^^
^'4vai' %v 5^, rb. fih ovlffo)
itriKavdapSfievos, rots S^ ifiirpoa-dev iTreKreivofieuos, Karh ffKoirhv
didjKb) iirl t6 Ppa^eiov ttjs &poj KXrjaeus. " This one thing I do,
forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth
unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark
for the prize of the high calling." — Phil. iii. 13.
§ I. Subject : usefulness not frufk of Christian religion : curious
misconception of religion as anti-social and abstentionist : this
xviii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
should not (if true in the past) apply in the future : likelihood
of a retreat of the religious consciousness into itself . . 88
§ 2. Necessary alliance of Church and Society : the ' use ' of religion
determines its expansion and survival : reflective process,
coercive argument merely secondary and subordinate : the
Will-to-live, irrespective of reflection, aims at Satisfaction : at
its zenith in Man, becomes a demand for worth and work :
relation of this to the post-Kantian movement . . 90
§ 3. Must this impulse to life be checked, when it reaches the level
of self-consciousness ? Christian faith denies : our modern
science and its increasing reluctance to do more than record
series and chronicle facts : we are quite ignorant of the laws
which govern rise and decay of nations : the unit alone an
actual experience . . . . . • 9^
§ 4. Limit to-day placed upon ambitious schemes : content to secure
personal and individual welfare, and right immediate wrong :
one cause of this more modest outlook the doctrine, ' man as
the sport of unknown powers ' : to the knight-errant succeeds
type of Laocoon : another cause is the democratic demand
for immediacy, after too long waiting {fatalism and savagery) . 93
§ 5. Current of egoism arrested in the seven teeth century : mechanism
supplants teleology : the individual in philosophy and the
Commonwealth is subordinated to the Universal, to Sub-
stance ; humility takes place of self-assertion : rise and signifi-
cance of Deism . . . . . '95
§ 6. Speculations of Behmen : problem of the ordinary man : distance
of God, indifference of Nature, — he takes note of evil and
pain neglected in the Great Systems : to him we owe con-
ceptions of antithesis and evolution : striving in nature real,
not fictitious . . . . . . .97
§ 7. Frank mechanical naturalism of the Great Systems disclosed : all
values expelled from a world of eternal necessity and (so-called)
Reason : Leibnitz attempts to justify to the individual (for no
teleology which stops short of him can be accepted in equity) :
his memorable decision not to capitulate to Positivism . 99
§ 8. Return of anthropocentric standard ; ' not man by nature, but
nature by man ' : takes up the old Renaissance impulse to per-
sonal realisation submerged under the Great Systems : Being
and working are the same thing : empty mythology of change-
less being gives way : worth of the exceptional, of idiosyncrasy 1 00
§ 9. At every point the world a striving : possibilities press forward
to justify themselves : * while still man strives, still must he
stray ' : opposition to Calvinistic autocrat, to Hobbes'
Leviathan : Sympathy, not a craven compromise or surrender,
but natural : development of self, not retirement from world,
but work in Society, according to one's faculties, respecting
the rights of others . . , . . .10)
CONTENTS XIX
§ 10. Great reaction also even in the eighteenth century against the
claims of * Reason' (as universal, impersonal, conceding nothing
t© the individual) : continual criticism of Rationalistic compla-
cence : powerful influence of Rousseau upon Kant . .103
§11. Kant restates the value of the plain man: free moral action,
the one common indispensable element in human nature : his
principles incompatible with Bureaucratic autocracy, or un-
limited Sovereignty of the State : undying feud of scientific
and 'democratic' {i.e. religious) conceptions of man . . 104
§ 12. The Neo- Kantian development ; individual ousted from his
rights : rapid degeneracy in the notion of the Source of Life ;
unconscious, unmoral, unknowable : unavailing pursuit in the
complexity of Science and experience of a Unity : the Gospel
alone comprehensive, alone able to satisfy the needs of the
individual, and the demands of Reason . , . 105
LECTURE VII
Agnosticism : Arbitrary State, Unknowable God
'Ayvd}fup e\irl8os. — I Pet. iii.
§ I. Difficulty of Religious Apologetic ; between Rationalism
and orthodoxy : the latter rejoices sometimes in magic, antithesis,
defiance.
§ 2. African paradox rejected : Christian teaching lays emphasis
on reconciliation : modem spirit abandons uncompromising dualism,
but also refuses to eliminate either side of the complementary
Truth : this typical of the Alexandrine School.
§ 3. But sharp contrast is more popular, and the over-confidence
of subtle logic : religion puts no premium upon superior intelligence :
Gospel message simple and universal, closely allied with true
' Democracy.'
§ 4. Resumes : — the Christian apologist cannot hope to satisfy
both the philosopher and the plain man : the pursuit of abstract
Truth,' and the consciousness limited to feelings, needs, and
personal experience : real audience of the preacher the poor, the
sinful, the doubting, and the ignorant.
Part ii. § 5. Wide scope of the following discussion : relations
)f Church and world : tendencies of modem thought and modem
I
2 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
society : precarious position in morals no less than in dogma :
sympathy of the Greek Fathers with intellectual development : the
Latin Church-State ; authority and non-possumus in contrast.
§ 6. Mischief of mediaeval preoccupation with the Aoyos-doctrine :
humanity met only on its higher planes : supposed identity of
Philosophy and Religion.
§ 7. Apologetic narrowed into an attempt to satisfy the speculative
reason : importance of the Nominalist movement : discontent with
dogmatic proof rather than with dogma.
§ 8. Violent divorce of the two before the Reformation : reformers
aloof from secular wisdom : Leibnitz attempts to conciliate : simplifi-
cation of the ' credenda ' during the eighteenth century to a bare
religion of Nature.
§ 9. The arbiter still Universal Reason : general acceptance by
educated and clerical circles of the new belief: sudden and
unexpected emergence of the ' will of the people.'
§ 10. Superficial optimism of the Age of Enlightenment : pro-
found ignorance of average human nature : claims of the heart
against the head : only recent recognition of the emotional or sub-
conscious forces which sway society.
§ II. Real simplicity of the motives of revolution, economic
rather than social : ' will of the people ' reacts towards Caesarism
and efficiency.
§ 12. Sum : the apologist resembles Telemachus between the
gladiators : the attempted reconcilement or identification of
Philosophy and Religion has twice failed : are there symptoms of
a new disappointment to-day ?
§ I The task of the Christian apologist is beset
with one very real and perhaps insuperable difficulty.
He stands intermediate between two classes of minds
which he can never hope to satisfy. Any attempt to
create a philosophy of Religion is in a similar plight.
The earliest Rationalist, Clement of Alexandria, inter-
preting the apostolic precept of my text, in a more
liberal spirit than heretofore, found himself between the
two parties of pagan wisdom and enlightenment, of
Christian orthodoxy and unquestioning faith. To the
one, such a programme of compromise seemed fore-
doomed to failure, because they could not start upon a
common definition of the Divine Attributes : to the
other, it was both arrogant and superfluous ; if God
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 3
had spoken with authority, man had not to question or
to understand, but to obey. The School of Carthage,
with its disparagement of the part of man in the scheme
of salvation, soon to become traditional, delighted in
the paradox which despised reconciliation : quia int-
possibile^ quia incredibile^ neque quia bonum est sed
quia Deus prcecepit. The moral law tended to become
(as with Duns Scotus) a mere arbitrary command,
expression of an absolute will ; with Lactantius, a mere
painful condition of future blessedness, which appealed
to a far-sighted Hedonism. The Divine Grace became
a magical gift, which lay side by side with man's mental
equipment or absorbed it altogether : just as with Philo
the sun of Abraham's reason has to set before God's
voice can be heard in the darkness. Now, at the outset
of these lectures, I wish to repudiate this shrill note of
defiance as a proper method of Christian warfare. We
have no right either to deny or to glory in an antithesis.
Right and wrong, the Church and the world, faith and
reason, the heart and the head — are instances of dis-
tinct and irreconcilable contrast, which repose rather on
carelessness or impatience of precise definition than an
ultimate and objective antagonism. How much of the
painful conflict of Science and Religion, of the lengthy
tentative of Christian evidences, might we have been
spared, of the repeated failures to readjust Christian
argument to ascertained fact, of the violent enmity of
conscientious supporters of two independent lines of
Truth, had the true motive been conciliation and not
a challenge, had the aim been to discover the real
sentiments of an opponent or a critic, and to base a
reply or an attack upon just so much as each can hold
in common !
§ 2. Weputaside, then, the African method of apology,
Tertullian's paradox, Cyprian's appeal to sheer authority
and discipline, Lactantius' arbitrary dualism of here and
hereafter, Augustine's despotic and irrational fiat. We
4 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
accept as our task the reconciliation of the Divine and
the human, as we accept the cardinal doctrine of our
faith, the union of God and man, salvo jure utriusque
naturcB. The end of creation is neither the glory of
God nor the welfare of mankind, but a third object in
which the two aims are blended without being confused ;
as the old Scotch catechism, "to glorify God and to
enjoy Him for ever." Moral behaviour looks not to
the fulfilment of the law for its own sake, nor purely to
human advantage. The State or the Church does not
exist for itself, nor yet is it a mere abstraction, a flatus
vocis to cover an accidental aggregate of selfish and
combative individuals, seeking either comfort here or
salvation afterwards. It is no explanation of a difficulty,
when two elements confront and defy, to stoutly
maintain that one has completely disappeared in the
other, in the spirit of Eutychianism, nor again that the
two are taken up into a higher and etherealised region
where both are robbed of their vitality. We are tired of
hearing that Mind is a form of matter, or matter an aspect
of Mind ; or that the whole Universe is made up of
* mind-stuff.' It is as futile to appeal to irrational
emotion in the conduct of life, as to a cold and faultless
logic ; and very few of those who glibly inveigh against
or deify Reason have any idea of what they defend or
attack. The true significance of a certain change of
philosophic standpoint both here and in America lies in
the conviction that man is neither intended to be " an
impersonal organ of the Universal Reason " nor a mere
creature of instinct. The modern spirit declines to believe
in ultimate antithesis or mutual exclusion ; nor will it
consent to suppress or eliminate either side. Everything
in nature or in human experience teaches the lesson of
dualism, reconciled but perhaps not wholly transcended
in a higher sphere. The elusive discrepancies are seen
to mark a stage of transition and of relativity. The old
enemies shake hands at last after the tournament, and
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 5
yet neither has completely yielded. To resume, the
Alexandrian School is a protest against a one-sided
development ; and one of our greatest Anglican bishops
has done well to recommend the Greek Fathers to a
renewed and careful study, broad, tolerant, and genial ;
determined as they were to find God and His reason *
in everything, neither to suppress the human nor to )
exaggerate the Divine element in things.
§ 3. But the difficulty still remains. For the position
of sharp contrast is more popular than that of
compromise and opportunism. The early heresies arose
when a somewhat obscured side of the truth was brought
to light and as it were discovered anew. They were
driven in the force of polemic and verbal warfare apart
from the needs of life, to exaggerate and distort into
undue prominence the fresh element, until alliance and
co-operation became impossible. When we have said
that Our Lord is "perfect God and perfect man," we \
have said all that reverent dogma can assert. The )
progress of heretical over-emphasis, of mediaeval and
modern Rationalism, has brought refinement and perhaps
sophistry into doctrinal definition; but it still marks
time at this twofold yet single assertion. It is hard to
understand, but it has a real meaning to the philosopher
and to the peasant alike; and one thing is absolutely
certain, that the Gospel puts no undue premium on "^
intelligence.
This is a point which it is as well to state clearly at the
outset of these lectures. The Gospel is a simple and a
universal message. It is addressed to the average moral
consciousness ; and in outline is capable of compression
into a very few lines of a catechism. The power to I
interpret, to sound the depths of its simplicity, is rather
a responsibility and perhaps a temptation than a f
privilege. It is no disparagement of intellect but rather
its complete association with human life; its right
recognised to direct and guide, but not to monopolise,
6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
or claim superiority by retreating to another world
altogether different to that of common experience. The
need of a Saviour is moral, not speculative; and the
apologist for religion is spokesman not of his own pride
but of the silent and uncomplaining masses, who feel
rather than understand the nature and reality of their
faith and hope. Some space in my lectures will be
occupied with tracing that phenomenon of the age which
perhaps has been most persistently misunderstood — I
mean democracy. It is high time a careful and
unprejudiced attention was directed towards this
movement, if it still be allowed by the cynical to have
any significance at all. I cannot do more than point
the way to a complete analysis ; at the opening I only
desire to make it clear that^n intellectual or dogmatic
exposition of Christian teaching is and must remain
entirely subordinate to its jnqral^ preaching, to its
spiritual usefulness tested in experience. We neither
fall into the mistake of making ethics independent of
metaphysics, nor do we elevate metaphysics above ethics
— and this, after a digression which has perhaps cleared
the ground, brings me back to that primary difficulty
which I have implied but not yet fully explained.
§ 4. The Christian apologist will not, if he try ever
so hard, satisfy either the philosopher or the plain
man. To the latter, an appeal to intellectual support
of doctrine appears dangerous or superfluous ; and any
alliance between faith and the wisdom of this world
almost a sacrilege. The intimate and ultimate proof
is his own assurance and conviction — his own spiritual
experience. He will not tolerate a verbal or syllogistic
argument with its tortuous digression and specious
episodes, to confirm what to him is direct and im--
mediate. And the serious objector to the Christian
scheme, with his professed detachment from personal
interest and motive, his disinterested devotion to truth,
his elevation of the universal above the particular, is
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 7
continually puzzled by our constant reference to human
needs and aspirations. Just as we are approaching
his lofty standpoint (perhaps in some concession to an
allegorical compromise), we seem to him to slip back
into the Valley of Unrest beneath, where dwell and
conflict rudimentary impulses, old superstitions of sin,
and the whole unreality of particular and independent
life and personality — and without this cardinal assump-
tion neither Christian preacher nor Christian apologist
can stir hand or foot. Just as he reaches forth to
welcome the pilgrims into the realm of Law and
Identity and the Absolute, we betray our sympathy
with the lower life by a wistful glance into the mists
we have passed through. We show too clearly that
the pursuit of Truth is not our primary motive — but
the wants of the poor and the humble. We refuse
to shut our eyes to the genuine antithesis there is in
things, which refuses to succumb to a formula. I am
far from saying that all believers can see dogma alike ;
I am far from chilling the enthusiasm or quenching
the half-belief of those who since Hegel have seen in
the Trinitarian doctrine an explanation of the world-
process. But the Christian preacher must never forget,
in his intellectual interest in the Faith, that his real '
audience is the sinful, the suffering, the distressed,
the ignorant; and that the primary message of the
Gospel is comfort and forgiveness, a sense of sonship
and acceptance ; and in no case the resolution of all
the problems of thought and of existence. Yet in
spite of the difficulty of adapting apologetic to both
classes of hearers, the Church will always attempt and
always renew the task. To the one, the apologist
appears too recondite, to the other too simple. Yet,
nevertheless, this reconciliation is just the work of
the Christian student, a work which, like that of
philosophy, is never finished. He cannot lose sight
of the practical and spiritual simplicity of the Gospel,
8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
yet he will not readily abandon the task which the
apostle in my text lays upon every believer — none the
less valuable because always incomplete.
Part II.
§ 5. The scope of these lectures may seem somewhat
too ambitious ; the relation of religious thought to
human life viewed as a whole, to national and in-
dividual development; and especially that design of
treating inductively, not merely the feelings and needs
of each man, but the value and teaching of that vague
abstraction — the Time-spirit in its historical evolution.
For this purpose I propose to review the relations
existing between the Church and the world, whether
of thought or of politics ; estimate the tendencies
which we see working with unmistakable force, and,
alas ! so uncertain aim in our Western society ; and
to remind the complacent of the successive criticism
which has undermined not so much our dogmatic but
our moral convictions. For here lies the veritable
danger of our time ; and the historical method is alone
able to help us from the treasure-house of the past to
understand the drift of the current which sweeps us
irresistibly along. We may or may not regret the
need of formulating a Christian philosophy of religion,
to meet the half- wistful, half- defiant objections of
Gnostic and Hellenic thought: but we cannot deny
the necessity. The Latin Church, njore interested in
discipline than in dogma, maintained the Roman
spirit of an ordered and visible community; and the
Pontiff, as we know, will presently succeed to the
prerogative of Caesar. The great writers are hostile
to private judgment or abstruse speculation, and will
not compromise by an alliance with Reason. They
contributed little towards the larger issues raised
by the Gospel, towards transforming the dictates of
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 9
Revelation into truth evident to the enlightened
intellect. The Greek Fathers, as we have noticed,
were far more sympathetic ; and it is to them we owe
the elaboration of the Aoyo^-doctrine, in which they
adopted a belief already current in the pagan world,
and met more than half-way the professors of human
wisdom or philosophic tradition. We have not time
to inquire closely into the effect of this on Christian
thought ; nor perhaps boldness either to criticise or to
approve. But it may be said, without touching con-
troversy, that such preoccupation with the theory of
wisdom obscured the value of Christ as a Saviour,
just as in the West the conception of kingship,
absolute authority and external law, disguised the
spiritual inwardness and comfort of the Gospel. An
inherent weakness of all pagan thought now emerges,
and long remains predominant ; the superior merit of
the intellectual, and, if the truth be known, of the
ascetic life.
§ 6. It is impossible not to trace the mischievous
results in mediaeval history. The attempt of Religion
to meet humanity only on its higher planes is from
all points of view mistaken. The hour of its chief
success is in the moment of man's weakness; and to
become entangled in any intellectual hypothesis, im-
plicated in any special theory of the world, is as
great an evil as to be reduced to mere emotion or
hysteria. Whilst Augustine provided the principle of
authority and the outline of a dogmatic system, the
genial tendencies of Eastern Universalism entered the
West in the ninth century. The Gospel had become
finally bound up with Hellenic thought; and this in
its latest and perhaps least Hellenic form. The final
goal of Erigena's speculation is a return of the
creature into the Creator. The old adage of Lactantius
that the true philosophy was identical with the true
religion is repeated with emphasis. Mediaeval thought
10 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
succumbed to the influence of the intellectualist system
of the later Platonists, and to that belief so fatal to
the value of the humble life, to the significance of sin,
of probation, of pain — that the path of knowledge alone
leads to God. It is certainly not a little surprising to
find the secular and pastoral duties of the Church so
fully acknowledged, and so zealously performed, when
the theology was so mystic and transcendental. Yet
the whole development of thought in the tenth to the
fifteenth centuries takes its time from this unfortunate
maxim of Erigena. Philosophy and religion were the
same ; the reason could expand the faith once delivered
to the saints, but, as yet, imperfectly unfolded. It
could enter into the field of faith, into the realm of
tradition and unquestioning belief, and convert into
rational propositions the Divine mysteries. This is the
starting-point of the entire speculative process ; and
Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race^ is the
last of the scholastic theologians. The knowledge, the
ymffig of the Alexandrian teachers, had implied a warm
and personal appropriation of the external truth, first
taught by authority and then realised by inward ex-
perience ; and it is but fair to say that this attitude
was still maintained by the Christian Platonists. But
the strict scholastic method was purely dialectical, and
never touched the heart.
§ 7. Christian apologetic was then narrowed into
an attempt to satisfy the speculative Reason. Direct
antagonism to the * credenda ' emerges but rarely, but
perpetual interrogative and considerable freedom of
speech and inquiry. We may for our purpose omit
the great mystical movement, the long line of the
theologians of St. Victor through the twelfth century,
spiritual parents of the German mystics and ancestors
of the Reformers. To such, an immediate emotion is
the test and not a process of ratiocination ; and the
proof is experience and not the satisfaction of logical
FUNCTION AND LIMITS ii
rules. We find the same tendency both in Islam, as
a protest against a narrow and literal orthodoxy, and
in the Evangelical Churches, when salvation seemed
to depend upon a bare signature to a confession. But
it is not here that we must look for the most significant
reaction ; rather in the movement of Nominalism, which,
partly in the interests of more practical piety, partly
in the interests of the particular, partly in a well-
grounded conviction of the fallibility of human judg-
ment, withdraws one by one the truths of dogma from
the sphere of reason, and tends to that separation
of the domain of practical and speculative knowledge
which to-day marks modern thought. The Nominalists
objected not to dogma as such, but to the method of
proof. The latter seemed to them singularly in-
adequate. (Their searching criticism was not the
mark of an arrogant pretension; it arose rather from
a sense of humility and a consciousness of the limits
of human intelligence, of the strange and yet impassable
barriers which divide off the several departments of our
knowledge and experience, of the real world of human
activities, the visible and the concrete. There were
many who disguised under an avowed deference to
church authority a thoroughly sceptical temper; just
as there were many like Amalric, Simon, and David,
who, under the terms of a mysticism similar to the
doctrine of Erigena, concealed a purely Rationalistic
Pantheism.) But I speak of the general current of
that reaction against Universals, which denied to
knowledge the supremacy in human life; which saw
in the warfare of separate existence not with Empedocles,
Plotinus, and Schelling, a regrettable lapse from pure
Being, but a condition of the coming of God's kingdom ;
which clearly descried the danger to the ordinary man
in an inaccessible and formal theology, and undermined
of set purpose the fabric of demonstrable and trans-
parent truth. Duns Scotus, though no Nominalist, and
12 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
perhaps, like Anaxagoras, hardly conscious of the gravity
of his objection, replaces the Will in a position long
usurped by pure Intelligence.
§ 8. By the period of the Reformation the discord
between the unequal yoke-fellows had broken out in
open war. Philosophy claimed not merely an autonomous
system of thought, but to regulate the State and invent
a new ethical code, in complete independence. The
Reformers rejected any alliance or compromise, dis-
paraged Reason, and rested Christian proof on inward
experience, on the letter of Scripture, and later on
orthodox subscription. The Roman Church, in the
wonderful revival of the Counter-Reformation, while
secretly borrowing from Machiavelli the arts, the
methods, and the maxims of the new wisdom, reverted
openly to infallible authority, to that absolutism which
had of late become the universal political ideal. Hence-
forward the continental Churches held aloof from
secular wisdom. The new age was dominated by con-
ceptions wholly alien to the mediaeval aim ; in politics,
efficiency was the sole desideratum ; and implication of
government or state-craft with moral prepossessions
was gradually though not at first expressly abandoned.
In science, experiment and use were demanded rather
than correctness of system ; and the English leaders of
thought laid a not unwelcome emphasis on the divorce
of intellectual aims and the religious needs of the
practical life. (The temper of an almost complacent
dualism between faith and knowledge, reason and
revelation, is a feature of the English temper so
strongly marked, that I may have occasion to refer to
it subsequently, and call serious attention to its latest
development.) Meantime, in the political field, the so-
called ' Wars of Religion ' burnt out, giving place to a
tired and lethargic stupor, to monarchical reaction, until,
in the closing years of the seventeenth century, a new
and spirited attempt was made to close up the rift
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 13
between Philosophy and Religion by establishing a
modus Vivendi. In this enterprise we notice the
universal and adaptable genius of Leibnitz — that great
theoretical conciliator of the Churches, who revived
the almost forgotten adage, the identity of the truths
of Reason and the dogma of the Church. Into the task
is thrown, too, the whole weight of the Schools of British
Psychology, and, if the truth were told, the sceptical
yet by no means wholly destructive crusade of the
French enlightenment. Nothing was so much discussed
and debated throughout the eighteenth century as the
simplification of the *credenda' within the limits of
rational credibility. It was the task imposed on the
learned piety of orthodox divines; it stimulated the
half-serious proffers of alliance by the freethinker.
Christianity was proclaimed to be non-mysterious, to be
in fact nothing but republication of the primitive belief
in God, in judgment, and in immortality; in a word,
the religion of Nature — a scanty remnant of ecclesi-
astical dogma which was supposed to coincide with the
requirements of Man and correspond to the arguments
of Reason. This simple and * self-evident ' creed (as it
was generally supposed) could be agreed upon for the
use of mankind in the coming era of genuine enlighten-
ment, when truth in absolute transparence should guide
the race back to Paradise. It is formulated in Voltaire's
Henriade no less than in the Savoyard Vicar of
Rousseau, and the pages of theological utilitarianism or
Deistic freethought in England. Everything seemed to
promise well for this new venture of modest reconstruc-
tion, the lowest or irreducible minimum of a Rationalist
creed; and it was combined with a demand for a
respectable and not over-exacting conformity to a
bourgeois standard of morality.
§ 9. It may be noticed that the court of appeal and
ultimate tribunal is neither the needs and experience
of man in himself, but a vague and still scholastic
14 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Universal Reason — raised by its clearness and univer-
sality above the vacillations of the several units. With
the same profound ignorance of human nature and its
requirements, the political reaction against an ineffect-
ive centralisation had proposed as a panacea for all
social distress the rule of the philosophers, the spread
of freethought, in place of half-hearted and unintelligent
bureaucrats and a Church which had ceased to believe
in itself, its doctrine, or its mission. Indeed, there are
signs all over Europe in the Absolutist Governments of a
gradual and amiable conversion of the Sovereigns to all
the fundamental tenets of enlightenment. Everywhere
the Jesuits were expelled, and in the end their Order
was finally abolished. The claims of the Papacy (except
as a small Italian territory) became as shadowy as the
pretensions of the Holy Roman Empire. Catholicism,
suspected or despised by all European Governments,
could still afford to laugh at itself, and surrender its
influence while retaining its privileges and emoluments ;
just as a similar unrighteous compact of constitu-
tionalism has suggested that Kingship might give up
its onerous charges and become an opulent and secure
Pensionary of the State. Of conscientious reaction,
tenacity of autocratic principle, there is no sign; and
prerogative was retained by those who openly professed
the creed of Equality, and had not the faintest concep-
tion of the meaning and the obligation of the Feudal
tie. The battle of the Revolution was already won
among the authorities as well as among the educated
classes before its tenets filtered down to the lower ranks
of society. The pacific substitution of judicious maxims
of enlightened selfishness for obsolete superstitions
seemed well nigh complete, when a sudden explosion
precipitated events in the social world, brought to light
new and rudimentary impulses which had been long
forgotten in the academy, the closet, and the 'salons.'
It exposed a novel factor, which henceforth, however
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 15
blind and unconscious and easily cajoled, will dominate
the great movements in the West, or may possibly lead
to a reconstruction which will render future movement
superfluous — I mean the ' will of the people.'
§ 10. It is a striking testimony to the short sight
and superficial optimism of the * Age of Reason,* that
although this and similar expressions were continually
on the lips of the agents of Revolution or Reform, no
attempt had been made to define or sound the obscure
depths of popular sentiment. To the philosopher, the
average man was a negligible quantity, or a contempt-
ible enigma not worth solution ; and he was profoundly
convinced of Plato's wisdom, in limiting intellectual
wisdom, and in consequence political power, to a single
and highly privileged class. It is usually taken for
granted that the French Revolution, with its early stage
of rational philosophy, was an indispensable prelude to
a wider enfranchisement. But the popular voice was
heard more distinctly in the acclamation of Napoleon
and the extinction of the Directory, than in the out-
cries of a Paris mob. The real tendencies of the nine-
teenth century are so imperfectly appreciated, that it is
necessary at each moment to ask. Are we still employing
the same term in the same sense ? And if this be true
of an age largely sobered by careful and painstaking
inquiry, by scientific methods and by the widespread
decay of idealistic phrase, it may well be true of a
century which in the discussion of the most vital
problems forgot all the fundamental facts of human
nature and experience. The new factors which so com-
pletely falsified the predictions of the sanguine were the
discovery of man, a creature by no means swayed, out-
side his academic theses, by reason but by the opposing
passions of blind hate, furious vengeance, loyal self-
surrender to a cause, warm and devoted adherence to a
person. For this the philosophy of Volney or Holbach
had made no provision : for degenerate human nature
1 6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
they had foreseen no guidance but in calm and austere
reflection, an absence of enthusiasm, an enlightened
self-interest. Rousseau, who by birth and circumstance
lived nearer to primitive human nature than any com-
placent Rationalist, had set up the claims of the heart
against the head, as Scotus those of the will against
the intellect. Leibnitz has directed attention to the
immense part played in our lives by the obscurer sensa-
tions, whose dimness baffled our analysis while it largely
impelled our action. The ' clearness ' which the Carte-
sians had demanded as a test of truth, was seen to refer
not to the indistinct material of practical and moral life,
but only to that realm of mathematic truth where
Reason has not to move and decide, only to receive and
to codify. It is but recently that human pride has recon-
ciled itself to the new truth, that the chief forces moving
in the realm of political and social development are the
incalculable and the sub-conscious. These act without
waiting for logical precision or for universal expression, or
indeed for any distinct or conscious acceptance. They
cannot be predicted ; nay, they cannot with accuracy be
described until Time has placed a long interval at the
disposal of calm and dispassionate Criticism.
§ II. But if we do detect a glimpse of the nature of
the secret yet irresistible forces which sway society, we
find they are much simpler and nearer to rudimentary
impulse than the dreams and the maxims of philosophers.
.Revolutions are as a rule economic, not idealistic; and
men who think they are fighting for a sacred cause are
as a rule resisting hunger. The sole and unpardonable
vice of the modern Absolutist State is inefficiency. The
French fought angrily against an ineffective and diffident
monopoly of privilege and authority, and the irresolute
State was condemned for weakness, for scepticism, not
for oppression. They submitted without a murmur to
a far severer discipline until that too was found wanting.
Behind the orderly and successful government of
j£>^
which can never be wholly superseded by any specious
unity. He is the spokesman of those who see in God
a helper and protector, nay, a fellow-striver who needs
our work ; not a place of rest, where antitheses are
annulled, and good blends insensibly with evil. We
have already pointed out that both conceptions are -
necessary and complementary ; but we cannot allow
the logical need for an all-inclusive world-order
(rendering reciprocal action possible) to supersede the
moral demand. How potent this sense of real co-
operation even in a losing cause can be, let the religion
of our ancestors testify. The religious myths of the
Norsemen, to a degree unknown in Southern Europe
138 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
or the East, moulded conduct and nerved endeavour
— partly by the very hopelessness of the conflict.
"Throughout his life," says Professor Ker, "the Norseman
hears the boom of the surges of chaos upon the dykes
of the world." This is the precarious ground reclaimed
from the Titanic forces, who are not as in Greece
finally subdued at the outset, but only held in check
for a season, — truly a x,o(iyjoq^ limited and threatened,
outside which are only the demonic and unrighteous
forces of Muspelheim, Nifleheim, and Jotunheim. The
tales of the battles of Odin and the giants, of Thor
and treacherous Loki, passed into poetry when it had
ceased to control as theology ; and received in its final
form the unauthorised Christian consolation of the
return of Baldur the Good after the terrible day of
Ragnarok and the promise of ' new heavens and a new
earth.' Unlike the theology of Greece and Rome, it
is a struggle not merely against fearful odds, but with
the prophecy of ultimate defeat. Yet it is upon such
gloomy legends and traditions that the youth of the
Anglo-Saxon race has been nourished. Restless enter-
prise, outspoken defiance, untiring toil in a doubtful
cause, owe much to a survival of the old Viking
temper — at its worst, a savage Berserk^ at its best, the
calm heroism of a Christian martyr. Diverted from
mere brute egoism, lust of spoil and carnage, this
temper soon becomes chivalry, sense of personal honour,
P aristocratic protection of the weak, and is enshrined
I in the motto which can never be the text of a bureau-
V cracy, * Nqblesse oblige.' Experience shows us the fact
of a world of manifold and conflicting elements. Unity
and rest is rather a pious hope than an accepted axiom.
Faith and Reason alike may anticipate a final reconcilia-
tion ; but no one is assisted if we deny the reality, the
genuine character, of the present struggle. We have not
time to inquire fully into the significance of the new claim
to transcend the disorderly realm of illusion, and rise
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 139
* Beyond Good and Bad.' Religion and philosophy in its
highest intensity has usually professed to depreciate the
* fatal doing ' which marks the sphere of turmoil, and to
oppose the perfect calm of the teles tic to the hurried and
feverish incompleteness of the cathartic virtues. And
it may well be that in some achieved equilibrium of
a better state, the sad material for our moral virtues
will have been eliminated, and our charity, justice,
compassion, have no call for their exercise. Yet at
present there is no such prospect ; and we cannot lose
the example of God's patience in the building of
the world ; the pain and agony of the scheme of
redemption.
§ 7. It is surely not too much to say that in Christianity
Religion becomes enlisted for the first time in the cause
of endeavour and the common life. In earliest origin
and in latest phases, religious feeling is distinctly un- '
connected with practice ; it is regarded with well-founded
jealousy and suspicion in the city-states of Greece or
Rome, and in the world-empire which replaced and
comprehended them. We have not tried to disguise
the anti-social tendencies of that selfish instinct which
impels the anchorite or the philosopher to seek a higher
communion than earthly ties can give. But here is the
alliance which to us as citizens and Christians seems
indispensable for our Western ideals. The root of
religion is a desire to escape law and to transcend its
sphere. Each converted sinner looks upon himself as
a standing miracle, a 'brand plucked from the burning'
by a signal instance of the Divine mercy. Here is no
recognition of unchanging order, no admiration for a
consummate whole, but rather a cry for deliverance; no
acquiescence in perfection, but a curious halting between
a sense of human frailty and unworthiness, and pride in
that new consciousness of Divine sonship. Fear and
diffidence are overpowered in the constraining force of
a special grace, a special mission ; God's messenger is
<
I40 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
summoned to remove mountains and convince the kings
and princes of the earth. Satisfying the personal
demand for worth and work, it becomes social. The
Gospel of Christ transformed and reinvigorated the
dying world of antiquity because of its emphasis on
the individual, the one straying sheep, the single lost
piece of money; the appeal of St. Paul for brotherly
forbearance is reinforced by the highest sanction, y-rgp
ov XpiffTog aTTsdoci's, * for whom Christ died.' Thus man's
impulse to religion is the desire to assure himself not
of the secrets of the universe, but of his own place and
duty and happiness in his limited surroundings. The
effort of faith, essential to every religious as to every
moral act, is the conviction, whether gradual or instan-
taneous, that the life of God's children is precious in
His sight. If we read aright the record of man's
thought or achievement, we shall find it is this convic-
tion alone (even if not always consciously held) that
sehds a man cheerfully to spend his labours and his
life in the cause of mercy or righteousness. No secular
sanction can offer an assurance or satisfaction in any
way equivalent. Religion, apart from the discipline and
perfection of the individual, the consecration and utilising
of his special endowment, cannot exist in the world as a
dynamic force.
§ 8. We must beware of that modern revival of
mediaeval Realism which can artfully substitute the whole
ffor the part, while we are not looking. Mr. Mallock is
^quite right when he says : " The whole meaning, the
essence, of the theist's doctrine of God is his doctrine of
God's love for the individual human soul. Christ did not
die, according to the Christian's idea of His death, in order
to preserve the peculiarities of the Teutonic race or the
Celtic, or to save the soul of any corporate body. The
Church, no doubt, is spoken of as the Divine Bride ; but
the Church is nothing if not composed of individuals;
and except as related to the life and conduct of the
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 141
individual, God's love is nothing also, as every theist
knows." So the Christian Church, while it satisfies the
legitimate and indeed irresistible aspiration and claim of
each unit to be considered as end-in-himself, neverthe-
less just for this reason gathers up the individuals from
isolation : it sets them each in his due place in a
social fabric, with different functions indeed in the hier-
archy, but with no loss of intrinsic equality. Talent,
opportunity, influence, capacity, are gifts strictly lying
outside the real man, to use rather than to possess.
The conception of life is only social^ and devoted to the
common good, because it is primarily and profoundly
individualistic. Only the man assured of the lasting
worth and dignity of his own life, of the safety of his
happiness in the hands of God, can afford to sacrifice
it for the benefit of others, in whom he sees children
of a common father. "The Christian theory of the
world," says Hartmann (c. xiii.) with curious bitterness,
" is simply incapable of rising to the complete resigna-
tion of happiness ; even its ascesis is thoroughly selfish.
Hence it is small wonder if we, who are still more or
less entangled, I will not say in the Christian faith but
in the Christian philosophy, indignantly resent this com-
plete renunciation of happiness." In the next chapter,
with perplexing inconsistency, he makes the very sur-
render of the last hope a ground of earnest appeal : " Of
the world known to us, we are the first-fruits of the
Spirit, and must bravely wrestle. If victory does not
follow, it is not our fault. . . . Therefore vigorously
forward ! in the world-process as workers in the Lord's
vineyard, for it is the process alone that can bring
redemption. Only in complete devotion to life and
its pains, not in cowardly renunciation and withdrawal,
is anything to be achieved for the world-process."
§ 9. Some of us, who listened some years ago to
Professor Huxley here in Oxford, cannot fail to recall
his final words of mingled optimism and despair,
142 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of fatalism and appeal for effort, blended in an honour-
able but illogical confusion : " Nobody professes to
doubt that so far as we possess a power of bettering
things, it is our paramount duty to use it, and to
train all our intellect and energy for this supreme
service to our kind." He is indignant at the ' fanatical
individualism * of our time : " Duties to the State are
forgotten ; and tendencies to self-assertion are dignified
by the name of rights. . . . We should cast aside the
notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is the
proper object of life." Such language belongs to an
epoch that is already closed for ever. To found on the
evil and vanity of the world-order and the single life an
apotheosis of the State, of man's duty to man, to ground
an appeal for self-restraint and willing service for a race
which never ought to have issued from non-being, —
such were sentimental theories current indeed in an
age of transition, when criticism, triumphant as it sup-
posed over dogma, had not ventured to attack morals,
but sounding wholly meaningless and incoherent to-
day. Closely 'entangled' indeed were these writers
with the old presuppositions which they scorned, who
thought that self-denial and renewed patriotic zeal
were the natural corollary of the destruction of Christian
hopes.
" It was not religion," says John Stuart Mill ( Utility
of Religion), " which formed the strength of the Spartan
institutions ; the root of the system was devotion to
Sparta, to the ideal of the country or State, which,
transformed into ideal devotion to a greater country,
the world, would be equal to that, and far nobler
achievements." Here, combined with imperfect
sympathy, with antique modes of thought, we have
a typical instance of that humanitarian hopefulness of
a past generation, that strikes to-day so strangely upon
our ears. There is keener national jealousy and com-
petition : there is no lull in the struggle ; and a * federa-
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 143
tion of mankind' would arise to-day from expediency
and not enthusiasm, and would certainly begin by
restricting the privileges of humanity to the higher
races. Nor indeed is it possible for consciousness,
once thoroughly awakened, to become immersed once
more in childlike and unquestioning State-duty and
routine. When he continues to applaud the 'service
of the State,' and desires to extend the national duty
of Cicero's 'offices' into a cosmopolitan fervour, we
feel he is speaking to us in an unknown tongue, and
find it hard to believe that but half a century has since
elapsed.
" If, then," he says, " persons could be trained as we
see they were * in ancient Rome,' not only to believe in
theory that the good of their country was an object to
which all others ought to yield, but to feel this pj^actically
as the Grand Duty of life, so also may they be made to
feel the same absolute obligation towards the universal
good."
This may be briefly answered by saying that we
cannot forget or abolish the effect of the intervening
period ; that even their patriotism was confined to a
small and highly interested circle; and that he has
himself disposed, on an earlier page, of any right to
use such dogmatic terms as the Universal Good, by
refusing to recognise a motive or an end in Creation :
" The past and the future are alike shrouded from us ;
we neither know the origin of anything that is, nor its
final destination." In such a sceptical confession of
universal mystery, we may approve the naive civism
of the English School, but in motive only, not in
logic.
Yet the odd persistence of obsolete notions of duty,
obligation, and (however vaguely and timidly expressed)
of the 'Beauty of Holiness,' point unmistakably to a
need of the human heart which cannot be expelled, to
an emotion which cannot be left without an object. In
144 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
face of such a sublime defiance of the laws of logic and
the cosmic process, in favour of a moral ideal of
purposeless heroism, let no one deny the empire of trust
and hope over the human heart, and let no one accuse
the Christian of his venture of confidence and his wager
of Faith. But let us not be deceived ; the day is past
for the repetition of such poetic sentiment. We are too
near facts ; and we are accustomed to a colder analysis ;
we have severed departments too rigorously. The
people, long cajoled by promises, finding themselves
no better for the increase of constitutional complexity,
are resentful at delay ; and, losing confidence in ideals,
suggest immediate enjoyment. Neither pure selfishness
nor pure altruism is typical of the heart of man ; both
are abnormal developments, and it must be remembered
that we are trying not to support a theory, but to reach
the average consciousness of mankind ; and perhaps to
mediate between two irreconcilable conceptions of our
life. The two impulses to self-development and to service
of others are blended and cannot be gratified apart.
Yet it may safely be said that the satisfaction of the
/'demand for worth and work must precede any confident
and eager endeavour in the cause of others' welfare, at
least if it is destined to withstand the despondency of
temperament, the shock of disappointment, the logic of
calm reflection.
§ lo. I began by disavowing any schemes of defiant
or paradoxic apology; the mission of the Church of
Christ is to conciliate, it is a disinterested arbiter. But
we have been obliged to expose the fallacy or blindness
of those generous but mistaken speculators who transfer
virtues and emotions natural to a world of moral purpose
and individual meaning, to a secular process, where to
* follow Nature,* the only known law, is to struggle at
all cost after survival. What is imperilled now is the
sense of Duty, the value of ideals, moral restraint, and
that peculiar and complex system of moral behaviour
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 141
which owes more to religious and less to social forces
than we care to allow. It is idle, in an age which is
unconsciously absorbing very rudimentary influences
and impulses, to point to instances here and there of
isolated generosity, where a sense of virtue survives
the conviction of personal nothingness, co rXjjfJjOv (OfX€vov eA-TTt^cov ; whilst the
true home of the Imperial philosopher is not the busy State
and its corrupt commerce of fools, but the inner shrine of a
meditative soul, and a world-fabric which, in spite of the Stoic
axiom (Kara (jivaLv = Kara Aoyov), has somehow drifted out of
the comprehension and sympathy of the thinker.
§ 6. The more austere features of abstention vanished in
the Neoplatonic School. A hierarchy of varying natures and
capacities, each good in its especial place, succeeded a ' crude
dualism' of saved and lost; in the scheme of things there
were 'many mansions.' In the progressive education of
souls by re-birth requital was always impartial ; station, duties,
and recompense adjusted to the fitness of the proficient.
Amidst all the disorder of the reign of Egnatius Gallienus
(253-268 A.D.), the feudal period of the earlier empire, there
was room in the School of Plotinus for quiet philanthropic
work, for lectures at the court, even for suggestions of
political experiment; for it was proposed to test the value
of Plato's 'Republic' in a ruined city in Campania. While
the strenuous hand of central authority relaxed, individual
enterprise revived; the provinces of Rome throbbed with a
new if tumultuous life; and the philosopher issued from his
privacy to tend the widow and the orphan or to propose a
social scheme. Mysticism has indeed not seldom been
found united with a sound judgment in practical matters,
with keen interest in others' welfare; but only when the
basis is religious. We have before traced the curious detach-
ment of the great mediaeval minds from the common life;
the interpretation of all problems in terms of the only
universal science, jurisprudence. We are apt to forget the
REFLECTION 207
less conspicuous workers who have left no record; and the
erroneous view has been widely received, that the Church
neglected the present for an imaginary future. We need
hardly perhaps repeat that the active development of science
and society, of individual and general reason, could never
have taken place without its support and guidance. We
must not judge the thoughts of an age by its chief writers,
just as we cannot estimate national welfare by the brilliance
of a court, the success of a foreign policy. The thinker and
the poet must always be exceptional rather than repre-
sentative ; and humanitarian sentiments are most flattered at
a time when they have least influence. "The passion for
unity in the mediaeval mind," says Mr. Figgis, " only expressed
the fact that this unity was so seldom realised." The logical
culmination of Christian theory might be an absorbed
devotional ecstasy, but the constant practice was a patient
supervision of mundane interests, 'the day of small things.'
Pure anchoritism was rather a pagan heritage than a Christian
tradition; the believer was never taught to be heedless of
externals, careless of behaviour, or indifferent to social well-
being. It was the error of the Reformers, reacting from a
system of graduated conduct, somewhat threadbare and
artificial at that time, to suppose that all duties, like all
merit, were equal; that there was one true pattern or type
of life, as well as one single path of orthodoxy. Where the
Catholic Church utilised and guided the exceptional, the
Protestants expelled. The mystical or detached temperament
is elevated to saintship by the one, no less than the fiery
zeal of the missionary ; but it becomes suspect in the other,
and forms a sect. The Catholic Church cannot, at one and
the same time, be accused of undervaluing and overvaluing
the present.
§ 7. It cannot be denied that with the Reformation, religion,
not merely clericalism, ceased to exert a moral supervision
over statecraft. Protestantism bowed to the secular power,
and largely helped in strengthening its claims to irresponsible
sovereignty. The old problem of Tertullian, Novatian,
Donatus, once more reappeared. Did the true Church con-
sist of the obedient or of the perfect, of the conforming or
the converted? Each sect, breaking away in the first place
208 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
from an indistinct ecumenical union, found even a national
basis beyond their imagination ; their embrace becomes con-
stantly restricted, their membership more difficult. Rulers,
indeed. Catholic and Protestant alike, might show strong
interest in religious difference, — in war, the religious issues
were dominant for a century and a half after Luther, — but the
two sides of human life were no longer in any vital connection.
And pure philosophy in the eighteenth century followed the
lead of the strictly religious and Puritan movement. The
three Revivals — of learning, of religious thought, of independent
philosophy — issued, as we know, from the cradle of freedom ;
the one common motive was desire for personal autonomy.
Breaking from the control of the Catholic objective, the
pioneers did little more at first than transcribe, edit, and
interpret the treasures of the ancient world; they did not
originate; they did but exchange one authority for another,
the ' dead hand ' of the Church for the ' dead hand ' of an alien
culture. The Reform within the Church had in view the
enfranchisement of the subjective spirit; but it entailed sub-
mission to the Book, though it opened the door to private
versions, and took refuge against this new 'Sophistic' in a
rigorous Confessionism. Modern philosophy in the early
years of the seventeenth century tried to repudiate all authority,
ipse dixit and hearsay. But, as we might expect, in de-
manding this complete independence, it left also in perfect
autonomy the other realm of practical life, never really
amenable to logic. It could not overthrow the edifice so
patiently built up by the unconscious efforts of workers in
Church and State, the coral-reef of popular custom. Its
attitude over against this dead weight was one of convinced
or ironical deference; in Montaigne and in Descartes re-
appears in a novel phase that mediaeval doctrine of the
Double Truth, which in some form or another seems
necessary to all aristocratic and esoteric philosophy. The
keynote of this age is ' the subordination of the individual to
the absolute powers,' just as the text of thought in the next
century is free personality. Resignation is the chief doctrine
of orthodox and innovator alike — submission to the autocratic
State (which just then happened to be controlled by masterful
individuals), pious obedience to the world-process, with which
REFLECTION 209
in a strange confusion of thought the Divine will was
absolutely identified (for the Divine, expelled by reflection
from accidental and intermittent interference with the parts,
had been restored to the undivided sovereignty of the whole).
Only in England did the practical independence and sober
sense of her philosophers refrain from this mystic surrender of
rights into irresponsible hands. Detachment of thought from
the actual, and recognition of any power because it was^ not
because it could be justified, to reason, to justice, or to
imagination, exerted a truly sinister influence on the un-
checked development of the State towards an un-moral
autocracy. Unprincipled intrigue and secular diplomacy took
the place of ecclesiastical arbitration. The States of Europe
were broken up into open or covert foes; and reflection,
seeing only the accomplished fact, intent on its own inward
peace and security, did nothing towards supplying the want
which the abdication or rejection of the old guide had created.
§ 8. The whole practical and popular movement of philosophy
in the ensuing age took its rise in this island. Here the
intimate connection of the ideal and the actual had never been
severed. The man of thought was also the man of action.
Constitutionalism, or the compromise between the rival
doctrines of sovereignty, whether of State or Individual, is
defended and explained by the same pen that examined so
coolly the pretensions of the human understanding. Hume is
not ashamed to confess that in the light of day he forgets, or
is obliged to put aside, the prepossessions of his strict theory.
This wise attitude makes the best of both worlds without
seeking to force them into an unnatural or a premature unity.
Monism, since Calvin and Spinoza, had expelled the ' human-
istic ' illusion on which a confident, practical life is necessarily
built. Intent upon arbitrary Will or changeless Substance, it
could only envisage a supposed totality; it would not con-
descend to arrest its attention and concentrate its notice upon
a trivial stage in the fleeting process. And, as we may soon
detect in the later development, if, owing to the religious and
moral (that is, humanistic and relative) instinct of man, it
is impossible to refrain from a general qualification of the
whole, the sole terms which can apply are absolute good and
absolute bad. And, as we must often repeat, it is a mere
14
2IO THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
question of temperament what the final verdict will be. We
may perhaps admire the pious equanimity of Spinoza more
than the hopeless discontent of later pessimism ; but there
are no arguments, there is no arbiter that can decide on the
truth of the two phases. All ultimate verdicts, where
they are not temperamental petulances, are ventures of faith
or acts of faith. From this unfortunate position the English
School was saved by its interest in practice, behaviour, develop-
ment, the individual ; and also, in no small degree, by its sense
of humour. Deism, the supposed religion of nature and of
reason, is a concession to the needs of the practical life : it
accepts mechanism, without the piety of a morbid resignation,
but superposes a teleologic postulate, — which amounted to
a moral demand that man should be the end of creation, and
virtue something better than 'its own reward.' English
thinkers had no desire to batter down with wanton impatience
the walls of partition between the divers interests and sciences
of life. They recognised the limits and the fallibility of human
reason, and were at no pains to show that it was Divine, or
God Himself. They doubted whether the development of the
spiritual element in things could be correctly estimated by a
vague introspection into one's own soul, or a still more vague
scrutiny of the human records of a few thousand years. So
long as they had working rules which were actually effective
in their respective departments, they had no wish to coerce the
rest under one set, raised into an artificial and paramount
position. They were loyal to their State and country without
requiring a logically perfect or consistent Constitution. And
from them came the sacred flame of energetic thought, not
satisfied with ideal vision, but seeking to perfect the real,
which largely kindled the eager and sanguine movement of
the French Revolution.
§ 9. Philosophy in this age is popular, not abstruse ; it is
concerned with the world and feels its responsibility. In
place of devotional homage to the Universal, enlightened self-
interest, best attained by social amity and forbearance, is the
end in view for all. But the idea of innate goodness and the
happiness of free co-operation gave place in the early years of
last century to the doctrine of State-control. Philosophy
veered, with the wind of middle-class opinion, towards the
REFLECTION 211
salutary and unenterprising. The emphasis on the personal,
the * humanistic,' the moral, gave way before the cult of force,
of the unconscious yet irresistible world-spirit; before the
blissful contemplation of the universe from the aesthetic side,
equally prominent in Hegel and in his most bitter opponent,
Schopenhauer. For the guidance of the average man, the
concrete spirit of the race embodied in its institutions seemed
to suffice. The State, like everything else, justified itself by
the mere fact of existence, which now remained the sole
argument and test of merit. Thought once more bowed to
the ' powers that be,' and, leaving the masses under military
tutelage and inquisitive police, passed on to its own esoteric
studies. Only in England has the voice of protest been raised
in favour of individual development and self-realisation. The
champions of the older Liberalism, with all their ignorance of
human nature, at least believed in it ; their pious faith almost
atoned for their lack of first-hand acquaintance. It is essential
to the welfare of government (though it may sound strange
to-day) that it should repose upon a basis of mutual confidence
and respect. This was attempted by the English writers, half-
statesmen, half-philosophers, the disappointment of whose
generous sentiments and outlook is the most alarming symptom
on the political horizon. Once again, even in England, philo-
sophy retired into the clouds, or rather into that ideal * watch-
tower ' from which the Universe might be contemplated in an
imaginary totality; a survey pleasing indeed to the pride or
piety of the speculator, but not to be shared by those whose
work still kept them 'attached to the soil.' Some of these
still retain, with creditable inconsequence and in one distinct
compartment, an interest in social advance and individual
discipline. But the entire small but notable movement of
British Hegelianism is strictly a reaction against the freedom
and hopefulness of the older Liberals, though few of its
representatives might care to confess it. Elsewhere, if
philosophy is sincere, it is on the side of autocracy ; where it
is sanguine as well as sincere, it is carried in its noble love for
liberty far beyond the bounds of sobriety, into the denial of
all law and all control. But the influence of these prosaic
academicians or overwrought Idealists is infinitesimal. They
have neither the patience nor the confidence which is necessary
212 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
for reformers who would deal direct, not with Acts of Parlia-
ment, Ukases, Dumas, and Utopias, but with average mankind.
But in spite of its present-day eclipse, the ' democratic ' instinct
is still strong; and ordinary men and women with certain
duties and uncertain leisure, with vague aspirations towards
that which they dimly feel to be the Good, form in our
civilisation an element by no means negligible.
Claims of the Individual for consideration
(historically treated)
§ I. Personal consciousness seems an ' dim ' in the world-process :
claim for liberty always baffled : stages in its demands for emanci-
pation : the Sophists as pioneers.
§ 2. Reaction against Nature, Habit, Instinct, Control, in favour of
purpose, insight, art : yet this claim not for all men ; aristocracy of
enlightenment.
§ 3. The State, as the result of voluntary compact or surrender,
of deliberate design : spontaneous element in society, language, be-
haviour, overlooked : original equality first postulated, then forgotten :
' Sophistic,' speculative, not practical or Iconoclastic : {contrast of
later movements) less revolutionary than Plato : not dogma but the
proof of dogma disputed {as with Scotus).
§ 4. * Man measure of all things ' ; its meaning : in epistemology ,
not so much in feeling or in moral judgment : Relativism should
win approval to-day : man recalled to his true kingdom, giving
' values ' {as Adam names) to the world of things : limits of our human
faculties ; a modified anthropocentrism, not anarchy or Nihilism.
§ 5. The age of classical Humanism at Athens won independence
for the wise : failure of subjectivity, whether licentious or austere,
hastened on the Roman Empire ; a brilliant compromise between the
sovereignty of the State and the sovereignty of the Individual : neither
A Icibiades nor Diogenes had succeeded : a new freedom claimed and won
by Christianity : the East commended personal search, the West was
long before it tried to suppress it : the Renaissance, the second great
revolt, culminates in the Reformation.
§ 6. Curious complicity of intellectual brilliance and despotism :
Antinomian tendencies of pure Thought; revival of the spirit in-
variably weakens ' morality ' : tolerance and doubt born of the Crusades:
* Age of the Despots ' and culture : the basis ability, not parental right :
claim of ruler and of genius to be ' above law.'
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 213
§ 7. Fresh outlet in the Religious movements of sixteenth century :
the ' Extreme Left ' : revival of A uthority : once more the intellectual
revival bowed to the Central power, contenting itself with speculative
freedom : the State supports freethought in its attacks on belief and
clerical influence : irreligion of Courts under the prevailing ' Liberal-
ism ' of Sovereigns before the Revolution : suppression of the Order
of Jesus.
§ 8. The nineteenth century opens with middle-class surrender of
impracticable rights : new form of Casarism : liberty once more in
rejection and private predilection : increasing scope for individualism
no longer comprised in citizenship : religion, conscience, taste, and {to
some extent) action more free to-day.
§ 9. The strictly academic problem of 'freedom ' not treated :
current metaphysical mysticism ignores the difficulty, — emergence of
the conscious person : Pantheism more lethargic than a theoretic
scientific fatalism, which but rarely comes into conflict with conscious-
ness of intrinsic energy : on this the zest of life depends.
§ 10. The 'Anarchist' movement, its Justice and its hopes: the
Christian Church in far more genuine sympathy with these aims than
with the deification of authority.
§ I. Whether we regret or are grateful for the result, we
cannot doubt that the emergence of the personal consciousness
is at least one principal ' aim ' of the secular process, as mani-
fested at least on our planet. When we speak of freedom in
any genuine sense, we imply the independence and ultimate
value of this consciousness. It need not be said that this is
not a fact of experience or a theory which can be established
by 'coercive argument.' In effect, nothing is more patently
incompatible with our well-defined speculative systems of the
world, or with the knowledge gathered by the wayside of life.
We find it invariably under the control of Universals, — natural
law, social custom, impersonal tradition, orthodox creeds, and
Catholic Churches ; and, lastly, the heavy hand of formal educa-
tion and automatic State-control, which goes on silently working
long after brain and motive are extinct. The spirit struggles
in vain to emerge into complete autonomy, and the thoughtful
or daring must needs be unhappy, because they can neither
accurately ascertain nor accomplish what they desire — self-
realisation. It may well be thought a tedious method to apply
to each problem the historical test, to attempt to trace it
from the earliest days of European thought to the present
time. But such a method is perhaps indispensable; at any
2 14 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
rate, on this topic, we have no alternative. For it is Greek
cities and Greek thinkers that stand to us as the first champions
of freedom. Before self-consciousness awoke, the independent
research of Naturalism had, without knowing it, laid claim to
entire liberty. When the individual who mocked at the
interests or protested against the control of society, found him-
self with even less guarantee for freedom in the world of
things, an acute Individualism, blithe or resigned, arose in the
Sophistic movements. Man, hitherto a serf in a State regulated
by ancestral routine or an accidental phenomenon in a fatal
world, might somehow regain his independence. He could
come back once more to the State and his fellows, having
learnt this at least in his Wanderjahre, that nothing was
sacred, and that his true cleverness lay in making others, by
hook or by crook, think Hke himself. He became an adept in
rhetoric, always in Greece a more powerful engine than the
sword. Single and detached, as befitted their principles, found-
ing no school, establishing no body of doctrine, the Sophists
perambulated Greece, and taught selfishness as a fine art, in
the cooling temperature of the reaction after the Persian wars.
After all, it is to them that we owe the implicit doctrine, " Each
man as end and not merely as means," upon which basis rests
the entire structure of our humanitarian ethics. It is true it
did not apply beyond the circle of the noble, the gifted, and
the opulent. But even so it must be deemed a distinct
conquest, a vantage-ground won for human thought and
freedom, against the tyranny of unquestioned convention,
which, whether in social or moral sphere, is a dead weight on
progress.
§ 2. Everywhere was there abroad a tendency to refer de-
velopment to conscious and deliberate initiative. "Design
calculating Purpose and Invention," says Gomperz of the
speculations of Protagoras, " fill the room of Nature, Habit and
unconscious Instinct. ... By * art,' * wisdom,' or * virtue ' . . .
men built houses, governed the Commonwealth, and fulfilled
the moral law. . . . We think (he continues, not without
humour) that we can discern a pedantic note in these utter-
ances [of the Platonic Socrates], a hint of the schoolmaster's
exaggerated reverence for what is founded on reflection, re-
duced to rule, and teachable by precept. Such a view of life
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 215
(he concludes) was eminently suited to the infancy of mental
and moral sciences, and was in none . . . more strongly or
more clearly developed than in the person of Socrates." There
is no need to wonder at the illogical issue of the doctrine,
" Every man an end and a centre in himself." With an honest
desire to elicit the spontaneous in every man, the Socratic
method combined an intense hatred of the merely capricious.
As with the * Enlightenment ' which about two hundred years
ago spread over all educated society in Europe a wonderfully
homogeneous body of rules and principles, this vaunted
freedom of the unit to think and act only with the sanction of
a convinced inward approval, very soon made way for a minute
State-tutelage, which was to be perpetual and (it must be
feared) hypocritical or ironic, like its master. It is difficult
to disembarrass the Platonic accretions from the genuine
Socrates; but it seems clear that he would have assented
to thus confining humanity's real prerogative to a narrow
and cultured circle. The wise man, claiming an inlet into
Universal Reason, might pretend to no advantage over his
fellows, if they would only resign themselves to its dictation ;
but in the end he was always prone to impose on others his
own arbitrary and personal system. With the slow process of
converting the ignorant, he was very naturally impatient ; like
his successors, it seemed enough if one privileged class in the
State possessed insight ; if " the philosopher could rule as king,"
if the "enlightenment could capture the machinery of absolutism,"
if, with Mr. H. G. Wells, " the New Republicans combined to
sweep away grey and deliquescent democracy," all requirements
would be satisfied. It need not be said that such a compromise
could content neither party ; neither Aristophanes or Cephalus
the Conservatives, or Alcibiades the Radical individualist.
§ 3. The State, men began to think, arose in the voluntary
combination of rational men, in the free reflecting choice of
rulers and forms of government. They overlooked the early
insignificance of the individual, except as limb of a tree, member
of family or class. They disparaged the "slow and imper-
ceptible achievements of the moderately gifted multitude " in
their veneration, not so much for the God-inspired, God-
descended hero, as for the figure of the calm, dispassionate
citizen, trained by long discipline of self-government, — a reflec-
2i6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
tion of themselves which they strangely and imprudently threw
back into the misty past. The same prepossession hindered the
recognition of the spontaneous element in language, and led to
the constant antithesis of nature and convention, of <^vcrts and
vo/xos, each finding zealous champions. The Atomists, who
were really the earliest Sophists, see in the one, changeless,
indestructible constancy; in the other, whether in human
society or personal feeling, mere idiosyncrasy, amenable to no
law. When this was found in its highest perfection, masterful,
unscrupulous, and free from all trammels, it could command
(as later in the case of the Italian despots) an aesthetic approval ;
for vague and undefined democracy is only, if one may use the
term, the vestibule to hero-worship. And in rejoicing in the
strength of the 'young lion's cub,' or in seeking to revive
aristocracy, they overthrew alike the pretensions of an original
equality, postulated as the origin of all society. It has been
well pointed out that the great difference between the enlighten-
ment of sophist and of * philosopher ' was that the former never
seriously descended into the sphere of practice. Greece was
homogeneous — but not crushingly uniform — in its government
and social traditions. No urgent economic problems, as in
France a century ago or in Russia to-day, pressed for solution.
There was no violent overthrow of religion or commonwealth,
only a gradual decline in interest and conviction. The Greek
cosmopolitanism (which was really limited to the confines of the
Greek world) was, it is true, a mere disguise for individualism,
— but it was passive and despondent, not iconoclastic. The
'Intellectual' movement in France or in Russia claimed at
once to upset the existing fabric and issue in a daring
challenge to any and every authority; but the criticism and
analysis of the Sophists was never a revolutionary propaganda.
Indeed (if for a moment we may speak generally of an uncon-
certed movement of individuals that cannot be recognised as a
* school '), Sophistic was never so radical as Plato or the Cynics.
And Aristophanes is perhaps guilty of no injustice in divert-
ing attention from the harmless rhetoric and paradoxes of the
ordinary itinerant to the real mischief of the arch-Sophist.
Prodicus is the apostle of the simple life, of strenuous man-
hood. About the middle of the fifth century, Protagoras
legislates effectively for the new colony of Thurii. The State
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 217
had less to fear from the brief riot of juvenile individualism
delighting in academic thesis, than from the studied aloofness
and disdain of philosophy. The Roman Empire again, in-
dulgent (within limits) to fanciful and orgiastic cults, refused
to Hsten to the exclusive and uncompromising claims of
Christianity. Once more the Sophists, by many hastily charged
with atheism, seem on closer inspection to have doubted not
so much the existence of the gods, as its proofs, — not * belief in,
but cognition of, the Gods.' And here, as indeed in the whole
later Nominalist movement in the Middle Ages, there is nothing
violent, nothing in the vulgar sense 'sceptical'; it is merely
the Greek equivalent of the wise or time-serving Tacitean
adage, ' Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere
quam scire ^ which, in an age of exaggerated deference to the
clear, formal, and correct, to rational insight and conscious
purpose, allows some moment in matters of deep import to
non-rationalised belief and the weight of spontaneous popular
faith and tradition.
§ 4. It would be impossible to leave this topic without
reference to its most notable maxim — avOpiDiro^ fiirpov dTravTwv,
in which we fancy we can detect the extreme of individualism
and anarchy. Like most other relics and fragments of the
Sophistic age, it is terse and obscure, for Heraclitus is still
the model for gnomic statement ; like the rest it is capable of
two opposite meanings, as the famous amphilogy, to (rvfji€pov
rov KpaTTovosy either one to be deftly put in prominence for
the vain blows of the debater and as deftly withdrawn at the
will of the skilful Sophist. It can only be blindness or
* torpor ' in Thrasymachus that somehow the chance is missed
of disconcerting Socrates by a lofty and idealist meaning of the
* interests of the right.' So our most subjective of maxims
may be a proud claim for human reason in general to weigh
and appraise the world of things, by indisputable right, as
Adam, called on to give names to the animals; it may be
the pretension of a sovereign or the despair of a sceptic,
for ever shut up in his own imaginary world which is for him
alone, but it certainly need not be interpreted as a demand
for the absolute validity without appeal of individual stand-
ards ; ^uof homines^ tot senteniicB — and we might add, tot mundi.
If the whole sophistic tendency is towards Relativism, it
2i8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
must merit the approval of an age like our own, which in its
persevering industry in particular departments has tacitly
condemned any wild attempts at summary implication and all
complacent dogmatism. The Sophistic age recalled man to
his true kingdom, — the calm survey of all things not as
they are in themselves, but as they are in relation to himself,
his knowledge and his needs: for Humanism is mainly a
fixing of values (sometimes, with Nietzsche, a ' transvaluation '),
an appraisement. In medicine, man already set up as the aim
no vague definition of average human nature, but an inductive,
casuistic inquiry what he is in relation to his food and drink
and to the rest of life's duties. Kant has been compared to
Socrates; but, to speak candidly, he resembles him only in
that moral austerity or unction (whichever you will) that is
always completely separable from the tenets of any particular
creed or system. In the real field of philosophy, meta-
physical thought, his forerunners are the Sophists; * know-
ledge is for ever limited by the bounds of our human faculties ' ;
we can never look out upon the world with other than human
eyes. And in this lies no Nihilism, no anarchy. Later
Humanism bade us forget the individual and "lay hold on
eternal life" (e<^* otrov ivBex^rai d^avart^ctv). But the
keynote of Greek tragedy and Greek Sophistry is modesty and
caution, fLCTpioT-q'; : it maintained the anthropocentric stand-
point, but without the pride of exclusiveness, without the
pretensions to absolute knowledge, which have been the bane
of all the Great Systems. The chief maxim or article of the
Sophistic creed teaches us to recognise, not to despair of, our
limitation ; a tempered individualism based on humility which
must surely be the genuine spirit of any discoverer or moral
teacher of values.
§ 5. Underneath a transparent disguise of loyalty to the
State, the classical humanists of Athens undermined its
authority, and won the recognition of the independence of
the wise. At least, it must be acknowledged that the private
life of the highest civic order, whether devotional exercise
or scientific study, becomes more prominent than his public
duties. It was the failure of egoism that hastened on the
' social compact ' of the Roman Empire. The isolated sage
was either miserable, defenceless, and persecuted; or made
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 219
impossible demands on a social world and a Nature, both of
which had long ceased to have any moral import. Both
Caesar and Antony, it may be said, represented too much the
wild subjectivity of Alcibiades to have any permanent influ-
ence on society. It was law-abiding simplicity, unwearying
diligence, steady reaction towards Conservative past, that
ensured power to Augustus. The pretension to be 'above
law ' had failed, as the claim to live aloof from society. The
Imperial system was a brilliantly successful compromise
between the Sovereignty of the State and the Sovereignty of
the Individual. It satisfied the mature self-consciousness of the
latter, without letting slip the principles of order and cohesion.
And a government which is by turns accused of extreme
socialism and military despotism must, if we take the mean
between these two wild accusations, have adapted itself not
infelicitously to the needs of the age. In Christianity, the
individual won another triumph in the separation of the sphere
of conscience and conformity. It was only in the debatable
borderland of the two that the Empire challenged this inde-
pendence. Largely allowing personal autonomy and private
creeds, there was for the loyal statesman a point at which
further concession was impossible. The Greek Church never
ceased exhorting believers to prove and test dogma for them-
selves, to transform faith into knowledge. It is true that
formal orthodoxy was of vital importance, but the Easterns
never identified this with lip-service or a dull compliance with
authority. The Western Church, with its Roman tradition
and Augustinian influences, surrendered more to the Universal,
visibly and beneficently embodied in the Hierarchy. But (as
we have tried to show) it cannot be said to have stifled free-
thought and private judgment, until it became alarmed at the
conspicuous divorce of fact and theory, ascertained knowledge
and accepted creed. We have now reached the second great
revolt in the history of thought. The Renaissance, far more
diffuse and varied than the Sophistic movement, is also far
more weighty and long enduring in its results. It cannot be
summed in a single sentence, or exhausted in a short analysis
of its signal features. It covered every side of human life, and
its final issue was the Reformation. Luther might well have
supposed he was fighting against an ungodly secular wisdom
220 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
as against a narrow and perverted Italian papacy; but in
truth he was the last in the long series of Reformers who
sought to remove the shackles of the personal spirit, and who,
alas ! only opened the way for a more cruel tyranny.
§ 6. To many it will always be matter for wonder that
periods of exceptional enlightenment, of literary brilliance, of
rapid social advance, have been so often marked by a return
to despotism. The phrase * Augustan' applied to such golden
epochs is not without a deep significance. We may notice
that this attitude, acquiescence in the strong hand, is no
homage to legitimacy, but a deference to sheer force and
ability ; it is no revival of the idea of parental sovereign, but
a new conception of arbitrary will. In effect, pure thought,
the reflective earnestness that wishes, with Descartes, to sweep
away all prepossessions, is somewhat anarchic, antinomian, and
unsocial. It is precisely this dull-hued edifice of respectable
convention that arouses its doubt or its disdain. It has
a standing quarrel, a smouldering resentment against society.
Even orthodox inquirers into the moral sentiments and
the laws or current behaviour of civilised countries, must
stand aghast at the chaos of incoherence and absurdity which
tolerates the fact if the name be not pronounced, finds ready
excuse or tolerant cloak for certain classes of offence, and bans
others equally sordid, no doubt, yet in evil effect no worse,
without appeal. The revival of the Spirit has never failed to
weaken moral cogency or to soften the moral fibre. Tolerance
and breadth of view is incompatible with prophetic indigna-
tion. The intercourse of East and West — silently in the
penetration of Arab culture from Spain, loudly in the religious
wars around the Holy Sepulchre, which, beginning with hate
of zealots, ended in something akin to respect — weaned the
Western peoples from conceit and undermined their sense
of exclusive privilege. A cosmopolitan complacence entered
European society, wherever men of intelligence passed beyond
criticism of the existing churchly order. Once more admira-
tion was felt for the spontaneous and untutored; and the
*Age of the Despots' was regarded with indifference or
approval, not merely because a certain order and a centralised
court afford field or asylum for the artist and poet, for the man
of perverted genius against outraged society, but also because
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 221
thought fancies it can detect its own triumphs in the success
of *Will,' untrammelled by social restraint, unbiassed by
social prejudice. The despot, alien or illegitimate, appealed
to no hallowed veneration for a parent Sovereign ; he claimed
allegiance in virtue of his brilliance and ingenuity alone. And
as Caesarism, or the pious expectation of a coming * Saviour of
Society,' flourishes best in the dead level of democracy, so it is
just in an intense and widely expanded culture that the despot
could grasp his precarious sceptre without scruple or question.
Public opinion did not condemn ; for the gifted and the
ambitious could not be bound by the slender and discredited
ties of ordinary moral restraint. Claims for the benefit of an
elect few, in the field of aristocratic studies, found their
counterpart in the pretension of a ruler to be ' above law,' —
pretension which no Roman emperor, and no accredited
mediaeval potentate had ever raised. It is easy to see the
peril, not merely to social institutions, but to current civic
practice and domestic faith, in the success of these maxims of
unmixed subjectivity. But the glamour of the Renaissance
was but transitory ; and in a more serious Europe the selfish
instinct betook itself to the outlet of religious emotion.
§ 7. The Peasants' War and the kingdom of Munster awoke
even the authors to the perils of the * extreme left ' in the new
movement; the subjective impulse ran riot, without proper
content and training, demanding with wild violence a freedom it
could not profitably employ. The individual, rising from the
basest serfdom and subjection to authority, recognises no halting-
place between his former * creaturehood ' and the crudest pre-
tensions as an immediate and inviolable organ of deity. To
feel one with the Divine Spirit has always been the solace of the
humble and the oppressed ; and this union of pride and nothing-
ness is invariably found in the mystical temper, which can never
speak too highly or too lowly of itself. But the Reformed
movement recoiled in alarm from its logical issues ; and, as we
have seen, individualism fared hardly at the hands of a new
and more vigorous ecclesiastical power (from which tyranny,
perhaps, Mr. Buckle first tore the veil), or lost its sense of
autonomy in following the precise lines of orthodox confession.
The duty of defending the cause of the unit against the
universal fell to the pure philosopher ; for the statesman and
2 22 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
jurist were too much occupied in safe-guarding the new
autocracy to show themselves sensitive to individual rights.
The principle of authority, silently undermined or openly defied
after the collapse of the Papacy, now rose into prominence.
Round it rallied the middle classes, always the real arbiters of
national destiny and development. It seemed to offer order
and security after chaos and unmeaning turmoil; and the
saddening experience of religious conflicts only increased men's
respect for a central and impartial ruler, who, like Henry iv., was
of * the religion of all good men.' The philosophers, who were
its warm supporters, unlike their stoical antitypes of austere or
theatrical protest under the Roman Empire, found in freedom
of thought the true sphere of individual independence.
Throughout the seventeenth century, with all the prevalent
doctrine of mystical submission, there ran a healthy current of
liberty. The wise men gladly resigned to still competent hands
the cares of office and popular control, if they might pursue
uninterrupted studies in wild and unexplored branches of
knowledge, or perhaps seek a welcome asylum at Court from
ignorant prejudice. Except in Spain, where the sovereign did
but endorse the hotly religious temper of the people, except
in the rare occasion of a monarch's penitential reaction or
remorse, the secular power availed itself gladly of this formid-
able enemy to its ancient rival. In France, it looked on with
amused indifference or secret pleasure at witty or acrimonious
attacks on the Church ; and, it may be, felt only a pained sur-
prise when the philosophers, tired of one-sided fight, turned their
artillery upon State institutions, with unexpected vehemence,
about the middle of the eighteenth century. Freedom of
thought and expression had been largely conceded by the
Government ; a cheap scapegoat was tossed now and again to
the demands of a dwindling clerical power; the wealthier
and influential escaped. There were few Courts that did
not coquet with irreligion. The monarchical idea had, to its
cost, enfranchised itself from any religious implication. The
Jesuit Order was condemned all over Western Europe by the
secular power; and the Pope pronounced the dissolution of
his last and staunchest body of allies.
§ 8. But, in spite of this alliance, the future lay neither with
the royal and sceptical 'first servants of a free people,' nor
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 223
with the learned and perhaps generous but unpractical men
who by turns flattered and lampooned them. It lay with the
constant champions of the social order, — neither with the rabble
nor their late masters. The eighteenth century was, in some
aspects, a carnival of innocent egoism, of facile sentiment, of
cheap tears. The new age saw once more the centripetal
tendency predominate, — a willing abandonment of impractic-
able rights to one who knew best how to use authority. An
age eloquent to tedium of the ' Rights of Man,' had secured,
had defined none. Hobbes' theory of a primitive surrender
to a single ruler almost took on itself historic truth. Caesarism,
as we have seen earlier, is one, perhaps not the least effective
of compromises between the two incompatible Absolutisms, —
of State and of man. The citizen, flattered at being consulted,
cynically aware that no change in constitution ever changes his
real dependence, is ready enough to yield to the ' strong man
armed.' The claim for liberty retired to a spiritual or an
intellectual realm, which now became far more important than
the eighteenth century could have dreamt. Certain provinces
of life preserve their autonomy ; conscience, religious emotion,
and the sphere of private predilection, which increases in
times of material comfort, scientific invention, and social rest-
lessness, and, above all, among peoples where the direct
interest of citizenship is slackened, as it is to-day, in the vast
extent of the State. Ever since the Reformation the secularis-
ing of the State had been in truth complete, though neither
statesmen nor peoples were conscious of the severance ; though
wars, in name religious, in truth partly national, partly
economic, concealed the truth. And when the State, after
the Revolution, increased and developed her police and her
coercive machinery for the sake of public order, it was obliged,
in the growing minuteness of this external supervision, to forfeit
any genuine control of the inner life ; it is curious, even to-day,
to notice how reluctant it is to make the confession. The logical
inconsequence of the English has maintained a peculiar associa-
tion of Church and State, alternately threatened and respited ;
but elsewhere consistency demands their complete separation, —
the resumption of an imperium in imperio^ two suspicious
rivals, not as Cavour anticipated, libera Chiesa in libera Stato.
It is perhaps unusual to regard the last century as a time when
224 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
a once intense interest in public affairs grew slack ; but the
opening of new occupations, 'new avenues of pleasure, new paths
of gain, new possibilities and interpretations of religion, have
reduced to a secondary place this once absorbing pursuit.
The individual has discovered so many lines of private and
personal development, which may be followed without the leave
of State regulation ; it is obvious to all but optimistic and super-
ficial observers that the real danger lies in the retirement of
the rich and gifted from the cares of domestic or civil life, in
the supineness incident to all diffused 'democracies,' in the
autocracy of the State captured, in the absence of legitimate
guardians, by a small minority, alert and unscrupulous. In
matters of religious choice, also, the individual is free, though
we cannot pretend that all envy and animosity is allayed. And
the outcome of the often unintelligible conflicts of the
nineteenth century is this : the State in its own domain possesses
enhanced powers and is reinforced by every new discovery ; but
the individual outside of this is more free, because so large
and so valuable a part of life lies entirely outside this control
and is at his own disposal. In the lessening of moral demands,
the tolerance of public opinion again, man enjoys (in certain
respects and with strange and notable exceptions) a freedom
undreamt of by the free citizen of a Greek or Mediaeval
State.
§ 9. It will not be expected that the present discussion should
treat with academic nicety the fundamental problem of
Freedom. At the level of these arguments, where the real and
ideal are closely and inseparably linked, — the level but seldom
transcended by the average man, — the whole question of
freedom is well nigh meaningless. Forming an integral part
of the mental equipment in each one (whatever its origin) is a
sense of power, choice and responsibility, which he cannot
shake off if he try. In a practical debate, which has for its
aim the defence of the chief Christian dogmas as essential to
moral and social life, no one will blame an apologist if he
keeps his foot resolutely on the high road of existence, clear of
any grass-grown by-paths of pure theory ; if he is content to
examine facts and experience. Mr. Mallock, in an eloquent
passage in the Veil of the Temple^ has shown us how in the
last hundred years the waves (as he puts it) of scientific laws
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 225
and fatal sequence have engulfed the last boasted asylum of
free activity. To the thinker, this may bring a feeling of
despair ; but action soon restores the zest of uncertain conflict
against unknown odds, and whatever may be the alien and
foreign character of that which determines conduct in *me,*
whether the * dead hand ' of ancestral usage or scruple, or a
transient indwelling of the Divine Spirit itself, the tyranny is
unfelt, because the individual is somehow identified with this
indefinable force. Such theoretical doubt can never seriously
impair the vital impulse, the enjoyment of the struggle and
doubtful issue. Perhaps a more urgent, serious danger lies in
the strange hybrid of philosophic and religious thought, the
metaphysical mysticism which disconcertingly alternates
emotion and logic. To this allusion has been and will be so
frequent, that it is needless to enlarge upon the obvious defect
it shares with all previous and kindred systems. It neither
explains nor justifies the emergence of the personal, which,
whether by accident or providence, or by some inscrutable and
yet purposive law, seems to have been the goal of development
at least on this earth. After the painful discovery of the self, as
the true end of philosophy, practical ethics, religion, and political
agitation, it is useless to point out that the discovery is after all
worthless. We are still left with an acute sense of its truth.
But we can more easily shake off a scientific fatalism which
momentary experience contradicts — at least so far as our
feelings are concerned — than the benumbing influence of
Pantheism. Against this (whatever its precise phase) no new
arguments can be levelled, because no new principles are
maintained. The tyranny of fact we can overlook and forget ;
but if it come to us in a half-moral, half-pietistic disguise, the
effect is far deeper. It is idle to repeat that in such a universe
good and endeavour are illusions, and the only end of the
universe intelligible to us (with our narrow, selfish, and human-
istic outlook), *' the glory of God and the salvation of man,"
becomes inconceivable. The sense of overpowering mechanism
induced the puritan Stalwarts in the Scientific School, like
Huxley, to lay all the greater emphasis upon the specially
human life of virtue and social welfare. Man has always risen
by confronting and defying Nature. But if the pressure comes
from the side where we looked for help, for sympathy, for love,
IS
226 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and if a painful consciousness of insignificance be the only
attribute of the ' deity within,' what more powerful solvent can
we imagine of that active social life which is so inextricably
bound up with the doctrines and hopes of the Gospel ?
§ lo. Side by side with these theoretic denials of individu-
ality we see the necessary counterpart in the modern claim
for immediate enjoyment, immediate realisation of promises
once so lavish. A word must be said about that School of
violence or of vision which sees in all government an unmixed
evil. Whether we believe with Calvin and Hobbes, that human
nature is radically mean and corrupt, or with Rousseau, that
it is perverted solely by its rulers, it is clear that if authority
is to be founded on moral rather than physical force, appeal
must be made to the generous instincts ; men must be taken
into the fullest confidence of their protectors, and treated as
if they were much better than they are. This is a common-
place of the most narrow experience of authority, but it is
constantly forgotten in the summary or reactionary legislation
of to-day, the 'administrative right,' which for State purposes
condones the violation of ordinary moral rule; in the unfor-
tunate dualism of constitutional government, which has
become a mere tug-of-war, diversified by loud menace and
abuse, none the less mischievous because so largely artificial
and engineered. The claim of the Anarchist is to super-
annuate all obsolete misrepresentatives of the popular will,
to reinstate average man, to expel abstractions and the fatal
chimaera of patriotism and national entity, — and, on its most
generous side, to trust men as open-handed, honest, and
sympathetic by the removal of restraint. For here is the
secret of all government : " Maluit," says Tacitus of his
father-in-law and a mutinous legion, "videri invenisse bonos
quam fecisse." Reference has already been made to Tolstoy's
End of the Age-, and in this ideal document and in the
earnest writings of Mr. Auberon Herbert may be found the
most temperate exposition of a system wrongly associated
with a policy of secret murder alone. This is no place to
descant upon the justice of such claims or (it may be) the
vanity of such hopes. It is one of the most significant of
the movements by which the subjective spirit has endeavoured
to win independence from a tyrannical objective, anonymous
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 227
aii(J intangible. True 'democracy,' as the Christian Church
can conceive and welcome it, is intimately bound up with such
an attitude to life, trustful, confident, appealing. Whatever
may be the errors of this violent challenge to existing institu-
tions, to that sensible increase in coercion which followed the
scare of the Revolution, it is only on these or somewhat
similar lines that the Church can recognise the value of
progress or the worth of political and social enfranchisement.
And herein lies the reservation with which Christians regard
the work of the State: it is content in law with a bare
minimum and with outward conformity; it cannot penetrate
to the motive or ennoble the personal spirit. It is fair to say
that it makes no such exalted claim. And it is for this reason
that the mission of the Church is indispensable and supple-
mentary : while it recognises authority and order, it remembers
that the ' Sabbath was made for man,' and sees even in the
mistaken issues of the doctrine which makes the unit the
only real, the true spirit on which the lines of State develop-
ment must proceed in Western society.
Overt Selfishness of the Revolutionary Maxims
§ I . Selfishness and Unselfishness ; vagueness of these terms :
the curious growth of undogmatic social ' altruism ' in the nineteenth
century : modern thought a hybrid, half science and half sentiment :
unabashed hedonism of pre-revolutionary aims : the modern revival
due alone, consciously or unawares, to Christian influence : true
reform cannot recognise this canon.
§ 2. Revival of practical and doctrinal Christianity, in the last
century, a marvel of history : Hegelian use of Trinitarian formula :
of the ' Common Reason,' and continuous corporate life and tradition;
almost an apology for Catholicism : a reaction against anti-dogmatic
Individualism of eighteenth century : in social reform, inspiration
only from the teaching of the Gospel : unfairness of the taunt, ' bank-
ruptcy ' of science.
§ 3. Religious impulse in the nineteenth century movements of
Emancipation ' : bold venture of the A bolitionist, in defiance of all
experience : man to be treated not as he is but as he ought to be.
§ 4. Contrast of the maxims of pre-Revolution philosophy : their
228 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
message perverted in the delivery to mere incitement to overthrow I
a direct appeal to selfishness : oblivion of man's inherent desire to
serve a cause : calculating and contracting temper in theology [England
and Germany) : rapid disappearance of the ' Intellectuals ' at the
outbreak of the Revolution.
§ 5. Emphasis on individual rather than on corporate life dis-
tinguishes eighteenth century from medicsval ideals : republican ideal
compounded of incompatibles, — Greek citizen and Greek sage : Aris-
tides and Socrates : real discord between the two : attempt to restore
the rudimentary patriotism of primitive times must always fail.
§ 6. Imaginary figure of the reforming Ideal : State - immersed^
and State-escaping : primitive man not ' unselfish ' in the truest sense
except for use : the philosopher not strictly ' unselfish ' ; and in any
case unsympathetic : character of the Christian doctrine of unselfish-
ness as contrasted with mere self-surrender : founded entirely on the
doctrine of the worth of self : no substitute for this energy.
§ I. There is nothing more perplexing than the common
use of the terms, selfish and unselfish. They have a rough-
and-ready practical meaning, are easily intelligible to the
instinct of children, and (as we have maintained in the text
of the Lectures) correspond to a fundamental impulse in
ordinary man, which for brevity and clearness we have likened
to the zeal of St. Christopher in the well-known legend. It
can hardly be supposed that a preacher wishes to discredit or
throw doubts upon an especially Christian virtue : " He that
will lose his life, shall save it." But it is important, in the
lazy confusion to which modern thought is especially liable,
to point out how very slender is the logical or metaphysical
basis for any consistent doctrine of 'unselfishness,' as this is
generally understood. Modern thought is half science, half
sentiment; the glaring discrepancies between the traditional
or 'mythological' view and the system recently ascertained
and believed to be beyond dispute, are reconciled (at least
for working purposes) by an appeal to the common instincts
of mankind. And these are not, in any strict sense, founded
upon 'reason' at all. Pushing aside whatever is hard and
ruthless in the scientific creed of competition and extermina-
tion, society falls back upon a body of inherited rules and
prepossessions; and these, singularly incompatible with
the results of scientific research, may well constitute a
necessary complement and balance. Life (it is impossible
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 229
to insist on this too often or too strongly) is far too complex
to yield to the sway of a single set of rules; and it is
impossible to imagine an ethical system, applicable to our
present state of development, which derives directly from the
accurate investigation of law, and does not borrow either
largely or entirely from the precepts of the Gospel. Therein
lies one significant difference from the thought of the pre-
Revolutionary age. It must be confessed that one turns with
something of relief to the unabashed and candid hedonism of
their aims, from the false and inopportune sentiment which
in treatises on mere fact and pure truth is introduced to
distort the clear outline of system ; coaxing or appealing in a
region where only law incontrovertible should reign. It may
be as well to lay down at once this axiom, which is by no
means the mere prejudice of an interested partizan ; that the
prominence of ' altruistic ' feeling in Europe during the nine-
teenth century is due in the main to a revival, not merely of
Christian fellowship but of Christian dogma, and without the
continued support" of the latter is most certainly doomed to
extinction. Not indeed that educated man can ever dispense
with an object outside himself on which to lavish unstinted
affection and devotion ; but it is certain that his choice would
fall on some Ideal State, or some individual man of higher
perfection. He would not be likely to err weakly on the
side of instinctive sympathy with the failures and the incom-
petence of life, with the wrecks of humanity. The true
reformer would steel his resolution against the pitiful com-
plaints and feeble murmurs of those who are nothing but
hindrances in the * path of progress.'
§ 2. This revival of doctrinal and practical Christianity in
the nineteenth century is after all, and with all allowance for
our empty churches, one of the standing marvels of history.
Whether speculation in finding the key of the universe in the
Trinitarian formula conferred a real benefit or opened the way
to cloudy pietism and mischievous allegory, it is not here
pertinent to discuss. But it is none the less significant that
aid should have been sought in the * arcana ' of the faith
against the dry morality, the cold and isolated individualism,
in which had ended the practical teaching of Hegel's prede-
cessors. The vivid sense of corporate life, of continuous
2 30 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
tradition, of the value of history as a standard and a guide,
pulses through his whole system ; and recalled the sequestered
Revolutionary units once more into a harmonious common-
wealth. Much of his writing may be read in the light of a
deUberate defence of the Church and of Catholicity. Where
he praises the * common reason,' apart from individual genius
or caprice, building up with unconscious dutifulness the fabric
of our society, his arguments tell quite as much in favour of
the Church's doctrine and fellowship. He dispelled the illusion
of the fictitious unit, or masses of uncommunicative units,
out of which both religious reform and political theory had
created an imaginary and invisible Church and an arbitrary
and coercive State. Here at least is one sign of a warmer
appreciation of Christian lessons than we can discover in the
anti-dogmatic individualism of the previous century. Mean-
time the artistic sense had awoken in the Romantic Schools,
and sought in the beauty and variegation of the age of chivalry
some compensation for the present monotony. Once more,
the State confining and restricting its function to suspicious
policing and a negative attitude, left all the positive and
adventurous domain of life open to any influence. And how
great a field there was for the efforts of the indignant and
sympathetic reformer! In spite of the hesitating eulogies of
the great Revolution we have still to listen to, not one of the
hopes for which men had written, fought, and died had been
as yet realised : in the new industrial age, the condition of the
worker left (and still leaves) far behind in hopeless squalor and
in conscious misery the lot of the peasant serf in the pre-
ceding age. ' Sic vos non vobis ! ' Whatever movement
was then on foot to benefit the masses must take its inspira-
tion not from the anachronism of a classical revival of citizen-
ship, not from wild and destructive schemes of jealousy and
revenge, but from the teaching of Christ, the still living embers
of the Church-spirit. It would not be difficult, in the solemn
and pragmatic manner of a German history, to show a priori
that the development could not have been otherwise, could
not in any case have followed different lines. But where
facts and their lessons are clear, there is no need to pursue
any method except that of patient and modest induction.
We need lay no arrogant emphasis on what is sometimes
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 231
termed the * bankruptcy of Science/ the failure of Idealist or
Romantic thought to heal the wounds of practical life ; — it is
eminently unfair to demand universal application from any
special science ; it is certain that neither Science nor Art can
teach morals, or create other than utilitarian or aesthetic canons
of behaviour. It is therefore not strange that the revival of
the social instinct was due in greatest part to the secret
workings of the Christian spirit on the average kindly heart.
§ 3. The reform movement in the previous century had been
classical and anti-Christian. Where the present endeavour
for social redress was not utilitarian, merely desirous of evading
the too weighty burden of a governing class, of avoiding a violent
outbreak by parley and compromise and divided authority, it
was definitely inspired by Christian ideals. And the aim was
not overthrow, but reconstruction. Kant, who had learnt from
Rousseau's theories and his own experience, would have wel-
comed the Emancipation of the Negro as the legitimate outcome
of his pious belief in * man as an end.' This movement, where
it was not secretly economic, was in the very strictest sense
religious : the children of the same Father, worshippers at the
same altar, could not accept the social distinction of absolute
master and serf. Without this faith in the religious equality
of mankind, it is hard to see what motive force lay behind
the age powerful enough to disturb vested interests and make
men contemplate great personal sacrifices unmoved. Yet the
fervour of this zeal would have been out of place had they not
firmly adhered to the teaching of immortality. Every social
Utopia seems to look forward to a form of State-serfdom ; and
had the sympathy of those enthusiasts been limited to the
present life and sufferings of the victims of plantation cruelty,
they might have aimed xd^Sh^x positively at the better treatment
of individuals than negatively made provision for a wholesale
emancipation. It might indeed to-day be termed a piece of
fanciful idealism rather than a sober measure of reform. It
issued with all its disappointments and misreckonings, not from
the classical tenet, * All men are born free,' but from a deep
if unconscious conviction of the individual's infinite worth.
This, in sufficient intensity to exert real influence over life
and conduct and ideal, is supplied, so far as we know, by
religious belief alone. It cannot be given by philosophy, which
232 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
first dramatically isolates the individual upon a pedestal, and
then almost with the sudden deftness of a conjuror absorbs
him into a Supreme Unknown ; it is not instilled by any teach-
ing of facts, by any interrogation of Nature ; for neither Science
nor Nature recognises the single life. In defiance of this
commonest experience, the hopeless anomaly and inequality
of men, the Abolitionist preferred to make a bold venture,
which was wholly one of religious faith ; to regard and to treat
men as equal, before they could be so in fact. In company
with a devoted and perhaps over sanguine band of Christian
reformers in our own later day, they boldly proclaimed the
* supremacy of moral over physical law,' and threw the gauntlet,
like Professor Huxley, to a cosmic process and to economic
fact.
§ 4. It is far from our purpose to disparage the earnestness
or question the principles of those who made onslaught upon
a corrupt and sceptical hierarchy, an idle aristocracy, and a
selfish or puppet monarchy. But they could replace nothing on
the site of the ruins, which in theory they contemplated with
such satisfaction. Their attacks were sincere, but ignorant,
unreasonable, and unhistoric. Personally brave and devoted,
they set before the world maxims of selfishness, not only far
below their own practice, but even below the enlightened self-
interest which was prevalent in the three reflecting and disputing
societies of France, Germany, and England. No scheme can
be popular unless it comply with two conditions: (i) it must
demand some present sacrifice for the cause ; (2) it must some-
how guarantee the final share of the devotee in its triumph.
It must satisfy man's amazing instinct for unselfish service,
which Reason and the *cool moment' cannot contemplate
without astonishment ; and it must take care not to stultify
itself by admitting the possibility of ultimate failure. The
two are needful correlates : man's whole-hearted devotion to
God's service; God's tender care for the individual. This
(we must reiterate again and again) is the minimum of religious
belief — of a kind sufficient to impel to action. Now, in the French
* Reign of Reason,' which it was vaguely proposed to substitute
for the chaos of impotent institutions, long since undermined,
no such satisfaction was to be found. In spite of the
semi-religious fanaticism which M. de Tocqueville very justly
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 233
discerns in the pioneers of this movement, they roused in their
followers nothing but feelings of disgust and contempt for the
existing order ; and in the lowest classes resentment and desire
for speedy vengeance. Emanating, as all attempts at reform
in history, not from the sufferers but from the righteous and
dissatisfied members of the privileged class, the message which
left their lips in devout indignation reached the ears of their
audience as a mere incitement to pillage, and to satisfy the
rudimentary passions of envy and greed. It was a direct appeal
to selfishness and to immediate enjoyment, which refuses to
bide its time. The text-books of the age reveal to us the true
ground- work of this insurrection against authority. Self-interest
was best attained in a body of free fellow-workers; in that
constitutional or anarchic State, from which so much was
hoped; in the removal of a weak central administration,
or, as most preferred, in its capture by the intelligent band
of unanimous reformers. At the same epoch, 'theological
utilitarianism ' expresses (in cumbrous phrase) the calculating
attitude of the religious temper in our own land; the
growing demands of the individual and the strictness of moral
law ; and in Germany, it is significant that the interest in pure
theology and the Being of God, sensibly pales before an
absorbed keenness in the problem and the proofs of immortality.
Partly the vague and negative character of the literary reformers,
partly their ignorance of human nature, partly that appeal
which fell so far below the generous instincts of their hearers,
might account for the disappearance of any educated control
at an early stage in the development of Revolution. The
flight of an idle aristocracy, whose interests had been artfully
dissociated from their natural clients, this was hardly perhaps
to be regretted; but the retirement or ineffectiveness of the
very class who had carefully engineered the movement of
protest, the writers and philosophers of France, left the field
open for the very chance they had most warmly opposed. The
seat of authority in a stupefied nation was usurped by a clique
who masked personal enmities under patriotic sentiment, and
who provoked the inevitable reaction in favour of pure Will,
pursuing without disguise its own ends, but in so doing con-
ferring the indirect benefit of peace and order on the whole
country.
234 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 5. This peculiar emphasis on the individual and his finite
aims, rather than on the corporate life, distinguishes the
eighteenth century from the Middle Age. The Ideal redeemed
man which floated vaguely before the eyes of the educated,
was a compound of the early Greek citizen, the later Greek
sage, and the Roman subject, who could appeal direct to a uni-
versal recognition of the ' Law of Nature.' This last ingredient
played by far the smallest part in the somewhat incoherent
amalgam. This ideal figure mainly consisted of a typical
law-abiding member of a Hellenic community; whose native
and spontaneous devotion to his home and State, with its
pressing needs and constant demands on his immediate loyalty,
was supposed to be reinforced by individual reason, musing
on the problems of existence and its own place in the whole,
in one sense, partial, isolated, and estranged, but in another,
universal, sympathetic, and all-embracing. The generous but
superficial minds of the eighteenth century worshipped with
indiscriminate homage Aristides and Socrates, the Cato who
expelled the first entry of philosophy into Rome and the Cato
who died after reading the Phoedo. They were not aware of
the religious basis of family worship, on which was built the
ancient city-state, an overgrown village of kinsmen; and
they did not appreciate the feud which raged between the
conservative yet active citizen and the abstract and often idle
thinker. For it is obvious to any student of the classical
period that the cosmopolitan coolness of the latter contributed
in no small degree to the overthrow of the State, with its vivid
and immediate appeal to self-interest, to instinctive affection
for comrades, at least in theory of the same blood. The two
ideals are utterly inharmonious and divergent : in the hundred
years of the Humanistic School at Athens the great leaders
tried, with perfect sincerity but to no purpose, to reconcile
these conflicting claims. Instinct, custom, and emotion,
buried but never entirely eradicated in the philosophic mind,
strove with personal conviction and logic ; and the anti-social
Schools, as we must often repeat, show the extent of the failure.
But in spite of this hostility the motive in either was the same —
desire to realise self. When this aim was found to be defeated
by the narrow prejudice of urban life and by the well-meant
curiosity of friends, the carping vigilance of bystanders, a
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 235
larger area was sought in the Universe itself; and the strange
and fallacious title 'cosmopolitan' was accepted as an ideal
after which it was man's duty to strive. The earlier Greek
citizen, like the savage, even like the civilised Chinese to-day,
had no conception of the member apart from the whole, of
the real existence of the son cut off from his family, of the
citizen exiled from his State. This dependence on a cor-
poration, as it were, for a derived life, is an invariable sign
of rudimentary culture, — noble and generous indeed, it may
readily be allowed, but always rudimentary, and to be tran-
scended in the first step of civil evolution, to be defied at the
first effort of independent thought. Who with even a shadowy
knowledge of human development could maintain that every
step forward was a step upward, that progress always set
definitely towards an ideal goal ? It is impossible not to regret
with Aristophanes, with Cephalus, the disappearance of the old
sanctions and the old simplicity. But the forces which are
moving and moulding society are as much beyond our ken
as they are beyond our control.
§ 6. The imaginary figure, compounded of the citizen with
his imperfectly awakened, the sage with his morbidly sensitive,
self-consciousness, hovered before the minds of these reformers,
to whom Christianity was the source of decadence and absten-
tion, and the Middle Ages, no less than the Imperial epoch in
Rome, an unspeakable aberration. In the proposed restoration
of this fictitious type, they paid no heed to the incongruity of
the two constituents, the State-contented, the State-escaping ;
but they took the self-centred basis, which was the one
common element in both. It is no discredit to the early
types of society that in them the unit calculates his own
interest by the sole known method, deference to ancestral
custom ; it is we who are to blame by reading into the sim-
plicity of the savage mind virtues (or perhaps qualities) of a
far later evolution, which indeed reflect, not the self-confidence
of a classical age, but a long series of surrenders to a malign
Fortune, ruling over an evil or a fortuitous world. It is true
that primitive man is unselfish, but merely in the sense that
he has not found himself, is unaware of his own independent
being. It is untrue to say that the philosopher is unselfish,
because if wisdom mean anything, it implies the justification
2 36 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
to an inward standard, either of knowledge or approval (we
must note the significant difference or reservation) of all
happenings in heaven and in earth. The seeming abnegation,
which puzzles us, or perhaps a little chills our sympathy by
its verbal expansiveness at the close of some great personal
system of the Universe, is in reality the triumph rather than
the denial of the highest self. The sage does not bow to an
unknown outside, letting his individuality flow outward in
homage, but he takes the Universe in to himself; he is\\.\
he embraces everything, till nothing is left unexplained or
unrelated; nay, it has no existence apart from his thought;
he is the one and universal Sovereign ; it is no wonder that
with so wide a heritage and dominion, he gives up readily the
trivial titillations of average life. Whatever may be the merits
of such an outlook, it cannot comprise among them the virtue
of sympathy, which is not merely the best but the only whole-
some source of 'unselfish' action. How often unselfishness
is preached, not from love of others, but from hate, disgust, or
despair of self! The pride of Diogenes looks out from his
tatters ; and the maxims of self-surrender never lose sight of
self. The Christian spirit, which is no self-regarding austerity,
no mere dwelling upon personal defects and blemishes (has
not God need of all sorts ? ), but a genuine self-forgetfulness,
in interest in others, in service of a cause, finds no counter-
part in the tenets of antiquity, or in that republican doctrine
which, regardless of the anachronism, strove to revive them.
The modified success, which we may with no Uttle shame
and some hesitation attribute to our social efforts to-day,
is due to the inspiration of the Gospel message, in many no
doubt unconscious, to the secret workings of the Spirit. This
lesson is as far as possible from any meaningless sacrifice of
a personality, which logic and science, coldly correcting our
conceits, alike pronounce to be without worth or permanence ;
it teaches or rather confirms the natural instinct of brother-
hood and fellow-feeling ; and in matters of secondary import
the test is not obedience to law, but respect for the weaker, ** for
whom Christ died." There is no sign either in past history
or in a survey to-day of the world and its spiritual influences
which warrants us in the belief that a substitute for this energy
is forthcoming.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE III— A
On the Original Independence and Antithesis of
Religious Feeling and Moral Behaviour
§ I . Some definitions of Religion and Morality : the general con-
trast between the subjective and the objective, Gospel and Law : to
Morality, the law, to Religion, the individual of real import : Morality
always unfinal.
§ 2. Religion a plea for the exceptional : Religion encourages effort
and comforts failure : Nature-worship, a passing and irrational thrill :
gradual increase of intimate and personal religion : Masonic individual-
ism of the Roman epoch in all religions : the protector instead of the
world-creator or remote ancestor : religion a matter of choice not of birth.
§ 3. Religion, supposed by some to have its origin in State imposture,
as a valuable engine of police, is opposed, and often directly hostile to
the State : Thuggee : absoluteness of Religious claims to surrender self
and override ordinary Morality : Joy of the religious martyr contrasted
with sadness of the moralist : the unreserved submission laid to charge of
Jesuits, true of all genuine religious feeling.
§ 4. Breach between Religion and Morality, — as between statecraft
and Morality in the times following Machiavelli and the Reform :
Charles I. ; and the Jesuits : era of simplicity : appeal to immutable
Morality as sheer utility : Religion and Morality confused and identified
in the eighteenth century by all Schools ; so Reason and Nature : with
the failure, alike of Church and Enlightenment, the question arose
again : new scope for ' supererogation ' in the new moralised State.
§ 5. Origin and Nature of the new ' regimentation ' and dis-
cipline.
§ I. That Religion and Morality have indeed some points
of agreement but many points of difference, might seem to be a
commonplace. But this truth is repeatedly forgotten or over-
looked by the religious apologist, who to secure acceptance
with an always wider audience identifies Religion with
customary Morality ; and also by the ethical Rationalist (now
almost an obsolete type), who wishes to restrict the province
of the Church to the teaching of honesty and self-control, the
237
238 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
function of the priest to the duties of a State policeman. By
Religion we do not of course mean a State-Establishment : —
otherwise this will come under the head of that inherited com-
plex, which with its teachings so many of us accept without
further question. The term is here used in the supposed
* Protestant' sense — personal and direct access to a Saviour
and Protector, or at least to a Creator. And this is the only
true definition of the religious feeling : " he took him apart
from the multitude . . . What must I do to be saved ? " No
doubt the awakened sinner will gladly accept the ordinary
channels of grace, the sense of support and fellowship given by
corporate life in a Church ; — but all this will have a new mean-
ing and value in the light of his inward and incommunicable
experience ; both higher and lower, for the standard and the
test is now within him. Now Morality is a word of very
doubtful usage ; strictly, it should mean the following of
custom and the acceptance of such restraints as society from time
to time puts on caprice or violence ; but it is also often used
to convey the notion of that intrinsic and personal principle,
which, whatever may be its source and derivation, prescribes to
its fortunate possessor a far higher and more careful rule than
society can ever demand. It will be said that this is a need-
lessly tedious way of stating the truism, that Religion and
Morality alike pass from the objective to the subjective stage ;
that the law, human or Divine, is no longer written and engraven
on tablets, but the " word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth
and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it" (Deut. xxx. 14).
" This is the covenant that I will make with them after those
days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts,
and in their minds will I write them" (Heb. x. 16) . . .
" and they shall not teach every man his neighbour ... for all
shall know Me from the least to the greatest" (chap. viii. 11).
This transition is indeed simply from acceptance on trust and
in fear to acceptance in love and with personal test and know-
ledge; in a word, from the Law to the Gospel, and in this
phrase everything is contained and implicit. But it will not
be doubted that in common parlance to-day it is the term
Religion which preserves a notion of the intrinsic and intimate,
the voluntary and spontaneous, while the other still gives us
the more rigid outline of conformity to existing usage, obedi-
RELIGION AND MORALITY 239
ence (often unconvinced) to coercive law. One of the chief
disputes of the time centres round the ' teaching of MoraUty.'
There are warm supporters of its independence, BlBuktov apa rj
*Ap€Trj. But there is a large and I believe growing body of
men who cannot accept Morality as ultimate or as self-
sufficient j as involving any but a paradoxic result. In order
that it may explain and justify one of its rules to the inquisit-
ive consciousness, it has to leave its own domain and encroach
on the sphere, borrow from the convictions or belief of
Religion. The reason is not far to seek : it is only Religion
that recognises the individual.
§ 2. I see no reason to modify what is said in the Lectures
on Religion when it becomes personal, as an asylum or retreat
from the tyranny of convention or the fear of Nature. Religious
fervour always pleads for the exceptional : first, for an excep-
tional forgiveness, for pardon, for mercies strictly uncovenanted ;
next, for an opportunity for exceptional service, a devotion of
self and its faculties in gratitude for blessings received — or
anticipated. No play of logic or coolness of Rationalism
could ever destroy the emotional element in Religion : " We
love Him because He first loved us." Nature may indeed in
some temperaments evoke a thrill of ' cosmic emotion,' a sense
of awe at the mightiness or the beauty or the incomprehensibility
of the Universe. But however legitimate such raptures may
be, it is clear they can but remind us of our nothingness : they
are powerless to encourage effort or console failure. And yet
this is what is meant by Religion, whenever the word is used by
average mankind, outside the text-books of dogma or apology.
In ancient Greece, there was the special parent or guide or
protector, first of the family and local haunt, next of the
individual, in his fast-growing self-importance; and we have
(as a caution) the heroic figures of Sarpedon and Hippolytus,
not to mention the sinister legends of Tantalus and Ixion.
The special tutelars did not lose their comforting nearness
and identity because their familiar features were found, as
barriers broke down, in countless other divinities throughout
Hellas. Then poetry stepped in and attempted to give
coherence to the whole, and provided a detailed theogony.
Before, men did not puzzle about the relation of these many
Divine figures to the dark background of Fate, or the closer yet
240 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
not much more sympathetic Nature. The notion that a God
created the world appears very late upon the scene of thought ;
and in answer to a passionate and instinctive demand that
things shall somehow correspond to man's sense of aim and
righteousness. Religion was in a certain sense natural, and
recognised tremendous and untutored forces at work, who
could not be completely brought within the scale of human
vision or before the tribunal of human judgment. But, as with
the Jews, true religious feeling found for its object domestic
and national gods ; or an intimate personal protector. When
the State religion broke up quietly and survived only in
immemorial rite, the philosopher reverted to a natural deity,
life and substance of the world, whom he vainly strove to invest
with the peculiar qualities that man desiderates in his Deity,
as bringing Him nearer to His creature by common attributes.
Others, of whom we see the type in Appuleius (indeed, in the
great band of Mithraists throughout the Roman world), found
that religion was not a matter to be * born into ' by the mere
fact of family and common ancestors, but to discover for one's
self, to deserve by trial and discipline, to enter by painful
and perhaps long-deferred initiation. This Masonic in-
dividualism, rather of special choice than national privilege,
had indeed always been in the Mysteries an emotional outlet
for pious fervour, wearied with the openness and formality of
the sterotyped ritual, the runic unintelligibility of the liturgy.
But under the Roman Empire, that happy arena for idiosyn-
crasy, this side of Religion, its most personal and intimate,
came into prominence not merely in Christianity, but in most
other heathen cults.
§ 3. Throughout, religious feeling, beginning acutely in a
protest against law, seems to rise above social usage, by en-
tailing a stricter conformity to certain duties, a purer personal
life than the State could either recognise or enforce. The
sceptic who tried to write the ' Natural History ' of Religion
vacillated (to put out the ' dream-theory ' of Lucretius and the
Atomists) between a physical origin in dread of unknown
forces, and a deliberate political imposture. " Primus in orbe
deos fecit timor : " we may contrast with the * Critias ' fragment,
where Religion is a mere device of the State, following the
citizen into his secret privacy and inner thoughts by means
RELIGION AND MORALITY 241
of this invisible yet ubiquitous police. But, as history has
proved, Religion is never content to maintain this subordinate
and ancillary position. It cannot accept without scrutiny the
rules which the State draws up for its subjects, and it can
claim to override them when its own peculiar welfare or
teaching is at stake. It is never a very stable or faithful
public servant : its kingdom is not of this world ; its aim is
beyond, and often counter to, the political end. It demands
more of its followers, because it has a secret code of its own ;
but also, in a certain sense, less, inasmuch as no merely
social law is binding against the interest or the doctrine of the
smaller organisation. We see in Thuggee the original anti-
thesis of our two terms : all States, not even excepting Sparta
and Venice, proscribe assassination ; but some religions may
require it ! Cases are by no means uncommon where an act
universally condemned by public opinion is performed as a
sacred duty, a religious rite; and the permitted licence of
certain pagan worships, as Astarte and Mylitta, is no warrant
for supposing a wide relaxation of that moral sternness, habitual
as it would seem to the savage ; rather the reverse. Religion,
it must be remembered, is the most absorbing, importunate,
and unsatisfied of all the objectives to which man, never self-
sufficing, can surrender himself. On occasion he must give
up everything, even his moral observance, his purity of life :
the names of Jael, Judith, and Maher-shalal-hashbaz will
prove that even among the Jews, whose religion was far more
closely implicated with outward and visible morality than the
rest, certain situations, as critical and exceptional, were held
to exempt from the usual stringency. It has been constantly
urged against the Jesuits that religion, conceived as the
welfare of the Holy See and the prosperity of the Order,
becomes a universal solvent of every obligation. Such attacks
may indeed in part be justified, but they show unlooked-for
ignorance of a very rudimentary truth — that religious feeling,
when personal, is not content with obeying the regulation of
the State, with sinking into submission to a civil department.
It claims life as an absolute whole, without a single reservation,
such as Saul tried to make (from motives, it may well be con-
ceived, of pity and compassion). Unlike the State, it does not
demand sacrifice without compensation. Mr. James, though
16
242 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
he scarcely alludes to immortality in his book on religious
experience, makes it abundantly clear that abnegation is no
mournful asceticism, no * death at duty's call ' ; loss of pleasure,
nay of selfhood, is a supreme rapture. It might be hard to
recall both moods in the poet's ' duke et decorum pro patrict
mori.^ We do not find, in our more introspective age, pro-
pensity and reason go so easily hand in hand ; but if we must
divide them, it may perhaps be necessary to give the former
to the religious martyr, the latter to the melancholy if self-
approving hero.
§ 4. It would seem, then, that Religion can ensure greater
sacrifices than the State, and can, without question, act as the
* Dispensing Power ' of the most cherished rules of its rival.
It was this sense that armed the darts of the Rationalist
attack. It was by no means the conscientious oppression,
but the dishonest intrigue of post - Machiavellian Church
and State on the Continent, that excited the earliest and
more lucid of its foes. When the most virtuous of English
Sovereigns was tainted by this indirectness, when the doctrine
' the end justifies the means ' was accepted as a maxim in a
religious order and practised in secret by the courts of Western
Europe, it is no wonder that the simple-minded took refuge
in a Church of the Elect, the educated in the * natural Reason.'
Men appealed either to 'eternal and immutable morality,'
with Cudworth and the Cambridge School, or, contemptuous
of any metaphysical sanction, sought to found conduct in
civil life on pure utility, either social or individual welfare.
England, always inclined to Teutonic individualism, re-
formed (or reduced) her religious establishment so as to be
well within the limits of average conformity. It expelled (not
indeed without reason) the Extremists and ' Enthusiasts,' whose
pretensions to the sole guidance of the inner light might
indifferently lead to sainthood or libertinage. It became the
handmaid, the preacher of pure morality ; and it may be again
pointed out that the Masonic liturgy well reflects the
prudently complacent temper, the sober charity, sympathetic
yet by no means exacting, the scanty dogmatic postulates, of
that era. Men laboured with astonishing industry to show
that Christianity was pure morality, the restatement of an
original law, forgotten or obliterated. Conduct was the whole
RELIGION AND MORALITY 243
of life; and Kant, who has much of the 'Anglican' spirit
from his Scotch descent, views with suspicion anything that
seems to go beyond. Throughout the eighteenth century,
Religion and Morality (as also Nature and Reason) were
constantly and indeed unpardonably confused. The Church-
State of the Enlightenment sought, like Catholicism, to
universalise ; to embrace all in a single formula, to admit no
exception to rule, to level down where it could not level up,
to derive the whole of life and experience from a unique root.
Such Monism failed, as all monistic efforts must. When the
old regime and (what is often overlooked) its successful rival,
the Enlightenment, perished together in the French Revolution,
the question had once more to be put to an age ready, in its
nakedness and exhaustion, to seize on any and every answer,
What is the precise relation of Religion and Morality? It
may be at once answered that Religion had taken under its
protection what may be termed the ' supererogative ' element
in Morals. It seems difficult to convince men that the more
perfect the social organisation, the more restricted the field
of moral action. Combined action and careful instruction of
the young may reduce that which now demands a critical and
precarious choice to such formal, rules as we consult in
sanitation or etiquette: it will then be quite clear that a
minority, dissatisfied with such automatic customary observance,
will seek to rise above it in the small field still accorded to
spontaneity; others, impatient of control, will seek to fall
below it, or openly to defy its restraint.
§ 5. The narrowing of this field of possible error, temptation,
indeterminate choice, is to some the weakness, to others the
strength, of civilised society. But it is only the fact which
concerns us here. The one certain outcome of the vague
struggles of the Revolution was to arm authority with fresh
powers, with chances of closer supervision. The inventiveness
of scientific progress is always on the side of authority and
capital: humanum paucis vivit genus. The forces which
from the very beginning of the nineteenth century stood
behind the nominal leaders, were no longer aristocratic ; the
real but prosaic interests of the middle class were predominant :
public order, security and expansion of commerce, certainty
of contract, judicial integrity. The ' Regimentation ' of society
244 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
proceeded apace, in spite of the protests of a pure and generous
Liberalism, which had far more sympathy with Rousseau than
with Hobbes. Once more disappointed with human nature
and the results of free competition, even larger powers were
(perhaps with a sigh) made over to the Government. Unex-
pected economic issues — the ousting of the yeoman and small
holder, the industrial slavery — warranted an encroachment on
the rights of capital. The last, most Christian and idealistic,
maxim of the early Revolution, the sacredness of the individual,
was abandoned. Men were dealt with not as units, but as
groups and in the mass ; and society passed — here rapidly, there
with obvious reluctance — in half-unconscious transition, from a
belief that legislation could do nothing to the conviction that
legislation can do everything. Those who lately had held, in
their eager enthusiasm for uncorrupt human nature, that the
sphere of Government should be as small as possible, were
now anxious to enlarge it indefinitely. The great and eternal
feud between ' Democracy ' and Science presented itself anew
in the rivalry of the expert and the amateur. The growing
complexity, growing burdens of Government, and (it must be
added) its growing suspiciousness, implied the increase of
functionaries and bureaux. While political reformers were
never tired of extolling with unconscious irony the blessings
of personal liberty, the equality of the toiler, the political
judgment of the illiterate, they were hasting at the same
time to transform the mass of the people into well-drilled
automata — not indeed with any deliberate policy of servitude ;
forces too deep to analyse, and certainly far beyond the com-
prehension of those whom they controlled, hurried a society
which prated of freedom into a regimental discipline. And
in the enlarged field of original choice (for discipline cannot,
with all its efforts, account for the whole of life), religious, social,
philanthropic, the sphere of the spirit and the conscience.
Christian dogma and Christian tradition exerted a new and
unexpected influence. To this revival is due in no small
measure the unconcealed antagonism between Church and
State. Religious feeling, wistful or dogmatic, controls the
still considerable element of 'supererogation.' It is not so
much antithetic to current morality as supplementary.
Granted a legal minimum, it prescribes, according to individual
GOD AS GENERAL 245
capacity, an ideal maximum to be striven after. Not to every
rich young man did Christ say, " Go, sell all that thou hast " ;
it is a special and particular vocation. This perhaps could
not be better expressed than in the words of the Bishop of
Birmingham: "Within the area secured by legislation, the
positive and characteristic Spirit of Christ had its vantage
ground ; and that was the spirit of self-sacrifice " (St. Mary's
Commemoration, 1 906). Where the political development has
worked unhappily, leaving only to the Church the sphere of
willing and gratuitous service, is just in this increase of
enactment, coerpive and spoliatory legislation, without any
appeal to principle, only to sordid interest. "We love Him
because He first loved us," is the secret of the Christian
incentive. It is no wonder that in the portion of life which
is still autonomous all the known influences are Christian;
that in the threatened banishment of religious teaching no
substitute is forthcoming to arouse the generous emotions ;
which after all, and however closely they must be watched and
guided, are the sole motive-powers in modern as in ancient life.
B
On the Conception of God as General, rather
THAN AS Judge
§ I. Character of 'Law,' to excite hostility: growing dislike of
restrain* : dutifulness, a fundamental trait in primitive culture :
with ' enlightenment ' it disappears : all political reflection tends
towards withholding allegiance from any alien authority : supposed
transfer of power to-day to a ' majority * has wrought little change.
§ 2. Significant refusal to recognise law {Education in England) :
* conscience final arbiter for each ' : Law takes an arbitrary character
at the time of the Reformation and the new competitive nationalities :
all systems unite in Absolutism {political, Divine, metaphysical) :
reaction in the eighteenth century : law the mere condition of present
welfare and^ future blessedness {according to common sense not to
arbitrary decree) : laws mere rules of self-interest, forestalling caprice
with kindly prudence.
§ 3. This ' popular ' philosophy not popular enough : Calvinism
disdains to explain law by human analogy : Deism, profoundly
246 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
humanistic, moral, and simple : its speedy collapse : the mysterious
regains ground : natural bias of Protestantism towards worship of the
Unknown.
§ 4. Mysticism and its unanswerable appeal to experience : the
' Union ' : legalism never transcends dualism : all human thought
and judgment relative : object of law can only be the welfare of the
mass : in eighteenth century, law condescends to reason and argue,
professing its proper aim to be use : men criticise Divine law from
same standpoint as human.
§ 5. Eternal punishment, its lessened significance : God no longer as
absolute Judge : notion of arbitrary force passed into realm of nature and
State : sense of Divine effort in Christianity : this desire to procure
a sanction for human endeavour , the legitimate counterpart of the
desire for a place of repose : the paradox of religion : both needs
must be satisfied : Christ as a Captain of free soldiers.
§ I. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to divest *law' in
the eyes of average men of its arbitrary and unaccountable
character. The supposed change from an irresponsible ruler
or oligarchy to popular arbitrament has done as yet very little
to lessen this feeling. Laws are still drawn up by mixed
bodies of experts and amateurs, tempered to meet a general
and lukewarm approval, often forced into incoherence by
timely compromise, and to the general public distasteful or
unintelligible. At this mention of Law in the abstract, all
that is questioning, sceptical, and revolutionary in the spirit
awakens. And this is the real meaning of maturity — not to
take on trust, but to submit to individual judgment : freedom
of conscience consists in nothing else. It is typical of a very
prevalent ignorance of human nature to believe that reverence
for law is an achievement of advancing civilisation, and
peculiarly appropriate to an age of 'free democracy.' No
greater mistake could be made. The whole political develop-
ment suggests, the whole political theory recommends, that
every man consider law calmly in relation to himself and his
needs, obeying only in so far as he can approve ; the overthrow
of existing restraint is a duty, and discontent is the condition
or source of advance. Absolute end in view there is none,
and at no stage in a fluent process is any sanctity discoverable
which could silence the criticism and arrest the innovating
hand. Undoubtedly public law has, like religious belief, its
irreducible minimum ; but open and serious debate is held to-
GOD AS GENERAL 247
day over questions which less than a century ago were decreed
beyond the reach of doubt or assault. Can it, for example,
be supposed for a moment that the State, if able to extricate
itself completely from Christian influence, will maintain intact
that peculiar system of sexual relations, taboos, and penalties,
in which it is hard to distinguish the origin, whether State's
utility as summa lex^ Christian idealism, or prejudice of a
narrow middle class? If it is difficult even in the smallest
community to agree upon statutes which receive unanimous
homage, it is impossible in the overgrown society of a
modern State, where, by the very fact and theory of the
constitution, it is always a minority that is in power. If law
excites only covert defiance in the natural man (of whom St.
Paul in Romans vii. shows a profound and sympathetic
knowledge), it is idle to suppose that the future of Western
society will show any substantial increase in the law-abiding
principle. Deference to convention is an unmistakable mark
of rudimentary and primitive society; once shaken (like the
confidence in a benevolent autocrat), it cannot be reinstated.
The sign of all 'enlightenment* is coolness and relativity;
sur tout point de zele I Emotion may creep in shamefast by
a back door; Reason may later, nay must, make an alliance
with sentiment, to stir at all : ovBlv y Aiavota Ktvct : just as the
painstaking studies of logic and scholastic merge at last in
Mysticism. But let us keep detached and separate the
criticism, which must be impartial and without bias ; and the
loyalty, with which as citizens we accept after due discus-
sion a result we may personally disapprove. We are not
predicting any violent upheaval; but it is well to remember
that the average man has been taught to withhold respect
from that which he has not made, or cannot understand
himself. This is the fundamental postulate of any system
within even distant approach to genuine democracy. Law, let
us resume, if suspected of arbitrary character, of interested
and partizan motives, will command no obedience ; and evasion
will not merely be generally condoned but recommended.
§ 2. We have recently seen a remarkable instance in our
country of this reference of law to individual approval
or dissent. It is only too apparent that free institutions,
statesmen's integrity, open debate cannot ' universalise '
248 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
particular enactments, cannot overpower conscientious objec-
tion. And whatever may be the inconvenience, whatever the
disappointment of those who believe nothing is easier to elicit
and interpret than the popular will, it is well that it should
be so. The standpoint of such refusal to follow the ' majority '
is, if narrow, at least moral. It preserves at least, even in a
mistaken way, a principle threatened in the multiplied re-
sponsibility of the State : that a large part of life must remain
outside the interference of a secular State; that conscience,
as Cardinal Newman wrote to the Duke of Norfolk, must for
each be the final arbiter. There is no need here to discuss
the possible perversion of the conscience, paraded as a disguise
for unworthy motives. I call attention to the broad principle
of resistance ' for conscience' sake,' here, not in a country where
religious and secular animosities divide the nation into openly
hostile camps, but where the vast bulk of the people are still
agreed in loyalty to the broad doctrines of a common faith.
Let us now ask. What in such an age is our attitude to God
as Lawgiver ? Clearly this cannot constitute an appeal for our
services or our love.
Jehovah's Jinger wrote the Law ;
Then wept ; then rose in zeal and
awe,
A nd the dead corpse from Sinai's
heat
Buried beneath His Mercy-Seat,
O Christians ! Christians ! tell me
why
You rear it on your altars
high ?
(W. Bi.AVL^, ' Gates of Paradise:)
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, law, human
and Divine, tended to withdraw itself proudly from contact
with the vulgar, and to become centralised, arbitrary, irrespon-
sible. The individual, still recognised in the petty manorial
courts as a unit with rights, still viewed by the Director's
casuistry as an *end in himself,' became insignificant before
the unified law of France or England, the everlasting fiat of
doom or salvation. The real relation of the universal and the
particular was never examined or defined. It was held by
Jesuit, Spinoza, Richelieu, Roundhead, that man was a sub-
ordinate member in a great scheme or system; even at the
height of conscious conflict he was but the vehicle of a purpose
greater than himself, 'a vessel of grace or wrath/ (though he is
careful to interpret this Pivine foreknowledge according to his
GOD AS GENERAL 249
predilection). In the subjective reaction of the eighteenth
century this deference to law is changed. Religious en-
thusiasm had everywhere decayed ; monarchy was no longer
implicitly trusted: it had displayed evident signs of human
frailty ; in France it had failed of its chief aims ; in England,
had been replaced by a clever and intriguing oligarchy. Law
was a mere compact and convention, not the edict of a
superior in goodness and intelligence. Throughout that age
Law became the mere condition of present comfort or of
future blessedness. The small yet fervent circle of Calvinistic
mysticism might take comfort, as do all mystics, in reposing on
absolute certainty, especially if this assurance was personally
hopeful. But to most thinkers within and without the Church,
laws, moral or political, were just the rules of self-interest,
invented (for no grand ulterior purpose out and beyond
individual convenience) by a benevolent and by no means
encroaching sovereign ; just as the dogmas of Christianity
were no esoteric mysteries, but (to Toland and to Lessing
alike), so far as they were true, the setting-forth for the benefit
of the unleisured and ignorant of truths transparent to the
cultured intelligence, — and, it must be avowed, commonplace
to the last degree.
§ 3. Yet this was the strong side of the ' popular ' philosophy
of that age : its resolution to accept nothing which could not
be related, in understanding or in use, to the individual
consciousness. It is not superficial because it is 'popular,'
but because it is not popular enough ; because no pains were
taken to trace the deep things of the heart, the genuine but
secret springs of human action. In the Deist as in the
Calvinist system, God entered into reckoning only at the first
beginning and the final close of the destiny of the universe or
the single soul. In both a place was left for judgment and for
retribution. The latter, weighted as it was with the dogma of
predestination, could not, like the former, commend to the
normal intelligence or the rudimentary notions of justice a
dogma which rejected all such standards. Deism, anxious to
retain against the evidence of science, surely and steadily
accumulating, man's place and dignity, raises human
qualities to Divine honours, good-will, artistic contrivance,
moral aim. God reappears, after a long absence, at the close
250 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of the drama. The world and man have been left during the
interval to their native resources : the guidance of physical law,
disturbed by no favouritism or miraculous intervention; the
light of natural reason and conscience, amply sufficient to secure
happiness through obedience to its simple conditions. Life
was easy to the prudent ; the facts of the universe were clear ;
nothing was needed but to remove the ruined fabric of obsolete
mythology that kept out the sun. But the brief career of
Deism, its sudden collapse or silence about the middle of the
century, is a strong proof of the hold of the mysterious on the
human mind. ' Reasonable religion ' disappeared, or at least
renounced any claim to effective control. Men plunged again
into the solace of irrevocable law. Edwardes and Wesley are
different types of one and the same movement towards a recog-
nition of a Supreme Power, of whom it is true, " My thoughts
are not your thoughts, neither are My ways your ways." In
both (in spite of the missionary vigour which sometimes
accorded so strangely with their tenets) we see clearly the
natural trend of the Protestant to quietism, to a Church of the
Elect, to individual assurance, towards a veneration which is
in the last resort a worship of the unknown. And against
this, there must be, prima facie^ no immediate objection;
the doubt arises not in hearing the dogma that the "judgments
of God are unsearchable and His ways past finding out," but
in testing the credentials of the prophet who claims to know
them. If one must be candid, the Roman Church insists far
less on the arbitrary and authoritative. Dogma has been
carefully built up, not by individual cleverness, but by inspired
councils, by modest scholastic induction of authorities. The
papal control was not above law, nor was the doctrine un-
reasonable. But the Protestant movement, to which Heine,
in a pamphlet of singular brilliance and inaccuracy, traces free
rational thought, abases the human intelligence as it disparages
human merit. It is far more strictly 'monastic' than the
Catholic saint in his hermitage. It opens the field for the
reverence for the unknown and unknowable, the Night of
Novalis and the mystics, Spencer's indecipherable First Cause,
which, among the increasing certainties of Science, is so
strange a feature in our speculation to-day. But for Religion to
lose contact with Reason is almost worse than to relax its hold
GOD AS GENERAL 251
on Justice. Universal in its claim over human life, the
*credenda' must satisfy our instinct for righteousness, and
cannot possibly demand worship for that which in fancied
majesty or conceit withdraws altogether out of the field of
human observation. It is easy to discover an object of
affectionate regard nearer home.
§ 4. The mystic in all time has the unanswerable plea of
personal experience. God, to his logic, may be the nameless
darkness of Dionysius, the indifferent ground of Cusanus or
of Eckhart, but to his soul a tasted bliss. Against the reality
of these subjective visions frigid argument beats in vain.
But the legalist has no such recourse. Law and its subject
or victim remain irreconcilably opposed, and the dualism is
ultimate. The expression ' glory of God ' only seeks to cloak
ignorance. It is the defect or the merit of the human mind —
but in either case inalienable, lSlov koL dva<^aip€Tov — that it can
only conceive things in relation to itself, in terms of itself.
It cannot put off the Kantian spectacles, through which, never
issuing out of its unsympathetic isolation into the core of
things, it views the universe. And it cannot, in any fancied
detachment, resist applying a moral standard, a test of value,
or of * righteousness,' or of pleasure, to its experience : a local
and humanistic canon indeed with which to plumb infinitude.
But who has ever refrained from giving a verdict so based as from
an equitable tribunal ? Is there any philosopher who can dis-
guise his antipathy or his approval, confronted with the whole,
with the supreme need of correlating it to himself? For it is
only speculative philosophy which can afford to be impersonal ;
and speculative philosophy is, on its own showing and the
public judgment, incomplete. What is the purpose of Law ?
It is surely playing with thought to define it other than as
the welfare of the many, guarded by interdict and control,
embodied in solemn phrases which represent the lessons of
past experience, enforced on the mass for their good by the
rulers, human or Divine, few, mature, and responsible. The
individual who throws himself gladly into devotion to a cause
or loyalty to a person looks with suspicion at the majesty of
Law. When autocracy had to justify itself to ordinary critics,
the French kings explained their benevolent motives in pre-
ambles of an ingratiating clearness. Law, hitherto unamenable,
252 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
like \}^Q pati-ia potestas^ to any questioning, then took the public
into its confidence. A reactionary or a soldier might reproach
this concession as dangerous to the arcana imperii, in the
significant and recurrent phrase of Tacitus. But the whole
end of political life is at once secured if by such patient
colloquy the citizen is convinced that the new statute aims
solely at his interest ; that he is not a tool in the hands of
scientific experimenter or theoretical charlatan. Assured of
this, he will cheerfully obey. And it must be remembered
that, in spite of the divorce between religious and actual life,
more and more accentuated in the last four hundred years, men
will take the same maxims and principles to guide their verdict
on the Divine Law as they have already been taught to apply
to human legislation.
§ 5. In one notable point of dogmatics there has been no
revival of conviction : the doctrine of eternal punishment.
In the sense of a subjective hatred and defiance of good,
which would find happiness in hell but misery in heaven,
it must always remain a dreadful possibility. But as a
penalty imposed from without for offences of youth or
ignorance it has all but vanished from the treatise or the
sermon. It is indeed hard to dispute that the ' entire ' con-
ception of God as Judge has retreated into the background.
The notions of force and irresponsible power having passed
into nature and State, the appeal in Christianity is not to
fear, or even the hope of future recompense, but to the
immediate delight of willing service. In the Churches there
has been remarkable increase in missionary zeal and social
interest, a return to closer contact with the practical concerns
of life. The religious life is a serious conflict; those may
perhaps think otherwise who by religion mean the ' sense
of being a perfect member of a perfect system.' Now, in
the perpetual paradox of religious experience it is vain to
expel this complementary side, of peace in the midst of
war, of Divine nearness in the midst of abasement to creature-
hood. Nor need we find fault with those who lay on it too
great and too exclusive stress, for without such alternate
over-emphasis on the Divine and human in the Christian
message, 'strength made perfect' only 'in weakness,' the
balance of truth must suffer. But we are writing of the
GOD AS GENERAL 253
average experience, which 'counts not itself to have appre-
hended.' And to such it is the human life of our Saviour,
as a supreme manifestation of God, that gives courage and
hope. * What,' says Schelling, in an almost inspired moment,
'What if God wouW enter the world of discipline and of
suffering so as to become perfect, so as to learn obedience,
* though He be Lord of all ? ' Here under Behmen's influence
is the point of transition from the motionless and indifferent
ground, not merely with Hegel to a semi-purposive process,
but to a fully conscious person. Mill believes, not without
good reason, that we find all the saints, heroes, and martyrs
of religion, and all the humbler workers who have left no
name, to have been upheld by the thought of 'fellow-
service.' There are two sides of pious enthusiasm, the active
and the theopathetic, typified by Martha and Mary. The
religious idea must somehow unite in itself the conviction of
a motionless calm at the heart of things, and the sense of
a close protector and sympathetic friend to help one in the
struggle. No other theory of the Divine Nature comes nearer
to satisfying both these instincts than the doctrine of the
Risen Lord, who has 'passed behind the veil.' To one,
unity the ideal, if not found at once, snatched and forestalled
by reasoning faith or proved against proof by pious logic ; to
another, effort and a sense of obstacles gradually surmounted,
secrets only unfolding themselves to the ardent searcher.
To one, Spinoza or Emerson the type; all here and now
complete; no advance, no purpose; truth, immediate, whole,
and entire. To another, Lessing's part bold, part timid
rejection of this unconditional gift ; for to such temperament
conquest and achievement, as the path to perfection or to
knowledge, contested inch by inch, outweighs all the joys
of possession. The stimulus, the incentive, to much Christian
activity to-day, to much secular well-doing and impatience of
wrong, is this sense of military service under a General who
Himself has gone through the ordeal of war like the meanest
of His soldiers. We do not complain if the mystic chooses
to dwell on the comforting assurance of peace and harmony
as already secured. But Christian zeal receives its inspira-
tion from a belief in the present imperfection of the world;
from the conviction that, by our means, God will accomplish
2 54 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
His designs ; He who is not a master of slaves, but a Captain j
of free soldiers, Himself made perfect through suffering.
On Surrender to the Unknown
§ I. Mysticism, the most real of experiences : incommunicable :
the strictly religious form only toys with nihilism and is genuinely
personal : another kind boasts of nothingness : ' hedonism ' of the
religious mystic : pessimism of other surrenders to the indefinable
and unconscious.
§ 2. Will or Faith alone can sum up the Universe as a totality:
ultimate unities in philosophy out of fashion to-day : specialism of
modern thought : the English School discounts the pretension of
speculation to have discovered Unity : only ' provisional ' or ' working
hypothesis ' : a practical need makes us apply a comprehensive term
to the Universe : problem, Can this central unity become a partizan ?
§ 3. Religious feeling arises from this desire — ' The Lord is on
my side ' ; spirit of favouritism * in the earliest personal impulse
to religion : keen sense of dualism, of a real struggle at the root of
religion : lulling effect of pure monotheistic systems, whether of will
(Islam) or pure Being {Hindu) : Christian belief reads God's char-
acter in a human life.
§ 4. ' Humanism ' of the Christian faith : ultimate antitheses :
the twofold demand of the Divine nature — peace and aid in fight :
this latter bears the first emphasis in Christian belief, not the final.
§ 5. Growth in Greece of man's humanistic demands on the central
power : it is gradually invested in human attributes : after Aristotle,
abandonment of the anthropocentric point of view : significance of
Platonic revival, and Gospel simplicity : the Gnostic^ starting from
intellectual need, falls back into pure irrationalism : except in Africa
and under Augustine's influ^ncey the Church never surrenders to the
unknown as such.
§ 6. Attitude of Tertullian — the message to be accepted because,
not in spite of, its paradox : Septimius Severus, embodiment of a
like principle of irresponsible sovereignty : scholastic movement a
half-conscious protest against Augustinianism : Absolutism revived
by Protestant reformers, though they started from freedom and the
standard of individual conscience : this development wholly in keeping
with the general movements of seventeenth century.
§ 7. Supreme aim of the eighteenth century — to eliminate the
unknown, mysterious, and unaccountable : reaction against clearness
and vaunted simplicity in the nineteenth : transparency a demerit
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 255
to the new school of Obscurantism : this emphasised by the general
sense of uncertain aim and irresistible forces : falsification of hopes
and designs in every part of social development.
§ 8. Perverted meaning of ' reason ' in the new age : anthropo-
centric standard ridiculed or ignored : reaction in Comtism : Pro-
fessor Huxley's moral dualism : refuge in abnegation : Church
indispensable as alone giving motive and hope.
§ I. The student of thought or religion is again and again
confronted by the puzzling symptoms of Mysticism. They
deviate but slightly in type and features from age to age,
from creed to creed ; everywhere, indeed, they preserve certain
marks and signs that never vary. One universal characteristic
seized on for especial attack by critics is this: the mystic
resigns himself to the Unknown, sinks his role of inquirer
or logician or free agent, to plunge headlong into something
which is not himself, which in the very nature of the case
"he cannot, or only very imperfectly, define. In a sense, this
objection, though unsympathetic to an extensive phase of
thought and feeling, is justified : the description of the
Universal with which he is so familiar and so well content
is incommunicable ; his joys he cannot share with others, and
he has not even the grace to seem ashamed at this; nay,
the further beyond precise definition, the truer for him the
experience. But it must be remembered that all the while,
if he be a genuine mystic, it is no ' unknown ' at all, but the
most real of things. Nothing else exists beside it; and the
test is not barren argument, but direct contact and immediacy.
Mysticism reverts to the earliest and simplest canons of truth ;
we pass through intellectual evidence to the emotional assent,
and through them to the enjoyment of the senses. We detect
what is real by proof (often valueless in action), by faith, and
by touch and taste. The lowest and the highest things in
the scale of being are judged by a like criterion. But the
certainty thus derived, if intimate and personal, cannot be
shared or imparted; with the first and last of Gorgias'
axioms every true mystic must sympathise, though there may
be a certain freemasonry among the adepts. The orthodox
and philosophic among the band mark out with admirable
precision the stages in the journey, the nightly pilgrimage
to Mount Carmel. But at the decisive moment, when you
256 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
have followed their dialectic or their appeal with conviction
and approval, they vanish within an open door, which at
once closes upon them. To the uninitiated such contem-
plative joys are the most empty and barren of all delusions ;
to the mystic himself, the most positive of facts. But there
is no bridge between the exceptional experience and the
unsympathetic critic; there is a 'great gulf fixed.' It will
not then be supposed that we summarily include these devout
raptures among surrenders to the unknown. Religious
mysticism, however it may innocently sport with nihilistic
phrase, is in reality personal, is directed towards a Deity
conceived as a person, finds supreme satisfaction in an inter-
course which, if it pass beyond the colloquy of a friend, only
becomes the passionate silence of a lover. There is, however,
another kind, which boasts that it has no definable object.
Negative in its interest, and quietist in aim, its sole doctrine
is the nothingness of the subject, the vanity and inadequacy
of thought, the unique 'duty' to become absorbed in a
larger life, which after all has no conscious existence apart
from the sum of its members (and how can the sum of the
imperfect make a perfect whole ?). It may be urged against
the purely religious mystic by the practical or the narrow,
that it is a system of hedonism. Inasmuch as some amount
of pleasure immediately felt (not merely indefinitely deferred
and expected) is a needful ingredient of all moral assent,
especially to those involving self-sacrifice, this is no very
terrible accusation. The impersonal mystic (with whom we
have chiefly to deal) is a disciple of Pessimism.
§ 2. There is not the slightest warranty, in the history of
mankind or of thought, for supposing that we can ever sum
up the Universe as a whole except by an effort of will or an
effort of faith. The complexity and specialism of modern
life (so well pointed out by Mr. Merz in his remarkable
volumes on recent intellectual tendencies) puts out of court
at once the glib and presumptuous unifications which were
once in fashion. Strictly speaking, there are no philosophical
systems to-day coherent and all-embracing. Any supposed
representatives of such claim to inclusion and finality are
mere restatements and faded copies of an archaic and primitive
type of thought. The passion and error of the human mind
OF
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 257
(as the English Schools since Bacon have always seen) is to
rise at once to unity, without mastering the particulars which
go to compose it. No doubt it is absurd to try and curb
by rule and method the spontaneous intuitions, which throw,
it may be, a glimpse of light on the way and give promise of
a coming harmony. Bacon himself cannot tame the ventures
of genius ; Science would fare badly indeed if it was not
guided by dim hints and vaticinations. But, it must not be
forgotten, these visions of an ultimate end, in which fragments
meet in a perfect whole and the rays blend in a single shaft
of light, are but provisional hypotheses. These the searcher
after truth must in turn abandon, with regret it may be, but
unsparing candour, if the facts disprove. Now it is clear
that to apply any summary title to a whole, which can never
be known in its totality or in its still undetected possibilities,
is either an impertinence or a paradox, or — an act of faith,
undertaken on account of life's practical needs. Solvitur
ambulando is still a sufficient if unscientific solution. Debate
without cease seems to-day to centre round the problem
whether Truth is, because we use it, or because it uses us.
We are not to be entangled into such thorny discussion.
The priority of an antecedent * world of logical truth,' which
forestalls our entrance upon the scene, and sets in precise
moulds our methods of thought and reflection, is a hypo-
thesis necessary to pure Science, and, it may very well be, to
all clear abstract thinking. But we are speaking here of
mixed Science, tarnished and adulterated by contact with
practical concerns. It is a practical need, which forces and
enables man to apply a comprehensive term to the universe.
Such verdict will be tinctured with the special bent and bias
of the philosopher ; and in the end it is the human elements
of personality, of sincerity, which wins respect for the system ;
the unproven and wistful anticipations in the midst of arid
certainty, which really attract and account for deeper
influence. Granted that the world is 'knowable,' that is,
merely, that its sequences can be concatenated in relation to
thinking consciousness, what is its inmost essence, its real
meaning, the core of its being? and can that which in its
very definition includes and welcomes and confounds all its
parts into its central indifference, ever become a partizan ?
17
258 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 3. The earliest incentive to religion is to be found in this
desire to make God a partizan. "No one ever acted," says
Henry Jones, "without some dim though perhaps foolish
enough half-belief that the world was at his back : whether he
plots good or evil he always has God for his accomplice."
Religious feeling is not (except in the young or senile) an
awestruck recognition of law and unity; it may indeed pass
into this attitude of acquiescence, this quietistic lethargy, when
men are tired of trying to correlate it to their needs. But
in the first instance it is a vigorous appeal for favouritism, not
entirely free from the contracting spirit. It is a demand that
the highest power known or suspected shall take a side, that
the God of battles shall "go forth with our armies," or, in strictly
personal and pacific function, "shall bring me again to my
father's house in peace." The nature of the obstacle against
which our efforts are directed has been variously interpreted ; but
whether matter be dull and crass or somehow animated, both in
ourselves and in the world around, by some malignant influence,
the contest of life in any case is not wholly imaginary and
fictitious. As this sense of discord and variance in our inner
nature, in society, in the world at large, is the chief and urgent
element of experience, so we track out the nature and qualities
of each of the hostile groups, try to ascertain its tendencies and
affinities, and by compromise unite them for practical purposes
into a working harmony. And here our powers end; to
reproach such a method as opportunist and unprincipled is
merely to reproach us with being human. For this endeavour
starts from no desire to attain logical accuracy in life, — which
is, after all, easily won by emptying your formula of all
content, making it (as most ethical maxims are wont to become)
merely tautologic A = A. It arises not from the scientific but
from the * felicific ' impulse, — if I may use the word to express
the desire to^make the best of one's self and of a world which in
the last resort must always remain an enigma. Personal religion
grows out of the consciousness of self, out of varied feelings,
despairing, conceited, or commercial; it ends in its ennoble-
ment and consecration. It is in this process, one of defecation,
not of surrender or absorption, that man demands that his God
shall be a partizan. It may be, as with Jacob at Bethel,
a demand for personal safety; with Moses or Paul, in his
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 259
sublime unselfishness, a demand that the people of the Lord
shall come by their own, even at the cost of his own rejection,
becoming 'anathema' for them, innocent for the guilty. Or
with conscientious persecutors of later day, faithfully perse-
vering in their terrible and mistaken duty. Or in modern
times, a demand for an * ever-present help in trouble,' against
impersonal foes, sin and indifference. Our own liturgy shows
the earlier form, God's enemies are the nation's enemies and
the king's; 'victory over all his enemies' is still the ideal.
Even when we have forgiven the sinner, and only think
how to convert him and loose him from ignorance and
vice, we still, even in our tolerance or sloth, ask that God
shall be on the side of right, as we interpret it. In all pure
monotheistic systems (except the Christian) there is a very
perceptible lowering of the spiritual temperature. The more
comprehensive the unity, the more fictitious and ironic the
antitheses which once appeared so stubborn and impracticable.
The establishment of such a system coincides with a decline of
zest and conviction in life. Wherever, through vast tracts of
time and land, such a belief has existed unshaken and un-
questioned, what the Western calls ' advance and development '
is indefinitely arrested. This thought, " God's in His heaven ;
all's well with the world," may have two lessons : ' fatal doing '
is a mistake and an impiety ; or, it behoves me to be up and
active in His cause. Impartial testimony from history will
show that the Christian Gospel cannot sink into torpor or com-
placence, because its basis is, and must remain, largely dualistic,
because in it we are taught to learn the nature of deity by
studying a human life. " He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father . . . My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."
§ 4. Christianity is then humanistic^ that is, does not com-
promise as other monotheistic belief must perforce do, with
the rigour of physical law, with nature's indifference to happi-
ness or desert, or to the aims and hopes of mankind. It fixes
our attention upon the value of a simple life, attainable by
every one, without respect to rank, knowledge, or opportunity.
It resolutely asserts, against almost unvar3nng evidence, a moral
end in the universe; not a vague current setting towards an
indefinable righteousness, but a personal guidance, judgment,
recompense of individuals, — a moral aim related to all, and, in
26o THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
spite of obvious problems, broadly intelligible to all. It will
not allow this antithesis, at least of natural and spiritual, to be
transcended, or the distinction of right and wrong to be blurred,
as with Assassins and perhaps with Templars, in an esoteric
cult of indifference or a region * Beyond Good and Bad.' This
refusal is sturdy and sincere, and accounts both for the un-
doubted force which the Gospel has exerted over development,
and for those brief but violent periods of antipathy to the
world, when, against some comforting preaching of Unity, or
salvation already achieved, the seductive influence of some
secular culture, the enervating effect of new comfort and multi-
plied appliance, the Church feels bound to raise the standard
of effort and of opposition. " Ye worship ye know not what ;
we know what we worship." All narrower antithesis of self and
others, of nation and Christendom, of Christian thought and
earnest pagan philosophy, may be put aside or surmounted.
But the widest scope of view from the watch-tower of wisdom
(wcnrep €k irepttoTr^s) cannot justify US in viewing life or the
universe as an achieved harmony. Happily for the zest of human
endeavour, the struggle is still raging, the triumph is not yet
won. This assurance does not entail condemnation of those
who seem already to have put off their armour and entered
into rest. The twofold need in God, as a ' place of peace,' a
bond of unity, and as a helper in the fight, — this we have
often noticed. There is a serious significance in that fanciful
interpretation of Trinitarian dogma which appealed to Abbot
Joachim and to Hegel and Schelling. The present age of
effort and striving and failure is the Kingdom of the Son;
and the perfect peace or Kingdom of the Spirit is to be attained
only by suffering and trial. There is a point, as we all know,
where resignation to the Divine Will becomes a snare. Has not
some modern writer, thinking perhaps of the story of Jacob,
spoken of the worthiest attitude to God — ' Behave to Him as
to a generous foe ' ?
§ 5. Having shown the limits to which Christianity can go in
the process of conciliation, of ' crossing out ' antithesis, let us
see whether the course of independent human thought can
provide any lessons from its sedulous pursuit of Unity. First,
a single material element was held by the lonians to account
for the variety of things, and Heraclitus in the East and
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 261
Xenophanes in the West were the earliest to introduce, in place
of mechanism, a certain notion of purpose, of continuity not
merely of sequence but of aim, even of conscious blessedness.
The universe, which was once too far above to interfere with
the lesser spheres of the gods, gradually takes on their semi-
human attributes. In the Attic or classical age, this concep-
tion was still more firmly established ; instead of a never-ceasing
process, infinite in time and space (where the primitive sub-
stance was never out of masquerade), or an unchanging organism,
circular limited ; one system, the Platonic, was pervaded by a
moral purpose ; another, magnetically attracted by a stable and
permanent, though inaccessible, point of conscious intelligence.
This somewhat naive confidence that the universe would
answer to men's moral hopes, as it certainly yielded to their
interpretation, was followed by that long and perhaps inglorious
reaction in which the anthropocentric standpoint was in effect
abandoned by all Schools. The Stoic was the first to worship
the unknown ; for it surpassed his cleverness to attempt to bring
into line natural, social, and moral forces. Stoicism, where it
is not used in the superficial sense of unrepining and patient
forbearance, implies agnosticism and nothing more. As we
know, where it failed to provide satisfaction for personal needs,
the more mystical side of Plato was put under contribution ;
and the alliance of Porch and Academy was complete before
the classical age of the New Platonists. Here, again, the
almost personal sense of intimate communion relieved their
doctrine from absurdity, their venture of faith from sheer
foolhardiness. It might indeed be impossible to explain to
others what was this secret commerce between particular and
universal soul ; but to Seneca and to Aurelius, as to any other
pious devotee in East or West, it was a fact of incontrovertible
experience, the most real thing in life. In the larger world
outside the Schools, in the rekindled interest in various cults,
society sought alleviation of its ennui, and some lightening of
the perhaps oppressive sense of uniform law, human and
Divine. Then came Christianity, with its ready and simple
message, its profound yet not obtrusive metaphysics, and
expelled the awe felt at the powerful and the strong, or the
respect paid to unintelligibility simply on that ground and
under that title. It cannot be doubted that the Gnostic
262 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
systems largely encouraged this humiliating worship; and,
starting in a praiseworthy desire to co-ordinate the ' credenda,'
to apply pagan criteria to Christian belief, to " be ready always
to give an answer," this movement of intellectual curiosity fell
into ' old wives' fables ' and irrationalism. The Catholic Church
strove against this reproach jby submitting to the ordinary
moral judgment of the individual, or to continuous corporate
tradition (guided, but never overpowered, by inspiration), all
necessary articles of Faith. It never flinched from open dis-
cussion ; in the Conciliar or in the Mediaeval period it deferred
to the definition of Greek philosophy, or the more rigid formula
of Roman law. In its Christology it preserved, against the
menace of absorption, the independence of the human side ; it
rejected the * transient and miraculous theophany ' of Cerinthus,
and the purely magical doctrine of Grace. But it is true that,
to some extent, the dominating influence in the Church of the
Middle Ages is to be found in Augustine's doctrine, whether
of Church-supremacy, or the Divine counsel and foreknowledge.
And the African Church was from the first a determined apostle
of Absolutism, which disdained any reckoning with ordinary
standards.
§ 6. To Tertullian — at least in one peculiar and (some may
suppose) artificial attitude, which he assumed and intensified
in the fire of debate — the Christian message is to be accepted,
not because it answers so fitly the unspoken aspirations, the
inarticulate needs of the heart, but because it runs counter
to all intellectual logic, all ordinary experience. Like a flash
of lightning out of a clear sky came the Divine marvel ; came
the summons to an unconditional capitulation. Rebuking
the liberal Alexandrinism, which looked for patient develop-
ment even in the Divine purpose, for partial revelation even in
dark and pagan times ; which groped diligently for any trace of
likeness and for points of affinity from the common ground for
learner and for preacher ; Tertullian rejected such compromise
as unworthy the unique majesty of a sudden and unprepared
Theophany. It is not a little significant that about the same
time, and from the same country, issued into the field of world-
politics Septimius Severus, a similar figure with a similar
mission, who tore from force a thin disguise of legality, and
became the first military autocrat in Rome. Then Cyprian
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 263
transfers this belief in irresponsible sovereignty into the sphere
of Church government; Lactantius into the moral life; for,
in itself arbitrary and indifferent, the demand of virtue and
piety are only of value because God has so ordained ; the test
of quia Dens prcecepit^ common to the African School and Duns
Scotus, the anti-Thomist. Augustine sums up all doctrine,
morals, and principles of statesmanship for the Western world
in the next millennium ; and in his finished theory the moral
aspects of the Gospel well nigh disappear behind the arbitrary.
The whole Scholastic movement is a serious and perhaps an
ineffectual protest against this surrender to the unknown. But
they fought for the intelligence^ not for the moral sense ; and
in satisfying this universal Reason by logic and formula, they
did not reach the heart. Now it is not a little strange that
unlimited power as a chief attribute of Deity, that distrust of
intellect, that (within a narrow society) hierarchic tyranny,
should have marked the issue of a reformation which avowedly
began in sympathy for the unit and its claim for freedom of
conscience and direct access to God. Yet the Reformation
undoubtedly ended by reviving Augustinianism, with all its
unreconciled dualism, its intolerance, its absolutism, — against
which the practice and (to a large extent) the theory of the
Mediaeval Church had reacted. We have already traced the
retirement of the religious element to its own peculiar and
private fastness in the following years ; the increasingly secular
and un-moral character of the State. Philosophy in the seven-
teenth century, like statesman and citizen, surrendered gladly
to autocracy. The God of the thinker is Law and fiat absolute,
to whom time and purpose and aim cannot be allowed. The
system or fabric is discoverable in its laws and sequence by
thought, but not amenable to a moral verdict or criterion.
Already the world of artistic unity, of speculative contemplation,
has unfolded itself beyond the visible, where there is 'no
variableness, no shadow of turning.' In that age, though pious
faith (until disillusioned) believed in a benevolent design in-
cluding units. State and Church were dominated by a notion
of arbitrary and irresistible power. Indeed, this was only toler-
able because its intervention was not perpetual, its presence
not always felt. The State was paramount, but its actual en-
croachments were limited ; the Divine fiat of doom or salvation
264 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
was irresistible ; but it left much to the pleasing or agonised
uncertainty of the individual in the long interval of suspense.
§ 7. We need not again traverse the ground already covered
in dealing with the eighteenth century; the novel claims of
the individual for consideration and respect, the Constitu-
tionalism, attained in England and demanded elsewhere by the
educated, the utilitarianism in theology, which suggested that
the 'greater glory of God' was best won by consulting the
happiness of the several units that made up His kingdom. A
government, a State, an institution like the Sabbath, did not
exist for its own sake ; just as the end of law is not its own
empty fulfilment, but the welfare of those for whose benefit it
has been set up. The entire aim of this epoch of eager and
sanguine reform was to eliminate the unknown ; to show the
facility of prudent virtue, the simplicity of the Divine purpose,
the open candour with which the secrets of nature were laid
bare to patient and unprejudiced search. There was no place
for * mystery ' in such an age ; the mystic and the * enthusiast '
were together banished from the coming realm of pure reason.
In the nineteenth century, when romantic thought reverted
wistfully to the charm of half-lights, Gothic cathedrals, feudal
chivalry, vague artistic delineation, blurred and suggestive out-
lines, hints and intimations of the spiritual ; when philosophers,
tired of the banal transparency of rational truisms which facts
refuted, went back to the * little sensations ' of Leibnitz,, the
unconscious background of thought ; Religion regained much
of the shadow and reserve which men had tried to dispel.
There was a great revival of dogma, which in the Christian
system has always retained, and always must retain, a certain
element of paradox, of paralogism — the finite taking on infini-
tude. Clearness became a demerit in the eyes of the new
School of Obscurantists; the test of value became to many
incomprehensibility ; the obvious was despised or handed over
to the dull routine of the State. Enigmatic utterance, * Hymns
to the Night,' and mystical sighs and aspirations, took the place
of straightforward teaching and simple lessons of honesty and
truth. Despairing of reason, men accepted the guidance of
feeling. In spite of the apparent deference to calm logic and
calculated rule, it may be questioned if any age has been less
influenced and moulded by conscious plan, by statesmanship
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 265
of decided aim. Great movements have swept along their
supposed agents and engineers towards goals which they never
dreamt of, to conclusions they never suspected. The common
and well-founded taunt of opportunism implies not a lack of
moral principles in individuals, but a puzzled ignorance as to
their right application in a world so changed. Many are
content to resign themselves to the current and drift with the
stream. And in the Social world, which is largely usurping the
place once occupied by pure politics, no one would venture to
decide where the future lies, with State-sovereignty or with
individual liberty, with automatism, beneficent but not spon-
taneous, or with a noble but perilous autonomy.
§ 8. Elsewhere we have tried to show the remarkable * down-
grade ' tendency to empty the Source of Being of any quality
that seems akin to ourselves, that might confirm the truth of
Kant's pregnant suggestion — the unknown element in things
may perchance turn out to be very near to our own mind.
Deism, with its narrow but humanistic moralism, was completely
out of fashion. Nature-worship, with its truths and its fallacies,
took hold of men's imagination ; and suited exactly the temper
of an age romantic just because it was prosaic. Poets sang
of the mysterious and indefinable emotion, which seized on the
soul like some panic or bacchic rapture. When Reason was
mentioned as the root or key of being, it was not the limited
calculation of the logician, but the whole impetus and onrush
of unconscious forces. All schools, whether optimist or pessi-
mist in tone, ignored or derided the anthropocentric standard.
Unable to penetrate the secret of the origin and meaning
of the world-process, the French School proposed to lay an
embargo on metaphysical dreams or idle search, and find in
* Humanity' a substitute for an extinct Deity: the English,
seeing even here something beyond verification and sensible
experience, recommended a return to the national State, to a
visible community, to ordinary moral duties of the old-fashioned
type, closely modelled on Puritan forms, among which they had
been brought up. And in some few, the sense of baffled intel-
ligence striving in vain to understand, drove to the utmost
length of renunciation or defiance. Such are some of the re-
actions which the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable
provoked. A large proportion of thinkers despair of finding
266 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
any counterpart to human needs and demands without. Some
conceal their disappointment by a revival of Stoic abnegation
or Buddhist calm, by calling men to defer ungrudgingly to a
race-purpose which they cannot decipher, and in which they
cannot participate. Yet never was age so carefully primed and
prepared against the insidious charming of these preachers of
self-sacrifice. The individual to-day has learnt both his worth
and his power. If the State, if the Divine purpose cannot
justify itself to him, to his sense of value and righteousness of
aim, he will have none of it; he will turn to 'cultivate his
garden,' an obvious duty not without its own simple delight
and immediate recompense. Although (as we see clearly) the
human mind is eager to discover a cause worth the serving, the
modern half-hearted appeals, duty for duty's sake, surrender of
present gain for a remote and problematic posterity, are listened
to with chilling silence. Christianity provides us with an ideal
object for our efforts, with a Sovereign who can recognise merit
and guarantee future triumph, with a sense of personal value,
with the assurance of the worth of endeavour; and in this
leaching, not merely appropriate to the present day but indis-
pensable, the Church occupies a unique position : it is the sole
hope of Western society.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE IV— A
The Three Stages of Modern Apologetic
CrEDIBILITyI ^^„„^,„^„^,„^ ^^ ^„^ fPURE REASON
■c, I CORRESPONDING TO THE U;, ^ c^
I'Z. j THKK. PH..OSOPH.ES j^--^^^-
§ I. Different standpoint of man of action and reflection : the
one careless of the absoluteness of a working hypothesis : conflict of
Science and ' democracy ' in one of its phases : rejection of a ' single
law ' in modern French thought : English doubt of the claims of
' architectonic ' science.
§ 2. Successive isolations of the Religious problem : the ages of
reason, of facts, of values, — corresponding to the years 1700- 1900 ;
early inquiry into Christian dogma by Rationalism : second inquiry
of Science, — the nineteenth century ' historic ' ; this age not prolific
in new principles ; but in revivals : its title to distinction, its in-
dustry : its interest, the conflict of ideas.
§ 3. Keen and critical inquiry into the Gospel story : attempt to
study without prejudice : general belief that its morality might survive
its supernatural basis : at length realised that Nature taught an
opposite lesson to Christian altruism : much pains to reconcile :
flnal settlement into Gnosticism ; or the theory of combating the Cosmic
Process : absence of any clear principle.
§ 4. u4 humanistic reaction sets in ; values : rejection of the
standards of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries : a division of ter-
ritory proposed : modesty of our aim to-day, to understand and
provide for average man : silence of contemporary thought on all
ultimate problems ; no reason for rejecting the light we have.
§ I. The traveller in search of Religious truth may follow
three paths at discretion : he may point to the probability or
reasonableness a priori of the doctrine ; he may carefully
ascertain the accuracy of the method of revelation (if indeed
the religion has any historical kernel); or he may point to
the value of the beliefs in their wholesome influence on life
267
268 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and happiness, to the social uses of the Church which is their
custodian. Now the undying feud between the philosophic
and the popular attitude to things, is due to their different
criterion. There is no sign at present that this stubborn
incompatibility can be reconciled. The average man is not
in the least interested in the pursuit of truth, that is of
logical consistency. If he can be provided with a working
hypothesis, a general rule of conduct, a scientific presumption,
somehow applicable to things, he has neither leisure nor
inclination to concern himself with the absoluteness of the
hypothesis which he finds so useful, with 'eternal and im-
mutable morality,' or with the essential relation of thought
and things. This (it will be said) is but to paraphrase the
commonplace that the busy man's standpoint \s practical^ the
philosopher's speculative. But some commonplaces are pro-
found; and some truisms are so often repeated that their
meaning and implications are apt to be forgotten. The
modern conflict of physical Science or abstract philosophy
with the aims and ideals of 'democracy,' should convince a
careful student of this complex age that the antithesis is of
very real import It is not too much to say that the future
of Western Europe (it would be arrogant to say of mankind)
must depend on the settlement or compromise which may
be arrived at between the two. The Christian and ' democratic '
axiom, 'every man an end in himself,' admits of no dispute
whatever in the opinion of the religious believer or the genuine
lover of his kind. It is a doctrine in which science and
philosophy cannot acquiesce, not because their point of view
is false, but because it is partial. We have ere this maintained
that there is no such thing as an ' architectonic ' science. We
listen with attention to the loud disclaimer of the supposed
identity of natural and social phenomena, which of late years
has reached us from France (once the very home and cradle of
monistic theory and logical coherence), from Rauh, L^vy-
Bruhl, Jankelevitch, fellow-countrymen of the great champions
of a single mastering law, Rousseau, Napoleon, Comte. We
in England have not indeed become once more conscious
of this dualism, because we have never forgotten it. In the
eyes of the strict it has always been the reproach of English
thinkers that they have never accepted the undivided sover-
CREDIBILITY, FACT, AND VALUE 269
eignty of pure thought. The philosopher in these islands
has always been many things beside ; the most materialist, a
devout Christian; the most sceptical, a sound man of
business; the most convinced of the vanity of things, an
eager, practical worker for the good of his age. It is the
merit of the * Constitutional ' temper, which implies not, as is
so idly supposed, an insurgence of the people against mon-
archical whim, but (let it be seriously remembered at the
present time) a generous deference to the weaker side, a
dislike of all dictatorship and State-encroachment, a spirit of
compromise, which puts up with what is second-best in theory,
if only a modified perfection will win a more general accept-
ance. It is surely no small achievement to brave with good-
humour this taunt of illogicality ; at given moments to isolate
the matter under discussion, to define precisely the sphere of
debate, so that we successfully avoid the temptation of reducing
all to an abstract unity, to a * night in which all cows are
black.' But if it is insisted that an architectonic science, or
at least rule, must be found, we must unhesitatingly claim
that place for Religion, which, in the sense employed in these
essays, is always practical and not speculative.
§ 2. In each of the two last centuries, thought centring
attention on the religious problem has been dominated by an
exclusive idea. To the age of reason succeeds the age of
fact ; and to this, again, the age of values. Each of our pre-
decessors has made an honest attempt at covering the whole
ground of experience with a single formula. Individual search
was at first directed upon the theory of revelation; only
imperfectly self-conscious and without humane sympathies,
these critics rejected the belief in any Divine unfolding, save
that contained in the all-sufficient volume of Nature. A
closer inquiry into this Divine and benevolent mechanism
would disclose all secrets needful for man's well-being. The
very fundamental conception of Christianity, the union of the
finite with infinitude, put its whole dogmatic basis at once out
of court. Instead was left a human prophet of pure moral
teaching and blameless life. Starting from prepossessions a
priori, wery natural to their habit of thought and impartial
criticism, they rejected the credibility of the story; because
God, as they conceived Him, could never have acted in that
270 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
way. With the failure of Rationalism, identifying itself with
a Nature it had never investigated, a new method was adopted.
Theories and logic and vision were given up to the Idealist
and Romantic Schools of discontented poets and philosophers ;
practical duties were entrusted to the State, with its largely
increased powers; and the universal aim in all branches of
knowledge was to ascertain wkat really happened. The
nineteenth century is above all the 'historic' age, — the age
of unbiassed inquiry into origins and stages of development.
All scientific study must start free from prejudice, though it
may be animated and stimulated by every kind of vague
hypothesis. It must rigidly divest itself of any kind of moral
prepossessions; and how difficult this is no reader of the
great authors of Science is unaware ; it seems impossible for
them to forget in the sense of the import of their mission
that we do not go to exact inquiry for commonplaces of
moral exhortation, and that a lay-reader and his tone of
thought is entirely out of place in a laboratory. " Render unto
Caesar " ; and this is no despairing surrender, but a necessary
limitation of province and propriety. This simple registry
of fact is the great achievement of the age that is past; its
industry is the best title to remembrance, its exactitude.
The nineteenth century may well be challenged to have
produced a single new principle, a single fresh idea: its
novelty and interest lie in this, — that it displays all principles,
all ideas in conflict. It brought forth an abundant crop of
revivals of antique or forgotten doctrines ; because a purely
negative survey of things as they have happened, or will again
happen, can be reconciled to any and every hypothesis as to
the source and meaning of the whole. When Mr. Darwin
was asked whether he considered his discoveries told in favour
of Christianity or against it, he answered without hesitation,
" In favour." Although far more exact proof of the unbroken
chain of circumstance is now forthcoming, it cannot be said
that the sense of fatal necessity is really more acute and
oppressive than in the sixteenth century ; when Kepler, mark-
ing at one moment the leap from mediaeval to modern thought,
removed the animce motrices in his second edition and
substituted natural forces. In the tracing of sequence and
series, in the prediction of coming events, in the control
CREDIBILITY, FACT, AND VALUE 271
(customary but always precarious) of physical phenomena,
the past epoch has made unrivalled progress. But it has
made no innovation in qualifying the Universe into whose
secrets it has so closely penetrated. With all its knowledge it
prefers to confess its ignorance. Except in a narrow and pietistic
clique, the voice of optimism is silent ; and in spite of some
superficial disclaimers of pessimism, the most prevalent theory
of the Universe as a whole is borrowed from the gnostic
dreamers of the second century.
§ 3. The attitude of such an age to the Gospel was one of
keen interest and criticism. Recognising the importance of
Christian phenomena in world-history, in social and political
development, writers of all Schools divested themselves of all
prejudice and metaphysic. It was not their concern to rave
against priestcraft or fumble with forgotten controversy.
Dispassionate calm, and even wistful sympathy, mark their
writings; the Gospel-record took its place with everything
human or natural, — a development having ascertainable cause,
motive, laws, utility ; following a course easy to be traced, and
doomed like all else to find an end when its vitality was
exhausted. In this research into religious origins, there was
nothing necessarily hostile, except perhaps the implicit assump-
tion that Christianity was a pure and natural phenomenon.
Some ventured to attack certain doctrinal outposts, without
carrying the site of the main citadel; others refrained from
any comment, though the result of their work was subversive
of belief; others, again, regretted the painful necessity of
plain speaking, and comforted their hearers with the thought
that the beneficial effects and pure morality of the Gospel
would survive the overthrow of its dogma. For nothing was
more typical of the last century than the vagueness and
instability of its moral sanction. It was imagined that, apart
from any 'doctrine of man and his nature, of the universe
and its meaning,' the * beauty of holiness,' in a very restricted
and Christian (not to say Puritan) sense, was obvious and
irresistible. The clearest thinkers, blind in this respect to
the real tendency and average temper of their age, preached
the separation, indeed the enfranchisement, of altruistic ethics
from the only doctrine which gave it cogency or attractiveness.
At that stage they neither knew nor cared whether further
272 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
investigation into the root-principle of life or the stages of
its evolution gave any warranty for this curious self-surrender.
As deepening knowledge laid bare the wide rift between the
lessons of natural selection and the teaching of the Gospel,
men were at much pains to conceal, to deny, or to explain it.
Many volumes were written on the relations of Science and
Religion; and whatever was the standpoint of the authors,
secular or orthodox, the final result was the same, — we must
leave to Nature her fatalism and her cruelty, and see in God
only ineffable love, and in supreme abnegation man's highest
duty. Even where the second axiom was rejected (as in the
British School of Science), the cogency of the third was never
seriously called in question. A demur might be raised that
except in the brief and instinctive sacrifice of maternal love,
man could seek in vain for any counterpart or encouragement
in Nature to their very exacting code; and at last a final
rupture took place with the inexorable physical system. Man's
sole virtue and sole hope lay in ceaseless combat of the cosmic
process ; the antithesis, which even lurked in the complacent
monism of the Stoics, between *wy' nature and ^ universal
nature, was recognised as the base and incentive of all human
endeavour, the ground of all human society. This antithesis
is the esoteric belief which actually governs Western conduct.
Yet the stream of apologies and reconciliations has not
ceased. Some explain away the reality of animal pain ;
others would console individual misery and failure by the
unsatisfactory and indistinct theory of an example set to
posterity; others deny, or give an unfamiliar interpretation
to immortality. And while the life-impulse prevents the extinc-
tion of the race (at least among our simpler classes), while
nations are recruited by the natural working of a passion
which has never recognised Reason as its master, — the best
die out and leave no heirs. In the acknowledged vanity of
things (apart from the Christian hypothesis) none can supply
anything approaching a clear and logical justification of their
hopes, their principle of action, their clinging to life; or of
the widespread yet quite unreflected * goodness,' kindness
and sympathy, which we meet with at every turn in dealing
with average and unsophisticated mankind.
§ 4. Whilst only a few, soon silenced or confined as mad-
CREDIBILITY, FACT, AND VALUE 273
men, follow to its logical conclusions the lesson of natural
facts, the remainder are (as we must, I fear, again remind them)
but pensioners of a system which they have done their best
to undermine. It is not to the inconsistency of this attitude
we would call especial attention ; the only enemies to the
advance of thought and the profit of men are the claimants
to absolute truth, the proposers of systems complete and
symmetrical. It is to the new standard which they employ,
a criterion which they will only avow with reluctance — the
standard of values. We must again utterly repudiate the taunt
of * bankruptcy,' which is levelled, here and in France and in
Germany (with the famous ' ignorabimus ' of Dubois-Reymond),
at scientific pretension. Never was a shaft so aimless or so
innocuous. Because some meddlesome sciolists endeavoured
in vain to extract rules for the moral life from physical
phenomena, it is the acme of religious arrogance to blame the
system, when in their own department they had won such
results. But we have made no little step towards clearness of
thought if we recognise that man is neither * an organ of pure
reason,' nor a higher, that is, more complex, animal, guided only
by the push and thrust of outward circumstance; but first
and foremost, and in spite of his introspective and self-centred
temper to-day, a social being, eager to find a cause worth his
support, actuated by generous instincts, which owe little
allegiance to the control of calculation and reflection. It is
in the conviction that neither the eighteenth nor the nine-
teenth centuries exhausted the nature of man that we are
proposing to-day a fresh and, it may be, lasting division of
territory. The former cared nothing for average men, though
it talked much of average humanity. The latter, moving in
somewhat blind sentiment along the path of so-called political
reform, must confess that it has not properly understood the
character and needs of those masses whose ideal rights it
maintained with such unselfish vigour. And while this
enthusiasm for freedom has been damped by the cynical and
sinister results of the parallel movement, of scientific induction,
men are perhaps only too ready to despair finally of the salva-
tion of the individual. He is to be left to penal settlements,
to coercive legislation. We have at least outlived inordinate
confidence in intellect apart from experience and the sympathy
18
274 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and tolerance which it should bring ; we have found nothing
to controvert, but also nothing to guide us in peculiarly human
duties, in the advancing certainty of facts, pursued down their
several avenues of knowledge. But we have at last met man
face to face ; we are endeavouring to understand that which
is unsophisticated — the child, the savage, the peasant. And
it is because we believe in the Gospel message as the unique
medicine of society through the individual, that we accept in
an age that would be * democratic ' if it could, the canon of
value and of worth) — at least a working test and guarantee
in a world where all really ultimate questions are still so
profoundly obscure. But a widespread darkness is no reason
for shutting out such glimmers of light as are permitted to
reach us.
B
On the Pretensions of Esoteric Religion
§ I. The claim of ' Catholicity,' of universal application : unique
appeal of Christianity, though it might adjust itself to individual
needs : tendency of all religion to divide into popular and esoteric :
Plato's ' noble falsehood ' : this precedent may excuse all deviation
in civil crisis from ordinary canons of right.
§ 2. Often a sincere desire to give the ignorant the best possible :
much that is slothful in the freedom we allow others cheerfully to-day :
the true duty of slave-owners, as of ' imperial ' races : esoteric reserve
in the early scholastics : some myths rejected : unworthy reserve
not a fair charge against medicsval hierarchy.
§ 3. Parents unconscious of offspring's maturity : Protestant
religion betrays a tendency to fall asunder into two : lack of
sympathy with the plain man in the eighteenth century : Rousseau
and English Revivalism appeal to direct experience, not to reason :
a similar modesty in the science of the next age.
§ 4. Science has appeared, deserting its true province of par-
ticulars, to teach an esoteric cult : ' monistic ' indijference has no
charm for the average mind, no claim on the ordinary life : in the
reduction of the simplest moral axiom to the sphere of faith all ' boasting
is excluded,' and wise and unlearned stand on the same lowly level.
§ I. One of the safest and most obvious tests of the value
ESOTERIC RELIGION 275
and benefit of an institution is its catholicity, Tiie wider the
circle to which it appeals, the greater its beneficial effect, and
(what may even weigh more with some minds) the better the
test of its 'truth,' its accordance not merely with a brief
national temper or private idiosyncrasy but with some ob-
jective reality. It was a ground of early attack upon
Christianity that it wished to be catholic and exclusive. It
was indeed a reproach that rising from the narrow creed of an
isolated people it claimed to transcend all distinctions of race,
age, and rank, and blend in one family all the nations of the
earth. And though the emphasis of the appeal might vary
slightly in each case, the appeal was always the same : man's
weakness and need of God, God's ' tender love towards man-
kind,' and (the eternal religious paradox) the ennobling
possibility for man of willing service in the highest cause.
To one, the stress might be laid on comfort in unmerited
distress ; to another, on the rescue from some special thraldom
of evil habit ; to another, on deliverance from the vagrancy of
intellectual uncertainty ; to another, once again, on the touching
spectacle of a visible and cheerful community at peace within
itself. To one class alone did the message appeal in vain, to
those who felt no need of such help. For such, even the
Saviour Himself could * do no mighty work.' But let the weak-
ness and dependence be once allowed, and redemption was nigh
at hand \ and in all the difference or versatility of its application,
the Gospel lesson was always the same — "God so loved the
world." To some, rest and quiet after the turmoil of life in
the * everlasting arms ' ; to others, the fiery zeal of missionary
enterprise ; — to one, the remote cell of the hermit ; to another,
the martyr's stake; to another, the auditorium of the cate-
chumens, or some meeting-place of earnest yet pagan thought.
But throughout, ' one and the self-same spirit.' Now, so far as
we know from historical research, every great religion has
suffered by drifting into two unequal parts : the * truths,' or
visible images and stories, accommodated to the vulgar ; and
the real meaning of this symbolism, entrusted only to the wise
or proficient. It has been divided into exoteric and esoteric
religion; simple duties, blind obedience, dogmas verbally
repeated, ceremonies unintelligently performed, on the one
hand ; on the other, secret beliefs or practices, sceptical study,
276 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
ironical compliance, authoritative utterance to the laity. Even
Plato's generous rulers had to appeal in an ideal State to the
influence of falsehood. The welfare of the State, the dutiful
submission of its citizens, seemed to depend on the acceptance
of a definite mythology, which amongst other ends was to
reconcile them to distinctions of lot. It would be easy,
following this innocent example, to justify logically any special
deviation from veracity and justice, at the trumpet-call, * salus
Reipublicae.' The natural perversion of this kind of doctrine
was seen even in Plato's day, in the intermittent murder of
dangerous helots ; and the Venetian oligarchy and the Spanish
Inquisition can plead the same precedent. In purely religious
matters it implies the strict regulation of the supply of dogma
to the vulgar, the perpetual tutelage of the uneducated, com-
fortable but unprogressive, and the haughty yet ironical
pretensions of the privileged hierarchy.
§ 2. This is the defect which follows in the train of any
sincere solicitude for the ignorant — a desire to give the best
that is possible for them to understand. Like our boasted
political enfranchisement, there is much that is slothful in the
shifting of responsibility, in the open Bible, in the public dis-
cussion of abstruse questions, in leaving so much unsettled for
the unstrung conscience of youth. We can see two motives
at work in either tendency : an eager sympathy with those who
do not enjoy privilege, and a secret desire to be rid of its
burden. But it cannot well be denied that with the Reforma-
tion, religion surrendered much of its contact with daily life,
the minister much of his minute influence on his flock ; that
to-day, the retirement of the competent and conscientious
from the guidance of affairs may soon constitute a real danger.
It is more difficult, yet infinitely more interesting, to guide
the independent than to govern the slave. Yet so far as the
ultimate welfare of the latter was concerned, how often would
it not have been the kindest policy to retain boldly the odious
name of slave-master, rather than imperil the future of the
weak by premature emancipation ! The Mediaeval Church
was sincere in its claims to universal dominion, not merely
over the hearts or counsels of kings, but over the minute
details, commercial intercourse, of gild traditions, of peasant
life. The dogma, carefully prepared, was derived to the
ESOTERIC RELIGION 277
obedient layman, like sacramental grace, through the proper
channel of the accredited priesthood. It is difficult to accuse
the great names of the scholastic period of intellectual pride,
yet it is plain that something of esoteric reserve entered into
the priestly spirit. It is impossible to bring home either to
Templar or Jesuit the sweeping accusations of irreligion
which have been levelled at them in company with all secret
and mysterious confraternities, challenging envy and suspicion,
like the Freemasons to-day, by their wealth or influence. To
substantiate the prosecution in a few cases is not to accept
the charge as generally proved against the whole body. It is
inconceivable (as has indeed been alleged) that the admission
of a Templar implied in every case a trampling on the Cross,
or that the inner doctrine of the devoted company of Jesus is
a barren Deism. It was not pride of intellect that hastened
on Protestant reform ; it was loss of conviction and honour in
the very headquarters of Catholicism, — " God has given us the
Papacy ; let us enjoy the gift," — confronted by the chivalrous
Teutonic individualism which cannot stand a lie. With all
the various forms of reserve which might be taken by an
aristocratic religion, accommodated for acceptance to the
popular competence, it cannot be honestly maintained that
the Roman Church as a whole has seriously erred in keeping
back truth from the people. It is almost impossible (so com
plex is human nature) to explore and analyse motives with
success. But a sincere reluctance to burden a weaker brother
with a load of dialectic may be laid to the credit of the Church,
no less than the visible and picturesque ceremony, which,
while it might unduly materialise the spiritual element, tamed
and interested and occupied the eager barbarians, and in
concrete form taught them useful lessons.
§ 3. It was the chief mistake of the hierarchy not to under-
stand when their pupil became adult. But it was, for many
reasons, both a natural and creditable error. It is difficult for
the ordinary parent to realise when his offspring is mature;
and to let the fledgling go from home to the only effective
educator — experience.
The unfortunate confessionalism of the Reformed Churches,
their preoccupation with literal orthodoxy, hindered the effective
application of the great and simple truths to which the earlier
278 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
movement appealed. In an age in which so much deference
was paid to Enlightenment, Religion could not fail to assume
two guises — for the educated and the ignorant. We have
pointed out the supposed merit of Deistic simplicity, the
universal currency of the few dogmas they were still content
to leave. But it would be a mistake to imagine the Deists as
warmly sympathetic with the peculiar difficulties of the inferior
classes ; and their lack of warmth was fatal to their proposed
substitute for revealed and established Religion. The whole
age ignored the plain man, though it professed to recognise
only a popular standard. Clearness and intelligibility was
the sole test ; but it accepted what was clear and intelligible
only to that strangely limited and uniform mind, polite
society in West Europe. In Germany and in England, re-
actions toward a personal religious pietism took place. These
excluded the very notion of esoteric reserve, in their disdain of
secular wisdom, of the support which dialectic and preciseness
of dogma might be supposed to yield to Faith. Like the
movement of Rousseau, these appealed to the ground of the
heart, to the direct immediacy of access to God, to a mystical
sense, which has never been wanting in the Church, even in
the most arid times. Viewed with profound disapproval by
the upholders of * reasonable' religion, of prudence and of
common sense, in whose ears ' enthusiasm ' was the most
damning charge, the renewed power of personal religion
flourished apace, and in our own country contributed directly
to the later ' Catholic ' movement some of its best features.
It was not to be expected that any claim to greater intellectual
insight should be allowed in the nineteenth century. A very
real and general desire to see things as they are, not merely
as confronted by tradition and by prejudice, led to patient
research, candid avowal of ignorance, and open discussion.
§ 4. That which is lasting in this age is neither its political
development nor its fancied recovery of lost principles, but
merely its mastery of facts. It examines these in their special
groups without undue prepossession, and above all with no
moral bias. But the scientific spirit sometimes seems to teach
that it is unadvisable to dazzle the vulgar with naked * Truth.'
It has proved hard, if not impossible, to co-ordinate into a
system, to animate with a humanistic sympathy, these various
ESOTERIC RELIGION 279
groups of necessary facts, which are somehow, in the end,
kindred. Men have almost ceased (or will soon cease alto-
gether) to speak of the 'religion of Science' as something
apart from and superior to the * religion of man,' as this is
revealed in the Gospel. Esoteric religion has always, in past
ages as to-day, tended towards a negative Pantheism, and the
indifference of distinctions, as of matter and spirit ; towards
denial of any absoluteness of division, in questions of right
and wrong. But however strongly philosophic reflection may
set* in favour of this monistic apprehension of the world,
it is certain that it has few attractions for the average mind.
The religious revival in the nineteenth century has been,
after all, social, not speculative ; and in the relegation of the
most elementary axioms to the realm of faith there is a
real guarantee against the revival of intellectual pride. So
long as the * rightness of reason,' the ' power and wisdom
and benevolence of the Creator,' *the certainty of moral
recompense,' were truths self-evident to the educated, and
sufficient for their guidance, while the masses stood in need
of positive doctrines, personal and historic ; there was room for
the ' lesser and the greater mystery,' according to the adept's
proficiency. But now that these are no less matters of pious
faith than the most abstruse 'credendum' of Christian
theology, all men are reduced, without respect to their insight
or attainments, to the same humble level.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE V— A
Ages of Faith
§ I. The present age the Age of Faith : every first principle {in
morals as much as in doctrine) called in question : Western mind
cannot settle into pure monotheism {unwarranted by facts) or mere
social convention : Christianity indeed stronger than other creeds,
because of its influence : Science respects only what is, and finds
only this justified : the new canon of authenticity, survival in the
theoretic field, proved value in the practical.
§ 2. Reluctance to speak of ' duties,' stress on * rights ' : marks
not necessarily a weakening of moral fibre, but a natural result of
thought-development : Dualism of law : a condition of welfare, not
an arbitrary stipulation : general agreement allowed, even of the
modern idiosyncrasies : even this not clearly defined : ' Catholicity '
only belongs to the first axioms of logic : thinness of universality :
individualism in conception of heaven : we remould social convention
and question moral law.
§ 3. ' Rights ' not ' duties ' prominent in Christianity as well as
in eighteenth-century Enlightenment : privilege before precept : op-
position to the rule of majorities quite as marked to-day as earlier
revolt against personal tyranny : order of the Church Catechism :
outside Christianity religion often means the sacrifice of the worth-
less to the unknown : State has lost its power of appeal ; threat and
compulsion : the Enlightenment {at its best) agrees with Christianity /
man not to be bound, but won, to the right.
§ 4. ' But is not this vocation and election a mere mythologic pos-
tulate ? and this faith in a transcendental destiny a bar to reasonable
and modest progress here ? ' : but this objection true of all the
principles animating the idealist movements of last century : all
Abolitionist measures imply treatment of men as better than they
actually are : ' man can only attain freedom or political responsi-
bility if considered already as deserving of it ' : extension of suffrage
{where not purely utilitarian) followed same lines : rights before
duties : duties learnt only incidentally by exercising rights : science
all the time was accumulating directly opposite evidence.
§ 5. Both the claims of the Enlightenment for man and the titles
of the newly baptized constitute a challenge to facts : the confidence
AGES OF FAITH 281
of the reforming secularist more a * venture of faith ' than the Christian
hope : democracy claims immediate enjoyment : subjective experience
confirms the value of Christian surrender of faith : philanthropy
disheartened : earlier appeal for deferred enjoyment and self-denying
toil : would he out of place to-day : effect of doubt in immortality :
unselfishness would still be practised, but it could not be rationally
defended.
§ 6. The Middle Ages as 'ages of faith' : inapplicable term:
immediacy of the Catholic Church, strong and rational : the ' ages
of faith ' begin with the Reformation : in spite of the lessons of
actuality, we cling to old beliefs : the postulate of reformers to-day
' dim mythologic postulate,' ' ventures of faith and hope ' : this in-
vocation of Faith more than ever before necessary ; the Church
alone answers.
§ I. It will not be found needful to deal at any great length
with the meaning and implication of this phrase — 'Ages of
Faith.' The standpoint occupied by these discussions (whether
true or false diagnosis of the course of thought) must be by
this time too clearly ascertained to stand in want of further
definition. It has been maintained in them that the present
age is the real ' age of Faith ' ; because the function of reason
has been reduced to a registry of phenomena, because no single
tenet of the scantiest theology or of the most attenuated moral
code remains at the present moment unshaken. Let it be
clearly understood, and let men face the issue honestly, that
the doctrine of purposive creation and moral plan in the
world, the very definition and use of * virtue,' the justification
of unselfishness (otherwise aimless) stand on no different
level to the particular dogmas of Christianity. They are pure
matters of pious and personal faith whenever they pass beyond
social convention, the compact of the weak. Arguments
for and against these beUefs (so indispensable to the social
life) play harmlessly round them ; conviction, if it follows at
all, comes from another source. Among other nations, where
prevails a prehistoric monotheism or its substitute, secular
socialism, deference to custom and respect for tradition may
prevent a really shrewd and outspoken inquiry into facts.
But the Western mind, once embarked on an independent
voyage of exploration, cannot be recalled from dangerous
shoals. In the new light of scientific fact and theory, the
same doubt that sets aside the Divine mission of Jesus ig
282 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
admissible against a moral creator or a teleologic aim. In
strictness, indeed, the Christian message is less open to assault
than a vague monistic piety, or even moral Theism. For the
scientific spirit finds that which /V, that which survives, justified at
the outset by this very fact. And, whatever its origin, the influ-
ence of the Gospel over all Western development, and its peculiar
consecration of the personal, its appeal to loyalty, is beyond
question. Study may indeed point out changes of emphasis,
from doctrinal to moral, from individualist ethics to social
interest, from outward dignity in the world to inward calm,
but never to a fundamental rearrangement of first principles.
And as to-day the chief problem before believer and unbeliever
alike is the position of the Church and its teaching in the
future community, we recognise first the fact that it is still
a power to be reckoned with, next that it has a practical
value for the average man of sober judgment, as vigorous
institution or as moral solace and appeal; — only in the
last and subordinate place does the scientific spirit allow
the inquiry to be raised as to the truth of the message, the
authenticity of its credentials. For authenticity is proved solely
by survival, not a priori. We have already called attention
to this diiferent attitude in criticism; stress on the strong
theoretical justification by the Fact that it is there: — in the
practical field, the acknowledged value of principles and
traditions in an age which has outlived all its own, and is
singularly ready (outside a certain sphere of utilitarian inter-
ference) to accept not ungratefully any guidance, any extraneous
support to the beliefs which still seem essential to social welfare.
§ 2. It is a commonplace to-day that we are afraid to speak
openly of ' duties ' : and the only safe topic is ' rights.' In one
sense, this marks not, as many idly suppose, a weakening of
the moral fibre, but a plain and necessary development of
common sense, the individual consciousness, confronted with
experience. The terms duty, law, obligation, even religion,
speak of dualism and chains and bondage. A law is obeyed,
surely not because it is an end-in-itself, or a stipulation, perhaps
capricious, of a higher power, but because it is a condition of
welfare. We take it on trust, but on reaching the age which bids
us inquire and criticise, we find there is perhaps nothing sacro-
sanct in the prohibition or command ; and in modern times we
AGES OF FAITH 283
have certainly outlived the notion of sacredness, in that
which is obnoxious to perpetual alteration, both in principle
and detail. The centre of gravity has passed irrevocably from
the objective fact to the subjective tribunal. " Only in terms
of myself can I interpret the world." And herein lies a plea
at least for the * truth ' as well as the use of the humanistic or
* moral ' attitude, which of late years has appeared so ill-founded
and problematic. We can never know the * thing-in-itself ' or
the particular phenomena except in this relation. * Truth'
may indeed exist somewhere as a unity beyond our ken,
but in the actual world it has as many appearances as there
are thinkers : ^uot homines, tot veritates. But this same rela-
tivity, which limits the jurisdiction of our particular colour
sense, musical and aesthetic taste, moral view and ideal,
may also be retrieved by the large though vague resemblance,
irreducible to exact canon, which exists between the judg-
ment of the varying units. What is significant is first the
idiosyncrasy of our sensations and our verdicts, next the
agreement that blends these variegated rays into a single shaft
of light. But if we are thankful for this vague and general
guidance, let us be modest enough not to claim absoluteness
even for this. It is not even capable of strict definition;
Truth, as well as law, is always weak, owing to its preten-
sions to universality (cAActVct . . . 8ia to KaOoXov). In this
light, as Novalis saw, the uncompelled sympathy and fellow-
feeling of another is of vital importance, and gives a new and
irrestistible confidence to our own convictions. The spontane-
ous in us meets a voluntary approval outside, and leaves the
domain of illusion or hallucination. We do not enter bound, as
the votaries into the sacred grove of the Semnones, into a rigid
realm of Truth. That which is catholic in the genuine sense
is confined to the attenuated first axioms of logic. The
universal is thin and rarefied, like the vast and homogeneous
vapour of the nebular hypothesis ; life pulses with conflict and
variety, as light in its pure brilliance is made up of all hues
merged for the general effect, but still distinguishable in them-
selves. And as truth here is partial and relative, so we must
believe heaven hereafter, no flat uniform perfection, suddenly
reducing to a dead level all the countless varieties of character
and predilection, but a hopeful outlook for future develop-
284 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
ment of the qualities here handselled and disciplined, under
the eyes of the same Master and in the same service of the
right. This kind of ' individualism,' whether based on these
or similar arguments, is in truth the only dogma that has any
genuine influence to-day, that Christianity can afford to recog-
nise. Law succumbs to inquiry : first appearing as aweful and
not to be questioned, it next is seen as a tiresome restraint
on individual freedom; finally, in the inevitable * synthesis,'
as a loving and needful provision against the rashness of
judgment not yet mature, a condition not a hindrance of
progress. But in this process it has become a means ; it is
no longer an end ; and as we are at liberty to evade physical
law, so we are free to remould social convention, and (within
certain limits) to question the absoluteness of moral authority.
§ 3. The changed temper which dwells on rights rather
than on duties is justified not merely by the whole underlying
motive of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, of modern
political reform, but by the presupposition of Christianity
itself. The early bloodless revolution in thought, the later
sanguinary outburst, the patient development, part idealist
part utilitarian, within the last fifty years, all arose from
indignation at the disregard of individual rights, at the mis-
carriage of personal justice, at the abuse of privilege. There
was among the best no idea of substituting one arbitrary
sovereignty for another; but a visionary dream of direct
government of the people by themselves. It is wholly an
error to suppose that the average man bows more willingly
to the 'will of the majority,' of which he does not happen
to be a member, than to the edicts of a king into whose
council-chamber he cannot claim admittance. There is every
probability (as history repeatedly shows) that the latter, even
in his selfish aims, is really furthering impartially the national
welfare, and is its best representative. There is the strongest
presumption that even at their most generous level the
efforts of sections will seldom rise much beyond exultation in
some party-victory. There is the same spirit of dull opposition
to majority-rule as to court-caprice or bureaucratic interference.
And this is in no sense a sign of degeneracy ; it is only a sign
of maturity, which conceives calmly and in relation to itself,
which refuses to be the dupe of a specious phrase or an
AGES OF FAITH 285
eloquent speaker. And Christianity too knows nothing of
submission to law for the sake of law and its automatic
uniformity. It is noted by preachers and divines that, of set
purpose or by felicitous chance, the Church Catechism
begins by a triumphant recapitulation of Christian privilege^
next of Christian belief (an account of the solicitude, the
sacrifices of God to recall us from ruin), and only in the
third place arrives at the duties which are incumbent on one
who has for no merit of his own already received so many
gratuitous rights. Like begets like ; the spirit of Christian
endeavour and martyrdom is no idle surrender of the worth-
less to the unknown, but a loyal attempt, however poor, to
meet the love of God. Brought up in such a school, it is no
wonder that the Christian looks askance at the claims of the
State to obedience and even to love. The two foremost
nations in European culture are in the throes of civil war,
each in their typical manner excited or phlegmatic. Once
more a religious question, what is Caesar's, what Divine ? has
arisen to embitter the good feeling of the social life. The
State, which to-day is but the alternation of faction, honest
but discontinuous, each bent on retrieving the errors or
reversing the policy of the last Government, cannot help
having recourse to threat and compulsion ; but it has thereby
lost its power of appeal. It begins in suspicion of its subjects
as much to-day as formerly. Christianity (as well as the
Enlightenment in its more generous, least cynical moods)
begins with the election, the vocation, the glorious destiny of
the individual, who by this feels himself not bound, but won,
to a better life of grateful service.
§ 4. Now it cannot be raised as a reproach against Christianity
that these privileges are dim mythologic postulates resting on a
system of imposture by which the wealthy have tricked the
poor into submission, in hopes of recompense beyond the
tomb. I believe here is the real gravamen against the Church
in the minds of earnest social reformers. In laying stress on
faith and futurity, the poor have been cajoled into letting slip
immediate opportunities for redress of grievance; discontent
has been stigmatised by an interested hierarchy, in the pay
of the State, as the chief crime in the sight of Heaven ; and
thus the path of advance has been barred. Now it must be
286 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
clear to any student of the political or social movements
during last century that all the first principles which have
animated idealistic zeal, in overturning abuse of privilege, in
recovering lost rights, and in renewing lost self-respect,
have without exception been of the nature of * mythologic
postulates.' One and all have entailed violent contradiction
of existing circumstance, defiance of every possible ex-
perience. The enfranchisement of the negro rested on a
somewhat complex general notion, compounded of Christian
sentiment for the weaker and oppressed, a ' classical-antique '
veneration for undefined liberty as in itself desirable, a
rudimentary sense of justice, and behind all, the pressure of
certain economic facts. The Abolitionist movement was a
* leap in the dark,' a presumption that individually the slave
was better than he appeared, and in any case could only
attain freedom if he was already treated as deserving it. The
sympathy with oppressed classes and nationalities, being also
idealistic, derived most of its warmth from a glowing and
prophetic prospect of what they might become if rightly used,
and was seldom reinforced by any unmistakable sign of
their present merit. The gradual extension of voting-power
in England might indeed very justly be defended on grounds
of prudence ; it being not a sentiment of justice alone, but the
pure common sense of worldly administration, which counsels
the removal of every grievance before it is acutely felt by
the sufferer. It certainly could not find much support in
sober logic; and indeed, at the time when such measures
were passed (largely, it must be feared, from partizan motives),
the science of government was fast becoming so complicated
a business, was falling so certainly from the hands of the
amateur into the hands of the adept and professional, that it
seemed a pleasantry to secure with some solemnity the pre-
dominance of ignorance in the national councils. It cannot
then be for one moment doubtful that the real lever in this
remarkable and bloodless revolution was a Christian and an
idealistic view of human nature, which in faith looked far
beyond the facts and even the probabilities, which dwelt on
privilege first before coming to deserts, on rights before
enumerating duties. It was a gage of defiance thrown, by
the reaction of a sentiment largely pietistic and religious
• AGES OF FAITH 287
without knowing it, against the fatalistic lesson which was
being urged on men from each new scientific discovery, of
the natural inequality of mankind, the certain doom of the
subject races, of the weaker vessel, of honest simplicity, either
in the rivalry of statesmanship or commerce.
§ 5. The imaginary prerogative of man, " bom free and
equal and with an inaUenable claim to happiness and right
of self-development," is no less a " dim mythologic postulate "
than the solemn titles of the newly baptized, " a member of
Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of
heaven." Both are a visible paradox, a strong protest against
facts; a presumption in favour of the triumph of innocence
and righteousness, which is hardly derived from experience.
Indeed, to speak truly, the confidence of the social reformer
on the lines of secularism is more strictly a 'venture of
faith' than the pious hope of the Christian. There is
abundant proof of the actual benefit of such belief as can
convince the poor of a future blessedness, as can give peace
and resignation to the most afflicted lot. If the claim of
modern 'democracy,' which as yet has never entered into
its promised rights, is to immediacy of enjoyment, surely
the happiness of the converted (subjective though no doubt
it must be to the end, like all happiness) is the most
'immediate' and undeferred return for a single act of faith
and surrender ! One alarming symptom to-day is this : the
faith which alone supports any genuine social reform, which
with generous lavishness would give all privilege before
exacting any duty, is growing disheartened. A calm diagnosis
of the altered temper of philanthropy to-day and half a
century back is much to be desired. Mr. Hobhouse, in an
interesting volume on ' Democracy and Reaction,' has traced
with much care and feeling the decay of the old illusions and
prepossessions on which the earlier and more hopeful move-
ment was borne along. We might indeed smile at the
inconsistency of the pioneers who called on men to sacrifice
their lives freely for a cause, for an abstraction, the freedom
of Greece or the union of the Italian provinces, while they
were perhaps at the time accusing the Church of postponing
indefinitely man's happiness beyond the grave. Sometimes
they dwelt on the immediate conquest of the 'Land of
288 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Promise,' and displayed the heavy clusters of Eshcol, which
told of speedy enjoyment there. But at others, they were
forced to address themselves to the spirit of self-denial, service
in a losing cause (as it must often seem), an appeal to
impulsive and uncalculating human nature, which seldom
fails ; they begged the disappointed claimants to wander
without repining in the wilderness, that their children might
one day enter Canaan. We may seriously doubt if such an
appeal will be so successful to-day. The entire movement
in early times was animated by vague beliefs in human nature,
which, closely examined, turn out to be inseparably united
with respect for the individual, his character, his chances, and
his immortality. The curious sophistry which consoles the
creature of a brief hour for its pain and failure, by pointing
out the benefit of his example on a posterity yet unborn, was
not then in fashion. Thinkers had not fully confronted the
implications of ' thanatism ' : we have certainly discovered
that ' indefinite postponement of pleasure ' to a remote con-
tingency (for our tenure of this planet is precarious no
less for the race than the individual) is no doctrine that can
be openly taught. Let no one mistake my meaning: the
unreasoned surrenders of the unselfish, for children, friends,
or country, will still take place. Scientific arguments against
survival could neither wholly eradicate the belief in our
continued life nor extirpate that involuntary sympathy and
respect for others which, if carefully analysed, must carry
with it the belief in the personal units, their wholesome
discipline and perfectibility. But this doctrine is not one
which calm Reason can allow to be preached or inculcated ;
we may (and probably shall) practise unselfishness ; we could
not possibly defend or explain it.
§ 6. It was the fashion to point scornfully at the ignorance
of the Middle Ages, at the subservience to a narrow and
interested governing class, at their easy belief in the marvellous
— in a word, at the * Ages of Faith.' In the Lectures we have
raised the question, whether * Faith ' is quite the right word
to employ with regard to a loyal acceptance of a Church
whose corporate reason analysed and demonstrated the
^credenda,' whose practical authority, with or without State -
aid, could punish offenders and coerce the recalcitrant. In
AGES OF FAITH 289
the sense of vague and wistful moral surrender to the absent,
as the Ideal, ws cpw/xevoi/, it is certainly not applicable. It
implies merely the yielding to the opinion of experts in matters
where they and they alone were qualified to judge ; the truly
* democratic' character of the hierarchy, recruited from every
class in society, providing an open ladder to the highest office,
prevented any complaint of the secrecy or imposture of an
intriguing oligarchy. The Church was well able to perform
her promise ; to rebuke kings and rescue the oppressed. It
is the Protestant systems which have encouraged men to this
unlimited deferment; and it is, in consequence, difficult for
them to have parley with Socialism, — always, in its very
essence and under the most clever disguises, the gospel of
* the Immediate.' The * Ages of Faith ' in reality began with
the Reformation. The emphasis on belief has been ever
since growing more intense. The discord of faith and facts —
facts political, social, domestic, scientific — has never before
been so acute. And yet the world walks still, or tries to walk,
by faith and not by sight. There is still a pitiful and half-
ashamed reluctance to follow Nature's easy method with regard
to the incompetent, still a shrinking to end incurable disease.
There is still a desire to give opportunities and field for
training to that freewill, which we in our scientific moments
pronounce to be a dangerous illusion. There is still a
deference to individual character, which is inexplicable except
on the assumption that something precious and dear to
Almighty Power lies behind the worn and soiled vesture.
There are still some who would resent a mechanically virtuous
Republic, not so much because of the unnatural load on a
disinterested ruling caste, half- monk, half -soldier, which is
its indispensable condition; but because (for reasons it is
hard to explain without becoming vague and 'sentimental')
such animal comfort and unreflecting ease seem to entail the
atrophy of the personal. But examine what you will of the
tenets of reforming propaganda, in one and all you will find
the scientific view of man and society conveniently forgotten
and obscured, whenever that comes into conflict with the
* dim mythologic postulates ' of man's freedom and worth, —
which must still animate the eloquence or the appeal of
secularism. And this invocation of Faith to help us, where
19
290 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the lesson of facts seems to run counter to our moral instincts,
must become increasingly prevalent in an age where the
discord between real and ideal is so emphatic. But it seems
clear that it is answered in Christianity alone; and that,
therefore, in the Church alone rest the hopes of Society.
B
On the Modern Separation of Classes and
Interests
§ I. No common currency in the various departments of exact
knowledge : the ' Universe ' : Hartmann, last of the Great Systems :
specialism as much a feature of practical life as of scientific research :
conflicting interests and party warfare : distance and abstraction of
the unity supposed to weld all together : the feudal polity in some
respects a revival of the best features in the Hellenic city-State : Manor
a State in miniature.
§ 2. Underneath the forcible unity of the modern State, hating
gradation and loving uniformity, seethes a conflict of interests : arti-
ficial language of political debate fosters the belief in class- animosity :
decay of easy intercourse : public language infinitely below ordinary
practice.
§ 3. The Churches ; harmony through division : religious differ-
ences dwelt on to exclusion of points of agreement : concerted action
impossible : idiosyncrasy and the private conscience and private
interpretation : sense of unity and common aim disappearing : absence
of dogmatism, nevertheless, and of sharp distinction, no sign of
weariness, but of uncertainty : it is tolerant and modest rather than
sceptical or indifferent : the Churches cannot at present heal the breaches
in the social order.
§ 4. Contract, the new method, cannot admit ' unselfishness * ; the
new State will know no such term : future of Constitutionalism, interests
and classes alternately represented : the Gospel more unanimous
in spite of the schisms of believers : social problems to-day : this
severance of interests only to be reconciled by the principle of the Gospel,
§ I. Mention has more than once been made of the
specialism of science, in virtue of which each group of
seekers follows its own especial line, uses its peculiar methods
and dialect, disappears down its own tunnel out of sight
of the rest. There exists no central and paramount court to
MODERN SEPARATISM 291
unify these divers results and exchange their contributions
into a uniform currency. Every harmony is an act of
(private) faith or hypothesis. The very term 'universe' is
heavily loaded with assumption, probably for ever outside
the range of strict verification. As a fact, few attempt this
unification, for the day of Great Systems is over; or if
attempted, it is in a semi-religious spirit and for purposes of
the practical life. Of this there is a remarkable instance in
Hartmann, perhaps the last of the great Absolutists who recall
the spirit and tone of the seventeenth century, — in its curious
anomaly, acute self-consciousness and stern reaction from
individualism towards incomprehensible power. His ' unifica-
tion,' purely a matter of temperament guiding unawares his
exhaustive studies, is clearly religious; he finds a substitute
for the Christian Deity which seems worthy of his devotion ;
and (significant enough of the modern spirit) is not ashamed
in a philosophic treatise to exhort men to be up and doing
* the Lord's work in the Lord's vineyard.' It is doubtful if
this attitude could be revived. Save for religion and a small
metaphysical school, which trembles uncertain between logic
and sentiment, such unity is neither needed nor pursued.
Convention (a mere working compromise) supports us when
we come back to real life from our special studies, with their
academic detachment, reserve, and singleness and narrowness
of purpose. The complex of life we leave to be put together
by wiser heads than our own, and we trust and lean on the
past, to an extent undreamt of by many who fancy themselves
the boldest revolutionaries and iconoclasts. And in this very
social life we find, when we arrive, the same specialism, the
same antithesis and antagonism. Interests and classes have
drifted apart ; and it is a truism to-day that Lord Beaconsfield's
ideal conception of a Lower House is almost realised, because
strictly it is not places that are represented, but the conflicting
interests of classes. And the tendency must increase. To
be outspoken in this matter is to court the taunt of reaction
and mediaevalism ; yet the fact is surely patent enough. The
unity, which is supposed to weld and harmonise, is too distant,
too cloudy and imaginary, to have any real effect. The State
is a mere abstraction, or a hybrid monster with claims to
omnipotence. Feudalism, which has sometimes been called
292 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the antithesis of the Greek polity, was in fact largely its revival.
It was founded on a belief in restricting the horizon of the
State to visible people, palpable interests, to local issues.
On the estate, it is true that country pursuits took the place
of municipal or Imperial sympathies; but this had already
occurred in the last century of the Western Empire, — certainly
in France in the case of ApoUinaris Sidonius and his fellows.
The centre of gravity shifts indeed from town to village (as
to-day from village to town), but the general spirit is much
the same, — a half-fictitious sense of kinship, reciprocal duties,
daily and hourly intercourse, often rough and brutal it may
be, but no more systematic than cruel conduct among slave-
owners in more modern times, no more deliberate and
authorised than ill-treatment of household dependants in
Greece and Rome. There was no need to go beyond the
limits of the domain for justice, for religious comfort, for
military protection ; the Manor was a State in miniature.
§ 2. It is far from my purpose to hold up for unquestioning
approval the mediaeval ideal. For whatever its perfection in
theory, it was seldom realised. And the casual recognition
of an ideal which no one pretends to put in practice may bring
comfort to sufferers in hopes of amendment, but makes the
privileged callous or ironical. But to any one who detects
how much the social movement of last century owed to the
Christian-mediaeval, how little to the classical-antique, ideal,
a survey of the principles, a respectful attention to the
maxims, on which the former depended, will not seem
amiss. The intermittent suggestions of federalism, provincial
autonomy, 'Home rule,' local government, — the protests of
anti-Imperialists, — remind one unmistakably to-day of the
gathering reaction against a worship of abstractions which,
however noble in theory, means as a rule the success of a
clique. Centralised government regards the mass of citizens
as units ; it opposes (along with a measure of public opinion)
a dull resistance to the claims of privilege or exemption ; and
law is intolerant of the exception. But underneath the artificial
harmony thus created seethes a chaos of conflicting interests.
Many evils of modern life are due to the want of easy inter-
course between the various ranks of the community, that
snapping of purely personal bonds of goodwill to give place
MODERN SEPARATISM 293
to mere ties of contract, which is possibly inseparable from
the present state of social culture. Classes rarely meet to
discuss unless they are beforehand determined to disagree.
It might well have been expected that a larger sympathy, a
better understanding, an easier tolerance would be secured
by political reform (regarded as the first duty of a long-
trusted hereditary caste), of systematic education (as one
chief function at least of a serious State). But (as we pointed
out in the case of the Enlightenment) this sympathy was nearly
always wasted upon imaginary figures ; and in spite of the
patient induction of parallel science, thinkers were reluctant
to learn from actual and unprejudiced experience. It is
possible that the average man discounts at once the fictitious
indignation and menace of political speech. To listen to such
debate is to believe that society is composed only of hostile
groups. We have before noticed the strangeness of the
situation ; our public language is at times infinitely below the
level of our common practice. The good understanding in
our own country between high and low, rich and poor, is the
wonder of those who take the trouble to penetrate past the
bristling sophisms or vulgarities of politicians to our inner
life and ordinary routine ; it would be impossible to suspect its
existence if they relied on purely political aspects for gauging
the temper of a great nation.
§ 3. If, while the Republic is too masterful to secure real
loyalty, and cannot bind its citizens together in common aim
and resolve, the Church might be supposed to provide a
rallying point, the situation to-day must cause us serious
concern. The Christian message is a principle of harmony,
perhaps only this because also of division, — "I came not
to send peace, but a sword." As against the secular power,
the * world,' the Church must assume a neutral attitude, and
at times a posture of challenge and defiance. We hear on
all sides complaints that in the subdivisions of the Church so
much more stress is laid on points of difference than on
broad principles of agreement, that we cannot achieve con-
certed and unanimous action. It is perhaps a trite criticism
to note, as the distinguishing mark of latter-day thought, just
this emphasis on idiosyncrasy. It is the special note that is
commended, not the typical: and although we are glad to
294 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
be free from the vague eighteenth-century veneration for the
type, yet modem experience has forced the varied and multiple
so persistently into the sphere of vision and interest, that in
many things the sense of unity has disappeared. It is always
a sign of earnestness and conviction to overvalue detail, even
though it may be a narrow and mistaken honesty. Ages of
great unities, of wider embracing generalisations, are ages
of weariness or impatience, — the fatigue of the old (as in
the political movement towards ' Imperialism ' at the Christian
era), or the immature achievement which youth boasts as
final (as in the hurried and inconsequential ideal structure
of Mediaeval monarchy). An age which thinks more deeply
and more freely, on which perhaps presses too great a load
of unrelated and indigestible facts, cannot afford an early
unification. In place of great ideas, it must busy itself in
concrete detail, without comprehensive formula. Its tolerance
is merely an armed and suspicious neutrality; a sign of
mutual agreement to surrender something, so that each
institution may mark out its own distinct 'sphere of influ-
ence,' may 'cultivate its own garden in peace.' It is a
common error to mistake compromise or toleration for
acquiescence or fatigue; it is neither; it is due to a scepti-
cism which, outside the limits of its own experience, knows
no certainty. It is not abstentionist, but often vigorous
enough within these boundaries ; but outside is the Unknown,
or the purely conventional, useful but relative and provisional.
The brisk (and to us arrogant) dogma of a summary division
into elect and lost gives way to Universalism, with its 'un-
covenanted mercies'; 'other sheep which are not of this
fold ' ; its consummation when ' God shall be all in all'
It is not that men have grown less serious, but that they
have grown less certain. But this less defiant spirit has not
led to any real harmony or power of co-operation : the
differences are still there, even if we are not always talking
of them. We must not expect the Church, as it is to-day,
'the company of all faithful people,' to be of immediate
avail or sovereign influence in healing the breaches of our
social order. Yet it is difficult to see any other aid forth-
coming. Contract, with its calculation and its egoism, its
suspicious emphasis on rights, is now the rule in political
MODERN SEPARATISM 295
and social life. A monarch is a covenanted 'First Citizen'
with certain ceremonious and social duties ; his place is con-
ditional on their punctual fulfilment; to the great detriment
of the State, the parental has in most countries given way to
a military or contractual type.
§ 4. Contract, unless it be lazy or pusillanimous, cannot
in reason surrender its rights; that is why the hopes of
unlimited unselfishness are doomed to be so rudely upset
in the new State. There is no longer ground left for unanimous
appeal. The future of constitutional States seems to be the
successive prominence of certain classes and interests in an
unvarying round. Each in turn must receive attention, and,
it is to be feared, at the expense of its predecessor, at the
costly sacrifice of continuity, of the general welfare. Much
honest zeal must evaporate in an atmosphere of distrust:
changes of government will imply the capture of the central
citadel by some new faction ; and each is under bond to effect
at all hazard some definite and instantaneous improvement
in the condition of a certain part of the community. In
nations, where no violent ebullition need be expected, the
work of the State in domestic matters must be like the web
of Penelope. Whatever be the bitterness of religious rivalry,
we are more likely to find a remedy in the principles of the
Gospel, the broad basis of doctrine, than in any appeal which
a future commonwealth could make. The exigencies of
modern life, which all appear to regret, which no one can
remedy, force the workers to live aloof from other classes, —
to inhabit ergastula where we find little or no trace of the
comfort, amenities, and scientific adjustment which is the chief
boast of the last age. It is only Christianity, or that sympathy
which is morally if not doctrinally Christian, that can compel
the happier lot to take thought for the less privileged. When
all advance is measured by a material standard, the central
authority might readily be charged with the duty of rearing
and educating perfect and uniform citizens for the great con-
flict of competitive States. But the enterprise of individuals
and of groups which will not resign the care of the poor to
mechanism, is a sign that the Christian ideal is still powerful.
No one can review without some alarm the symptoms of
modern social inequalities ; the growing sense of detachment
296 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and irresponsibility in rank and riches, due (quite logically)
to the admission of all classes to political influence, the relief
and emancipation of a once serious governing class ; the
condition of the toiler; commercial dishonesty; dwindling
interest in the home; multiplication confined to one end of
the social scale. The Church in such an age has before it
a new and important work. It must unite on those essential
doctrines which cannot be surrendered, — the divinity of
Christ, the brotherhood of man in and through Him, the
priceless worth and dignity of each individual soul. In
faithful maintenance of these it runs counter, like every
Idealist or Secularist project of reform, to current experience ;
for all action must rise in faith ; and faith in human nature —
the real individual, not the imaginary and abstract type or
race — is the most difficult of all. The Church need not
once more be clothed with worldly power ; nor need it, on the
other hand, refuse willing co-operation in all social schemes.
It must boldly face the ignorance and want of sympathy
which separate classes even in days of a common and uniform
education. It will recognise here the greatest hindrance to
the Kingdom of God ; and its mission will be to preach the
simple message, "God was in Christ reconciling the world
unto Himself"; the parts not divided and hostile, but com-
ponents of one body, which, through the varied gift and
duties of each, becomes not a dead abstraction but a living
whole.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE VI— A
On the Prevailing Sense of Helplessness before Irre-
sistible Forces, or, on Pessimism, its Origin and
Significance
§ I. Relativity of all knowledge : early Greek Humanism : the
Self as ' measure of all things ' : attempted application of human
attribute and sympathies to the Cosmos : new conception of ' Divine ' ;
certain and calculable : defecation in the humanistic period ; sym-
pathy, goodness, intelligence {Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) : in subjective
schools anthropomorphism vanishes.
§ 2. Exceptional genius rarely mirrors its own age : life and thought
of a people in letters and drama : science and philosophy deal always
directly with law and uniformity ; adjustment to individual use
quite secondary : literature always with the unit and his conflict with
the outward order : the hero or the protagonist is always Athanasius
contra mundum : natural bias towards belief in reason and righteous-
ness of things : confusion of intelligibility and goodness, of ignorance
and vice : man finds his own true being at the heart of things.
§ 3. Greek tragedy opens with the legend of Prometheus ; repre-
senting Humanism and the protest against arbitrary force : unavailing
attempts at a Theodicy : the poetic mythology, out of relation to human
interest and moral demand, is swept away : humiliating new reading
of ' man measure of all things ' : gradual restriction of sphere ; from
the conflict of East and West, the drama of a new dynasty in heaven, to
domestic intrigue and liaison : failure of Reason to force its moral
and intellectual canons on the world.
§ 4. Doubt if ' righteousness ' receives recognition in the Universe :
fallacy of the maxim ' Virtue its own reward ' : serious artists in our
own days interest by representing victims in the clutch of destiny, and
deny any correspondence to the moral aim of man : this the origin of
Pessimism.
§ 5. Pessimism, often merely temperamental : right to agency and
service balked by denial of humanistic aim in the Universe outside :
theoretic pessimism often united with cheerfulness and endeavour :
pessimism of Cicero : art and philosophy seek to procure relief by
detaching the attention from preoccupied care of the personal : its
failure shown in the revived Gnosticism of later years.
297
298 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 6. Such call to illogical self-sacYifice as is heard in some quarters
to-day of no avail : Epicureanism is the natural corollary of an aim-
less world : an accidental world leaves room for the play of human free-
will : added zest in insecurity of tenure and occasion : it is Stoicism
that leads to pessimism : nor would proof of accident at once overthrow
moral sanctions : even the discovery of pure mechanism might leave a
scope for venture : in eighteenth century a sense of freedom succeeded
to ' predestination ' and caste-system.
§ 7. Buoyant feeling of Self-sufficiency ; very speedily lost : what
Epicurus feared has now come about : impersonal fate succeeds to
personal will : a loop-hole still left in his system : this now disproved :
heavy air of finality in Roman Empire : pessimism always issues
from subservience to unknown law : demand for personal worth and
freedom : danger to civilised States, apart from Christian belief.
§ I. When the intelligence of the Greeks rose from the
partial gods of city, grove, and hearth, to the conception of a
single overruling force, the discovery filled them at first with
an enthusiasm which afterwards cooled, giving way to mistrust
and lethargy. What man seeks in his curiosity and pursuit of
truth (which we willingly concede as a primitive and abiding
impulse) is not the ' thing-in-itself,' but its relation to ourselves.
" We may here," says Gomperz of an early physician, " almost
detect the insight, or at least the conjecture, that all our know-
ledge about Nature is relative ; and that the true goal of human
inquiry is not what Nature is in herself, but what she is in
relation to man's perceptive faculties." This commonplace is
constantly forgotten or overlooked to-day. The final unity,
which we pretend to grasp, is a venture of logic, of faith, or of
devotion ; and very few, increasingly few in modern times, ever
arrive at a point in the ascent in which the universe can be so
regarded, 'as if from a conning-tower.' It is by no means true
that when practical needs are satisfied the keen pursuit of
knowledge relaxes ; but the knowledge sought is always partial
and always relative, — cutting off, with conscious arbitrariness, a
piece of the knowable for inquiry, — quite contented if the
results can be summed up in terms intelligible to man and
his aim, easily verified by test and experiment, and laying no
claim to any infallible comprehension. And in Greece, as
Humanism spread under the gradual influence of Sophistry,
all investigation was perpetually being recalled to the question :
How does this stand in relation to me, to my intelligence,
PESSIMISM 299
and to my practical needs ? As beyond human ken, use, and
interest, many avenues of exploration were closed; attention
was centred on the self, — and this became the * measure of all
things.' This standard was applied to a new unity, which
loomed large as the coherent cosmos, held together by a
principle of life, harmony, and continuity, to which, somewhat
inaptly, the term 'Divine' was applied. For * Divine' had
before meant little else than unaccountable, the outcome of
arbitrary caprice, which, even after the patient and devout
study of experts, could never be really certified. The new
conception of ' Divine ' meant, on the contrary, reasonable or
consistent, — a force governed by its own eternal laws, which
search could detect and verify once for all. The notion of
* reason ' or purpose and constant aim in the recognised flux of
existence was interpreted at Athens in the humanistic or strictly
teleologic form ; Heraclitus and the Stoics, however, understood
by it method and regularity alone, but not relative convenience
to man. Man, for himself, might be the 'measure of all
things,' implying a limit of his powers, not any proud claim to
sovereignty. Socrates had definitely claimed the Divine power
as human in the best sense, as accountable, as affording not
merely tidings of special vocation by accredited channels, but
also secret personal intimations. His theology was in the
highest degree relative and humanistic; he bowed to no
universal order, but found the best vindication, the most
excellent virtue of deity, in sympathy with individuals. But
the steps in the decay of this naive confidence (which alone is
true religious feeling) can be easily traced : Plato in his * Idea
of Good,' preserves the notion of teleology, while disengaging
it from embarrassing connection with persons ; Aristotle seats
it as pure Intelligence in inaccessible majesty ; the later schools
(as we have so often seen) relieved it of the last vestige of
anthropomorphism.
§ 2. It is doubtful if the great writers of any age can be
accepted as the best exponents of its spirit and temper.
Reaction is in most, it may be said, the chief incentive ; even
for the satirist facit indignatio versum^ the insolence of the
rich, the crass tolerance of the vulgar. We complain, in the
dull recitals of courts and camps, that we learn little in histories
of a people's genuine life and feelings. The same doubt
300 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
perplexes us in the study of exceptional genius, which belongs
to no age or race, but to all time. Romance and the stage
provide, perhaps, safer guidance, though even here caution is
needed : at least we are admitted, with these imaginary and
heroic figures, to a more intimate communion with individual
humanity; we stand nearer to the throng and its sympathies
than in the impersonal studies of the philosopher or the man
of science. Now, if we consult Greek letters, poetry and the
drama, we shall find our previous estimate of the course of
philosophic religion receiving clear and additional support.
While science and reflection calmly examine law, only later
and with a little reluctance adjusting it to use and individual
difference, letters, strictly speaking, are engaged always with the
strife, the conflict of the unit and the universal order. The
interest is confessedly purely personal; it is a growth, or a
discipline of character, of the spontaneous ; and the scenery of
social or natural law is around it, rigid and unfeeling. But the
sympathy of the audience or the reader is invariably engaged
for the hero, against the blind force of circumstance or the
misunderstanding of his fellows. The protagonist is always in
a sense Athanasius contra mundum, the exception protesting,
often fruitlessly, against the rule. " Man is no idle spectator
of the conflict of the forces of right and wrong; Browning
never loses the individual in the throng, or sinks him into his
age or race. Although the poet ever bears within him the
certainty of victory for the good, he calls his fellows to the
fight as if the fate of all hung on the valour of each. The
struggle is always personal, individual, like the duels of the
Homeric heroes. It is under the guise of warfare that morality
always presents itself to Browning." So writes Henry Jones in
his valuable work on " Browning as a philosophical and religious
teacher." Now the study of Greek drama and history during
that notable century of enlightenment, convinces us of a deeply
critical and self-conscious attitude, even outside strict philo-
sophic inquiry; and of a firm resolve to bring everything in
heaven and earth to book before the tribunal of reason, a
faculty in which were blended logical accuracy and the moral
standard of conscience. That which we to-day keep apart with
eff'ort was then indistinguishably confused, — clear thought and
moral judgment, scientific inaccuracy and conscious falsehood.
PESSIMISM 301
These canons, each sovereign in its own special sphere, were
indiscriminately, or even alternately, applied. We are never
sure if the matter under discussion is to be treated by proof or
by appeal; if we are taking part in an unbiassed debate, or
listening to a sermon. But philosophy surrenders at once her
proud claim of arbiter if she becomes a partizan. Moral
appeal is no part of philosophy at all ; the pure spirit is content
with viewing (not realising) truth, — ov^ev rj Atavota Kivet, —
it has no wish to consummate that which is already perfect
But where the demarcation of provinces was not precise, the
ordinary consciousness, half guided by tradition, half by the
keen and critical education then prevalent, summoned every-
thing to the bar to hear a verdict which was sometimes logical,
but more often strongly tinged or distorted by moral and
humanistic prejudice. It was a natural bias to attempt to find
reason and righteousness in things. Man was somehow con-
scious that here lay his own true being ; and he persisted in
the conviction that these constituted the essence, the core of
things.
§ 3. Greek Tragedy, as well as Hesiod's poems, may be said
to open with a Theogony, rather with the succession of a new
dynasty ; it closes with its overthrow. Prometheus represents
humanism and reason against arbitrary force; thus early is
heard the note of protest against the autocracy. Man appears
later on the scene, to become the plaything of destiny; he
struggles in the toils like Laocoon. Sometimes this eternal
order is identified with the will of Zeus ; the human sympathy
which bewailed the fatal death of a favourite in the Homeric
poems has given way to the passionless resolve of an absolute
sovereign; he is *no respecter of persons.' Sometimes the
moral sense claims him as its champion and representative,
as establishing the broad principles of truth, kindliness, and
justice, which overrule the partial and selfish enactments of
tyrants. Sometimes the Pantheon breaks into feud; and
human passions, transfigured as objective deities, bring men
to ruin. At others, a family curse or doom sweeps away the
innocent with the guilty, under the sanction of the highest
powers. And, once again, we see the lesson of mediocrity and
modesty and relativity inculcated, xPV pov€lv Tav^/awirtva, the
retort of common sense to Aristotle's advice, 1 144, 287, 328.
Meaning and origin of term, 129,
324-
Mediaeval Church's attitude
towards, 59.
Misapprehension regarding, 6, 15.
Opportunist dealings with, 157.
Privilege in detachment, attitude
towards, 310-312.
Revolution by, 14-15.
Science and philosophy, feud
with, 244, 268.
Unconcern of, with first prin-
ciples, 212.
* Will of the people ' —
Emergence of, 14-15, 17, 156.
Middle Ages, in, 329.
Supremacy of, 34.
Democritus, 26.
Descartes, 16, 96, 97, 155, 208,
220.
Despotism, enlightened, as theory
of government, 65.
Development. See Evolution.
Devotion to a cause, 85, 125, 132,
189, 198, 229, 232.
Dionysius, 251.
Disillusionment, 20, 22-23.
Divine, meanings of term, 299.
Divine attributes, 47-48 ; rejection
of moral, 72-73.
Dogma —
Differing estimates of, 1 79.
Growth of system of, 167.
Mysterious nature, view as to, 170.
Double truth theory, 30, 1 77-178,
180, 181, 208.
Dualism. {See also Antithesis) —
Absence of, in system of Aquinas,
178.
Certainty and hope, separation of
realms of, 84.
Christian attitude towards, 29.
Hellenistic, 29.
Mediaeval compromise of, 61.
Dualism — contitiued.
Persistence of, 4, 136, 158, 268.
Post-Reformation, 181.
Prominence of, in English thought,
12.
Science and religion, of, 178.
Stoic monism, latent in, 272.
Theory and practice, of, 125.
Dubois- Reymond cited, 273.
Duns Scotus, system of, 3, II-12,
16, 61, 177, 179, 263; diverse
elements in, 31-32.
Eckhart, 109, 251.
Edwardes, 250.
Efficiency as aim, 62, 68.
Emancipation of slaves, 93, 105,
231-232, 276, 286.
Emerson, 253.
Empedocles, 11.
Energy, centres of, lOl.
Enlightenment, Age of. See Age of
Reason.
' Enthusiasm,' 278.
' Enthusiasts,' 185, 242.
Epicureanism, 27, 205, 305-307.
Epicurus, 176.
Equality of man, theory of, 68.
Erigena, 9, ii, 109, 169.
Eutychianism, 4.
Evil, problem of, 98,
Evolution —
Antithesis, by, 134,
End-in-itself theory, 1 17.
Law of, 98.
Leibnitzian insistence on, 100-
lOI.
Exceptional, the —
Law intolerant of, 292.
Religious demand for exceptional
treatment. See under Re-
ligion.
Value of, loi, 152, 166, 293.
Experience, inward, 6, 10, 12, 50,
89.
Faith-
Ages of, 75-76, 281, 288, 289.
Conception of, offered, 75.
Emotional test of, 172.
Evil a motive for, 104.
Facts in discord with, 289.
Hegelianism founded on, 113,
123.
Human nature, in, 296.
Levelling effect of, 279.
Mediaeval Church, in, 168.
33<5
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Faith — continued.
Morality's demand on, 72, 75, 86,
144, 173, 191, 281-282.
Rationalistic axioms transferred
to realm of, 183.
Reason, antithesis with, 75.
Works in contrast with, 30-31.
Fatalism, 94-95.
Feudalism, 31, 173, 291-292.
Feuerbach cited, 134.
Fichte, 98, 182; system of, iio-
III, 116-117, 157; quoted,
189 ; cited, 203.
Figgis, Mr., quoted, 207.
Force —
Doctrine of, 24.
Hegelian ' Reason ' better so
called, 114.
Mind-stufF, 112.
Modern appeal to, 150, 21 1.
Sole existence, as, loi.
Franchise extension, 286.
Freedom of modern times, 224.
Freemasons, 277.
Free-thought —
Anti -moral tendencies of, 72.
Reaction against, 170.
Seventeenth century, in, 222.
Free-will —
Mallock on, 13 1.
Personal sense of, 224-225, 305.
French Revolution —
Atheist attitude before, 135.
Cause of, 16, 65.
Conduct of, 65-66.
Miscalculation regarding, 15.
Progress of, 93, 233.
Galileo, loi ; cited, 152.
Gierke quoted, 66, 328-329.
Gnostic Theophany, 132.
Gnosticism, 261-262.
Gomperz quoted, 214-215, 298.
Good will, 24, 28.
Gore, Bishop, quoted, 245.
Gospel. See Christianity.
Government —
Caesarism, 24, 65, 219, 221, 223.
Constitutionalism, 209, 269, 295.
Essential basis for welfare of, 21 1.
Irresponsibility of modern, 326.
Greek Church, 219.
Greek Fathers, 5, 9.
Greek Schools, tendency in, 1 59.
Greek Tragedy, 301-302.
Gunther cited, 180.
Guyon, Madame de, 45.
Plaeckel, 317 ; quoted, 83.
Happiness, universal claim to,
132-133.
Harmony of contradictories, II2,
118.
Hartmann, 82, 305 ; system of,
124, 291 ; quoted, 117, 141 ;
cited, 120, 159.
Heaven —
Individualist conception of, 283-
284.
Mediaeval conception of, 67.
Hedonism —
Mystic, 256.
Prse- Revolution, 229.
Hegel, 98, 159, 253, 260, 305;
system of, 91, 112-114, 116,
1 19-123, 206, 211, 230 ; quoted,
170 ; cited, 204.
Hegelianism, British, 202, 211.
Heine quoted, 163.
Helvetius, loi.
Heraclitus, 170, 217, 260, 299.
Herbert, Auberon, cited, 226.
Heresies, early, origin of, 5.
' Higher ' and * lower,' sense of
terms, 37, 82.
Historical method, 8.
Historical research, province and
limitations of, 92.
History, Hegelian emphasis on im-
portance of, 121.
Hobbes, 223, 226, 328.
Hobhouse, Mr., cited, 287.
Hoffding, Prof., quoted, 104-105.
Hofmann controversy, 180.
Holbach, 15 ; cited, 155.
Hugh of St. Victor, 180; cited,
170.
Humanism —
Christian, 259-260.
Decline of, 159-160.
Eighteenth century, in, 32.
Greek, 176, 204, 234, 298, 299.
Values, a fixing of, 218.
Hume, David, 103, 209.
Plutcheson, 103.
Huxley, Prof., 63, 125, 225, 232;
quoted, 142 ; cited, 190.
Idealist and Naturalist, meeting-
ground of, 112.
Ideas V. persons, 93.
Immanence, theory of, 109.
Immortality, justice of demand for,
190.
Indifference, place of, 112, 118.
INDEX
337
Individual, Fichte's despair of, 117.
Individual as end-in-himself —
Christian recognition of, 92, 121,
134, 140-141, 152, 153, 186,
268, 308, 328.
Disregard of, 63, 95.
Emancipation based on doctrine
of, 231-232.
Imperialism in relation to, 130.
Mediaeval insistence on, 66-67.
Origin of doctrine, 214.
Individual consciousness as aim in
world -process, 213.
Individual freedom — of modern
times, 224 ; under Roman
Empire, 240.
Individualism —
Eighteenth century, 33-34.
Heaven as conceived by, 283-284.
Impossibility of, as an ideal, 84.
Sophistic, 214.
Sovereignty of Individual in con-
flict with Sovereignty of
State, 67-68, 105, 181 ; com-
promise of Roman Empire,
219.
Tendency towards, in European
thought, 21.
Industrialism of nineteenth century,
230, 244.
Instinct, 160, 162.
Intellect-
Christian system, position in, 5-7,
11-12.
Detachment of, in modem times,
21.
Kant's system, position in, 68.
Pagan systems, position in, 9.
Sphere of, 25.
Intellectualism —
French and Russian, 216.
Mediaeval, 165-173.
Orthodoxy resented by, 179-180.
Islam, II, 171.
James, Prof. William, quoted, 90,
165, 167 ; cited, 241-242, 312.
Jankelevitch, 268.
Jesuits —
Anti-moral self-surrender of, 241.
Deism charged against, 277.
Dissolution of Order of, 14, 222.
Tenets of, 248.
Jews —
Deity of, 240.
Religion superseding morality
among, 241.
22
Joachim, Abbot, 260.
Jones, Henry, quoted, 258, 300.
Jurisprudence, mediaeval exaltation
of, 206.
Justice —
Hume on, in.
Mallock on, 130.
Omission of, as Divine attribute,
47.
Kaftan quoted, 166.
Kant, Immanuel —
* Anglican ' spirit of, 243.
Neo-Kantians, 115, 158.
Post- Kantian Schools, 91.
Rousseau's influence on, 104.
Socrates, compared with, 218.
System of, 104-105, iio-iii.
Work of, 68.
otherwise mentioned, 34, 231,
251, 265.
Kepler, 270.
Ker, Prof., quoted, 138.
Lactantius, 3, 9, 32, 169, 263.
Laing, Samuel, cited, 161.
Lanfranc cited, 170.
Latin Church. See Roman Church.
Law —
Compact of self-interest, 249.
Dualism implied in, 282.
Exceptional not tolerated by,
292.
Hostility to, 246-248.
Individual approval necessary for,
326.
Natural. See Nature.
Phases in conception of, 284.
Physical sequence, application of
term to, 316.
Post -Reformation character of,
248.
Purpose of, 251.
Roman supremacy of, 176-177.
Sovereignty above, 330.
Le Maistre, Joseph, 74.
Leibnitz, 98, 264; work of, 13, 16;
system of, 99-103.
Leighton, Mr., quoted, 123.
Leisured classes, 31 1-3 12.
Lessing, 10, 76, 169, 190, 253.
Levy-Bruhl, 268.
Liberal ideals of nineteenth century,
211.
Liddel cited, 180.
Literature as representing its age,
299-300.
338
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Locke, loi.
A 239-240, 258.
Individual recognised by, alone,
.239-
Individualist nature of, charge as
to, 89.
Interest in, revived, 83.
Morality identified with, 242-243.
Morality distinct from, 41, 47, 50,
202-203, 238-242; in an-
tagonism with, 241-242.
Natural, 97, 109, 175-176, 265 j
origin of, 240.
Origin of, and impulse to, 104,
132, 134, 139-140, 240, 258.
Paradox of, 252.
Partizanship of God claimed by,
258.
Personal, distinction of, from
dogmatic, 38,
Philosophy, relations with. See
Philosophy.
Protestant definition of, 238.
Rational, 175-176, 250.
Science and, attempts at con-
ciliation of, 178.
Social function of, 165.
Stages of development in — fear of
the unknown, 37 ; recog-
nition of divine protector,
37-38, 239 ; CO - operation
with divine purpose, 38-43,
50-52, 253 ; self-surrender,
44-46, 51-52.
State opposed by, 241-242.
Theology in contrast with, 49.
Threefold work of, 165, 184-185.
Truth of any, witnesses to, 166.
Utilitarian character of, 90, 165,
166.
Wars of, 208.
Renaissance —
Influence of, 100, 219-221.
Relativity doctrine of, 173.
INDEX
341
Renan, 321.
Republicanism, irreconcilable oppo-
sites in, 234-236.
Responsibility, shifting of, 148-149.
Revivals, three, of eighteenth
century, 208.
Revolution, French. See French.
Revolutions —
Origin of, 16.
Progress of, 64.
Richelieu, 248.
• Right to do what is right,' 162.
Righteousness in scheme of things,
problem as to, 302.
Rights rather than duties, 284-286.
Roman Church —
Counter- Reformation, 12.
Discipline rather than dogma the
preoccupation of, 8.
Exoteric side of, 277.
Gnostic School contrasted with,
262.
Jesuit Order, dissolution of, 14,
222.
Mediaeval —
Breadth of interests of, 58, 60,
147-148, 207, 276.
Democratic character of hier-
archy of, 289.
Enforcement of appeal of, 75-
76, 288-289.
Twofold aspect of, 167-169.
Protestant bodies compared with,
250.
Secular mission of, 58-60.
Roman Empire —
Christianity, attitude towards,
217.
Compromise between rival sove-
reignties, 219.
Individuality fostered in, 217,
240.
Romanes, 125.
Romantic era, 1 15.
Romantic schools, 230.
Rousseau, 13, 137, 226, 278, 328 ;
system of, 16, 103, 109, 156,
176; influence of, on Kant,
104.
Sceptical School, 205.
Scepticism, 27.
SchelHng, 11, 98, 260; system of,
117, 119; quoted, 253.
Schlegel, 102.
Scholasticism —
Arguments of, 166.
Scholasticism — continued.
Logic and dialectic of, merit of, 1 7 1
Method of, 10.
Nature of, 263.
Schopenhauer, 124, 211, 305.
Science —
Function of, 313.
Method of, 157.
Scotus, Duns. See Duns.
Scotus, Erigena. See Erigena.
Self-consciousness, 204.
Self-realisation —
Baffled efforts for, 213, 234.
Christian recognition of demand
for, 34.
Leibnitzian theory as to, 103.
Self-surrender not incompatible
with, 41.
Self-surrender. {See also Devo-
tion) —
Conscience' sake, for, 34.
Disillusionment, through, 23.
Extreme view of, 327.
Love, of, 26.
Religious, 44-46, 51-52.
Self-realisation not incompatible
with, 41.
Universal desire for, 85, 189.
Utilitarian state, not to be ex-
pected by, 187.
Selfishness and unselfishness, use of
terms, 228.
Seneca, 175, 261.
Sensationalism, 1 18.
Septimius Severus, 262.
Shaftesbury, 103.
Shaw, Bernard, quoted, 189.
Sidgwick, Professor H., quoted,
121 ; cited, 162.
Smith, Adam, 103.
Socialism, 289, 324.
Socinian movement, 181-182.
Socrates, influence of, 27 - 28 ;
system of, 159, 215, 299 ; death
of, 204-205 ; Kant compared
with, 218.
Sophists, 109, 176, 214, 216, 218.
Spencer, Herbert, 250, 306 ; quoted,
123 ; cited, 161.
Spinoza, 248, 305 ; system of, 33,
96-98, 103, 112, 155, 253;
temperament of, 210.
State-
Church and, illogical relation of,
in England, 223.
Conformity not motive the con-
cern of, 227.
342
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
State — continued.
Duty to, as urged by Huxley and
Mill, 141-143-
Family the origin of, 234.
Freedom of individuals in, 224.
' Godless ' citizen, fiction of,
203-204.
Morality of, 22, 200.
Origin of, theories as to, 215.
Philosopher-king theory, 215.
Post-Reformation, basis of, 195-
196.
Regimentation of, 243-244.
Religion in opposition to, 241-242.
Rise and fall of ignorance as to
causes of, 92.
Secularisation of, 223.
Self-preservation the aim of, 6'^^
64, 85, 149, 194.
Supremacy of, 23.
Theory of, Machiavellian, 62-63.
Voluntarism, disappearance of,
197.
Stirling, Dr., quoted, 119, 120.
Stirmer quoted, 8 1.
Stoicism —
Arguments of, 102.
Classification of, 45.
Domestic and social side dis-
dained by, 27, 205, 311.
Dualism latent in, 272.
Epicureanism compared with,
307.
Naturalism of, 109, 112.
Platonism, alliance with, 261.
* Reason ' as understood by, 299.
Spinoza's ethics touched with, 33.
Sub-conscious motive, 16, 20, 57.
Subjectivism. See Individualism,
Sympathy, 103.
Tacitus quoted, 226.
Teleology —
Christian, 4, 135.
Leibnitzian, 99.
Mechanism and, conciliation of,
178.
Mechanism as supplanting, 96.
Scientific view penetrated by,
no.
Templars, 260, 277.
Terms, popular sense of, 37.
Tertullian, 3, 31, 262.
Theory and practice —
Divorce of — Mediaeval, 31, 60 ;
modem, 71, 78-81, 125.
Reaction between, 80.
Theology in contrast with Religion,
49.
Theresa, St., 45.
Thing-in-itself theory, 115.
Thomas, Thomism. See Aquinas.
Thought without thinker, 120.
Thuggee, 241.
Toland, 97, 175.
Tolstoy cited, 197, 226.
Trinitarian dogma, 48, 260.
Truth-
Antecedent world of, theory as
to, 257.
Arrogant pretensions regarding,
166.
Distinct aspects of, 152-153.
Double truth theory, 30, 177-
178, 180, 181, 208.
Relativity of, 166, 283.
Test of, in mystical tradition, 173.
Tyranny, forms of, 105.
Ultimate sanctions, 13-14, 21.
Unbelief, religious, immediate re-
sults of, 306-307.
Unconscious, the, in Fichtian
system, 116.
Unity-
Provisional hypothesis of, 257.
Theories as to, 313.
Universal Reason as ultimate sanc-
tion, 14.
Universal v, particular, 6, II, 21.
Universalism of Mediaeval Church,
61.
Unknowability of world powers,
93-94-
Unknowable, the, 159-160.
Unknown, surrender to the, 255-
266.
Unselfishness —
Christian, 236.
Contract method incompatible
with, 295.
Indefensibility of, except on
Christian hypothesis, 288.
Meaning of term, 228.
Primitive, 235.
Source of, 236.
Utilitarianism —
Aristotelian, 28, 33.
Duns Scotus, of, 32.
Mediaeval, 30.
Platonic abandonment of, 28.
Standard of value in present
lectures, 55, 88.
Theological, 233, 264.
INDEX
343
Utopians —
Miscalculations of, 192-193, 197.
Personal element atrophied in
republics of, 289.
Primitive sanctions, reversion to,
161.
Serfdom contemplated by, 231.
Value-
Catholicity a test of, 274, 275.
Sense of, 84, 282.
Values —
Christian standard of, 188.
Humanism a fixing of, 218.
Modern acceptance of standard
of, no, 273.
Vanini, 96.
Victorines, 172, 179.
Virtue —
Meanings of term, 27.
Pleasure in relation to, 28.
Reward, its own, theory as to,
302.
Volition as original Being, 118, 119.
{See also Will-to-live.)
Volney, 15; cited, 155.
Voltaire, 13, 137.
Wallace, Prof., quoted, 60, 72,
1Z'
Weigel, 179.
Wells, H. G., quoted, 215.
Wesley, John, 250.
Westermarck cited, 160.
Will and Idea in conflict, 135.
Will of the people. See Democ-
racy.
Will-to-live, 90, 114.
Willert, Mr., quoted, 156.
William of Occam, 31, 173.
Work and worth, demand for, 91,
131 ; Christianity in relation
to, 140-141, 144.
World-spirit as object of worship,
63-
Wundt cited, 31.
Xenophanes, system of, 261.
Zeno, 176.
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