^^ ^'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£>