither more nor less than our religion, 
 
ftnt, >, 
 
 RELIGION' AND THE STATE. 205 
 
 But along with it there goes forth from us also our 
 irreligion, and still more, our false religion. And so 
 India gets from England not only the rigorous and 
 commanding science of the West, not only its Christian 
 humanity enlarged by Teutonic liberty, not only its 
 less dreamy enjoyment of life, but also all English here- 
 sies, all our deviations from the line of true civilisation, 
 all our ignorances, rudenesses and shortcomings. The 
 national faults, which we so readily pardon in ourselves, 
 which we smile at and are half proud of, may well 
 frighten us when we see them magnified in the total 
 working of the whole nation upon another nation, and 
 still more in the general impression produced by England 
 upon mankind. Our want of any high ideal, the com- 
 monness of our aims and of our lives, the decay of that 
 strong individuality which used to be our boast, our 
 want of any moral greatness which may at all corre- 
 spond to the wide extension and prosperity of the 
 English race, all this which we fondly misname our 
 common-sense, our honest plainness and practicality, 
 may well frighten us when we view it thus, and may 
 almost fill us with the foreboding of an ignominious 
 national fall. 
 
 These and such as these are the thoughts which 
 belong to religion, these far more than speculations 
 about cosmogony or miracles or a future life. Witness 
 the Hebrew prophets themselves, including the last 
 and greatest of them all ! Their great topic was 
 always the destiny of cities and nations, the rise and 
 fall of kingdoms, national sins and punishments, and 
 whether 'in the judgment it should be more tolerable' 
 for this city or for that. 
 
206 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 But if modern civilisation ought to become mission- 
 ary it ought to embody itself in something of the 
 nature of a church. And thus we arrive at the Church 
 of the Natural Religion. 
 
 A church without supernaturalism ! The idea is 
 so little familiar to us that it may be well to state 
 distinctly at this point the difference between the con- 
 ception here presented of a church and that which is 
 current. 
 
 For the current notion which is somewhat as follows : 
 That an absolutely unique supernatural occurrence, 
 namely the Resurrection of Jesus, called into existence 
 an absolutely unique institution called the Church ; 
 that the progress of scepticism in modern times having 
 thrown doubt on the reality of this occurrence the 
 Church is likely to fall, and that after the fall of the 
 Church human society will be left purely secular : 
 we are led to substitute a view which may be thus 
 stated : 
 
 That every community has in a form more or less 
 organised that for which Christianity furnished a 
 name, that is a church, or rather that every such 
 community is in one aspect a church as in another it is 
 a state ; that Christianity was the instrument by which 
 the universal state, the Roman Empire, completed 
 itself and became also a church; that the growth of 
 new states in the bosom of the ancient Empire has 
 created a powerful reaction against the universal 
 religion, because each new state is ambitious of having 
 a religion and a church to itself; that the decline of 
 the ancient Church paves the way not to secularity 
 but to a new growth of national religions such as those 
 
RELIGION AND THE STATE. 207 
 
 of the ancient world; but that the ancient Church has 
 left behind it a conception of universal civilisation, 
 which holds in check these national religions and out of 
 which a new universal church and religion is likely to 
 grow ; so that it seems likely that, as the ancient world 
 had national religions and the medieval world a 
 universal religion, the future will witness national re- 
 ligions flourishing inside a grand universal religion. 
 
 It is not solely in order to deal with the outlying 
 populations that the universal religion might well em- 
 body itself in a church. There is a domestic problem 
 no less urgent. It is not only for foreign expor- 
 tation that civilisation needs to be concentrated into 
 a doctrine ; without such concentration it can scarcely 
 maintain itself at home. This is no new-fangled 
 notion, but one of the oldest and best authorised 
 observations. All old philosophers knew that the 
 fabric of the State rested ultimately upon a way of 
 thinking, a habit of opinion, a 'discipline/ which was 
 a thing so delicate and easily deranged that in the 
 opinion of some of them new tunes coming into vogue 
 might be enough to cause a revolution. If this was 
 true then, in a world comparatively quiet, in com- 
 munities subject to few shocks of thought, how much 
 more true must it be in the vast organisation of later 
 times? That impalpable way of thinking needed after- 
 wards, in the age of migrations, to harden itself into an 
 iron doctrine guarded by a potent priesthood; thus 
 only could the great miracle of human history be 
 accomplished, civilisation and the unity of it be 
 preserved. Another universal danger now threatens. 
 The tide of barbarism might be stemmed by spiritual 
 
208 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 authority ; the tide of thought, scepticism and discovery 
 which has set in since can be stemmed by no such 
 means. No wise man indeed wishes to stem it ; and 
 yet in some way it must be warded off the institutions 
 which it attacks as recklessly as if its own existence 
 did not depend on them. It introduces everywhere a 
 sceptical condition of mind, which it recommends as the 
 only way to real knowledge ; and yet if such scepticism 
 became practical, if large communities came to regard 
 every question in politics and law as absolutely open, 
 their institutions would dissolve, and science, among 
 other things, would be buried in the ruin. 
 
 Modern thought brings into vogue a speculative 
 Nihilism which explodes traditional theories, such, for 
 instance, as the theory of Monarchy ; but uninten- 
 tionally it creates at the same time a practical Nihilism 
 which explodes and annihilates the Monarch himself ! 
 
 There is a mine under modern society which, if we 
 consider it, has been the necessary result of the 
 abeyance in recent times of the idea of the Church. 
 There is a total want of correspondence between the 
 views of the people and the system under which they 
 live. The body wants a soul, the State wants a Church. 
 This is equally true of the populations which are still 
 conservative as it is of those which are revolutionary. 
 The link has been broken which united the mass to 
 the advanced minds. The people have long ceased to 
 understand or to follow their own development. 
 
 In England the ideas of the multitude are perilously 
 divergent from those of the thinking class. No suf- 
 ficient pains have been taken to diffuse everywhere 
 the real religion of the age. Accordingly a large 
 

 RELIGION AND THE STATE. 209 
 
 section of the people adhere to the limited religion of 
 the past as it was in the last age of the real efficiency of 
 ecclesiastical organisations, and another large section 
 have abandoned this and have gained no other religion 
 in its place. No adequate doctrine of civilisation is 
 taught among us. Science only penetrates either in 
 the form of useful information or else in that of a 
 negative doctrine opposed to religion ; as itself a main 
 part of religion, as the grand revelation of God in 
 these later times supplementing rather than supersed- 
 ing older revelations, it remains almost as much un- 
 known as in the dark ages. Still less known perhaps 
 is that doctrine of the gradual development of human 
 society which alone can explain to us the present state 
 of affairs, give us the clue to history, save us from 
 political aberrations and point out the direction of 
 progress. So long as churches were efficient this idea 
 of the continuity of civilisation was kept before the 
 general mind. A grand outline of God's dealings with 
 the human race, drawn from the Bible and the church 
 doctrine, a sort of map of history, was possessed by all 
 alike. Are we sufficiently aware what bewilderment 
 must arise when this is no longer the case, when those 
 old outlines grow unserviceable, but no new map is 
 furnished ? 
 
 Such bewilderment may continue for a long time 
 passive. In a country like England, a country of pub- 
 licity and reform, where political institutions do not 
 press overwhelmingly upon the individual, where for 
 instance there is no conscription, the absence of any 
 doctrine of civilisation may but make public opinion per- 
 plexed and vacillating, so as to cause the nation to seem 
 s. 14 
 
210 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 unworthy of its position in the world. But this same 
 bewilderment, which here produces only dulness, leads 
 on the Continent to revolutionary frenzy. There the 
 old instructress of nations, the Church, has not merely 
 declined in influence but is regarded as a malignant 
 deceiver ; there too the pressure of governments is 
 severely felt. The result is a body without a soul, 
 institutions without corresponding ways of thought, or 
 in other words a State without a Church. The suffer- 
 ing individual instead of seeing in the institutions 
 around him his institutions, the house lie lives in, sees 
 no connexion between himself and them, knows not 
 how they came or why they exist, and suspects them 
 to be but the walls of a prison into which he has been 
 entrapped by a conspiracy of priests and kings. One 
 doctrine of civilisation he has rejected as false, and he 
 conceives no other except the wild improvised conjec- 
 ture that it has been from the beginning a wicked 
 imposture. 
 
 The truth is that religion is and always has been 
 the basis of societies and of states. It is no mere 
 philosophy, but a practical view of life which whole 
 communities live by. For this purpose it must have a 
 basis more solid than mere individual opinion. What 
 can this basis be? ' Divine revelation and miracle,' 
 said men in past times. They said so because then 
 miracles had an overwhelming, awe-striking effect 
 beyond ordinary evidence. But a change of opinion 
 has taken place, so that miracles instead of compelling 
 belief have now the effect of provoking disbelief. Is 
 then religion henceforth impossible ? 
 
 But in proportion as miracles have declined, scien- 
 

 RELIGION AND THE STATE. 211 
 
 tine method has risen, in credit. Why should it 
 not then be capable by this time of doing what in old 
 times only miracle could do ? 'Ah ! but unhappily 
 science refuses its testimony on the very points which 
 are most essential. We want a future life, a heaven 
 which will atone for all our sufferings here, and science 
 will not give us one.' 
 
 True, this purpose of religion science will not serve. 
 But it is by no means the only purpose of religion. 
 From history we learn that the great function of 
 religion has been the founding and sustaining of 
 states. And at this moment we are threatened with a 
 general dissolution of states from the decay of religion. 
 Now it does not seem impossible without miracle and 
 using scientific method alone as our organ of discovery 
 to lay down such a Natural Religion as may serve at 
 least this purpose, and may be a sustaining principle to 
 the civilisation of the world. 
 
 142 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 NATURAL RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 WE have been led on from the conception of a Natural 
 Religion to that of a Natural Church. We have not 
 thought of it as a mere utopia, which may or may not 
 sooner or later be realised. This Church exists already, 
 a vast communion of all who are inspired by the culture 
 and civilisation of the age. But it is unconscious, and 
 perhaps if it could attain to consciousness it might 
 organise itself more deliberately and effectively. 
 
 Now there exists by the side of this a Church which 
 has had from ancient times consciousness and organisa- 
 tion. It is still vigorous and influential, especially in 
 this country. Ought the vast unconscious Church here 
 described to disregard the conscious Church, and ought 
 it to organise itself independently ? Or should it 
 regard the existing Church organisation as rightfully 
 its own, and as capable by reform of being adapted to 
 its purposes 1 For thus when fifty years ago a new 
 England had sprung up in vast manufacturing towns of 
 which Parliament knew nothing, that new England 
 did not frame for itself a new Parliament, but called 
 for a Reform Bill which admitted it into the old. 
 

 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 213 
 
 The hindrance to such a course is obvious enough, 
 and yet it must seem strange to those who arrive at 
 the notion of a church as we have done. The great 
 ideas which lie at the basis of civilisation do 
 indeed demand much study from those who are to 
 teach them, but we are not disturbed by the fear that 
 of able and serious men undertaking such study, a 
 large proportion will end by rejecting the ideas as 
 untrue. Or if such a doubt should arise we should 
 think it ought to be met by reconsidering, and, if 
 necessary, altering the accepted doctrine. We should 
 certainly not think it ought to be met by rigidly 
 excluding all such heterodox candidates, however 
 numerous, however able, however serious. The clergy 
 of such a church as has been here described, if it should 
 have a clergy, would be subjected to no tests of 
 opinion, but only to tests of character and competence. 
 It would be held that liberty of opinion was the first 
 condition of their efficiency as teachers. 
 
 Now this, which is stated here as self-evident, is 
 almost universally considered monstrous and almost a 
 contradiction in terms. Freethinking is understood to 
 be the opposite of religion, and accordingly member- 
 ship in a church is supposed to imply a restriction 
 upon the liberty of thought. The very idea of free- 
 thinking as an important condition of religion and 
 especially of efficient religious teaching, provokes ridi- 
 cule; it has been described as 'a medley of St Paul and 
 St Voltaire.' But if we have succeeded in drawing the 
 distinction between religion and philosophy, it will now 
 be clear that a church is wholly unlike a philosophical 
 school, held together by doctrines. If, as we have 
 
2H NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 held, it is more like a state than a school, doctrinal 
 tests will begin to seem more absurd than the absence 
 of them. Imagine a state resting upon dogma ! 
 
 Suppose we had formulated in the sixteenth century 
 the principles or beliefs which we supposed to lie at the 
 basis of our national constitution. Suppose we had 
 made a political creed. Perhaps the doctrine of divine 
 right and the power of kings to cure disease, per- 
 haps the whole legend of Brute and the deriva- 
 tion of our state from Troy would have appeared 
 in this creed. Once formulated, it would have come 
 to be regarded as the dogmatic basis upon which 
 our society rested. Then in time criticism would 
 have begun its work. Philosophy would have set 
 aside divine right, science would have exploded the 
 belief about the king's evil, historical criticism would 
 have shaken the traditionary history, and each in- 
 novation would have been regarded as a blow dealt 
 at the constitution of the country. At last it would 
 have come to be generally thought that the consti- 
 tution was undermined, that it had been found un- 
 able to bear the light of modern science. Men would 
 begin publicly to renounce it ; officials would win 
 great applause by resigning their posts from con- 
 scientious doubts about the personality of King 
 Arthur ; and those who continued orthodox would 
 declare that they felt more respect for such per- 
 sons, much as they deplored their heresies, than 
 they could feel for other officials who continued to 
 receive the emoluments of the State when it was 
 suspected that they had altogether ceased to believe in 
 the cure of the king's evil, and when they explained 
 
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 215 
 
 away with the most shameless laxity the divine right 
 of the sovereign. If any of this latter school, whom 
 we may call the Broad State, should argue that the 
 State was a practical institution, not a sect of people 
 united by holding the same opinions, that it existed 
 to save the country from invasion and houses from 
 burglary, they would be regarded as impudent sophists. 
 ' Was not the creed there ? Were not all officials 
 required to subscribe it ? How then could it be affirmed 
 that the State did not stand upon community of 
 opinion, upon dogma?' And if any of these sophists 
 were evidently not impudent, but well-meaning and 
 high-minded, they would be regarded as wanting in 
 masculine firmness and the courage to face disagreeable 
 truths. It would be generally agreed that the honest 
 and manly course was to press the controversy firmly to 
 a conclusion, to resist all attempts to confuse the issue, 
 and to keep the public steadily to the fundamental points. 
 Has the sovereign, or has he not, a divine right ? Can 
 he, or can he not, cure disease by his touch ? Was the 
 country, or was it not, colonised by fugitives from Troy ? 
 And if at last* the public should come by general 
 consent to decide these questions in the negative, then 
 it would be felt that no weak sentiment ought to be 
 listened to, no idle gratitude to the constitution 
 for having, perhaps, in past times saved the country 
 from Spanish or French invasion ; that all such con- 
 siderations ought sternly to be put aside as irrelevant ; 
 that as honest men we were bound to consider, not 
 whether our constitution was useful or interesting, or 
 the like, but whether it was true, and if we could not 
 any longer say with our hands on our hearts that it was 
 
216 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 so, then, in the name of eternal truth, to renounce it 
 and bid it farewell ! 
 
 Now why should churches, if they are not mere 
 philosophical schools, be bound by dogma more than 
 states? Institutions are not mere machines; they are 
 also organisms; they have a certain power of gradual 
 self-modification analogous to growth. And they have 
 this power usually in proportion to their healthy vigour. 
 Thus it is that the English State has weathered the 
 storms of a thousand years. If now it is a thing pro- 
 foundly different from the England over which Edward 
 the Confessor ruled, the change has been made in the 
 same insensible manner by which the child with its 
 tender limbs, vague, dreamy thoughts and fickle 
 instinctive motions, passes into the man with his 
 strong-set frame, fixed habits and sure logical trains 
 of reflexion. And that it has been capable of such a 
 gradual transformation is the best evidence of the 
 healthy vitality which has animated it. There could 
 have been no more certain proof that it was but 
 half alive or that the English nation, like some other 
 nations, wanted the political sense necessary for forming 
 a state worthy of the name, than an inability to pass 
 through such modifications silently, or a disposition, 
 whenever such changes became necessary, to dissolve 
 the State on the ground that it no longer answered its 
 original definition, perhaps with some vague intention 
 of afterwards forming a new one. 
 
 Such a rigid definition are the formularies and 
 articles by which churches bind themselves. A church 
 cannot any more than a state submit to such tram- 
 mels without confessing that it is not really alive, 
 

 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 217 
 
 and that it is a machine rather than a living or- 
 ganism. 
 
 Nor has a church any strong hold on life if it only 
 deems itself in a healthy condition while it continues to 
 be what it was originally, or if it thinks to cure its 
 ailments by undoing all the modifications which time 
 has brought and restoring its original shape. This 
 process is called in the Church reformation and is 
 thought of as an evidence of vigour; and of this kind 
 are almost all movements which go on within the 
 Church, that is, they are returns upon the past, revi- 
 vals of what was dead, reinstitution of what was obsolete. 
 
 Such anxious retrospectiveness would not be thought 
 a healthy symptom in other institutions. Life looks 
 onward, not backward; the man does not pride himself 
 upon being precisely like the boy, but there does come 
 a time when he regrets to perceive himself altered, and 
 we know what this means; it means that he has begun 
 to decay. 
 
 An institution is healthy in proportion to its inde- 
 pendence of its own past, to the confident freedom with 
 which it alters kself to meet new conditions. 
 
 In this volume an attempt has been made to treat 
 the subject of religion in a practical manner. We have 
 asked the question, Is there really such a thing as 
 religion in the sense in which our fathers took the 
 word, that is, not some faint feeling in feminine minds, 
 not some hardly discernible subtlety of a special school 
 of philosophers, but a thing obvious, palpable, huge, 
 filling the earth and the sky and dwarfing everything 
 else by its magnitude ? Of course this can only be, 
 and yet people not know it, if some egregious mistake 
 
 .UNIVERSITY 
 
218 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 of nomenclature Las been made, so that what past 
 generations used to call religion has now got another 
 name or names and the word religion has been trans- 
 ferred to something of less importance. This then has 
 been asserted. It has been shown that the multitude, 
 fixing their eyes, as is their wont, only upon the 
 outsides of things, have identified religion with its 
 organisation, with churches and chapels, with the 
 clerical profession and its interests. They have accord- 
 ingly mistaken the fact that this organisation has ceased 
 to be efficient for a decline in religion itself. But 
 it has seemed to us that though religion runs shallow or 
 scarcely runs at all in its old channel, this is only 
 because the stream has been drawn off in other directions. 
 We have found the substance of religion still existing, 
 but outside its old organisation, broken up and distri- 
 buted under other names or under no name. Man has 
 still grand spiritual interests, which are all -important 
 to him and which he partly feels to be so ; only to his 
 misfortune he has ceased to think of them together in 
 
 o 
 
 the whole which they constitute. If he could view 
 them thus they would affect him with the same solemn 
 anxiety which we trace in ancient utterances concerning 
 religion. He would see that religion is everything, if 
 not precisely in the sense of those who talk of an 
 endless heaven or hell awaiting each individual, yet in 
 the sense of the ancient prophets who watched over the 
 weal of their Jerusalem. Pie would see that on re- 
 ligion depends the whole fabric of civilisation, all the 
 future of mankind. 
 
 Now the clear recognition of this in churches 
 would make it possible for them to live again with 
 
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 219 
 
 healthy life. All that retrospectiveness, that un- 
 healthy inclination for revival and what is called refor- 
 mation, proceeds from a conscious perplexity about the 
 object for which churches exist. Those who cannot 
 see the end fix their eyes, as the next best thing, upon 
 the beginning, as in politics also fantastic revivals are 
 sometimes undertaken by immature or dilettante poli- 
 ticians. All such aberrations spring from want of 
 seriousness, and seriousness consists in knowing what 
 you desire, in consciously willing the end and willing 
 the means. If in churches there were found the 
 seriousness that is found in states, if the spiritual 
 interests were as vividly clear to the churchman as 
 those partly material, partly spiritual interests which 
 occupy the politician are clear to him, we should 
 see the same free and inventive adaptation of means 
 to ends in ecclesiastical as in secular politics. 
 
 An attempt has here been made to consider the 
 Church with reference rather to its end than to its be- 
 ginning. It has been shown that religion does not 
 always need any very palpable embodiment, but that 
 in very large communities there is danger lest for want 
 of a doctrine of civilisation, and therefore an organised 
 Church, multitudes should grow up without any ac- 
 quaintance or sympathy with the order in which they 
 live. Now of all such great social organisms the 
 largest ever seen on earth is that to which we our- 
 selves belong, the great whole of which the Christian 
 Church once formed the soul and the European system, 
 an Empire slowly dissolving into a brotherhood of 
 States, was the body. Being so large and having 
 institutions so complicated, it does need much 
 
220 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 spiritual machinery. And yet in the last century or 
 so this machinery has been wanting, owing chiefly 
 to the self-assertion of the smaller national organisms 
 which conceal partial national religions. The result 
 has been what might have been expected, a result of 
 which few yet measure the awful importance. It 
 is something which almost threatens the death of the 
 organism, that is, of European civilisation itself. It is 
 a vast rebellion of the less prosperous classes against 
 the whole system which has nursed them, a fierce repu- 
 diation on their part of the whole system or law, way 
 of viewing the universe or worship, which lies at 
 the basis of the civilised world. It includes a mortal 
 hatred against all visible authority, a complete political 
 revolution. 
 
 This movement is not to be confounded with the 
 movement of reform. The reformers are those who 
 desire to advance civilisation, which they regard as a 
 gradual development. They are therefore adverse to 
 everything like immobility, and even believe that 
 change ought now to advance with some degree of 
 rapidity. Naturally therefore their a/ttack upon sur- 
 vivals and abuses is often vehement and bitter. But 
 it is echoed in quite another tone by a vast host who 
 are so far from holding this doctrine of development 
 that they are quite unable to conceive it. These are 
 not reformers or progressists. Their conceptions are of 
 the archaic primitive kind. They hold that happiness is 
 a fixed thing within easy reach of all, and that civilisa- 
 tion is the mass of frauds by which it is appropriated to 
 the few. Their object therefore is not to advance civilisa- 
 tion, but to destroy it by assassination and massacre. 
 

 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 221 
 
 If we really believe that a case can be made out for 
 civilisation, this case must be presented by popular 
 teachers, and their most indispensable qualification will 
 be independence. They perhaps will be able to show 
 that happiness or even universal comfort is not, and 
 never has been, within quite so easy reach, that it can- 
 not be taken by storm, and that as for the institutions 
 left us from the ' past they are no more diabolical than 
 they are divine, being the fruit of necessary develop- 
 ment far more than of freewill or calculation. Such 
 teachers would be the free clergy of modern civilisation. 
 It would be their business to investigate and to teach the 
 true relation of man to the universe and to society, the 
 true Ideal he should worship, the true vocation of par- 
 ticular nations, the course which the history of man- 
 kind has taken hitherto, in order that upon a full view 
 of what is possible and desirable men may live and 
 organise themselves for the future. In short the modern 
 Church is to do what Hebrew prophecy did in its 
 fashion for the Jews, and what bishops and Popes did 
 according to their lights for the Roman world when it 
 laboured in the tempest, and for barbaric tribes first 
 submitting themselves to be taught. 
 
 Another grand object of the modern Church would 
 be to teach and organise the outlying world, which for 
 the first time in history now lies prostrate at the 
 feet of Christian civilisation. 
 
 Here are the ends to be gained. These once recog- 
 nised, the means are to be determined by their fitness 
 alone. The question is not what means the Church 
 employed in other times, for other times had other 
 problems, not what was done by Paul or Gregory 
 
222 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 or Luther, but what men who, like Paul, Gregory 
 and Luther, knew what they were about, would be 
 likely to do now. 
 
 But if so why should we delay while we puzzle 
 ourselves with the question, 'Are we really members of 
 the Church or not ? Can we conscientiously call our- 
 selves Christian ? Is the Christian religion true ? Is it 
 
 o 
 
 not necessary, before we can act, to invent a new religion?' 
 The truth of a religion is a phrase without meaning. 
 You may speak of the truth of a philosophy, of a 
 theory, of a proposition, but not of a religion which is 
 a condition of the feelings. Nor ought we to speak 
 about joining or leaving a church as if a church were 
 a philosophic school or a political party. A church is 
 the social organism into which a man is born; his 
 membership in it, like his membership in a state, is 
 not a matter of opinion or belief, nor is it to be put on 
 or off at pleasure. And as to the Christian Church it 
 is simply the spiritual side of the great organism 
 of civilised society throughout the Western world. 
 
 The most cross-grained sceptic, the spirit most in 
 love with negation, can scarcely deny the grandeur of 
 the original conception of a universal Church. As we 
 can still trace to some extent the gradual growth of it 
 in the mind of its Founder, it is the largest and highest 
 of all conceptions. That there is something under 
 the State which is not quite the State, a thing as yet 
 unnamed, shall we call it kingdom of God ? shall we 
 call it ecclesia? and then that, as God is one and 
 Man is one, this something must underlie not each 
 nation only but all mankind taken together the 
 vision of the whole race passing out of its state of 
 
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 223 
 
 clannish division, as the children of Israel themselves 
 had done in the time of Moses, and becoming fit to 
 receive a universal constitution, this is great. Great too 
 is the temporary realisation of the vision, when the 
 world-church, thus largely sketched, met with a world- 
 state strangely fit to be its complement, and so for the 
 first and only time in history Universal Civilisation 
 took visible shape. The thought of human Society 
 as resting on a double basis, of civilised men as the 
 children of a transcendent marriage between the 
 spiritual and the temporal, suggested the image of the 
 Mother Church, the Wife of the crowned Humanity. 
 At other times a spiritual city was spoken of, which 
 descended from heaven and was set up in the midst 
 of the cities and kingdoms of the earth. 
 
 This conception of a spiritual city is precisely what 
 is now needed. But can we recognise the faintest 
 attempt to realise it in the actual organised Church ? 
 Does this institution even pretend to perform such a 
 function, to act as the organ of civilisation, as the 
 interpreter of human society? Does it explain to us 
 the development by which we have been brought to 
 our present stage? Does it open to us the vista of 
 the future? Does it make us at home in human 
 history, and so save us from the bewilderment and 
 horror which the past excites when we open its records 
 at random, by showing us how rigorously human 
 progress has always been conditioned, how much is 
 impossible, and at the same time how much and what 
 the laws of history justify us in hoping for ? Such 
 guidance was never more needed than now, when this 
 horror is seizing innumerable minds and exciting them 
 
224 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 to frenzy. But does the Church even pretend to 
 offer it ? 
 
 We know that for the most part it is occupied with 
 quite other topics. To most of its utterances the 
 active world listens in half- contemptuous silence, feeling 
 that it is useless to controvert the propositions laid 
 down, and that no results would follow from admitting 
 them. The . propositions are archaic; they show that 
 the Church once understood its function and discharged 
 it efficiently. Something evidently has arrested de- 
 velopment. What ? The retrospectiveness, the anxious 
 fear of ceasing to be what it originally was, which 
 seizes an institution when it has begun to be uncertain 
 why it exists. 
 
 But why should the outside public approve such 
 devotion to archaic dogmas, as if it were the only 
 honest and rational course which the Church could 
 take? 
 
 Circumstances have created a sort of fixed idea in 
 the public mind, an inveterate association between 
 the belief in certain dogmas and the membership of a 
 certain church. Accordingly a view like that which 
 has been here presented is certain to be met in general 
 with objections like the following. 
 
 " Possibly such a way of regarding religion and the 
 Church may be in itself sound. But in that case the 
 proper inference is that we want a new religion, that 
 we ought to dissolve the present Church and to found 
 another. And perhaps it may be true that 'the good 
 Lord Jesus has had his day/ that other hopes and 
 other beliefs animate the modern world, which when 
 the time is ripe will find their proper embodiment, 
 

 RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 225 
 
 In that case it is a mark of weakness and vagueness 
 f view to attempt to slur over radical difficulties 
 and to confuse together under a cloudy statement 
 inconsistent ideas. Let us say, if you will, religion 
 will endure, but let us say with firmness, Christianity 
 will die. There may be a church in the future, but it 
 will not be the Christian Church." 
 
 The assumption involved in this, viz. that the 
 Christian Church is a society founded upon a dogma 
 is neither altogether absurd nor quite without plausi- 
 bility. Such societies there are. Those who have 
 some common conviction and wish to propagate it, 
 adherents of some doctrine or disciples of some master, 
 commonly have some association among themselves, 
 though they seldom go the length of excluding from it 
 all who cannot subscribe a symbol. And if we look, 
 as Protestants are disposed to do, at the original 
 institution of Christianity, we find it growing out of 
 the single alleged fact of the Resurrection, we find 
 St Paul himself declaring that without that fact it was 
 nothing the fact being precisely one of those which 
 the modern scientific school puts on one side. On the 
 other hand the Catholic view is still more pitilessly 
 dogmatic. Here no doubt is explanation enough of 
 the opinion now commonly held about Christianity 
 and of the tenacity of it. 
 
 But a great organic growth such as Christianity, 
 illing so vast an extent both in space and time, is not 
 to be judged by the estimate of any single observer 
 were it St Paul himself. The strongest creations 
 of human sociability are not those which have sprung 
 up in the most logical and consciously reasonable way, 
 s. 15 
 
226 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 but rather those which have their roots buried deep in 
 the unconscious part of human nature. Could we 
 penetrate to the origin of Athens, we should not find 
 that conscious artists and conscious philosophers as- 
 sembled to lay the first stone of it. We should find 
 a simple village -community and one or two temples 
 with a sacred legend preserved in each; scarcely a 
 presentiment of what was to spring from such a germ ; 
 only a vague belief to the effect hunc frondoso vertice 
 collem, quis deus incertum est, habitat deus. And yet 
 we do not say that the later developments of Athens 
 were illegitimate, abusive ; when we read of Solon's 
 impatience at the first modest beginnings of Athenian 
 tragedy we judge him mistaken ; we judge that 
 while he thought himself a wise reformer calling 
 the citizens back to first principles he was in reality 
 short-sighted, and that his example proves that the 
 instinct of development in a truly living institution is 
 wiser than the wisest individual man. 
 
 It is not very bold to claim for the Christian 
 Church that it has as much right to develope and 
 expand as any political institution that hopes to live 
 must needs have. If at first it sprang out of a 
 local miracle and may have been little distinguished 
 from other waves of feeling that were propagated 
 by the religious guilds of the ancient world, Chris- 
 tianity is not now identical with belief in the Re- 
 surrection of Jesus. It is now and has for fifteen 
 centuries been something wholly different, namely the 
 great bond holding the European races and their 
 offshoots together in that sort of union out of which 
 naturally springs a common polity. True it may be 
 
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 227 
 
 that the miracle was the essential fact without which 
 the union would never have been accomplished; there 
 may have been a time when it was true that 'if Christ 
 be not risen our faith is vain ' ; but when the union has 
 taken place, has endured for a thousand years and 
 though since weakened and endangered yet subsists 
 in the form of an indestructible common civilisa- 
 tion and sense of unity among nations, it is true no 
 longer. The Christian Church is now the visible ex- 
 pression of a true cosmopolitanism which will be eternal, 
 and this being so, it avails nothing henceforth against 
 it to argue that after all Christ is not risen. Nay, 
 no conceivable historic scepticism ought to have 
 the power to shake it, any more than the fabric 
 of imperial Rome at its height would have been 
 shaken if a Beaufort or a Niebuhr had arisen at the 
 court of Augustus to question the personality of 
 Romulus. 
 
 Rome was strong because it looked to its end, the 
 Christian Church is now weak because it looks back to 
 its beginning. And here is the difference between the 
 great social fabrics which last for thousands of years 
 and the temporary associations, such as philosophic or 
 political parties, which live only the wearing out of a 
 fashion of thought. So long as an institution has 
 a visible and palpable use, so long as we want and feel 
 that we cannot do without the support of it, so long 
 its continuance cannot be made a question and it has a 
 robust life that no criticism can touch. Thus to most 
 of us the English State seems to exist as necessarily as 
 the sun and moon, and an Englishman does not ask 
 himself anxiously what discoveries historical research 
 
 152 
 
228 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 is making about our early kings, or whether he agrees 
 with Hengist and Horsa. 
 
 The Christian Church was once an institution of 
 this kind, of all institutions on the earth incomparably 
 the greatest and firmest; it was not so much like the 
 sun in the heaven as it was a light of which the sun 
 was a pale reflexion. In those ages of slow intel- 
 lectual movement when all Hellenism, all philosophy 
 or science, was in abeyance for several centuries, it 
 was possible to hold this commanding position for a 
 long time without submitting to much internal modifi- 
 cation; but since man began again to think, to know, 
 and to discover it has become more evident with every 
 century that churches like states can only live on the 
 condition of changing freely and perpetually. The 
 time has evidently come at last when this must abso- 
 lutely be admitted, unless the Church would be a 
 martyr to its own dogmas and would lay down a prin- 
 ciple which Jesus Christ denied, the principle namely 
 of finality in Divine Revelation. 
 
 But it may be urged that if this time has come it 
 has come too late for Christianity. 'The decline of 
 the Church has advanced so far that there can be no 
 more question of reforming it, even if such a Reforma- 
 tion was still possible two or three centuries ago. A 
 certain amount of corruption might be purged away, 
 languor or debility might be removed by opening new 
 sources of life, but the season of such remedial measures 
 is past. When reformers everywhere find the Church 
 the great obstacle in their path, when it seems the 
 great asylum for all abuses, where they find shelter 
 and an air of sacredness is thrown over them, the time 
 
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 229 
 
 is come for a revolutionary outbreak. H faut en finir. 
 Like Savonarola or Luther or Knox, nay like Jesus 
 Christ himself, we must declare war against a hypo- 
 critical organisation.' 
 
 It is not quite extravagant to take this tone against 
 Catholicism. A system which has been associated in 
 the past with so much crime and has so firmly resisted 
 reform provokes this style of opposition, and all the 
 more so because in its abasement it has retained so much 
 grandeur. But neither Jesus Christ, nor Luther and 
 Knox, when they proclaimed the downfall of a corrupt 
 hierarchy, thought of establishing society, by way of 
 reform, upon a secular basis. All alike treated the 
 system they attacked as the perversion of something 
 good and sacred, all alike substituted another church for 
 that which they destroyed. Our modern reformers who 
 wish to hand over what they take from the Church to 
 the State are of a different type. They are of those who 
 do not understand that there must always be a church, 
 organised or not, where there is a human society. 
 These are like children, who confound air, the most 
 necessary of realities, with vacuum or nothing at all. 
 
 But there are some among them who say that no 
 doubt a new religion and church must be introduced 
 in the room of Christianity, that it must be a system 
 founded upon science and embodying the real honest 
 beliefs of the present age. That such a system ought to 
 be introduced has been assumed throughout this book; 
 but is it so evident as not to be worth discussion that 
 because such a system might in many important points 
 be inconsistent with the Christianity of the creeds 
 therefore it must be introduced as a rival system, and 
 
230 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 that a place must be cleared for it by the destruction 
 of Christianity ? Must there needs, so to speak, be 
 two Acts of Parliament, the first abrogating Christi- 
 anity and the second instituting the new system in its 
 place ? Is this the way in which great changes are 
 usually or wisely made in the world ? Is it not rather 
 evident that the most extreme opponent of the 
 Christian creed, unless he is a Secularist, ought to 
 design the reform and not the destruction of the 
 Christian Church ? 
 
 It may be true that on the Continent reformers are 
 provoked by the immobility of the Church to take a 
 revolutionary course, in spite of all the untold evils, 
 the incurable ulcer of social discord, that may spring 
 from such a policy. But when we contemplate the 
 religious question from the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon 
 point of view we can see no reason to do so. The 
 Church here looks more like an organism and less like a 
 vast machine. We can imagine without much difficulty 
 English and American Christianity taking a shape 
 adapted to the age. We should have little difficulty 
 in conceiving that fixed exclusive dogmas are no more 
 necessary in the Church than in a state or a university 
 or in a philanthropic society ; only we are for the 
 time puzzled to give a precise answer to the question, 
 If the Church is not a society holding certain dogmas, 
 what is it ? 
 
 To this question then we answer as follows. The 
 Church is neither more nor less than the spiritual city 
 of Western civilisation ; but this city has been dilapi- 
 dated by schisms and revolutions so that it is scarcely 
 traceable in the present and is best understood by look- 
 
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 231 
 
 ing back to the world-church of the Middle Ages and 
 to the small state-churches of Israel and of Greece. As 
 to dogmas, we say that the word is unsatisfactory, 
 but that the Church so understood does indeed hold 
 certain dogmas in the sense of cherishing certain 
 views of the universe, certain maxims of life, certain 
 habits and tastes ; that however it does not pride 
 itself either upon the peculiarity or upon the un- 
 changeableness of these dogmas ; that many of them 
 are simple and indisputable enough, mere truisms if 
 considered philosophically, and only made important 
 by being acted upon ; that others again it shares with 
 many other religions ; that others have been called in 
 question by modern science, with respect to which 
 it only asks that science be not too hasty and do not 
 indulge malice against a rival system, while it professes 
 to be actuated by nothing but a love of truth ; and 
 that others again, the growth of later centuries, have 
 never been formulated into dogmas at all nor recog- 
 nised by the ecclesiastical authorities, and yet are of 
 priceless value ; finally that a reform is evidently 
 needed by which new truth, such as wells forth so 
 abundantly in the modern world, shall be taken up 
 into the teaching of the Church. 
 
 As to the controversy between orthodoxy and 
 science this volume is not concerned with it. True 
 religion, as it is here defined, can never have any 
 conflict with science except when science disregards 
 the claims of humanity. Only as we have a duty 
 to truth we consider also the interests of the human 
 republic. We reflect that a reckless devotion to the 
 pursuit of truth may endanger the foundations of 
 
232 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 society partly by shaking too suddenly the beliefs 
 upon which it is founded, partly by creating a dan- 
 gerous chasm between the philosophic class and the 
 vulgar. We hold therefore that while the dispute 
 between orthodoxy and science continues undecided 
 there should take place a great coalition of all who 
 are serious on both sides. While Science says, 'Before 
 we can seriously benefit mankind we must exterminate 
 Christianity/ it breaks the continuity of history, sets 
 men at wild war with their own past, alienates all 
 those who by training and disposition feel most ten- 
 derly towards mankind, and surrounds itself exclu- 
 sively with those whose studies are cold and in 
 some cases foster a ruthless fanaticism. While Chris- 
 tianity devotes itself to a crusade against modern 
 thought, it is likely either to be beaten, if it fights 
 the philosophers with their own weapons, or to rouse 
 the superstitions of the vulgar, if it appeals to 
 feeling against thought. It remains then to make 
 the most of the common ground between them ; this 
 common ground is Natural Religion and the Christian 
 Church so far as the Christian Church shows itself to 
 be modifiable. 
 
 That Natural Religion is a far larger and more 
 substantial thing than is commonly supposed, that 
 it is indeed as wide as modern civilisation, has been 
 argued at length. On the other hand why should not 
 the Christian Church open itself to the modifications 
 which the age requires ? Any one who should study the 
 nature of Christianity only in the Bible would praise it 
 most of all for this that more than any other religion it 
 takes account of the claims of time. In the long religious 
 
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. 233 
 
 development recorded there nothing is so impressive as 
 the historic piety which binds the successive revela- 
 tions together. The prophets reverence the lawgiver ; 
 Christ and his apostles reverence both ; and yet each 
 new revelation asserts its own superiority to those 
 which went before, the superiority not of one thing 
 to another thing but of the developed thing to the 
 undeveloped. It is thus that the ages should behave 
 to one another. Has Christianity lost this secret, 
 this understanding and concert with time ? It possessed 
 it assuredly in its first period. The apostolic writings 
 like the prophetic are full of the future ; they do not 
 look upon all development as ended, but study intently 
 to divine what time will bring next, what new dis- 
 pensation, what second coming is in store for the 
 Church. But in passing into other races Christianity 
 could not but suffer by being dissociated from the 
 tradition of Jewish prophecy. It could not but lose 
 the prophetic spirit, the eager study of the future. 
 
 We have spoken of science as replacing miracle ; 
 prophecy it does not so much replace as restore. As it 
 grasps human affairs with more confidence it begins to 
 unravel the past and with the past the future. It 
 shews the significance of each new social or political 
 phase as the Hebrew prophets studied to do. History 
 and prophecy belong together. As it was prophecy 
 that made the old Church modifiable by preparing 
 it to understand each new time, the modern Church 
 may recover the power of development by calling 
 history to its aid. That view of history as a whole 
 which past generations had, when they spoke of the 
 creation of the human race six thousand years ago, of 
 
234 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 Adam's fall, &c. may seem to us crude, but some such 
 general view we must have if mankind is to be saved 
 from bewilderment and anarchy, an anarchy which is 
 already almost upon us. Such a view grows every 
 year fuller and more distinct through the labours 
 of scientific historians, a view of the past from 
 which the future in some of its large outlines may 
 be inferred. And thus as science replaces the cos- 
 mogonies of old religion, history scientifically treated 
 restores the ancient gift of prophecy, and with it may 
 restore that ancient skill by which a new doctrine was 
 furnished to each new period and the old doctrine 
 could be superannuated without disrespect. 
 
 Lastly it is a capital circumstance that the organi- 
 sation is there, an organisation for working on all 
 mankind at once, which once destroyed could not 
 without vast trouble be replaced. To send a new life 
 through this organisation, the life of science and 
 history, would be a shorter and a cheaper course than 
 to destroy it. But this course would call for a great 
 moral effort. Ecclesiastics would need courage, and 
 the opposite school forbearance. Both alike would 
 need, and this perhaps in practice would be the 
 hardest requirement, to rise above the petty love 
 of petty triumphs, the degenerate propensity to idle 
 quarrelling ; they would need in short the seriousness 
 which comes from the sense that great issues are at 
 stake, scarcely less indeed than the whole future of 
 civilisation. 
 
RECAPITULATION. 
 
 IT remains to collect together and exhibit in one view 
 the principles to which we have been led separately 
 and successively in the course of this volume. 
 
 There is a Lower Life, of which the animating 
 principle is secularity, or in the popular sense of the 
 word materialism. This Lower Life is made up of 
 purely personal cares, and pursues even in the midst 
 of civilisation no other object than those which the 
 savage pursues under simpler conditions, self-preser- 
 vation, personal possession and enjoyment, personal 
 pleasure. The principle of secularity would lead in 
 fact to savage isolation but for the influences which 
 check and thwart it in civilised society, compelling it 
 to wear a disguise and reducing it to a dangerous 
 tendency. The Good Cause of the world consists in 
 resistance to this tendency and detection of its dis- 
 guises, wherever it is found working not openly in 
 nihilistic outbreaks but insidiously by weakening or 
 perverting the great institutions of cooperative life. 
 
236 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 There is a Higher Life, of which the animating 
 principle has been called at different times by different 
 names, but the most comprehensive name for it is 
 religion. It is the influence which draws men's thoughts 
 away from their personal interests, making them in- 
 tensely aware of other existences, to which it binds 
 them by strong ties sometimes of admiration, some- 
 times of awe, sometimes of duty, sometimes of love. 
 Under this influence the individual ceases to be a 
 mere individual and becomes the member of some 
 corporate body, whether city or nation or tribe or 
 church, and his acts in consequence begin to have a 
 moral character, as being determined by some motive 
 larger than personal interest. When the influence has 
 operated for a long time upon a whole community, 
 each member of it finds himself amply overpaid for 
 his sacrifices by a richer consciousness, a capacity for 
 more various and finer enjoyment ; the savage becomes 
 a citizen ; and in the midst of the community there 
 grows up a great treasure of institutions, arts, inven- 
 tions, traditions, refinements and habits, which is called 
 collectively its civilisation. 
 
 But this process suffers interruption and frustration 
 in many ways, principally in two. In the first place 
 the influence which draws together and conglobes 
 certain individuals into a living society acts as intensely 
 in producing discord outside the society as in creating 
 union within it. The corporate bodies, each of which 
 is a nucleus of civilisation, are all at war with each other. 
 The sacrificing Aryan, the 'twice-born man/ regards all 
 that are outside his sacred community as 'devils', against 
 whom he must wage perpetual war ; the Israelite, made 
 
RECAPITULATION. 237 
 
 suddenly into a hero by his divine law, rushes down 
 upon Hittite and Jebusite asserting a divine right to 
 their territory ; the Islamite overthrows kingdom after 
 kingdom for no other reason than that his prophet has 
 given him a new principle of life. And by such wars 
 religion often destroys itself. For conquest mixes again 
 the atoms of humanity ; it neutralises the religions 
 that held them together, and so disperses them again 
 through doubt and bewilderment. The Romans had 
 not long begun to conquer before they perceived that 
 conquest would destroy the heroism that had made it 
 possible by introducing foreign disciplines. Their fore- 
 boding was fulfilled ; the Empire of Rome was under- 
 mined by moral decay until a new discipline grew up 
 which embraced the whole of it. 
 
 This experience of the discords produced by all 
 partial religions, with the example given in the Roman 
 Empire of the way in which such discords may be 
 healed, has put before the minds of men an unfading 
 vision of a universal religion which may unite all 
 mankind at once as the partial religions have united 
 particular communities. 
 
 But religions do not only hurt each other by 
 collision, they also decay inwardly. Springing up or- 
 dinarily in the infancy of the human mind they are 
 alloyed from the beginning with mistake and miscon- 
 ception. They are indeed alloyed with something far 
 worse, of which in this volume intentionally nothing- 
 has been said, but which it may be well once for all to 
 take note of. 
 
 Let it be remarked then that religion has been 
 treated of here only so far as it is a good thing. In 
 
238 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 comparing religions in order to discover their common 
 property it has always been tacitly assumed that there 
 is a species of religion which is noble, and that our 
 concern was with this alone. But assuredly there is 
 also a species of religion which is bad intrinsically and 
 yet is of such common occurrence that it might almost 
 lay claim to determine the sense which should be given 
 to the word religion. Religion has been regarded here 
 as the link of feeling which attaches man habitually to 
 something outside himself, and it has been assumed 
 that this feeling is always of the nature of admiration 
 and love. But as a matter of fact it is quite as often 
 of the nature of terror. If we chose to describe religion 
 as a night -mare eternally troubling man's repose, de- 
 pressing all his powers with slavish dread and tempting 
 him to terrible crimes under the name of expiations, 
 history no doubt would amply bear us out. But on the 
 whole in the modern world the better aspect of religion 
 has vindicated itself. The word is now more naturally 
 used in a good sense. It is no longer convertible with 
 superstition. We recognise that men have at times a 
 vision of something mighty and horror- striking which 
 makes them grovel in the dust, and that this is 
 superstition, but that they have also at other times a 
 vision of something as glorious as it is mighty, and that 
 this is religion. 
 
 Nevertheless, though we can thus distinguish in 
 thought religion from superstition, we cannot always pre- 
 vent them from being intricately mixed together in fact. 
 It has rarely been found possible to extract from religion 
 the nobler element, so as to escape suffering at the same 
 time from its wasting influence. Not only in Tauris or 
 
RECAPITULATION. 239 
 
 in Mexico but here in England religion has been and 
 is a night-mare, and those who flatter themselves that 
 they have shaken off the horror find a colder, more 
 petrifying incubus, that of Annihilation, settling down 
 upon them in its place, so that one of them cries out, 
 Oh! reprends ce Rien, gouffre, et r ends-nous Satan. 
 
 But even the nobler kind of religion, as it springs up 
 naturally, is full of mistake and misconception. It 
 finds the man at a certain stage of enlightenment, it 
 lightens up with love and wonder his view of the 
 universe, but it does not of itself correct that view. And 
 as religion is one of man's earliest friends, it finds him 
 commonly when his view of the world is not merely 
 a little wrong but childish and fantastic in the extreme. 
 Out of conceptions half-childish half-poetic it constructs 
 objects of worship, and in the temples built to these 
 and in the sacred poetry and history which grow out of 
 the worship of these, all the poetic childishness is 
 consecrated and perpetuated. In this way religion, 
 at first the inspiring guide of man, becomes at a later 
 time his tyrant. She who taught him his rudiments 
 opposes his higher education, and with all the more 
 effect that she does it c with no unworthy aim and e'en 
 with something of a mother's mind' 
 
 Almost always when religion comes before us 
 historically it is seen consecrating in this manner 
 conceptions obsolete or obsolescent. The stage in which 
 it fully satisfies the best intellects lasts commonly but 
 a moment. Then begins a time in which it wants 
 a little help from interpretation. What was meant 
 literally must now be taken figuratively ; what was 
 advanced as fact must be received as allegory. Yet still 
 
240 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 for a long time the very greatest minds range themselves 
 sincerely on the side of belief. Sceptics may perhaps 
 have witnessed the first representations of Aeschylus, 
 and assuredly there was scepticism ;n the age of 
 Dante, but Aeschylus and Dante were greater than 
 the sceptics. How long this period of substantial 
 effective predominance will last depends very much 
 upon the character of the reigning religion. It could not 
 last very long in Greece, where the religion was too 
 evidently primitive and childish though so lovely. 
 Italian religion fell speedily into contempt. But 
 Christian orthodoxy, to the composition of which so 
 many and various elements had gone, which was 
 developed in the midst of advanced politics and ad- 
 vanced philosophy, which had a broad strong basis 
 in Jewish history and prophecy and a superstructure 
 composed of materials drawn from Plato and Aristotle 
 this was able to hold its own with ease for many 
 centuries. When the spirit of inquiry was reawakened 
 in the twelfth century, the Church was able to make 
 it subservient and to create a philosophy of her own. 
 As Dante was orthodox in the fourteenth century, 
 Michael Angelo was orthodox in the sixteenth. If 
 Rabelais and Montaigne knew themselves not to be 
 Christians, if probably Shakspeare's mind in its immense 
 wanderings had become acquainted with doubt, yet 
 still throughout the seventeenth century great and 
 subtle intellects, such as Pascal and Milton, could feel 
 their spiritual life to be rooted in the Christian 
 tradition. 
 
 A third stage begins in the history of religions 
 when the best minds begin consciously to admit that 
 

 RECAPITULATION. 241 
 
 their view of the universe has altered since the 
 religion was first promulgated. Then, and not till 
 then, arises a great practical question, What is to be 
 done? 
 
 A question difficult enough in itself; but we 
 complicate it unnecessarily. It is an effect of the 
 greatness and sovereign nature of religion that the 
 particular variety of it under which we live seems to 
 us the only possible religion. When therefore this is 
 attacked we do not say, A religion is in danger ! but, 
 Religion is in danger ! And the new views of the 
 universe are never thought of as a new religion or as a 
 modification of religion, but as something secular in 
 their nature. At best they are called philosophy or 
 science. 
 
 And yet what are these philosophies, but the freshest 
 attempts to grasp the universe ? Now are not the 
 religions which they attack but older attempts to do 
 the same 1 The only peculiarity of religion is that 
 it is a philosophy which has in some past time shaped 
 a community, and therefore by a kind of necessity, lest 
 the community^ should fall to pieces again, holds a sort 
 of monopoly in it. If we make the extreme supposi- 
 tion, namely that the reigning religion is wholly 
 opposed to the new views and must be rejected wholly, 
 it would still not be immediately certain that religion 
 as such must suffer or secularity gain, for the new phi- 
 losophy might prove a more edifying and ennobling re- 
 ligion than that which it replaced. 
 
 Another unnecessary difficulty which we introduce 
 is to regard the new system as much more flatly 
 opposed to the old one than it really is. Here again 
 s. 16 
 
242 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 religion suffers from the fact that it has its roots in 
 the primitive period of society. For hence it gathers 
 precedents of a rude barbarous mode of conducting 
 controversy. In minds accustomed to philosophic 
 thought a change of opinion does not come by abrupt 
 cataclysm but by gradual development. If it be 
 accompanied by debate, the debate is conducted with 
 candour and temper. But religion by its nature is the 
 ancient philosophy of a whole community, that is, it is 
 a philosophy of unphilosophical people. It is discussed 
 therefore, like politics, with wild party spirit and with 
 an eager desire to make all differences as sharp as 
 possible. Like politics, it is seized as a pretext for 
 fighting, since fighting in one form or another is the 
 salt of life to the majority in most communities. But 
 religious controversy is always some degrees more 
 barbarous than political, as it appeals to more primitive 
 precedents. It imbibes the spirit of an age when Avar 
 was the business of life, when rude warriors turned 
 dogmas into war-cries. And even to the present day, 
 though we have grown so familiar with the nicety 
 of philosophic distinctions and the delicate handling 
 they require, yet when the subject is theology we grow 
 indignant at anything that looks like compromise, 
 think the edge of controversy cannot be too sharp, and 
 insensibly take crusaders and iconoclasts for our models. 
 Yet assuredly the great religious problem of modern 
 times is to purge this taint of barbarism away from 
 religion. An attempt has been made here to assert for 
 religion all the sovereign importance that has ever been 
 claimed for it. But all such attempts will be vain 
 and religion will perish in spite of them, if we must 
 
K dories o f 
 
 RECA PITULA TIGS'. 243 
 
 needs attribute this sovereign importance to abstract 
 verbal propositions or dogmas. In stationary periods, 
 when but one or two ideas at a time ruffled the 
 mind of nations, such verbal religions might be strong, 
 but not in an age like this, when new ideas come 
 upon us in a torrent that is never intermitted. 
 
 We must face once for all the truth that these great 
 views of the universe upon which states and forms of 
 civilisation rest are partial and provisional, however 
 much they may assert themselves to be final. Bat we 
 must realise on the other hand that states really do 
 rest upon them and not upon nothing at all, so that 
 the decay of a great religion involves a revolution 
 of incalculable magnitude. We are driven then not 
 by some sentimental weakness, but by the feeling that 
 society has claims upon us as well as truth, to the 
 conclusion that in this province New and Old must not 
 be allowed 'to meet and clash like armed foes/ but 
 that all reasonable means should be tried to graft the 
 new upon the old. This may indeed prove to be 
 impossible. The true view of the Universe must be 
 opened to the -population of India, even though it 
 should seem to blot out and cancel all the conceptions 
 in which they have lived for three thousand years. 
 Such is the awful Nemesis of a system which arrests 
 change too long and too successfully ! But even there, 
 and much more elsewhere, let what is possible in the 
 way of accommodation be done. 
 
 This general view of the nature of religion and of 
 the two great perversions to which it is liable has been 
 applied in this volume to the religious question of the 
 day. We see a great religion approaching the end of 
 
 162 
 
244 
 
 its second millennium. It held together for many 
 centuries the civilisation of Europe ; it does so to this 
 day more than most suspect. But it suffers from both 
 the perversions. 
 
 First it cannot persuade itself but that all other 
 religions must be its enemies. For a long time it 
 struggled to show that Mohammed must be an im- 
 postor, as though the loss of Islam could not but be its 
 own gain. It could not without great effort imagine but 
 that the heathen must be excluded from God's mercy. 
 It was hurt when any strong resemblances to its own 
 creed or scriptures were produced from other sacred 
 books, and has therefore looked on in sheer dismay at 
 the discoveries of recent times, which have shown so 
 much resemblance among most great religions. The 
 curious correspondence, for example, between Buddhism 
 and Christianity affects our religious world with 
 distress, though beforehand one might perhaps have 
 expected it to cause delight and triumph. But such is 
 the nature of religion, which being an attractive force 
 to those whom it brings together is a force of violent 
 repulsion towards those who are without. 
 
 Secondly, it has allowed itself like other great 
 religions to be stereotyped. And it has now entered 
 upon that phase when minds of the higher order are 
 seldom found to receive its ancient dogmas with complete 
 conviction, when they do not altogether belong to it 
 even when they most admire it and most appreciate 
 the service it has rendered to mankind. It has 
 reached this rather advanced stage of decline, and has 
 left quite behind it the first stage when individual dis- 
 believers were indeed numerous enough, but still minds 
 
 I 
 
RECAPITULATION. 245 
 
 disposed to religion, even when they were minds of the 
 highest order, were troubled with no scepticism that 
 they could not overcome. 
 
 This volume has not aimed at combating the 
 scepticism of the age. It has rather assumed that 
 a system of doctrine which has been left unrevised for 
 more than a thousand years must needs provoke scepti- 
 cism. The only questions here raised have been : How 
 far does the prevalent incredulity extend ? and, What 
 course ought to be adopted if its case were completely 
 made good ? We have protested against that fatal 
 propensity to exaggerate differences, that taste for 
 discord even when discord is most ruinous, that craving 
 for excitement which would rather make life a tragedy 
 than see it deprived of all dramatic interest. We 
 have argued that not theology as such nor religion 
 as such, but both only as far as they are founded 
 upon supernaturalism, are attacked by modern phi- 
 losophy; that undoubtedly an age of progressive 
 discovery cannot regard a system two thousand years 
 old with the undiscriminating reverence of the Middle 
 Age, which looked up in all things to antiquity as 
 superior to itself; that it will regard the Bible and the 
 creeds as archaic in form ; but that on the other hand 
 it may easily regard them as true in substance or as 
 presenting grand outlines of truth, since indeed the 
 modern way of thinking is especially historical and 
 appreciates the past all the more as it does justice to 
 the future. We have pointed out analogies between 
 the stern rigour and hatred of anthropomorphism 
 shown by modern science and the very same qualities 
 in Hebrew prophecy, between the tone of Hebrew 
 
246 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 religion and that nature-worship which breathes in 
 modern poetry, between the humanity of the modern 
 world and the spirit of early Christianity ; we have 
 remarked in short that both the Old Testament and 
 the New lose that appearance of obsoleteness which 
 ecclesiastical formalism has given them, and stand out 
 as true sacred books and classics of mankind, so soon 
 as in the former Nature is written for God and in the 
 latter Humanity for Christ. 
 
 So much has been urged in respect to the doctrinal 
 system itself which was established so many centuries 
 ago. Considered solely in itself it seems to be the 
 archaic outline of precisely such a religion as would 
 satisfy the modern world. But secondly we have urged 
 that it would be much more than this had it not been 
 stereotyped so early, and that the finality which has so 
 long prevailed in religion is peculiarly abusive in the 
 Christian Church and prevents Christianity from doing 
 justice to itself. Other religions have been stereotyped 
 early because their first preachers were narrow-minded 
 and could not conceive of development in religion. 
 But our religion was not at first of this kind, since the 
 most remarkable feature of our Bible is its system 
 of successive revelations covering many centuries, and 
 its doctrine of an Eternal God who from age to age 
 makes new announcements of His will. Here again 
 in archaic form we have a modern doctrine, by the 
 help of which Christianity ought to have been pre- 
 served from the fate of other religions which have found 
 themselves incapable of bearing a change of times. It 
 follows that we may find in Christianity itself the 
 principle that may revive Christianity, for the principle 
 
r^f "Uic,-^ 
 
 RECAPITULATION. 247 
 
 of historical development, which is what we need, is 
 plainly there, and the whole Bible is built upon it. 
 Christianity was intended to develope itself, but some- 
 thing arrested it. The spirit of prophecy, that is, 
 of development, did not continue sufficiently vigorous 
 in the Church. It was not indeed absent. The prophet 
 of the Apocalypse and Paul show us in what way 
 Christianity might have faced the new exigencies. 
 In later times too it exhibited itself occasionally, 
 Augustine's ' City of God' may be called a true prophecy. 
 The creation of the Papacy is a wonderful proof of 
 life and the power of self- adaptation in the Church. 
 At the Reformation and since true prophets of the 
 ancient type have appeared. And in more recent 
 times outside the Church there has been a disposition 
 to treat the great writer of each period as having a 
 prophetic mission, as though we felt that, the old 
 Hebrew sense of historical development having re- 
 vived, the Hebrew prophet must revive with it. But 
 if this spirit had been lively in the Church at all 
 times, if at all periods prophets had been on the watch 
 to discern ' the" face of the sky and the signs of this 
 time 7 , and the Church had retained the power of 
 receiving a prophet and rendering him due homage, that 
 dangerous gulf which now we witness between the 
 teaching of the Church and the needs of the people 
 need never have opened. 
 
 But after all the evil cannot be thought irremediable 
 since the disease is of an ordinary kind and has many 
 times been cured. This doctrine of development has 
 always been seized with difficulty and soon dropped 
 again; the prophet, who believes in past and future 
 
248 NATURAL RELIGION-. 
 
 alike, lias always been opposed by those who believe only 
 in the past or only in the future, that is by the majority. 
 It has been urged here that at least in England and 
 America a reform is still possible, since in both 
 countries the old religion retains its hold not merely 
 upon sentimentalists but upon a vast number of calm 
 and serious minds. 
 
 Such a reform must rest upon the principle 
 that as Christianity was wider than Judaism so the 
 religion of the present age must be wider than 
 Christianity, but at the same time as Christianity 
 did not renounce Judaism so our religion must not 
 renounce Christianity. If the Eternal revealed Him- 
 self between Moses and Christ, surely He has not 
 ceased to reveal Himself since the time of Christ. If 
 we say so we cannot be serious, for we know that in 
 recent times we have learnt far more of the laws by 
 which the universe is governed than former ages 
 knew. Accordingly in this volume an attempt has 
 been made to distinguish the additional element which 
 modern ages have brought but which our stereotyped 
 system has refused to admit or assimilate. 
 
 We have noted at what points the human mind 
 seems cramped by the reigning orthodoxy, and so 
 cramped that it cannot permanently submit or acknow- 
 ledge the wholesomeness of the restraint. We found 
 on the one side artists bitterly complaining of its yoke, 
 of the primness and suspiciousness of its morality ; 
 on the opposite side we found science rebelling 
 against the sentimental and unreal view of the uni- 
 verse which it imposed as dogma and to maintain 
 which it fettered the freedom of inquiry. Both these 
 
RECAP ITU LA T10N. 2 4 9 
 
 opposite rebellions appeared to gain strength irresistibly 
 from age to age, and both appeared not irreligious but 
 religious in the spirit that animated them. We could 
 not but acknowledge that the inspiration of the artist 
 though less serious, and that of science though so 
 terribly austere, had the character of religion, that they 
 were binding forces such as destroy selfishness and 
 sustain the Higher Life. Nay in the latter \\e 
 seemed to see the very same iconoclastic impulse that 
 lay at the root of Semitic religion, while in the other 
 we found the delicate spirit of Greek Paganism, which 
 had been crushed in the blind rancour of victorious 
 Christianity and had left the world deploring its less 
 ever since. 
 
 Especially of late years and among ourselves Art 
 and Science have proclaimed themselves to be not 
 mere rebels against the reigning religion but rival 
 religions. The change in their tone is very marked. 
 The artist, literary or other, who in Walter Scott's 
 time professed only to furnish amusement to the public 
 and to be richly contented if they applauded him, now 
 assumes the air of a priest and makes it a point of 
 honour to speak of his pursuit as a cult. The scientist 
 does this with still more decision ; he is now a priest of 
 Truth as the other of Beauty, and he asks with the 
 loftiest self-consciousness what any Christian priest 
 can have to say to him. 
 
 According to this volume the Christian priest can 
 only be silent ; it is the penalty he suffers for having 
 allowed himself to believe that the Eternal, who used in 
 old time to teach man by successive revelations, has long 
 since ceased to do so. But may he not now recover the 
 
250 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 lost ground by reviving the Hebrew doctrine of develop- 
 ment ? 
 
 It has been alleged here that he may recover a great 
 part of it. For of the new knowledge, the new views 
 of the universe, of man, and of the history of man, 
 which have opened upon us and which make us 
 feel more than ever the need of spiritual guidance, 
 though unfortunately they seem to escape the notice of 
 our authorised spiritual guides ; of this new know- 
 ledge by far the larger part is only additional to our 
 established Christianity and by no means opposed 
 to it. The monkish asceticism and horror of nature 
 against which Art protests, the dread of free inquiry 
 w^hich seems so contemptible to Science these are 
 not to be found in the original Christianity, they 
 are but vices which mark the failure of Christianity 
 to adapt itself to new and trying conditions. There 
 is no reason why Christianity should not now recognise 
 views of life which are really kindred to its own, 
 though they were beyond the Hebrew culture of 
 its first preachers. 
 
 But of course in practice there arises a difficulty 
 which cannot long be overlooked and which it has 
 been an object of this volume to deal with. The 
 conception of successive revelations of Himself made 
 by the Eternal, discerned first by prophets, and 
 made by them manifest to all, makes indeed a 
 grand basis for a progressive religion ; but how 
 much margin does it allow for mistake ? In the 
 Bible itself this conception is handled broadly, and 
 in the style of a nation capable of great ideas, but 
 quite incapable of criticism. There is a remarkably 
 
EEC A PI T ULA TIOX. 25 1 
 
 grasp of the idea of development in the ages, 
 and of a certain economy in revelation by which 
 it is adapted to the 'hardness of heart' of a particular 
 generation. But there is no admission that mistake 
 on a great scale may mix with revelation, that 
 beside the true and the false prophet there may be the 
 mistaken prophet, speaking at one time great truths 
 and at another time falling into great errors. Ac- 
 cordingly we find here no precedent which shall tell 
 us what to do when our religion needs not merely 
 to be developed further, but to be corrected, when 
 it appears not merely unripe but simply mistaken and 
 wrong. 
 
 Now such a precedent is just what we need and 
 scarcely know how to do without. For the difficulty 
 which the modern world feels in dealing with its 
 ancient religion is not so much that it has been too 
 much stereotyped that is a difficulty which might 
 conceivably be surmounted but that it is mistaken in 
 the most important points. We are told that it needs 
 correcting not developing, and that even this is not the 
 whole truth. "Its fundamental statement, upon which 
 avowedly its whole system is built, is itself, it is now 
 maintained, untrue. For what is, what was originally 
 the Gospel, but the announcement that Jesus was risen 
 from the dead? Now it is the prevalent opinion among 
 those who are most penetrated with the modern spirit 
 that Jesus did not rise from the dead. What then can 
 the modern world do but conclude, however regretfully, 
 in the words of St Paul himself, that its faith, the 
 faith of eighteen centuries, is vain ? 
 
 It is this dilemma which at the present time 
 
252 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 frustrates the efforts of those who would hold them- 
 selves at liberty to reject miracle and yet avoid the 
 fathomless abyss which would be left by the dis- 
 appearance of the ancient religion of Christendom. 
 For they are obliged either to pronounce Christianity a 
 vain faith or to think that St Paul, speaking in his 
 most prophetic tone with unusual emphasis and with an 
 air of the most deliberate solemnity, was mistaken. 
 
 But as we suppose development in everything, so we 
 ought to expect development in the idea of prophecy. 
 The Hebrews conceived the vision of each prophet to be 
 limited, so that he would be left behind by the prophet 
 of the next age. The conception was grand and true, 
 but it would be absurd that we with an infinitely 
 larger grasp of history and with habits of more 
 exact thought should bind ourselves too strictly to it. 
 We recognise that there are seers gifted to trace the 
 course of human destiny, who help us to understand 
 what new scene in the drama of time is about to open. 
 But we do not now believe that such seers are merely 
 limited in their views, we think them capable of error 
 and of great error. We even think that their in- 
 tensity is closely connected with a certain wayward- 
 ness, and that the very vividness with which they see 
 some things makes them blind to others; so that 
 we are never surprised to find them as often more 
 right, so at times more wrong, than the rest of the 
 world. And whatever we may think either of miracle 
 in general or of the particular miracle of the resurrection, 
 it is difficult now, whether we look at the first rise of 
 Christianity or at its later history, to admit that 
 it hangs by a thread, as St Paul declares, logically 
 
KEGAPITULA TIOF. 253 
 
 attached to the testimony of Cephas and the Twelve 
 and the Five Hundred. Its basis is rather the whole 
 Judaic conception of the foundation of the state and of 
 the development of history. The grand pages of 
 Hebrew prophecy, including those contained in the 
 Gospels, would not be cancelled if all that testimony 
 were discredited; nay it is one of the most clearly 
 marked circumstances in the biography of Jesus that 
 the thought of death and resurrection did not rise in 
 his mind till his undertaking had reached an advanced 
 stage. Again it is certain that the other great feature 
 in the history of Christianity, the union it established 
 among European nations and the universal civilisation 
 it thus brought to light, is quite separable in thought 
 from the miracle of the resurrection, however much 
 belief in the miracle may have contributed to bring it 
 about. And this subsequent addition made to Christi- 
 anity would go far to compensate any loss it might 
 suffer by the loss of its miraculous element. 
 
 In a word Natural Christianity regards prophecy 
 too as natural and therefore highly fallible. It can 
 imagine even -St Paul mistaken. Nevertheless it 
 believes in prophecy, and so far from thinking that 
 no 'sure word' is vouchsafed to men it believes that 
 there not only once were, but that there still are, 
 prophets, or rather vehicles of pure truth concerning 
 man's relation to the universe and the course of his 
 history far more trustworthy than the Hebrew prophets. 
 It lowers somewhat the value of the ancient Revelation, 
 but it adds a revelation made since and still making. 
 
 We conclude then that it is a mistake to imagine 
 Christianity as standing or falling with the miracle of 
 
254 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 the Resurrection, and that it rests in fact not on the 
 narrow basis of a disputable occurrence but on the broad 
 foundation of Hebrew religion, Hebrew prophecy, and 
 the historic union of the nations in the Christian 
 Empire. When this is once granted, it will appear 
 that the unmiraculous part of the Christian tradition 
 has a value which was long hidden from view by the 
 blaze of supernaturalism. So much will this unmira- 
 culous part gain by being brought for the first time 
 into full light, such new and grand conceptions will 
 arise out of it, illuminating the whole history of man- 
 kind, that faith may be disposed to think even that she 
 is well rid of miracle and that she would be in- 
 different to it even if she could still believe it. For 
 the religion that thus emerges is in many respects 
 more powerful and animating, mainly because it is 
 more public, than supernatural religion can be. Super- 
 natural religion, all must feel, has not done so 
 much, has not reformed the world so much, as might 
 have been expected. Its failure is evidently due 
 in great part to its supernaturalism, to the unnatural 
 stress it lays upon a future life. To hope even with 
 enthusiastic conviction for a future life is one thing; 
 to be always brooding over it so as to despise the 
 present life in comparison with it is another. The 
 orthodox system is always in practice sliding into this 
 error, because its vision of the future life is far too 
 distinct and mythological. By the side of such a 
 vision, everything historical, all the destiny of states 
 and nations, fades away, and men become quietists if 
 not monks. A religion arises which is intensely personal 
 if not selfish, which does not, like the religion of the 
 
RECA PITULA TION. 255 
 
 Bible, accompany history, interpret every historical 
 change, and in fact make time, change and development 
 its subject-matter, but contemplates fixed objects and 
 ' forgets itself to marble ' in contemplating them. 
 
 But as we perceive with great clearness that the 
 original Judaic religion though it had supernaturalism 
 had it not in this form, and instead of being monkish, 
 otherworldly, and immutable was social, political and 
 historical, we find ourselves reconciled with the past 
 and the future at the same time by pushing, the super- 
 naturalism of our religion into the background. By 
 reviving prophecy in its modern form of a philosophy 
 of history we at once adapt religion to the present age 
 and restore it to its original character. 
 
 One great object is always before us while we study 
 the Judaic religion in the Bible, Jerusalem or Zion, or 
 the kingdom of God, or the New Jerusalem, or the 
 ' city which hath foundations.' In the Bible this city, 
 sacred as it is, is exhibited as subject to, the vicissitudes 
 of time ; now it is happy and triumphant, now it sits in 
 the dust or is carried into captivity. The supernatural 
 guardianship does not save it from adversity or raise it 
 beyond the reach of sympathy. But in our modern 
 religion this Zion has been transferred across the grave 
 into a starry region of eternal immobility. It is gone 
 away to heaven, which is as much as to say that it 
 is dead. Supernaturalism has killed it. 
 
 Now according to the view here presented the 
 spiritual city is here on earth as much as it was in the 
 times of the Bible. For it is neither more nor less 
 than civilisation itself, which consists not in any visible 
 fabric nor even essentially in institutions, but in religion 
 
256 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 or worship or the higher life. As in the Bible the 
 spiritual city is identified in language with a definite 
 locality, a visible citadel and temple, and yet is 
 always held separable from such local limitations, so 
 in our view the civilisation of the later world was for a 
 long time gathered into an institution, the great 
 World- Church or World- State of Europe, but yet 
 does not absolutely require such embodiment ; the 
 machinery may grow old and unserviceable; it may be 
 cast aside, and a time may elapse during which it re- 
 mains unreplaced. For the spirit, the religion, the 
 worship, is not to be identified with any visible forms, 
 so that we are not to be too much astonished if when 
 the New Jerusalem of modern civilisation appears before 
 us we 'see no temple therein.' 
 
 This view may fairly claim to be nearer to the 
 original Christian scheme than that which has taken its 
 place. But does it not also supply the link among 
 religious thoughts which is often thought to fail when 
 supernaturalism becomes doubtful ? Without super- 
 naturalism, we are told, religion is mere morality 
 or mere philosophy ; very proper perhaps but mere 
 morality, very true perhaps but mere philosophy ! Not 
 so, for it is inseparably intertwined with politics and 
 history. At the bottom of every state we shall find a 
 religion, a religion underlies universal civilisation, and 
 necessarily therefore religion is the main subject of 
 history. 
 
 This view will also be found most useful to the 
 culture of the age. For in our culture there is at 
 present a most dangerous gap. While most other great 
 subjects of knowledge have been brought under syste- 
 
RECAPITULATION. 257 
 
 matic treatment, rescued from mere popular miscon- 
 ception, and then, when the great generalisations have 
 been duly settled, rendered back to the people in authori- 
 tative teaching, one subject remains an exception, and 
 that one the all-important subject of the history of 
 civilisation. No grand trustworthy outlines have yet 
 been put within the reach of all, which may serve as a 
 chart to guide us in political and social movement. 
 
 Such a chart, it has been pointed out, Hebrew 
 prophecy in archaic manner gave. But the work was 
 long ago broken off, and the result is that history has 
 become for all popular purposes a chaos. Who derives 
 guidance from it ? Who does not lose himself in its 
 labyrinth? On that sea we embark without a compass 
 and without any fixed point by which to steer; we are 
 driven hither and thither upon it by gusts of national 
 prejudice, or theories taken up at random. An ab- 
 straction called the State is set up as a sort of absolute 
 end; its glory or well-being made the standard of 
 public action. Its relation to other States or to the 
 whole, the ground of its pretensions, how it arose, why 
 it exists and whether it will exist for ever, in fact 
 all the largest and most urgent questions are decided at 
 random, if they are decided at all. On the most im- 
 portant of all subjects there is put before us a medley 
 of facts unclassified and unverified such as excites 
 the ridicule of the man of science; and yet we re- 
 ceive them with delighted interest; we are rational on 
 other subjects but madmen on the greatest subject of all. 
 
 This subject, it has been urged, is in the proper 
 sense theology, and it is the grand topic of the Bible. 
 Considering man as in the presence of a great Ne- 
 s. 17 
 
258 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 cessity, theology inquires how his ideals may be con- 
 formed to it. The Bible is a great history of the 
 dealings of a certain human group with this Necessity, 
 of their attempts to obey it, of their fits of disobedience 
 and forgetfulness. This is the proper historical point of 
 view, which must be taken up in modern history also if 
 it is to become a source of serious instruction, to 
 have its canonical books, or to cease to be the Babel 
 of national brawls and mendacious party recriminations 
 that it is. The remedy lies in regarding history with 
 more reverence, as a main part of religion ; only thus 
 can we save it from the unprincipled perversion it now 
 suffers at the hands of party- writers ; the remedy lies 
 too in seeing, as the Hebrews did, not only the struggles 
 of men in history but the decrees of a superior Necessity, 
 for history is a source of wild delusions, of the mania of 
 admiration in reactionaries, and of the frenzy of hatred 
 in revolutionists, to those who see in it only human 
 free-will. 
 
 But what of Supernaturalism ? Throughout this 
 volume it has been held aloof, and our principal object 
 has been to break the inveterate association which 
 in the general opinion connects religion with it. We 
 have denied that Supernaturalism is necessary either 
 to the idea, or to the practical vigour, or to the 
 popular diffusion, of religion. We have even main- 
 tained that when it is made the mainspring of religion 
 it does harm, since it gives religion an unpractical, unpro- 
 gressive character, and withdraws it from the main 
 
EEC A P ITU LA TION. 259 
 
 current of modern thought. And yet it has been 
 so long and so uniformly treated by all religious parties 
 as such a mainspring that when it is removed from this 
 position, religion is altered and becomes difficult to 
 recognise. It may no doubt produce perplexity when 
 the name of religion is given to that which wants some 
 of the leading characteristics, which, not at some 
 times or in some places only but all over Christendom 
 and from the primitive times of the Church, have been 
 supposed to belong to religion. As described here 
 religion does not brood over a future life, but is intensely 
 occupied with the present ; it does not surmise some- 
 thing behind nature, but contemplates nature itself; it 
 does not worship a Power which suspends natural laws, 
 but the Power which is exhibited in those laws ; it does 
 not shrink from political organisation, but is itself the 
 soul of all healthy political organisation ; it does not 
 damp enjoyment, but is itself the principle of all rich 
 enjoyment ; it is not self-conscious or self-absorbed and 
 does not make us anxious about our own fate, but is 
 the principle which destroys self and gives us strength 
 to rise above personal anxieties. Undoubtedly, if this 
 view be right many medieval saints must have been sadly 
 wrong, and it must be admitted that for long periods 
 strangely foreign elements must have been blended with 
 religion. But after all not much less than this was 
 asserted at the Reformation ; after all if we have here 
 deserted the medieval ideal it has been for that of the 
 Hebrew prophets down to the very end of the Hebrew 
 period of religion. For their religion was social, po- 
 litical, historical, and supernaturalism was not the 
 mainspring of it. 
 
260 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 But supernaturalism in religion is quite another 
 thing when it is not thus made the mainspring. If we 
 have learnt to see our God in Nature rather than out- 
 side Nature it does not follow that we are to regard 
 Him as limited by Nature, that is Nature as known to 
 us. We are all supernaturalists thus far that we all 
 believe in the existence of a world beyond our present 
 knowledge. It is practical Supernaturalism when we 
 allow this world beyond our science to influence us in 
 thought, feeling or action. We may do so by holding 
 that though we have not science of it yet we have 
 probabilities or powerful presentiments or lastly indica- 
 tions given through exceptional unaccountable occur- 
 rences called miracles, which together make its exist- 
 ence practically important to us. 
 
 And if we can think so and if the news thus brought 
 to us are good news, who will not say that a super- 
 natural religion, thus supplementing a natural one, may 
 be precious, nay perhaps indispensable ? So much 
 knowledge does our life need, and so little satisfying are 
 the revelations of science, that to many, if not most, 
 of those who feel the need of religion all that has been 
 offered in this book will perhaps at first seem offered in 
 derision. It will be inconceivable to them that religion 
 can be mainly concerned with what all know and all 
 admit. To them religion is only conceivable as a unique 
 solace, or a prop in weakness, or a stay in the eddy, or 
 a substance under the hollowness of life ; they do not 
 associate it with happiness, health, or vigour, but exclu- 
 sively with pain, decay and death. They think of it as 
 something added to life and knowledge, because life and 
 knowledge fall so dismally short. This view is indeed 
 
RECAPITULATION. 261 
 
 mischievous so long as it is thus exclusive. It has often 
 been pointed out of late years that Religion loses its old 
 commanding influence when it is thus monopolised by 
 the miserable, that it becomes a melancholy partial 
 thing, a mere makeshift for the science and practical 
 energy which will in the end sweep the world clear of 
 most of our present misery, and make life rich and satis- 
 fying through realities not through dreams. To this 
 objection it may be added that we cannot give such an 
 infinite range to our hopes without also heightening our 
 fears, for if we yield too much to the thought that 'in a 
 boundless universe there must be boundless better' 
 how can we help feeling at the same time that there 
 must be 'boundless worse?' With heaven comes hell, 
 with transcendent hope an unnamable despair. But 
 when this view ceases to be exclusive it acquires quite 
 another character. When the supernatural does not 
 come in to overwhelm the natural and turn life upside 
 down, when it is admitted that religion deals in the 
 first instance with the known and the natural, then we 
 may well begin to doubt whether the known and the 
 natural can suffice for human life. No sooner do we 
 try to think so than pessimism raises its head. The 
 more our thoughts widen and deepen, as the uni- 
 verse grows upon us and we become accustomed to 
 boundless space and time, the more petrifying is the 
 contrast of our own insignificance, the more contempt- 
 ible become the pettiness, shortness, fragility of the 
 individual life. A moral paralysis creeps upon us. For 
 a while we comfort ourselves with the notion of self- 
 sacrifice ; we say, What matter if I pass, let me think 
 of others ! But the other has become contemptible no 
 
262 NATURAL RELIGION. 
 
 less than the self; all human griefs alike seem .little 
 worth assuaging, human happiness too paltry at the 
 best to be worth increasing. The whole moral world 
 is reduced to a point, the spiritual city, ' the goal of all 
 the saints' dwindles to the 'least of little stars'; good 
 and evil, right and wrong, become infinitesimal, ephe- 
 meral matters, while eternity and infinity remain attri- 
 butes of that only which is outside the realm of morality. 
 Life becomes more intolerable the more we know and dis- 
 cover, so long as everything widens and deepens except 
 our own duration, and that remains as pitiful as ever. 
 The affections die away in a world where everything 
 great and enduring is cold ; they die of their own 
 conscious feebleness and bootlessness. 
 
 Supernatural Religion met this want by connecting 
 Love and Righteousness with eternity. If it is shaken 
 how shall its place be supplied ? And what would 
 Natural Religion avail then ? 
 
 But still if religion fails us it is only when human 
 life itself is proved to be worthless. It may be doubt- 
 ful whether life is worth living, but if religion be what 
 it has been described in this book, the principle by 
 which alone life is redeemed from secularity and ani- 
 malism, so that every high thought and liberal senti- 
 ment, even if it appear completely divorced from reli- 
 gion, is but a fragment which once had its place in the 
 fabric of some religion and now awaits the time when 
 it can be built in to some new fabric of religion adapted 
 to the coming time, can it be doubtful that if we are 
 to live at all we must live, and civilisation can only live, 
 by religion ? 
 
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