The witness of denial

NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES

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Witness of denial

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THE

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

PRESENTED BY

Rev, Wilt on. Merle Smith
29 August 1917.

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THE

WITNESS OF DENIAL

VIDA D. SCUDDER, A.M.

W

NEW-YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
1895

PUBLIC LIBRARY

AS+Slf^OThAx

'■I

ANT)
TILDF,N FOl.'NDATIOrtiS

R I9'8 L

Copyright, 1895,
By E. p. DUTTON & COMPANY

PREFACE.

This little book is an abridgment of
lectures given at Wellesley College during
a course of instruction on modern English
prose-writers. It may seem strange that
thought so avowedly and entirely religious
should find place in the study of literature ;
but the century is to blame rather than the
lecturer. It was impossible to teach mod-
ern English prose ignoring such men as
John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Cardinal New-
man, Herbert Spencer, Frederic Harrison,
Frederic Denison Maurice, and Matthew
Arnold ; it was equally impossible to gain
intelligent understanding of the work of
these men and their relation to their age
without some treatment of their intellec-

4 PRIil-Al.l:.

tual and ethical l^acki^rouiul. Lectures on
the clitTcrciit phases of modern religious
lhuuL;ht in I'^ngland alternated, therefore,
with critical studies of various authors on
the ])art of the class. The lectures proved
useful to the students ; they are presented
here to a wider public. The critical ac-
companiment has been discarded, except
in occasional choice of illustration ; and the
impersonal presentation of thought, suit-
able to the lecture, has been supple-
mented and modified by frank judgment
and comment.

The tone of the book throughout will
be found, indeed, candidly Christian and
Catholic. It were easy to disguise private
con\iction and to gi\e a seemingly im-
partial treatment of great themes. Such
a method may appear more dispassionate ;
it is assuredly less simple and less sincere.
Personal bias is sure to exist, whether be-
trayed or not ; better confess it at the
outset. In a fair mind such bias mav

PREFACE. 5

help analysis instead of destroying jus-
tice ; and there is no reason why readers
should distrust an author because he ac-
knowledges what he might have con-
cealed. The Christian turns with eager
interest to the revelations of the earnest
agnostic, grateful for the privilege to see
for a time through his eyes and gain a
better and more sympathetic understand-
ing of his point of view; the agnostic may
surely follow a like impulse and gain a like
advantage in wider outlook by turning to
the reflection of his own thought as seen
in the thought of the Christian.

But these modest and short pages will
hardly appeal to the thorough agnostic ;
they speak, too often, a language strange
to him, which he will reject as fantastic
and unreal. The book is meant for those
who seek, not those who are at rest ; per-
haps, indeed, it could reach no one who is
not already earnestly wishing to accept
Christianity. Even so, the number of

6 PRHFACH.

those to whom it is directed is very
great. Should it <4i\c one liclpful hint
to three, or two, (jr one of that number,
its existence will he justified.

ViDA D. SCUDDER.

Triiiity-tidc, 1895.

THE WITNESS OF DENIAL.

O God of Truth,
Make me one with Thee in eternal love.
Oft am I weary, reading, listening,
But all I wish and long for is in Thee
Tlien silent be all teachers, hushed be all creation

at the sight of Thee.
Speak Tliou to mc alone.

Thomas a Kempis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE

Preface 3

I.

The Movement of Doubt 11

II.
The Renascence of Faith S3

III.

The Religion of Mystery 51

IV.
The Religion of Humanity 71

V.

The Religion of Morality 97

VI.

The Religion of Christ. . . . , . . . 131

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT.

Vou call for faith :
show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.

Brown INC..

THE WITNESS OF DENIAL.

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT.

Never, probably, has any century been
so vigorous in mechanical activities as that
which is slipping from our grasp ; yet none
has ever cared more strenuously for spirit-
ual things. It has produced the modern
system of business and competitive trade ;
it has also produced great movements in
thought and faith and art. We may wail
as we will over our passion for riches, our
pursuit of ease. We may sink into pro-
found discouragement as, passing swiftly
through the streets of a modern city, we

14 THE IV IT NESS OE DENIAL

realize the vast industrial energies devoted
to life's mere machine, the comfort of the

senses. But the instant that we pause we
are conscious of a breath of power blow-
ing perpetually through all our more ma-
terial acti\ities, to quicken, to purify, some-
times to destroy. The world of the spirit
is dying no weary death; it is "mewing
its mighty youth."

Do we ask for proof? We look at the
great religious movements which during
the century have shaken the souls of
men — the Catholic Movement in France,
the Oxford Movement in England, and
that present social renascence which, con-
sciously or not, finds source and spring-
in the Christian passion. We note the
indirect witness of the eager haste with
which every new activity, from a theory
of science to a mode of writing fiction,
has been dragged into the presence of
relicrion and forced to define its relation to
the spiritual life. Above all, we think of

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 15

literature — that great modern literature of
every country of Europe, with its som-
ber brooding over psychological problems,
its spiritual unrest, its search for peace.
Sometimes, as in the days of Homer,
literature centers in the action of men;
sometimes, as in the days of Shakespeare,
it centers in their passions; to-day, as
in the days of Dante, it centers in their
souls. Whether Goethe in ''Faust" gives
us man's pilgrimage through the wide
world, or Heine in his lyrics man's wail
from his prison ; whether Carducci and
Hugo voice his cry of revolt, or Words-
worth and George Eliot his joy in obedi-
ence, through the whole sweep of modern
literature interest is focused in the drama
of the inner life. We see that this in-
terest has been sustained and conscious if
we think of the modern essay, as written
by Mazzini, Carlyle, Arnold, Bourget; we
see that it has been progressive as well if
we trace the sequence of themes in the

16 THF. HITNFSS Oh DF.NML.

nioclern no\cl from Sc(^tt lo Meredith,
from Dumas to Daiidct.

But it is in the i^reat movement of
doubt that, i)aradoxieali}- — and is not £ill
life paradox? — tlie \itahty of the spirit
may be most clearly seen. For doubt
is ever a sign of life, and never have
men been so conscious of their souls as
in this aL;e when they are so fond of deny-
ing" them. Scarcity-\'alue, as economists
would say, rests to-day upon untroubled
religious conxiction. The man who pos-
sesses it is grave, alert, and joyful, filled
with gratitude for a gift granted to very
few. Spiritual desire, not spiritual con-
viction, is the prevailing modern mood.
Where others adored we question ; where
others obeyed we seek. "The same ques-
tion-mark," says a French writer, " is for
the modern world perpetually posed on a
perpetually receding horizon." Between
the Land of Conventions and the King-
dom of Faith lies the wide region of Un-

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. ' 17

certainty. In its gray mazes the men of
the modern world have wandered, seeking
and suffering. Intelligent and peaceful
activity is not for him who lingers there.
To traverse this country has been the lot
of some, to pause in it the fate of many.
The throngs who abide there can never
rest, though they never attain.

The century of Dante affirmed; the
century of Voltaire denied. Our age has
neither affirmed nor denied ; it has in-
quired. There have been both loss and
gain in our mood of challenge. *' Fight-
ings within and fears without," as the old
hymn puts it, have been our heritage ; but
our generation deserves, perhaps more fully
than any since the words were uttered, the
blessing pronounced on those who hunger
and thirst after righteousness.

The same vigor which has shown itself
in the increase of material energies, the
extension of science, and the exploration
of history is manifest in the passionate

18 THR WITNESS OF DEN ML

eagerness with which modern men liave
sought for truth. The movement of doubt
has gathered to itself much of the best hfe
of the century. It has known a definite
sequence with distinct successive phases ;
and its history must be understood, not
only philosophicall}', but humanly and
simply, by those who wish to be able to
say, with Browning's aged prophet, " The
Future I may face, now I have known the
Past."

In the first years of the century the im-
pulse of revolt and the love of humanity
nearly sufficed the human soul. We can-
not wonder at the passionate restlessness,
the rebellion against tyranny, which is as
much the ke^'-note of relif^ious as of social
life. The Church — alas that we must say
it! — stood seemingly committed on her
thought-side to rigid and artificial dogma,
on her social side to an aristocratic ideal.
Most of the people who clung to her be-
lieved conventionallv ; a few — humble folk

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 19

for the most part — believed fervently ; but
nearly all the men of the future, the men
vividly alive, made an exultant religion of
freedom. The skeptical philosophies of
the eighteenth century had prepared the
way; then came the French Revolution,
and energized to passion in the many that
conception which had been inert in the in-
tellect of the few. Greek stories tell that
the mortal who surprised the face cf
oread or dryad was henceforth niiin-
pJioleptos — possessed by a divine mad-
ness. In the Revolution men beheld the
face of Freedom ; and though she van-
ished like the fieeting nymph of the old
mythology before her human pursuers,
the mere vision was enough to inebriate
them with celestial rapture. Shelley, for
instance, is like a soul enchanted in the
early years of the century ; he and the
many of whom he is a type are possessed
by the simple joy of revolt, religious and
social.

20 THE mTNHSS Oh' DENIAL

This static of pure clcliglit in escape
from t\ ranny we have left far behind in
our spiritual development. Something of
it may linger in the intellectual provincial-
ism of a man like IngersoU ; but the ablest
and highest minds thrill no longer at the
simple thought of freedom. The thought-
movement of the age swept on. It de-
veloped next, in reaction from emotional-
ism, a phase akin to the dry temper of the
eighteenth century. The philosophy of
experience, as formulated mainly by the
two Mills, father and son, is the direct
forerunner of Darwinian philosophy. Al-
ready, in its system, conscience is not the
voice of God within, but the echo of
ancestral wisdom ; religion has no objec-
tive correlative, but is the projection of
the human shadow on the mists of the
unknown. Expedienc}-, in a refined sense,
is to be the guide of life, and physical ex-
perience is the only basis of knowledge.

The " Autobiography " of John Stuart

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 21

Mill shows US, with a revelation exqui-
sitely dispassionate and mournful, just what
conceptions of this order can make of
human life. It is one of the strangest
books of the century ; surely, also, one of
the saddest. It tells us with scientific
precision the story of a nature starting on
a high plane, with few moral temptations
to conquer and no mental confusion to
overcome. It shows this man achieving
an immense amount of valuable work,
practising not only exalted, but subtle
virtue, convinced to the end with his de-
liberate reason that life had yielded him
as much of truth and joy and power as it
had to offer a sincere intelligence. Yet
no one can read the "Autobiography " of
Mill, or his admirable books, and feel that
in him the century has found a full repre-
sentative, or human nature been set free.
We trace through the book itself a signifi-
cant progress from entire complacency to
a dim sense of want. The want is met,

'2-2 I HI: irr/NHSS Oh DENIAL.

but only in part, by tlie poetry of Words-
wortli, with its peculiar power to exalt all
ethical emotions to the spiritual plane. As
life goes on we feel that Mill gropes with
more and more approach to consciousness
after something not included in his philos-
<iphy. His unfinished essay on Theism
strikes a new and wistful note. Yet he
dies as he has lived, at rest within the
limits of the natural reason. Spheres of
experience which are the human heritage
are closed to him. He is " shut out from
the heaven of spirit."

Definite in a world of bewilderment was
the philosophy offered by Mill ; but popu-
lar it could not be. Strange though it
seem, even in this most practical of worlds
men refuse long to live without certain
intangible commodities which they call
ideals. The lost faith, rich in sacred emo-
tion and lofty hope, was ill replaced by
allegiance to Utility. In the barren phi-
losophy of experience the century could

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 23

not rest. Its placid complacency is as
much a thing of the past as the hot
spirit of re\'olt which preceded and in
part engendered it. Coldly mechanical,
with nothing to quicken the imagination
and little to fire the conduct, it was dying
a natural death when an unexpected rein-
forcement from an entirely different quarter
gave it a mighty impulse, bestowed on it
a quickening power, and sent it out into
the world to conquer under the guise of
modern science.

It was not till 1861 that Darwin pub-
lished "The Origin of Species." Before
this time, as is evident from literature,
evolutionar_y ideas were filtering through
English thought ; from this time for a third
of a century they became a controlling in-
fluence in modern Europe. To prove this
we have only to run over the table of con-
tents of the chief magazines — sensitized
plates as they are, swift to catch the reflec-
tion of the age-sky above. Evolutionary

1^4 THl: HlTNliSS Oh DHNML

theory in relation to art, morals, educa-
tion, relii^ion, may be said to absorb atten-
tion from i860 to about ICS85. Slowly
another theme emerges ; and to-day so-
ciology and economics replace science
as the chief inciters to speculation. But
under the power of evolutionary thought
we have each and all been trained. It
has produced a whole system of ethics.
It has shaped the great men who have
shaped us. It produced the type of non-
Christian thought of which those just en-
tering middle life are perhaps most vividly
conscious. Its power may be waning, but
it is mighty yet.

To questioning souls, long starved on
negations, science seemed at first, in its
mere revelation of the physical universe,
to offer a positive faith. The philosophy
of experience had shut them within their
own natures; the theory of evolution set
them free of the world. The old vision of
the New Jerusalem was lost to men ; but

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 25

here was a new vision to take its place.
Gazing backward, uplifted above that life
of which they were a part, their freed
spirits beheld a stream of mysterious
energy flowing, in whirls of ever more
complex life, from star- dust up to man.
They saw the Power pulse upward, from
nebulous and inorganic chaos to the or-
dered glory of the crystal earth ; on to the
thrill of life in tree and blossom ; higher
yet, till the silent gives response. On-
ward still they saw it sweep, through
simple forms of animal life where reflex
nervous action alone hints what shall come
— on till " up the pinnacled glory leaped,
and the pride of the soul was in sight";
till from the mass of inert matter was
evolved the human race.

No wonder that in the dazzle of this
great earth-procession men forgot, for a
time, to gaze into the heavens. No won-
der that in the revelation of the vast sweep
to time they cared not to question eternity.

20 THE HITNHSS OF DENIAL.

The \cry immensity of the evolutionary
conception seemed at fn-st to absorb atten-
tion and still men into awe.

lUit not for loni;-. Soon it became evi-
dent that in all the mij^hty sequence there
was nothing to satisfy the soul ; that, long
though the procession was which moved
from seeming death to life, it issued from
the void, and made, so far as the revela-
tion of science was concerned, for dark-
ness. For from shadows impenetrable on
into a silence unbroken does the whirl of
hfe revealed by science perpetually sweep.
Thus the theory of evolution received,
nourished, and recreated the philosophy
of experience, and formed the next and
strongest phase in the great negative
mo\'ement of the century.

For it seemed to almost all thinking
men, in the first excitement of that vision,
that science had established a presump-
tion, nearly strong enough for proof, in
favor of a material interpretation of life.

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 27

All its wavering glory did but reveal and
establish the supremacy of the sense. It
showed, far back in the dim region of
origins, matter alone, matter supreme.
Once given the primordial atom, and force
to work thereon, it seemed, to hasty in-
ference, a mere matter of time to produce
humanity. The old conception of a series
of special creations vanished once for all ;
it was replaced by the strange picture
cf a world seemingly evoh'ing itself, by
its own power, from chaos to order, from
nebula to man. The universal reign of
Law seemed to rule out the possibility of
miracle. The physical nature of man was
seen to be derived, according to certain
law, from the glutinous unity of the jelly-
fish; could not his honesty, purity, kind-
ness, be traced back in like manner to
the first instinct of self-preservation in
the species? Instead of descending from
above, had not the moral nature ascended
from below? The first teaching of evolu-

28 THH II 'UN ESS OF DENIAL

tion seemed cogently to confirm that
which a radical philosoplu' had up to
this time mereh" hinted; seemed to de-
clare that body was not the serv^ant of
soul, but sold the sla\e of body ; that
mind was at best and highest a mere
function of brain-activity, and that when
brain once returned to the dust wlience
it was formed, mind, its shadow-action,
would vanish, even as Plato questioned
long ago, like music when the instrument
is mute.

Thus science, as at first superficially
conceived, seemed to banish God and im-
mortality and to strengthen the movement
of negation. Starting with the analytical
temper of the eighteenth century, rein-
forced by the revolutionary passion, sanc-
tioned by the criticism of the philosophy
of experience, the movement might yet
have fallen by its own weight but for this
mighty help. The scientific temper, foe
to all conventions, exalted the impulse of

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 29

denial to the duty of inquiry ; the recog-
nition of the reign of natural law strength-
ened the revulsion from artificial creeds.
Our knowledge showed the seemingly tiny
part we play in the system of nature ; our
ignorance suggested the vast swxep of
truth outside our ken ; and the agnostic
temper was born.

Agnosticism ! Dismal though humble
title, denying, not that spirit exists, but
that spirit can be known. Hardly a title
in which to glory, since it implies that
man is little and that truth is great. Un-
luckily those who adopt it give to the
term at times the reverse significance,
meaning that man is great and that noth-
ing is important or essential which he can-
not understand. But the spirit of the true
scientific agnostic was from the first in-
tellectual and sober, moderated by the
caution which will know only what it
can prove. It was to be still further dis-
ciplined, as well as still further strength-

30 THH lilTNESS OF DENIAL.

ened, by influence from a new quarter.
To the witness of metaphysical speculation
and of natural science was to be added
the witness of history. More direct than
denial based on the rex'clation of the laws
of nature, a new^ denial, based on the e\i-
dence of the story of man, took up the
work of negation. The critical school, re-
jecting not only the assumptions but the
facts of Christianity, destroyed credence in
the authenticity of the documents which
are the only witnesses of the Christian
faith. Under this new influence the spirit
of the agnostic movement soon altered.
From fierce argument it passed into quiet
assumption. To the minds of its advo-
cates the cause of denial was won ; and it
became possible for a writer on theology
brought up on Christian traditions and
sensitive to Christian ideals to take as
starting-point for his thought the state-
ment that " miracles do not happen," on
the ground that discussion of truisms is

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 31

waste of time. Modern agnosticism began
as pure instinct of escape and rebellion ; it
passed into philosophical theory, thence
into assertions concerning historic facts ;
and its strong sequence was complete.

II.

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH.

Power was with me in the night,
Wliich makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone.

L\ Memoriam,

II.

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH.

The sun and the heavens are hidden.
Over our heads extends a low curtain of
vapor, heavy with the wrong of earth and
gray with its sorrows. Among us there
is Hght, dim and shadowless ; there is
warmth, for we live ; but the Source of
light and warmth we cannot see. Our
heaven is but the exhalation of the earth,
and unchanging and mournful is the light
that streams through it. Yet, gazing up-
ward into the mists, men exclaim with
triumph that the world is growing larger
to our sight. There was a time when all
was defined, distinct; when great moun-
tains leaped upward, radiant, into the
smooth blue sky, and a far, sharp hori-
35

36 THE H- IT NESS OE DENIAL.

zon-linc sliowcd where earth impinged on
heaven. Behold, all boundaries are swept
away ; there is n(jthing to impede our
vision, and, unhampered by interruptions,
our eyes, turn them where we will, peer
serenely into infniite space.

We have watched the upward sweep of
the cloud enshrouding us, the develop-
ment of the modern movement of denial.
In a thought-world where all, even the
sky, is the output of our own earthliness
many people recognize light, but claim
that it has no location. Others, ignor-
ing it, center thoughts and love in that
humanity which it reveals. And some
there are who, haunted by dim memories,
mourn forever a vanished sun.

The impulsive rapture of revolt with
which the agnostic movement was initiated
could not long endure. Before a third of
the century was over this mood had died,
and vacancy ceased to inspire exultation.

No age, perhaps, has known deeper

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 37

spiritual agony than our own, or voiced
more poignant cries of reiterated pain.
Many of our noblest spirits have turned
cynical and fierce of soul; many — and
these the most exquisite — are paralyzed
in the very nerves of life ; many take
refuge in silence.

y Be silent, heart. What if thy pain be great,
/ What if thine anguish cannot be forgot,

Thy questions cannot sleep, thy doubtings wait?
It matters not.

** Think'st thou that in the universal woe

Which holds the world's great heart, thy tiny jot
Of anguish counts for aught? I tell thee, no.
It matters not.

I

** Then, O my heart, be silent! If thou die
Because the flame within thee burn so hot,
Die silently ; for if thou live or die.
It matters not."

Thus mourns at last the soul which
long has stood, as Carlyle puts it, " shout-
ing question after question into the sibyl-
cave of Destiny, to receive no answer but
an echo." j

38 THh: IVITNESS OF DEN ML

Yet not all of these echo-servants, these
children of loss, are silent or sorrowful.
Some of them exult in the very still-
ness which meets their questionint^- cries.
While some of the votaries of denial have
suffered, others have triumphed. The
denial of old faiths has become a banner
around which have rallied praise, fidelity,
and joy. Whole schools of thought to-
day congratulate themselves that, leaving
Christianity behind, they have pressed
forward into a purer air, come nearer to
the naked truth.

Now those who rejoice in this way have
never rested in bare negation, for here the
soul simply cannot stay. Rehgion is ne-
cessary to man; so much is witnessed by
the whole story of human life, and never
more strikingly than by the spiritual story
of the nineteenth century. Those who
have turned away satisfied from the reli-
gion of Christ substitute for it always a
religion of their own. This has been true

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 39

from the time of Shelley to that of Emer-
son, from the time of Emerson to that of
Matthew Arnold. And so the movement
of denial has cast, in its varying phases,
successive shadows of assertion which form
a strange, sad sequence of their own.
Each phase of doubt has had its positive
aspect, its effort to find in its very nega-
tions solace and stimulus for the soul. To
trace the development, phase by phase, of
this positive movement within the limits
of denial is perhaps an unattempted task;
yet few attempts could prove more fruitful.
It is from the middle of the century
that this tendency toward shadow-faiths
becomes most clearly evident. The self-
satisfaction of denial was from the first
purely superficial ; nor could the negative
hypothesis satisfy long. Gladly, for a
moment, men turned from the dreams
of spirit to the facts of sense. But for a
moment only. The profound sadness of
non-Christian thought was barely inter-

40 THE IVri'NllSS O/- DEN ML

rupted by the contempt of scientific denial.
Not all the glory of scientific discovery,
not the fascinating history of the Descent
of Man, not the vision of the stars in their
courses, arrested for more than a moment
the keen search of the soul. Still it
pierced by its longing beyond the glitter-
ing procession of visible life ; still listened
for some voice from the creative dark-
ness whence the great procession starts.
In the midst of that which they may in-
vestigate men sought that which they
may adore.

It was then at this stage that first ap-
peared the promise of the movement of
reaction of which we are to trace the
shadowy progress — the movement which,
making no attempt to deny denial or to
recall a banished faith, yet stretches lame
hands through the darkness, and seeks,
though it may not trust, a larger hope.

We want to trace the thought-origin
and life-origin of these faiths which spring

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 41

from denial ; we want to question their
value to our souls. Is the attempt auda-
cious? Surely it is necessary too. For,
though the inquiry be so wide that answer
is hopeless, yet is it also so definite that
answer is essential. Has a higher substi-
tute been found for Christianity? Many
have made up their minds yes or no; for
those who are still groping these pages are
wTitten. Keenly we need one another's
comradeship in this sad yet tonic search ;
and the simplest line of thought, if it has
led even one soul into peace, is worth the
pointing out.

What attitude, what method, will best
further our inquiry? Not, let us say at
the outset, intolerance. Between pure,
steady, literal agnosticism and Christianity
there can be no moral quarrel, only a per-
plexed silence. But between the expo-
nents of Christianity and of new systems
of religious thought there is often mutual
and deep hostility. " The only contempt-

42 THE IPITNIISS OF DEN ML.

ible thing in the workl," it has well been
said, "is contempt." With this unlovely
and intolerant quality our minds are too
often tini^ed. Yet absolute tolerance is
the only temper in which helpful thought
about these matters is possible ; not the
shallow tolerance of the newspaper or the
man of the world, which springs from in-
difference, but the passionate and noble
tolerance of the seeker, which springs
from the love of truth. If we trust God
we must believe that He gives some of His
truth to every seeking soul ; that the
Light coming into the world lighteth
every man ; and that the Spirit moves and
guides in all differing attempts to solve
life's mystery. We can no longer say
with easy minds that Christianity is true
and all other faiths are of the devil.
Yet, on the other hand, to many of us
Christianity is not merely one faith among
many, a dying phase of religious evolu-
tion. We cannot be quite sure that these

THE RENASCENCE OF FXITH. 43

new faiths, of ethical societies, theoso-
phists, positivists, are rising from its ashes
glorified. Somehow it is a Httle hard for
us to believe that. Somehow we remem-
ber times of bitter poverty and jDain in
our own lives, or yet more vividly, per-
haps, in the lives of others, when the old
words rose unbidden to our lips. Did
we lie then? Did we feed souls on
metaphors? Souls cannot live on meta-
phors; nothing can nourish them but
facts. Christianity, unfortunately for the
theorists, is not defunct. It shows among
us an immense vitality. Its disciples, from
a Salvation Army lass to Cardinal Newman,
are perhaps the only thoroughly happy
thinking people in the modern world. In
any consideration of contemporary be-
liefs, on the inspirations of modern lives,
Christianity must be taken into account.

The religion of the future ! Where shall
we find it ? Ah, let us look for that faith
which answers most fully the needs of the

44 THE PVITNESS OF DEN ML

human soul! Should it prove to be any
modern substitute for Christianity we must
accept it. Nay, if a new faith, however
limited, holds any one new factor of spir-
itual worth, we must let our Christianity
go. For if any religion springing avow-
edly from human thought alone can offer
the soul something not held within the
faith of old, then the religion of Christ
must cede all claim to unique or supreme
sacredness. It must take its place along
with Buddhism, Mohammedanism, or the
latest American system in religion — faiths
all equally human because equally divine.

Let us try to find the faith most compe-
tent to set man free and make him noble
— the faith of strongest appeal.

''The faith of strongest appeal! But
why seek it?" murmurs many a sighing
voice among the shadows. " To point it
out is only to leave us sadder than before.
Is desire the proof of fact? "

Many a sincere and noble spirit rejects

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 45

Christ because it so longs for Him, turns
aside from faith because it is so an-hun-
gered. ** Christianity is so well adapted
to the human mind," they cry, " that the
human mind is quite capable of inventing
Christianity." Belief in the Word made
flesh is created by the craving for a per-
fect revelation ; belief in atonement springs
from the human cry for redemption ; belief
in immortality is the shadow, not of fact,
but of desire. Browning, in '' A Death in
the Desert," describes lovingly and sadly
these people. He describes their condi-
tion as

" A lamp's death, when, suffused with oil, it chokes ;
A stomach's, when, surcharged with food, it starves."

It is hard to know how to meet them ex-
cept as Browning does. Yet, to the theist
at least, an answer is ready. Does in-
trinsic excellence argue truth ? Is a faith,
because beautiful, real? No, a hundred
times no, if we have no hope and are

40 THE IVITNHSS OF DENIAL.

without God in the world. But for one
who trusts the Creator, yes, a thousand
times yes. For if God is not mocked,
neither does He mock His children. Can
the wish of man conceive any good which
the will of God has not made fact? Can
man think a holy thought not thought by
God before him? Nay, but ** before they
call, I will answer"; and we who believe
in the Fatlier may rest assured that the
higher and more satisfying our concep-
tions the more we may trust them and the
nearer they approach to an adequate re-
flection of eternal fact.

Yes! If God is, and loves, the best
must be true in Him, and the fairest faith
which the soul can conceive is the most
real. Let us look for this Best and Fair-
est. Let us study the subtle spiritual re-
lationships of those differing modern faiths
which have sprung from the movement of
denial, and consider them not so much
metaphysically and absolutely as with con-

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 47

stant reference to that human need and
human nature out of which, after all, they
spring.

Even to the agnostic this line of inquiry
must have a certain significance. He
knows, indeed, no God of whose reason
our reason is the image ; but he must
accept in a measure, if he thinks at all, the
validity of that thought-instrument which
he uses. Perhaps he is also inclined to
believe in the gradual development among
men of the power clearly and justly to
apprehend life ; and so he must feel a
slight presumption — since negative cer-
tainty is as impossible as positive — in favor
of the truth which deliberate and symmet-
rical judgment pronounces most desirable.
The highest result of evolution may have
a certain balance of favor on its side, and
the creed which best sets character free for
progress is at least worth respecting.

Yet for agnostic, and, indeed, for theist
as well, theoretical perfection is of course

48 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL.

no final evidence of truth. The witness
of fact must meet the cry of need. Chris-
tianity can have no credence if simply a
vision of what should be; it must be a
statement of what is. Our plea for fact,
for historic evidence, is manifest to-day in
the wide critical movement which is ex-
amining Christian documents. This most
wholesome and necessary movement our
few slight pages cannot touch. But we
must be conscious of our need before any
evidence will convince us; and to consider
what answer is given by diflferent new re-
ligions to the cry of human need will pre-
pare the way for inquiry into the external
evidence of fact. To be sure, the advan-
tage of much modern subjective religion
is that it requires no external evidence at
all ; and in this aspect our line of thought
might have even more value than we claim
for it.

This is a little book of personal inquiry.
It is not a theological treatise, and it does

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 49

not pretend to any theological or philo-
sophical knowledge. It will not deal with
abstractions, but with life, common sense,
the revelation of experience. If it clears
from the way of one or two explorers in
the tangle of life even one tiny thorn-bush,
it will have done more than it ought, per-
haps, to hope.

III.

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY.

I will not prate of thus and so,
And be profane with yes and no.

C LOUGH.

Holy, holy, holy ! Lord God Almighty !

Though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see.

III.

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY.

The desire for God! It can never die.
The religious impulse! It is the supreme
result of evolution. Thus it came to pass
that in the very heart of scientific denial and
the agnostic temper was soon generated a
mystic somewhat calling itself religion.

Science had seemingly finished her
work, had substituted for the Father of
Lights, to be loved, obeyed, adored, blind
Force, insentient Law. In vain did sensi-
tive souls lament the ancient faith, which
had upheld and blessed, purified and
healed. Given the physical, to find a
substitute for the divine — such was the
new task set the spirit.

Darwin, the greatest mind in the scien-
53

54 THE IVITNBSS OF DHNML

tific movement, appears, strangely enough,
lo have had a nature closed to any ap-
peal of the spirit. But the other leaders
and representatives of the movement — men
occupied less with the direct inquiries
of modern science than with the bearing
of these inquiries on life — were normally
religious in instinct. They were restless
without some working theory of man's
relations with the universe as a basis for
active life. It is Spencer who pursued the
search with most energy — an energy
springing, we are tempted to think, partly
from the passion for system which pro-
duced a whole library of classification and
analysis. A religious element was cer-
tainly latent in the evolutionary concep-
tion which he himself defined for us.
What, he asked, might it be?

Science shows us a vast universe of
ordered matter emerging from a myste-
rious void. Where is there here scope for
the religious passion?

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 55

In the void itself, says Spencer.
" Science," he writes, *' gives us an ex-
planation which, carrying us back only a
certain distance, there leaves us in the
presence of the avowedly inexplicable.
Higher faculty and deeper knowledge will
raise rather than lower the element of
wonder with which we view the course of
Nature and the Unknown Abyss beyond."

In the sense of wonder is the soul of
religion. As the bright little sphere of
our knowledq-e extends, it touches an ever
greater surface of surrounding darkness;
and the need becomes greater and the
scope wider for that reverent recognition
of mystery which shall make men humble
and sane. From the days when the sav-
age fearfully worshiped he knew not what,
resident in the stone or tree, the appre-
hension of an unknown Force has been the
eternal element of truth in the vagaries of
religion ; it is the only element which can
abide enlightened search. The effort to

.-i6 THE H'lTNESS OF DllNlAL

define that wliicli is beyoiul our ken is the
source of all fanaticism, and has led to
all distortions of religion, from the barba-
rous anthropomorphism of the savage to
the anthropomorphism, more refined, but
equally unthinkable, of Calvinist theology.
There was excuse for a religion founded
on sentiment and assumption in the old
misty days, excuse even for the fantastic
ideas of our fathers, only less crude than
that worship of ancestral ghosts in which
they remotely originated. To-day such
excuse has fled. Science removes from us
heaven and hell, God above and the Spirit
of God within. But sternest loyalty to
truth leaves us somewhat — the action of
natural law, and, behind this law. Mystery
solemn, insoluble, and mighty. When all
illusions of fancy, all deceits of desire are
suppressed we find ourselves — the words
are Spencer's — *' in the presence of an In-
finite and Eternal Energy from which all
things proceed." Profound awe, intense

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 57

humility in this dark presence, are hence-
forth to form our religion, to nourish our
spirits, and to replace the adoration
charged with obedience and love with
which, in less intelligent days, men pros-
trated themselves before the Father of
Lights.

Instinctively, men began at once to call
this kind of thought the Religion of the
Unknowable. And by a right instinct.
For not only unknown, but unknowable,
at least to all criteria of science, the Energy
behind phenomena and natural law must
forever remain. Between this Energy and
the spirit of man there is a great gulf fixed.
That there is held within its darkness any-
thing cognate to ourselves, anything to
accept or summon love, we dare not
assume. The highest spiritual state of the
thorough agnostic is silent acquiescence in
his own littleness; sacrificing every intel-
lectual instinct of assertion, every emo-
tional instinct of love.

58 THE IVITNHSS OF DENIAL

" I will not frame one thought of what
Thou niayest either be or not,"

cries fervently the devout, doubting spirit.
To liow many among us this stern refrain-
ing from question, 4:his abstinence from
speech or thouglit, seems the only reverent
attitude! How often is the impulse to
approach the Infinite Majesty with the
happy trust of childhood checked by the
njodern spirit whispering the fear, not only
of folly, but of irreverence ! The ardor of
our worship is vitiated by the dread lest
our deep feeling contain an unwarrantable
assumption ; the eager freedom of our
thought in the divine presence is ham-
pered, if not inhibited, by the suspicion
that all creeds are a human impertinence ;
and the temper that abstains even from
communion with God lest it should insult
either His being or its own integrity is
known to every modern soul.

And if the inner life even of those nur-
tured in the Church catholic and loyal to

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 59

its traditions is invaded by this dread,
what shall we say of those without?
Vigorous has been the reaction of our
generation against creeds. Men have
schooled themselves to a severe reserve
of thought which has threatened at times
to sweep all theologies away. The old
Hamlet-sigh, *' The rest is silence," is to
many the only utterance, when, gazing
past life's brief, sad, perplexing drama,
they peer into the shadows beyond. The
faith which has serenely claimed to pene-
trate these infinite shadows seems to them
puerile when not arrogant. If, in times of
inward stress, they indulge themselves in
vague emotions, in impulsive crying on
Mystery to save, the folly of such moments
finds full compensation and correction in
the sharp self-contempt of more intellectual
moods. Perhaps, if it be indeed true that
the human soul is made for adoration,
there may be more of the element of per-
sonal worship than men recognize in the

60 • THE IV UN ESS OF DENIAL.

enthusiastic reverence with which they
contemphitc the Secret of Life and Force ;
but such an element is unconscious. From
the rehgion of the future, so runs a com-
mon feehng, all attempt at formula, defini-
tion, creed, must be abandoned, and awe
must take the place of love.

Does this awe of the Unknowable, this
Religion of the Unknown, offer food before
untasted to the soul of man ? Is it new or
strange ? Turn to the Book which defines
the Infinite at times with most audacious
assurance, which is repudiated with sharp-
est decision by bare scientific thought.
There are ancient words antedating by
many a generation the discoveries of mod-
ern agnostic science which seem to possess
much the same ring. Less purely scientific
because couched in the passion-fraught
language of poetry, there yet rules behind
the glow of their imagery a like reverent
severity of thought. " Canst thou by
parching find out God? canst thou find

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 61

out the Almighty to perfection? It is
high as heaven ; what canst thou do ?
deeper than hell ; what canst thou know? "
** He made darkness His secret place."
** Clouds and darkness are round about
Him." "Thy way is in the sea, and Thy
path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps
are not known." " Behold, I go for-
ward, but He is not there ; and backward,
but I cannot perceive Him : on the left
hand, where He doth work, but I cannot
behold Him : He hideth Himself on the
right hand, that I cannot see Him."

If such phrases abound in the Old Tes-
tament, they are not lacking in the New.
" No man hath seen God at any time," is
the assertion of the most dogmatic of
gospels. There is a book placed last in
our Bibles, as the Apocalypse, the Reve-
lation, par excellence, of the divine. At
the very beginning is heard a Voice pro-
claiming, '' I am the Alpha and the
Omega, which is and which was and

G2 THE IVITNESS OF DEN ML.

which is to come, the Ah-niy;lity." Did
the modern scientist model upon these
words his statement of " an Infinite and
Eternal Energy from which all things
proceed " ? If so, he omitted nothing.
In the presence of this Energy, science
tells us that we abide. In the presence of
the Alpha and the Omega, the Almighty,
the seer of Patmos tells us that the living-
creation abides and worships. And its
chant rises forever, with no rest day and
night, while in the liturgy joins the race of
men, casting down their insignia of domin-
ion : " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God,
the Almighty, which was and which is
and which is to come." Yet here must
we pause ; for the creation, passing be-
yond the self-announcement of the Eternal,
hails it as Holy — a step far greater than
any sanctioned by the modern scientific
mind.

The confession of the inscrutable mys-
tery of the divine nature, the abnegation

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. G3

of all human sovereignty, the conscious-
ness of the abyss between the Eternal and
the creature of a day — these are the first
conditions of the spirit of worship ; they
are the primary postulates of all theism,
and hence of all Christianity.

Of all Christianity, not of all theology.
Too often, throughout Christian history,
theologians have neglected their solemn
warning. ReHgious wars, in act and
thought, have followed. Yielding to
temptation, they have sought to define the
Infinite, to put God in a formula. They
have their reward. The formulae " make
themselves air." The Infinite can be ex-
pressed under no human terms; and the
next generation rejects, it may be with
relief, it may be with strife and pain, the
efforts of its predecessors.

" Our little systems have their day,

They have their day and cease to be ;

They are but broken lights of Thee,

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they."

64 THE IV n NESS OF DUN ML

A spiritual rclii^ion must ever find its
very source and spring in the recognition of
tlie solemn ab}-ss of unknown being that
surrounds our Httle life. The words
" Eternal " and '* Infinite " imply by their
very negations a Something incomprehen-
sible to thought, alien to the nature of
man, and because alien hailed as divine.
No words of the scientist, no visions of
far-darting speculation, can increase the
humility with which the Christian recog-
nizes his own ignorance, the reverence
with which he prostrates himself before the
majesty of infinite life and infinite law.
Still he who seeks to behold the glory of
God must be hidden in the cleft of the
rock, and rejoice if a glimpse of a fleeting
garment is vouchsafed him. The assump-
tion of the agnostic is the essential condi-
tion of the worship of the theist. Were it
not so, humility would be lost in arrogance
and faith in sight.

Scientific thougfht has no new element

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 65

of inspiration to offer human life. Nor,
indeed, does it claim to have. Rather, it
claims to reject the spurious and the tran-
sitory and to retain that one permanent
factor which can never be shaken by the
progress of knowledge or the clash of the-
ologies. Its glory is its simplicity.

A simple faith! It is always the cry of
the denier. Protestant hurls it at Catho-
lic ; theist at Protestant ; and the advocate
of simple morality flings it at theist in due
turn. One would think, to hear the com-
mon phrase, that simplicity was the first
requisite of religion, and that any creed
which can be challenged must be false.

Yet as matter of fact the simplicity won
by intellectual negation has never held the
world. Theorists and thinkers may feed
themselves on abstractions ; men and
w^omen demand facts. And the more
nearly the alleged facts — or truths — of
faith meet the known and complex facts
of experience the swifter is the response of

66 THE IV UN ESS OE DENL4L

the soul. Thus it is the faith that is
famihar rather than the faith that is empty
which appeals to humble folk and meets
with ready understanding and swift assent.
The peasant woman will grasp by intuition
the full Catholic faith with all its intricacy
and detail ; for she finds in her own nature
that which leaps to meet every assertion
and w^elcomes every claim. She rests be-
wildered in the presence of theism, of a
religion vague and broad. In truth, there
are two kinds of simplicity : one at the
beginning, one at the end ; that of struc-
ture not begun, that of structure perfected.
The amoeba is simple in the first sense, the
human body in the second. " From the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous" the
scientist tells us that evolution moves. Is
its law to be disregarded in religion alone,
and that faith to be highest and purest
which is most amorphous? If so, the
Religion of the Unknowable will satisfy our
souls.

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 67

But it does not satisfy them ; it makes
no general appeal. We have eloquent and
noble words, ringing with a kind of triumph,
inspired by the thought of the vastness of
the world and our own ignorance ; we have
more frequent expressions of passionate sor-
row in the thought of a Father loved and
lost. "Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man
unveils me; I have none," cries Shelley
exultant ; but Clough, in later days, mourns
bitterly : " Eat, drink, and die, for we are
souls bereaved." And bereaved indeed the
vague contemplation of Mystery leaves us.

" Mr. Spencer's Unknowable," writes a
clever critic, " may truthfully enough be
expressed by the algebraic formula x".
The suffering world comes to the scientific
philosopher waiting to be consoled, and he
says, 'Think on the Unknowable.' Where
two or three are gathered together to wor-
ship it, there may the algebraic formula
suffice to give form to their emotions ;
they may be heard to profess their un-

08 THE IVITNFSS OF DHNIAI-.

wearying belief in x" even, if no weak
brother of ritualistic tendencies be heard
to cry, * O x'\ love us, help us, make us
one with Thee.' "
\ The critic hints the truth. In the hour
of pain, danger, death, can any one think
on the Unknowable? Can Mystery re-
deem? Shall we plunge our faith, our
hope, our adoration into this blank
nescience which envelops our pitiful
humanity, and expect them, to return
aglow with hope, \ital with courage?
Such faith, if faith it can be called, meets
one only of the requisites of the soul — the
need to abase itself ; the correlative need —
to exalt itself, need so cogent if man is to
act — it leaves untouched. It offers neither
stimulus to effort, standard for conduct,
nor strength in failure. Can a religion
devoid of all these elements satisfy the
race that is to be? The first word of the
Almighty in the Apocalypse corresponds,
indeed, exactly to the admission of

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 69

science ; but the cry of worship even at
first transcends it. The book unfolds its
mystic sequence of the history of man as
seen in the Spirit, and the great antiphon
of worship sounds down the ages, reechoed
at each crisis of the human tale. As taken
up again and again, it throbs each time
with new knowledge. " Worthy art Thou,"
cry the elders, " our Lord and our God, to
receive the glory and the honor and the
power: for Thou didst create all things,
and because of Thy will they were, and
were created." Creative Force not only
works, but wills. Later comes the chant
of the great multitude — white-robed palm-
bearers; and they, coming out of great
tribulation, from all peoples and tribes and
tongues, give praise to a God who saves.
Finally comes a voice from heaven as of
many waters, of thunder, of harpers play-
ing on their harps ; but this " new song "
of those purchased out of the earth no
man may understand, for it hath not

70 THE IV IT NESS OF DEN ML.

entered into the heart of man to conceive
the revelations of the Infinite Force which
await souls perfected. At the end the
Almighty speaks once more, and He saith,
" Behold, I make all things new. I am
the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning
and the end. I will give unto him that is
athirst of the fountain of the water of life
freely. He that overcometh shall inherit
these things; and I will be his God, and
he shall be My son." That which sufficed
for creation shall suffice also for renewal,
and the man who overcomes in the spirit-
ual struggle of existence shall inherit the
very nature of a Power no longer unknow-
able or unknown. The first word of God
in the Apocalypse is the true and scientific
starting-point for faith ; must we hail the
last as delusion?

IV.
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY.

For each man of all men is God, but God is the fruit of

the whole ;
Indivisible spirit and blood, indiscernible body and soul.

O God with the world in wound, \\ hose clay to his foot-
sole clings,

( Glory to Man in the highest, for man is master of things.

A. C. Swinburne.

Raise Thou the arms of endless intercession,
Jesus, divinest when Thou most art man.

F. W. H. Myers.

IV.

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY.

Sharp and unsparing is the criticism on
tlie Religion of the Unknowable quoted in
the last chapter. The author might be a
priest, nurtured on the most full and defi-
nite ''forms" ever evolved as ** food of
faith." He is, as it happens, Mr. Frederic
Harrison, champion of the Religion of
Humanity, chief exponent of Positivism in
England.

Harrison is as profoundly agnostic as
Spencer. He too, also denying that a divine
Spirit can ever be known by us, asserts
that in ultimate analysis the life of sacrifice
and aspiration cannot be ascertained to
have other than a physical basis. He too
rules out, not by argument, but by as-
sumption, the soul, immortality, God.
73

74 THE H^ITNESS Oh DtXL^L

Yet his repudiation of the scientific sub-
stitute for rehgion is scathing and scornful
— more scathing, more scornful, perhaps,
than a follower of the Lord of Peace and
Meekness would allow himself to express.

For the Positivists, and with them many
others, mark a phase in the reaction from
Christianity precisely the reverse of that
marked by Spencer. While one school of
agnostic thought criticizes the definiteness
of the Christian faith, another criticizes its
mysticism. One school demands that
religion exclude everything but the senti-
ment of mystery ; another that it rule out
mystery altogether, as the foe to light, and
evolve its being from the contemplation of
known fact.

In the recognition of the dark grandeur
of Force there is no response to the human
cry, no appeal for action or service. Be-
cause it leaves the soul still empty its
votaries are very limited. The great cur-
rent of agnostic consciousness has set in

THE RELIGION OE HUMANITY. 75

another direction, away from tlie myste-
rious, the vast, and the vague, toward the
clear, the famiHar, and the human. Man-
kind becomes tlie center of its thought,
and practically, if not avowedly, the object
of its religion. Positivism is one phase,
and that the smallest, of the wide tendency
to concentrate all passion and devotion on
the service of men ; one phase of the Re-
ligion of Humanity, which during the last
half-century has expected, and at times
almost appeared, to supplant the religion
of Christ. But it is a phase curiously
interesting because fully aware of its own
nature, and trying to shape for itself an
organic, semichurchly structure, while
most agnostics are pure individualists,
content to let attitude take the place of
confession of faith. The Positivists, in-
deed, do not like to be called agnostic.
** The Positivist answer to the theological
problem," says Harrison, *' is of course the
same as the agnostic answer ;" but negation

/

I

,VG THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL.

is only the starting-point which shall lead
to the " Positive " faith. They have felt
the need of the century, the aching hunger
of the soul. They accept the dictum of
science, unknown and known, no mediator
between. But the solution of the scientist
they discard. To fling their faith, their
love, their service into a dark blank is not
only cold, but unpractical. Another solu-
tion remains, another possible answer to
the hunger of the soul. God is lost to us,
the Unknowable is useless. Let us take
what remains — the Known. Starting on
this basis, Auguste Comte built up an
immense system which w^as to include all
knowledge and conduct, and which found
substance and center in the cry, " Worship
humanity; exalt the race-ideal."

It was in the second quarter of the
century that Comte published his Bible,
the " Philosophic Positive." He starts
with assumption and classification. His-
torical progress he divides into three

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 77

stages : the theological, when man wor-
shiped a supposed divine Being or beings
and interpreted life in the light of such
worship ; the metaphysical, when, convinced
of the folly of belief in God, man still
seeks to pierce the veil of phenomena, to
apprehend causes, and to reach absolute
truth ; finally, the positive, when, reaHzing
the futility of the search for cause, man
abandons speculation and confines himself
within the limits of fact. Every science,
says Comte, passes through these three
phases. The science of religion, slowest
because greatest of all, is only just emerg-
ing from the second or metaphysical stage
— nay, some shreds of the old theology
yet cling about it in feeble minds. To
shake these oflf, to escape also from thought
of abstractions, to force man to a solid
basis — here is the duty of the future, the
inspiration of the enlightened mind.

And let it not be supposed that the new
religion was to be devoid of its ardent

78 THH IVITNHSS OF DENIAL.

emotions, its ritual even. Comte devised
for it a cult elaborate as that of the Roman
Catholic Church, a cult of altars, lights,
vestments, and sacred signs, with a calen-
dar of saints. A central symbol, a woman
of thirty with a child in her arms, was to
replace the Madonna. Women, indeed,
through whom runs the sacred river of life,
were chiefly to be worshiped ; for they
stood as types of all humanity, that great-
est of known facts. Positivism in England
has known a very definite though limited
development. Already there has been a
split in the ranks ; the ritualistic brethren
now worship in a church where an adap-
tation of the Anglican liturgy is in use
and prayers ascend to " holy Humanity " ;
while the more hard-headed members of
the party — we might perhaps add, those
endued with a sense of humor — continue
to meet in a hall adorned with busts of
great men, and to satisfy their devout im-
pulses wnth lectures on popular history.

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 79

But far more important than the exis-
tence of Positivists as a sect is the large
and indefinable extent to which their faith
has spread as an attitude. It has taken
possession of many of the most intelligent
natures of the century. Its ardent plea
for the service of our kind in the brief time
that elapses before we go forth into the
great darkness ; its faith in the influence
which survives us as our only immortality ;
its yearning lo\e — love touched with pity
— for its lame divinity, man — all these give
to it a strange, sad beauty, like the last
gleam of dying day in a wdde twilight sky.
John Stuart Mill was an admirer and fol-
lower of Comte. G. H. Lewes and his
great companion, George Eliot, were
inspired and suffused by the highest Posi-
tivist spirit. To come to later times and a
different type, it is hardly conceivable that
the strong and terrible genius of Zola
should have penned the pages of " Docteur
Pascal" without reference, definite even if

80 THE IVITNHSS OF DUN I A L

unconscious, to the tenets of Comte. Yet
it would be unfair to choose Zola as a
typical exponent of Positivism. For one
philosopher who would feel his awe in the
presence of the Unknowable an adequate
substitute for the sweet human faith
of Christ, fifty men and women seize
on a religion which at least enjoins on
them, as the chief privilege of life, devo-
tion to their fellow-beings. Those who
have lost God will try forever to fill His
place with man. So it comes to pass that
the Religion of Humanity has become
almost a cant phrase among us, and ex-
presses itself in definite forms, shifting
year by year. Societies of Ethical Cul-
,.ture, repudiating, for reasons invisible to
the outsider, connection with the Positiv-
ists, yet hold tenets apparently similar,
and seek by practical ritual in settlements
and guilds among the poor to embody
their tenets in ways in which the Christian
church may well be glad to join. Mean-

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 81

while countless wanderers in spirit, outside
of societies or church, seek in cherishing
faith in the future of the race the chief
satisfaction to their souls. Humanitarian!
The ugly word has become in these latter
days a battle-cry of progress and of hope.
The advocates of this position, as they
think of Christianity, are especially imbued
with the sense that they have risen higher.
And their great plea is that of an ethical
superiority. They say much of the self-
ishness of the Christian scheme, with its
claim of personal immortality, its emphasis
on individual salvation. *' We shall have
a glorious religion," cried Shelley to Leigh
Hunt long ago, in the shade of the cathe-
dral of Pisa, " when charity and not faith
is made its basis." To nourish the soul
on illusions — how weak! To concentrate
thought upon itself — how dangerous!
Far truer to abandon the desire to know ;
far nobler, renouncing thought of the Be-
yond, to center life and love on others!

^

'h

82 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL.

So shall unselfishness and honesty alike
be better preserved, and aLruistic virtues
replace the religion of egotism.

It is hard to admit this charge of selfish-
ness, brought against Christianity by those
who would make the honor and care for
men the center of life. The spiritual
wisdom of the Church Catholic has taught,
indeed, the supreme importance of per-
sonal holiness. To this end she has en-
joined keen self-searching ; penitence,
confession, reparation ; the yearning of
the soul toward personal communion with
the living God. But in any agnostic
community these things or their equiva-
lent must find place. Social morals must
always be founded on individual virtue.
To attain this virtue man must examine
himself straitly, must know the agony of
self-abasement, must recognize his failures,
and must seek inspiration in the ardu-
ous struggle through placing his own life
beside the highest he knows. The drama

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 83

of the inner life must be eternal, whether
that drama pass beneath a cloud earth-born
or open to the spiritual heavens.

Nor can the taint of selfishness be
affixed to the Christian faith in immortal-
ity. From the time of George Eliot,
people who earnestly plead for a religion
centered in influence on others have pre-
ferred the charge. Fools and blind, not
to see that this faith, as any other, becomes
charged with selfish or unselfish passion
according to the nature that holds it — can
minister to an individualist craving or can
satisfy the yearning cry for the good o^ ^ y
the entire race. Unselfishness inheres in ./ ...
character, not creed. I, sound in mind
and body, to whom nature, art, love,
action, have opened their full glory ; I, the
heir of the ages, living a life of peaceful
energy, with spirit attuned to catch the
faintest notes of the earth-music — what
claim have I on immortality? I verily
have lived ; when my time comes to pass

84 THE IV I TN ESS OF DENIAL.

into the shadow I may lay hfe aside, con-
tent, or, if not content, at least knowing
that the great universe has gi\en me a fair
share of its inheritance. But these my
brothers, stunted of body, sordid of heart,
lethargic of brain — these who live, uncon-
sciously, in torment, pursued by the furies
of physical want and of inherited vice — for
these, what compensation ? How shall the
great Law of the universe be justified for
having made them? How% indeed, unless
there is a new earth beyond these troubled
shores for the meek to inherit ; unless, in a
^ife to come, peace, light, purity, fullness
of life such as they never knew below,
await them? Not for ourselves, the rich
in this world's goods of comfort, art, and
thought ; not for ourselves, but for these,
the oppressed of the earth, we demand
from Justice immortality.

Nor, as a matter of social morality, can
we find anything new in the Jiiuch- vaunted
gospel of service. The modern Church,

THE RELIGION OE HUMANITY. 85

indeed, intent upon theologies sometimes
fantastic, was from the first of the century
false to the social passion. It is now at
last responding, though as yet faintly,
to the social renascence in which we
live. But, in the teaching of her Master,
the ethical and social commands of the
Sermon on the Mount preceded by at least
a year the mystic dogma of the first
eucharist ; and it was only after long train-
ing in the casting out of demons and in
works of temporal mercy that the disciples
were allowed to hear the mighty word, " I
and My Father are one." The law un-
folded by Christ mounts upward, indeed,
in crest after crest of moral and spiritual
grandeur. He begins by repudiating the
law of negative justice so sternly set forth
in the Old Testament — " An eye for an
eye, a tooth for a tooth;" that law which
is still the avowed' — alas! too often the
violated — canon of modern trade. He
advances at once to the higher, positive

8G THl: iriTNFSS Oh' DF.NI.4L

laws uf rcciprocit}- and non-resistance:
" W'hatsoexer yc would that men should
do unto you, even so do ye also unto them."
" Love your enemies, and pray for them that
persecute you." Still this law holds be-
fore us a distant ideal, which we struggle
to attain as individuals and ignore as a
community. But the Master does not
pause, or pauses only that a practical
training may reveal the awful scope of His
commands to His lovin^ but foolish dis-
ciples. Then, in the intimacy, familiar yet
mystical, of His last hour on earth with
those whom He has just for the first time
called His friends, He lifts them at last to
a yet nobler height, and describes to them
the perfect social law, the law of sacrifice :
" This is My commandment, that ye love
one another, even as I have loved you."
** Greater love hath no man than this, that a
man lay down his life for his friends. Ye
are my friends, if ye do the things which I
command you." Then, going forth into the

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 87

night, He manifests in act what He has
taught in word, and the social gospel is re-
vealed. However falteringly, His Church
has followed Him. No height can be
reached by the followers of a modern social
morality which has not been trodden before
by Christian feet.

Ethically w^e can find no point in which
the Religion of Humanity transcends the
religion of Christ. How is it spiritually?

The worship of humanity! Sad and
puzzling the thought, as we contemplate
it, becomes. Live for a while, as man}^ of
us have lived, in the slums of a mod-
ern city, among the great majority ; nay,
walk for one long evening through the
Bowery in New York — or, indeed, Fifth
Avenue will do as well — and watch the
faces streaming b}^ : faces dull, sodden,
unbeautiful, rarely criminal, but never
ideal. Gather them into one composite
vision ; is it this pitiful image that is
offered for our god?

S8 THF: lllTNl-SS OF DENIAL.

Or suppose, without askin<j^ whetlier we
ha\e the lot^ical rii^ht, we put aside the
average. Concentrate thought upon the
best and noblest of the race through its
long history — the leaders of mankind,
heroes, poets, statesmen, martyrs. Fuse
their best into one image, still thinking of
this image as the object of religion, and
our first instinct, our surging emotion, is
that of a great pity. Pity is noble and
sweet ; but it is a strange religion which is
driven at the very heart of faith to replace
worship by compassion.

Where, indeed, is scope for adoration if,
to satisfy the religious instinct, we turn to
man alone? Religion demands an object
of worship no less than a standard of con-
duct and a comforter in pain. Can I pray
to humanity ? Will its ears be open unto
my supplications, accept my thanksgiving,
purify my will? Will it discipline me to
obedience? Alas! where may its com-
mands be learned ? For many-tongued it

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 89

is, and changing as the wind. Can it
comfort me in the hour of anguish?

" That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more,"

is the cry of the high-minded soul. Can
I serve humanity ? Yes ; this indeed, this
alone ; but it is service rendered to a need
below us, not to a glory enthroned above,
and such service is not freedom.

''Be it so," writes the humanitarian;
" but what more, or what better, have
we? If this is not enough it is at least all
that men and women on earth can possess."
There is but one alternative — an Unknow-
able Somewhat, which cannot be presented
in terms of consciousness, to which the
words ** emotion," *' will," ''intelligence,"
cannot be applied, j'^et which stands in
place of the Creator; or a known human
race, faulty if you will, stupid without
doubt, but able at least to profit by your
devotion. Choose ye which ye will serve;

90 THF. IVITNESS Oh' DEMIAL

for other God tlian tliesc the eiiHghtened
intellect of man, standint^ on the vantage-
ground won b\' the wisdom of the ages,
declares that there is none.

The old assumption ! And yet the as-
sertion of at-one-ment has been made, the
revelation of the Divine has been given.

We cannot even think the Unknowable,
far less love it. And the object of religion
— so proclaims the positive temper fostered
by science itself — must be something that
can be known and loved ; must, therefore,
share our nature. We seek a God and
we find him ; our God must be Man.

Yet the attempt is pitiful, to make a
divinity out of men as we see them around
us and in history — feeble, stupid, failing
of perfection at their best. And the
attempt is useless ; for men, taken collec-
tively, can afford neither standard of con-
duct nor strength in pain.

But, looking back through history, we
find one Figure on which the eyes of all

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 91

the generations have been fixed. Alone
among all the sons of earth it has borne
their scrutiny and yet appears in purity
unsullied, in wisdom supreme. A perfect
standard of conduct was given to the
world forever in the person of Jesus Christ.
Verily the Son of man, He may be known
by men ; and there is probably no fact in
nature or histor}- so sharply distinct In the
general consciousness to-day as that of
His personality. But in Him humanity
loses its confusion, variableness, and fail-
ings, and is uplifted into perfect unity,
holiness, and strength. Gathering up into
Himself the fullness of all men. He is the
Race-ideal, the perfect archetype. Not,
as the Catholic faith has always held, a
man — one unit in the multitudinous
throngs of human lives — but Man essen-
tial, Man eternal. He appears as the Mas-
ter of the race, the Vine of which all are
branches, the Lord w^ho draws to Himself
with irresistible power not only the wor-

9li THF. IVITNFSS OF DFNML

shipful service, but the \-en' bein^^ of men.
Those wlio know Him give their allegiance
to no mere stream of life, passing through
countless forms, but to one ever-living
Lord.

And in the Church, the mystical body of
Christ, we have a yet further extension of
the idea for which the lover of humanity
cries. For the Church, both normally and
ideally, includes the entire human race;
even now, in a world invaded by sin and
failure, it is the representative of all, the
earnest of the society to be. It not only
claims our service, but commands our
reverence ; for, made up as it is of faulty
and distorted people, it yet reaches up into
a higher region, and witnesses to perfec-
tion, through its organic and sacramental
union with a Head in whom are centered
holiness, wisdom, authority. The intense
and ardent devotion to " holy Humanity "
sounds strained and unreal from the lips
of the Positivist ; it has real meaning, a

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 93

meaning which yet contradicts in no wise
superficial and obvious facts, on the Hps of
the Christian. Christ in history and in
His Church may well be the center of the
souls of men. Thus does the Christian
faith free from impurity and fulfil in glory
the demand for an object of worship which
can be known, loved, and served.

The cravings of the Religion of Human-
ity are met in the religion of Christ; how
about the limitations? Does Christianity
join in the hatred of mystery, in the re-
fusal to let thought or imagination dwell
on the Infinite Unknown ?

Not so. For in Him who is the first-
born of every creature, we behold the
image of the invisible God. Man must
worship mystery, exclaims the scientist.
Man must worship man, is the rejoinder of
practical thought. And the two state-
ments find union and great harmony in ai
few quiet words written many a century
ago, which tell us, " No man hath seeni

94 THE IV IT NESS OF DENIAL.

God at any time ; the only begotten Son,
/which is in tlie bosom of the Father, He
hatli declared Him."

The mystery of Infinite Power is not, in
the Christian faith, denied, but revealed,
and revealed that men may adore. " The
fear of the Lord" is the first element of
worship ; but this fear is made luminous
with love. The Eternal Force behind
phenomena Spencer refuses to call per-
sonal. " And I do so," he says, " because
it is not less than personal, but more."
With every word the Christian agrees.
God must be more than personal : does
He not comprehend the universe? Per-
sonality, whatever the word may mean —
consciousness, love, will — must be included
within His being: do they not flow forth
from Him into the nature of man?
Whence should man derive consciousness,
if consciousness there be none in the
Creative Force which is the source of his
being? But this Power, not less than
personal, but more — how much more may

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 95

be known to the denizens of other worlds
than ours — is revealed to us, in the aspect
it bears to humanity, in Him who emptied
Himself of His glor}^ and took upon Him
the form of a servant, and was made in
the likeness of man. Thus revealed, the
Eternal is manifest to us, not as force, not
as law, but as the Father. Thus are
human and divine made at one ; thus is
the Infinite revealed to the finite ; thus is
crossed that vast and sundering gulf which
seems to the man of pure science, over-
whelmed by the sense of distance, impass-
able not only to the reason, but to the
imagination of man. In the first fourteen
verses of the Gospel according to St. John
we have the full account of a spiritual
evolution, of the creation of the universe,
through a divine Reason shining unrecog-
nized at first in the darkness of inorganic
being, yet illumining all ; gradually recog-
nized as human consciousness appears ;
manifesting itself at last under a form
knowable to men ; and exalting those who

1)6 THE IV UN ESS OF DENIAL.

respond witli power to become full par-
takers of infinite and eternal life. " In
the beginnini^ was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was
God. ... All things were made by Him.
. . . And the hght shineth in the darkness ;
and the darkness apprehended it not. . . .
There was the true Light, which lighteth
every man, coming into the world. . . .
As many as received Him, to them gave
He the right to become children of God,
even to them that believe on His name.
. . . And the Word became flesh, and
dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory,
glory as of the only begotten from the
Father), full of grace and truth." Here
is the satisfaction of all thought ; here the
demands of the Religion of Mystery and
the Religion of Morality are met and
fused. Here, rejecting their negations,
the positive assertions of each are seen to
be essential and rightful elements of the
faith that is eternal.

V.

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY.

The one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the heavens' light.

Shelley, Adonais.

Come, thou Holy Spirit, come,
And from thy celestial home

Shed a ray of light divine.
Come, thou Father of the poor,
Come, thou Source of all our store,

Come, within our bosoms shine.

Ancient Hymn.

V.

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY.

Mystery and man. Here, then, are
the substitutes which we have so far found
offered for the old faith in the Son, full of
grace and truth, leading us to the Father of
our spirits. There is yet one more faith in
which lost minds, lost hearts, have sought
to take refuge from the cold of a godless
world. " There is no God ; let us worship
a mystery," says Spencer. "There is no
God; let us worship humanity," says the
Positivist. " There is no God ; let us wor-
ship a tendency," says the man of culture.

The phases of agnostic thought which
we have been considering can never satisfy.
They are too severe. In politics, art,
99

OOO 41

100 THE l^ IT NESS OE DENIAL.

religion, there are always a few rigorous
souls who know where they belong and
where they do not ; blaek to them excludes
white, white has nothing in common with
black. But the majority are neither rig-
orous nor, perhaps, logical. The sensitive
people, too intensely alive ; the sluggish
people, only half alive ; the critical people,
whose life is absorbed in the instinct to
observe — all these hate to take sides.
Their effort is to palliate and retain ; their
impulse, compromise.

So it happens that few people, perhaps.
repudiate Christianity thoroughly. The
exultant antagonism of Huxley or Inger-
soU is very rare ; the sweeping and con-
temptuous denial of the older scientific
agnosticism or of the followers of Comte
is becoming constantly rarer. Christianity
is less often than ten }-ears ago, even,
treated as an exhausted force. Its litera-
ture, its ethics, its ideals, indeed, like
gentle and pure rills of mountain water.

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 101

the waters of regeneration, have worn for
themselves in the rocky nature of man
channels which cannot readily be aban-
doned or forgotten, though in drought the
streams are dry. We live in a society
which, though hardly Christianized in fact,
is deeply Christianized in theory. Our
art, speculation, conduct, are shaped by
influences wholly absent from that pagan
civilization which was in some respects so
much fairer than our own. Our convic-
tions may change and become de- Chris-
tianized ; but the intangible yet controlling
sentiments which these convictions have
brought with them, and which determine
the quality of life as undertones determine
the quality of a musical instrument — these
cannot perish at once.

Thus hosts of people hold to the past
with tenderness, even when they cannot
hold to it with faith. They feel the lofti-
ness of Christian passion, the worth and
power of Christian organization. Why

102 THE IVITNHSS OF DUN I A I..

relinquish all this? Why renounce forms
hallowed by the prayers of generations,
entwined with the fibers of our deepest
inherited life? Why not cling to the old
even while we spring to the new ?

The exponents of such an attitude are
all around us. They use our terms,
sympathize with our ideals, join sometimes
in our worship, claim membership in our
churches. We cannot live earnestly or
broadly without meeting them at every
turn. The children of the scientific move-
ment, they have reacted from it with their
hearts, but not with their minds. The
exhilaration of denial has died away, and
their impulse is constructive. Far from
challenging the faith of their fathers, they
claim that in essentials it is still their own.
The sacredness of the past is potent with
them, and organic connection with the
Christian Church, no less than the atmo-
sphere of Christian sentiment, is their most
cherished heritage.

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 103

The revolutionary passion of revolt
emanated chiefly from France ; the modern
theories of science were identified with an
English school of thought. But this latest
and most subtly vital of all phases of
agnostic thought derives tone and char-
acter, in a double sense, from Germany.
The way was prepared for it by the
Hegelian philosophy, with its constant
tendency to place the idea above the fact ;
and this impulse of pure transcendentalism
was reinforced by the resultant school of
theological criticism, with its fierce yet
confident challenge of the authenticity of
the Christian documents. The awakening
of the historic sense, indeed, potent in
secular tracts, could not be expected to
spare Christianity ; the spirit which re-
spects and cherishes the past must of
necessity analyze it also. Dread of the
result of destructive analysis was removed
from men thoroughly trained by idealist
philosophy to believe

104 THE H 'IT NESS OF DEN ML

"It matters nothing for the name,
Su the idea he left tlie same."

And the result was the appearance of crit-
ics Hke Keim or Hohzmann, who do their
best to demohsh the historical basis of
Christianity, while professint^ and experi-
encing most exalted reverence for the
Christian faith.

Browning, the poet so keenly alive to
all contemporary thought-movements, has
given us in his " Christmas Eve " the most
concise study and summary of a thinker
of this type. The soul, which is to learn
that love is supreme whether manifest
through vulgarity, formalism, or critical
.'scholarship, is transported from the hideous
dissenting chapel to the glory of the mid-
night mass at St. Peter's, and thence to
the lecture-desk at Gottingen, where the
" .sallow, virgin-minded, studious " pro-
fessor is demolishing the myth of Christ —

" Whether 'twere best to opine Clirist was,
Or never was at all, or whether
He was, and was not, both together."

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 105

The professor's discourse must be read to
be appreciated. Denying facts and words
of the gospel record, he yet, when the
destructive work is at an end, bids his
hearers give to the story of Christ their
supreme reverence —

" Which, though it meant
Something entirely different
From all that those who only heard it,
In their simplicity, thought and averred it,
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable."

Then breaks forth in a rush the poet's
half-indignant, half-impatient, amused
flood of comment :

" Truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic
When papist struggles with dissenter. . . .
But the critic leaves no air to poison ;
Pumps out, with ruthless ingenuity,
Atom by atom, and leaves you — vacuity.
Thus much of Christ does he reject ?
And what retain ? His intellect ?
What is it I must reverence duly ?
Poor intellect for worship, truly,
Which tells me simply what was told
(If mere morality, bereft
Of the God in Christ, be all that's left)
Elsewhere by voices manifold.
With this advantage, that the stater

100 77V/:" HIJMiSS OF DEN ML.

Maile nowisL' the important stunil)le

Of adding, He the saga and humble

Was also one with the Creator,

You urge Christ's followers' simplicity,

But how does blame evade it ?

Have Wisdom's words no more felicity ?

Morality to the uttermost.

Supreme in Christ, as we all confess,

Why need we prove, would avail no jot

To make Him God, if God He were not ?

What is the point where Himself lays stress?

Does the precept run, ' Believe in good.

In justice, truth, now understood

For the first time ' ? — or, ' Believe in Me,

Who lived and died, yet essentially

Am Lord of Life ' ? "

Finally, Browning sums up the critic's
position and his own comment :

" ' Go home, and venerate the myth
I thus have experimented with —
This man, continue to adore Him
Rather than all who went before Him
And all who ever followed after.'
Surely for this I may praise you, my brother.
Will vou take the praise in tears or laughter ?

Nay, call yourselves, if the calling pleases you,
' Christian ' — abhor the Deist's pravity.
Go on, you shall no more move my gravity

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 107

Than, when I see boys ride a-cockhorse,

I find it in my heart to embarrass them

By hinting that their stick's a mock horse,

And they really carry what they say carries them. "

From Germany to England the thought-
journey is long. Before i860 a reaction
had set in on the Continent toward ad-
mitting more and more of an historic basis
to the gospel story, and a nearer approach
of the narrative to the ev^ents described.
Strauss, in his second " Life of Jesus,"
abandons the purely mythical theory of the
first " Life " in favor of an historic though
shadowy figure. Thus in the land of their
origin the mythical and idealist theories
soon underwent modification; but in 1880
the theory-wave, in its first fullness, was
still affecting England. It was in vain, for
many, that churchmen and theologians
tried to stay its force. The criticism of
the Christian documents suggested a host
of new doubts and questions, which coin-
cided only too readily with the a priori
difficulties in the way of faith presented

108 THE IV UN ESS OF DEN ML

by scientific speculation. A transcendental
philosoph}', hintin^,^ that the spiritual truths
of Christianit}' were independent of historic
fact, fniished the work ; and the agnostic
position in its latest phase was thoroughly
matured. It has reached classes whom
the previous course of the movement of
denial had never wholly won — people with
a literary sense, which the scientists have
not ; people with a sense of humor, which
the Positivists have not ; and the many
fine, rare, delicate spirits who are exclu-
sively transcendentalist and indifferent to
crude questions of fact.

The final agnostic attitude, thus wide in
its appeal, has permeated thought rather
than defined itself into a school. The man
who did most to spread it, and who was
himself its most finished exponent, was
doubtless Matthew Arnold. Arnold, in-
deed, more French than German in tem-
perament, mocks German critics as sharply
as Anglican bishops. A free-lance, he

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 109

fights under no banner; yet it is obvious
enough, to any one who reads his books
as a whole, how largely he was formed by
the thought he despises.

One of the most significant, though not
one of the greatest figures of the century,
Arnold tempts us to linger. A man of
exquisite culture, nurtured in strictest
Christian tradition, he clung devotedly to
Christian sentiment ; yet Christianity, on
its supernatural side, had become to him
an irrevocable dream. It is quite wrong
to speak as if Arnold had been an antag-
onist to Christianity, an iconoclast thirsting
for destruction. Nothing is clearer than
that his conscious aim was constructive.
He believed that Christianity contained
elements inestimably precious ; that the
age-thought, crudely Philistine, was in
danger of letting these elements go and
impoverishing life forever. He sought to
distinguish the transitory from the endur-
ing, and to lead men to the recognition of

110 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL.

ft

that in the teachings of Christ which could
never die. lie himself tells us that while
in England his books were \iewed as a
dangerous onslaught on Christianit)', critics
on the Continent marveled that a man of
intelligence should waste his time in the
fatuous and strange effort to discover
elements of permanence in an outworn
faith. Deep love and tender reverence are
visible in all Arnold's treatment of the
New Testament, love and reverence all the
more striking when compared with the
flippancy of his favorite tone toward the-
ology and church dignitaries. This exalted
religious sentiment makes distinctions dif-
ficult, and, in a very bewildering world,
bewilders us yet more. To a man of his
type, remarkable less for logical acumen
than for keen literary sensitiveness, the
value of Church and Bible is twofold — their
ministry to emotion and their guidance to
a moral life. These elements he endeavors
to preserve intact, untwining from them,

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. Ill

gently or rudely as the case may be, the
intellectual conceptions and definite doc-
trines which were once supposed to bear
to emotion and maxim the relation of a
flower to its perfume. Arnold would keep
the aroma ; but he ruthlessly flings the
fiower away. Rejecting scornfully, from
the idea of God, the personal and all
which pure reason cannot recognize, he
keeps a tendency that makes for righteous-
ness. He considers the person of Christ,
and, passing as unworthy of notice the
Catholic faith of the Godhead manifest in
perfect manhood, he presents to us the
Jewish mystic, wise with the wisdom of
the heart, instinct with a sweet reasonable-
ness. Of the glorious scope of the New
Testament commands and promises to the
believing soul, he leaves us the method of
inwardness, the secret of self-renunciation.
And having thus " defecated," as has well
been said, ** the conception of religion to a
mere transparency," he bids us retain in

112 THE I^'ITNLSS OF DENIAL.

fullness our old passion of worship; direct-
ing it no longer to the God adored by our
fathers, but to a tendency toward right-
eousness. " Morality touched by emotion"
becomes our religion, and a " Something
not ourselves " becomes our God.

On the whole, Arnold defines clearly
enough the amount of intellectual convic-
tion which underlies much Christian phra-
seology. An uneasy tendency is abroad
to dematerialize religion, as it were, to
escape from the troublesome connection
with historical and concrete fact ; to relin-
quish everything susceptible of challenge,
and to take refuge in abstractions. The
very strength of the religious emotion, in
a way, aids this tendency. Spiritual pas-
sion is eternal in the soul ; but the force
of feeling may at times be self-sufficing
and veil by its very intensity the absence
of definite object. Such an attitude is, as
a rule, happy. No longer pursued by the
sense of loss or haunted by regrets, it is

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 113

complacent and peaceful. It offers a
compromise which retains the comfort of
use and wont while escaping strenuous
demands on thought. Many people, more
marked by devoutness and sympathy than
by clearness of thought, and impressed by
the wideness of truth, fail to see the dis-
tinction between this attitude and the
attitude of the Church.

Yet the distinction is absolute. The
Church is the guardian of what her foes
call dogma and she calls truth ; that is,
of belief in central definite and objective
facts. Only secondarily and as result is
she the guardian of morals or the inspirer
of feeling. Those who deny a God with
whom intercourse is possible as with a
friend, an immortality in which man may
find release, those who restrict our in-
spiration to powers and laws evolved in
human experience, these are as truly
agnostic as the most virulent foe of Christ
and the Church. Whatever delicate sym-

114 THE WITNESS OF DEN ML.

pathy they may have for the exquisite
ethics of Christianity, however they may
cherish and adopt Christian sentiments and
terms, they diflfer from other schools of
agnostic thought onl\' in surrounding their
negations with the glamour of finer feeling
and a more subtle sense of duty.

This attitude is a witness to the might
of Christianity; but it is a sorrowful wit-
ness. One can hardl\- refrain from enter-
ing a protest against, not its spirit, but its
method. The protest would be launched,
not in the name of Christian dogma nor
of moral consistency, but of intellectual
honesty. For surely such an attitude
tends toward what George Eliot, in " Theo-
phrastus Such," calls " debasing the cur-
rency." Arnold rebukes over-scrupulous-
ness; but in truth it is well-nigh impossi-
ble to become over-scrupulous in our me-
dium of intellectual exchange. It is hard
enough to understand one another in this
bewildering and sorrowful world. We live

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 115

amidst the confusion of tongues, and no
man can be sure that he speaks the same
language as his fellows. That we behold
the same objects in the physical world is
matter of pure conjecture; that we hold
the same conviction in the inner world of
mind is an hypothesis doubly removed
from demonstration. Is it not, then, un-
wise to destroy the little unity that we
have in our means of interchange ; to take
words which have already gained a vital
and definite meaning through long use and
wont, so that everybody approximately
understands them, and to insist on using
them in a quite new sense, retaining what
they adumbrate, but rejecting what they
signify? Yet surely this is what is done
by people who speak of the living Christ
as a name for the race-ideal, of the res-
urrection as signifying simply moral or
spiritual regeneration, of God as a tendency
that makes for righteousness. To mean
an abstraction when one says " God " is

IIG THE H^'ITNESS OF DENIAL

neither fair nor honest. Words are flesh
as well as spirit. Try to strip away the
flesh — historical implication, intellectual
con\iction — and the spirit, the emotional
and moral power, becomes not only invis-
ible, but unknowable. Let us at least
keep the rough accuracy that comes from
meaning by words what our fathers meant,
what simple people mean, what the words
themselves, taken at their face-value, seem
to say. If we are to have a new religion,
let us have a language for a new religion.
If our religion consists of the moral senti-
ment of the old, minus its convictions, let
us not use language which was assuredly
meant to imply the fact first and the feeling
only by inference. Let us avoid using as
poetry — Arnold's pet illustration — what
was meant as science. Stern scrupulous-
ness in speech is our only hope of under-
standing one another at all or making real
progress. If our faith is true and high it

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 117

ought to be quite capable of engendering
a new poetry of its own. To borrow is
evidence of weakness.

Yet an attitude in which rare spirits find
repose cannot be founded on illusion.
What is it, then, in this religion of abstrac-
tions which supports the soul ?

It is the recognition of that tendency to
righteousness which operates, mighty but
unseen, through all the course of human his-
tory, bending men's hearts to itself to fulfil
the counsels of the Eternal. This school
of thought cares not, with the scientist, to
fix its eyes on the abyss, the wide space-
gulf behind visible nature. Nor does it,
with the pure lover of humanity, Positivistor
other, seek to center the religious passion on
a personal, concrete race of men. Person-
ality it abhors, indeed, as if the very term
savored of limitation. It is an impulse of
high culture, at times, to withdraw from fel-
lowship with men into a solitude of thought.

118 THE IVITNHSS Oh DEN ML

" The lofty peaks Init to tlie stars are known,
Hut to tlie stars and the cold lunar beams ;
Alone the sun arises, and alone

Spring the great streams."

The impulse which prevails toward men
seems also to prevail in the thought of the
Eternal ; and men repudiate the personal
with horror from their faith, as they escape
it in their lives. But that which meditative
thought finds most worthy of honor, that
which stirs it to action and feehng, is the
recognition of moral force. We perceive
such force playing through human history ;
through all man's errors making for truth,
through all sin for righteousness, through
all vacillation sweeping steadily forward
with irresistible might. In the individual
it is the impulse which makes for inward
purity and self-renouncement; in the
community, for social righteousness ; in
the long sequence of human generations
it manifests the wide and just workings
of the moral law. It is this force, as re-
vealed to the student of human experience.

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 119

which is to exact obedience and inspire
strength.

Is there here any element of inspiration
absent in Christianity? Is this recognition
of a spiritual force molding destinies and
encircling life, working outward from and
through the conscience of men, a new
revelation ?

We saw how the religious instinct of the
man of pure science, his mind concentrated
on the natural order, led him to bow before
the mystery surrounding nature, which he
worshiped as the source of life ; and we
found this Infinite and Eternal Energy
recognized with awful dread by the pro-
phets of old as the God who hideth Him-
self, by the Christian seer as the Almighty,
the Beginning and the End. Then, noting
how the humanitarian finds an opposite
religion in the service of his kind and the
worship of the race-ideal, we saw that the
satisfaction of tlie craving which led him
back to man was found in the adoring ser-

120 TH1-: lllTNHSS Oh DENIAL.

vice of that Son of God who, incarnate in
humanity, exalts the entire race to mystic
union with HimseH'. \\c are confronting
now a third phase of agnostic thought — a
phase which loves to dwell, not on nature
nor on men, but on the moral law. It
recognizes, as the stimulus to devotion and
ardor, an influence \iewless as wind, un-
confinable as water, kindling like flame,
moving toward righteousness in society
and in the soul.

What have we here but reverent recog-
nition of the final doctrine of the Christian
faith? " Let Thy loving Spirit," cried the
psalmist long ago, 1* lead me forth into
t!:e land of righteousness." All through
the Old Testament breathes the sense of
a spiritual force, making for holiness. It
moves at first upon the face of the waters.
It is known supremely in the lives of men.
They cannot escape it. Whither shall
they flee, then, from its presence ? Shaped
and guided by its direction only could

THE RELIGION Of MORALITY. 121

they reach goodness. "Take not Thy
Holy Spirit from me." It Hfts them out
of bondage into freedom. In its hberty
alone could life be secure : " Stablish me
with Thy free Spirit." Time goes on, and
with clearer light the consciousness of
this force becomes more distinct. It is
hidden, universal, invisible, the very at-
mosphere of human life, yet manifest at
times only. " The wind bloweth where it
listeth, but thou canst not tell whence it
cometh, and whither it goeth." Those
"born anew" in its might share its mys-
terious power, free of the world, uplifted
into a higher region ; for " where the Spirit
of the Lord is, there," as the psalmist
knew, "is liberty." It is essentially, with
all its mystery, moral ; its results are love,
joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, good-
ness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance —
an ideal of character suave yet austere, in
which the gentle and bright joyousness
of the Greek meets the high standard of

122 THE IVITNIzSS Oh DENIAL

the Hebrew. Tlius it works secretly in
the conscience of each man, to purify, in-
struct, and guide ; but, greater than the
being of any one, it works in the collec-
tive soul, and is the universal power bind-
ing the human race in one, through all
illusions of sin and failure making for an
ideal not yet attained — " for through the
Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of
righteousness." Impersonal, it speaks not
of itself, and may be known only in its
workings ; it shows unto us the things of
Another, revealing the perfect Standard of
conduct for which men cry aloud. This
is the force, evident to any thoughtful
eye, which perpetually con\icts the world
in respect of sin, of righteousness, and
of judgment. The Spirit of righteous-
ness, it is also the Spirit of truth, the power
which, bringing all things to remembrance,
interprets the past and enables men to read
the lessons of history. Revealing the past,
it makes for the future, showing things to

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 123

come and guiding into all truth. It is, as
it has been from the beginning and shall
be for all time, the informing life of all
spiritual and social evolution.

Here is the Catholic doctrine, in the
very words of the ancient and dogmatic
Book which the Church hold sacred. Where
does it fail to cover the faith of the tran-
scendentalist : the perception of a Power
which may not be defined, making for
righteousness ; of spiritual force, mighty in
nature, in history, and in the souls of men ?

All through the century has been in-
creasing the number of those who fear —
with too much reason from the past history
of religious thought — a crude anthropo-
morphism ; who, dowered with deep spirit-
ual intuition, shrink from limiting their
perception of divine power within the
thought of personality. This religious
movement of revulsion has, however,
known a distinct development. In its
earlier phases (before, we may say, 1850),

124 THE lllTNFSS Oh DFNML

those who revolted from the Church and
flung aside the conception of a theological
Deity found their chief inspiration and
awe in contemplating dixine life pervading
nature. Philosophers and poets — Spinoza,
Shelley, Emerson, to a great degree Car-
lyle — nourished their spiritual natures,
widened their imaginative outlook, and
prepared in advance the corrective for a
purely materialistic conception of evolution,
by their intuition of the one Spirit's plastic
stress, sweeping through the dense physical
world, imposing forms on all creation, and
bursting, in sequence of cuniulative glory
" through trees and beasts and men, into
the heaven's light." This enraptured
pantheism — emotion which mistook itself
for philosophy — held an element of true
inspiration which cannot die ; but as time
advanced another phase of thought be-
came more appealing. Consciousness more
and more passed from nature to center
itself in man. Those who were not drawn

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 125

into the Christian reaction continue to
deny or ignore personahty in spiritual
force ; but they have turned to tracing
the movement of that force in the moral
rather than the natural world, in human
history and experience rather than in the
goings forth of the morning and the even-
ing. We may correlate the pantheism of
Emerson or Spinoza with the sense for the
mystery of nature developed by the scien-
tist ; while the tendency-worship of Arnold
has more in common with the love and
reverence for men shown by the religion
of humanity.

But, whether in earlier or later form, the
recognition of spiritual force has for the
Christian no new element. It is simply
the intuition, vouchsafed to all who ear-
nestly seek the light of nature, history, or
the soul within, of the Holy Spirit of God.
This Spirit, moving upon the waters at the
creation, is immanent in the whole uni-
verse, a principle of beauty and of life

]26 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL

compelling matter to yield up divine
secrets ; but it abides most truly and most
vvondrously in the soul born anew to child-
like faith ; and, mo\ing toward righteous-
ness in the Church which has received its
influence, slowly, surely, according to the
working of mighty laws, evolves the society
to be.

We may trace a wide distinction, how-
ever, between the pantheistic thought of
the first and second half of the century ;
that which springs from the contemplation
of nature is far less profoundly agnostic
than that which springs from the con-
templation of man. For to Shelley or
to Emerson the spiritual force discerned
within the workings of nature is generated
apart from nature, and transcends the visi-
ble, material world. But to Arnold or the
pure ethicist the mystic force which sways
human destin}-, the " tendenc}-," the
" Eternal," has no source outside the being
of man. We may call it " not ourselves,"

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 127

but practically it has no existence for
thought, apart from human consciousness.
We say it " makes for righteousness " ; but
that very righteousness can be known to
us from arbitrary inference alone. To the
man for whom religion is morality touched
with emotion God is simply the atmosphere
of the human moral instinct, swayed by
some great impulse till it becomes a wind,
powerful to drive the wills of men forward
on its current. Spiritual force is essen-
tially self-created. It beareth witness of
itself. " Such witness," said, long ago.
One whose spiritual wisdom all thought
delights supremely to honor — " such wit-
ness is not true."

Far different is the language familiar
to Christian ears : " And I will pray the
Father," says our Lord to the disciples,
touched with wondering fear, " and He
shall give you another Paraclete, that He
may abide with you forever ; even the
Spirit of truth ; . . . He abideth with you,

128 THE IVITNESS OF DEN ML

and shall be in you. . . . He shall guide you
into all the truth : for He shall not speak
from Himself; but what things soever He
shall hear, these shall He speak : and He
shall declare unto you the things that are to
come. He shall glorify Me : for He shall
take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you."
Behind the spiritual influence visible in
nature and in the minds of men Christian-
ity puts the personal God, the Father,
revealed in a perfect humanity, absolutely
one with the divine. ''Because we are sons,''
it says, " God has sent forth the Spirit
of His Son into our hearts, to hail Him,
Father." Pantheism infused with morality
is all around us. It recognizes a Spirit,
invisible in its workings, secret, righteous,
eternal ; a Father and a Son it does not
know. INIean while the Church makes
steadily, as she has made throughout the
ages, her confession of faith : " I believe
in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of
Life, who proceedeth from the Father and

THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 129

the Son, who with the Father and the Son
together is worshiped and glorified, who
spake by the prophets."

How often the doctrine has seemed
strange, arbitrary, invented! But let it
go ; believe in a Spirit who proceeds from
no Father and no Son, who has no source
in absolute and loving Being, no relation to
a Humanity manifest, once for all, as holy,
and what certainty has life left? Where
is a standard of conduct ; where salvation
from sin? Gone is the assurance of abso-
lute right, gone the quiet certainty that a
Spirit proceeding from such right, far
above our wistful hypotheses, is guiding
us into all truth. Vaguely the mists close
upon us, and man is left shut in upon him-
self. Remo\-e the doubt, repeat with joy-
ous awe the Catholic confession, and the
sunlight, not diffused, but direct, streams
from the sun full upon our upturned brows.
" For the Lord is the Spirit," says St.
Paul.

VI.
THE RELIGION OF CHRIST.

O Luce eterna, chc sola in te sidi,
Sola t'intendi, e, da te intelletta,
Ed intendente, te ami ed arridi !

Quella circulazion, che si concetta
Pareva in te, come luce reflesso,
Dagli ocelli miei alquanto circonspetta,

Dentro da s^, del suo colore istesso,
Mi parve pinta della nostra effige,
Fer che il mio viso in lei tutto era messo.

O Light Eternal, sole in Thyself that dvvellest,
Sole knowest Thyself, and known unto Thyself,
And knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself !

That circulation which, being thus conceived,
Appeared in Thee as a reflected light,
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes,

Within itself, of its own very color.
Seemed to me painted with our efifigy.
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.

Paradiso XXXIIL, Longfcllcmfs Translation.

VI.

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST.

By following with docility the three
chief phases of modern agnostic thought
we have been led into the presence of the
threefold mystery which is the central
glory of the Christian faith.

To what avail? If the assumption be
true that the faith of the future must retain
no element susceptible of challenge, our
thought and time have been lost. The
Christian conception of God can never be
demonstrated. To Dante, most exalted
of Catholic spirits, was granted the vision
which we have found reflected in shadow
by the very assertions of denial. The poet,
gazing upon the threefold circle imprinted
with the human image, dares with supreme
audacity of thought to ask the Jiow, the

134 THE IVITNF.SS OF DENIAL

inner method of the union. Nor is the de-
sire of tile pure in heart refused. His
mind, he tells us, is " sliaken by a flash,"
wherein " its will comes to it." We wait
and listen; but alas! "All' alta fantasia qui
manco possa " ("Here power fails the
high imagining ") ; and the sacred poem, its
long journey at an end, sinks abruptly into
silence.

Nor can we wonder. For the very
content and meaning of faith, as conceived
by Christianity, removes sight from pos-
sible earthly experience ; and he who de-
mands proof can never accept its witness.

But if another assumption be true — and
it is at least equally reasonable — if, as we
claimed at the outset, the odds are in favor
of that religion which meets most perfectly
the cravings of the normal human soul,
then we have summoned mighty witnesses,
and their witness is agreed. In the Catho-
lic faith, and there alone, the demands of the
soul are met and its powers are set free.

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 135

The doubt which has pervaded our cen-
tury began, in the time of Voltaire, with a
purely intellectual and logical skepticism.
Then came democracy ; then came modern
science ; then came the higher criticism
with its challenge of historic documents ;
and the great sequence of doubt was com-
plete.

But in the very heart of the movement
of doubt we have watched the birth of a
reaction toward faith. A faith it has been,
visible only in the night-time, a mere halo
of reflected light, which has invaded and
revealed the dark shadows of denial. Of
this dim faith we have traced the wistful,
significant progress. The thought which
discards God is for a moment only exultant.
Soon it realizes that in all the glorious
phantasmagoria of nature there is no in-
spiration in living, no comfort in dying. We
see it, with the pitiful sense of loss upon it,
seeking if haply it may find. And first it
tries to form for itself a religion out of its

136 THll IV IT NESS OF DENIAL

very negation, and it cries aloud to the void ;
but there comes no answer. Next, thrown
back upon himself, man tries to find in
that very self the object of worship, the
inspiration to conduct ; but the attempt is
like trying to lift one's own body, unaided,
from the grcnind. h^inally, impressed by
a rexival of the historical sense, recogniz-
ing, however reluctanth', that the faith of
the past reached mightier results than the
negation of the present, men seek to return
in sentiment while advancing in conviction.
They keep the forms of faith while sacrific-
ing its content, and seek to emphasize the
spiritual life while they deny the Spirit of
God. But clear-eyed honesty cries shame
upon them, and they leave us still earth-
holden, met, if we lift up our eyes, by blank
cloud, instead of by One who dwelleth in
the heavens.

Within the limits of pure agnosticism —
of the sweeping assumption that a perso-
nal God cannot be known to men — what

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 137

further solution could be offered? The
agnostic movement is integral and com-
plete. The abyss; humanity; the abstract
moral law — these things are knowable.
Here is the universe of the agnostic ; here,
if anywhere, must he seek salvation. He
has sought ; he has pressed each of these
ideas to yield its full spiritual content ;
does the result, separately or united, re-
spond to the human need?

In the consciousness of modern men
these differing attitudes cross and recross
in blended light and shade, with variety as
infinite as that of human nature itself.
Yet it is strange — it is also amazing — to
watch the interrelation of the schools of
agnostic thought. Identical in primary
assumption, running into one another by
gradations so delicate as to be almost
invisible, there has been between their
exponents a bitter and ceaseless war. The
air of modern England has been hot with
the breath of their controversy, and dark-

138 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL

ened with tlie fli<(ht of their missiles.
Pure inth\iducihsin rciyiis among them.
In the pages of ancient Nineteenth Cejitu-
rics, Spencer and Harrison may be found
fighting a duel a outrance; scientist lieaps
opprobrium on Positivist, and the Positivist
rephes — getting rather the best of it — with
unsparing ridicule and unsweetened con-
tempt. Theories give place to personalities
before the end. Arnold, meantime, wan-
ders about as a sharp-shooter, branding
both combatants as Philistines, and aiming
indiscriminately the arrowy darts of scorn.
The little episode is typical. With much
talk of solidarity, with many attempts to
shape new churches, the agnostics flock by
themselves.

Yet, above the voices of despair, of scoff,
of complacency, of desire, is heard, steady,
clear, undaunted, the unchanged confession
of faith of the Catholic Church. And in
this great confession, which gathers up
into itself the highest wisdom of a mighty

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 139

literature, the truths revealed through
sweep of centuries to a nation that could
hear — in this confession are recognized all
needs discovered by modern men. The de-
mand for reverent recognition of encom-
passing mystery ; the yearning for a nature
akin to our own which can receive love and
exact obedience ; the honor of a moral
force working through history and setting
free the soul from world and self — all
these are recognized, met, and fused by
the faith in the Father, Son, and Spirit,
one God, w^orld without end. Here, and
here alone, the complex search of the
century finds answer ; here '' all strife is
reconciled, all pain beguiled." The sense
of an infinite Unknown quickened by scien-
tific thought can waken in the soul some-
thing akin to adoration ; it ofifers no ap-
peal to the moral nature nor summons to
the deed. The religion of humanity does
hold incentive to action ; but it permits
no worship, for it forbids sight to rise

140 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL

above its own level. The religion of
tendencies recognizes righteousness as
alone eternal ; but it meets the need of
concrete life with abstract truth. Add all
these phases of thought — as, indeed, they
blend often in a single consciousness, with
result perplexed and strange — still we have
offered us no assured standard of right, no
answer to the mystery of pain, the deeper
mystery of sin. The God in whom we
believed of old, the Father of Light and
Love, is lost to us ; we find in His place a
universe of matter and of law. But the
cry of life can be satisfied by a Life alone.
Li the Religion of Christ, and there only,
are met all those demands to which thought
severed from Christ is driven — for an
Object of Worship which shall transcend
knowledge, for an Ideal thoroughly subject
to knowledge, for a living Power so work-
ing in the soul with secret might that this
Ideal may inspire us, not with despair, but
with courage. Thus is force revealed as

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 141

loving, humanity as holy, and the moral
law as divine. This is the assurance, won-
drous, 3^et by the very witness of denial
less wondrous than essential, brought to
the world by Jesus Christ.

** Turn us again, O God of hosts, show
the light of Thy countenance ; and we
shall be whole." ** How long wilt Thou
forget me, O Lord? forever? how long
wilt Thou hide Thy face from me?"
** Up, Lord, why sleepest Thou ? awake,
and be not absent from us forever." " Thou,
O Lord God, art the thing that I long
for." *' Like as the hart desireth the
water-brooks, so thirsteth my soul after
Thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God,
yea, even for the living God : when shall I
come to appear before the presence of God ?
My tears have been my meat day and night,
while they daily say unto me. Where is now
thy God ? " '' My soul thirsteth for Thee,
my flesh also longeth after Thee in a barren
and dry land, where no water is."

142 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL

Such has been the cry of the human
soul from the very dawn of history ; such
is its cry to-d^iy. It has been the cry, not
in disease, but in heahh. When Hfe is
strongest, when civilizations are in their
vigorous, early prime, when indi\'iduals are
most intensely and healthfully sensitive to
the world around them — these are the
times when consciousness of God is clear.
In morbid and abnormal days, in the
decadence of a nation, a race, or a soul,
there may be diseased subtlety and lovely
hues of death, but the craving for God is
weakened. A symptom of vigor, of full-
ness of life, it cannot, by the scientific
temper, be ignored. The highest result of
evolution, it must ha\-e some objective
correlative. It is in vain that those who
deny call on us to find peace and energy
in a doubt. Out of the very depth of
denial speaks the witness of the shadows ;
a reflected light mingles with the darkness,
and the needs of the soul are shown to be

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 143

eternal by the very men who reject most
forcefully the eternal satisfaction of those
needs.

We have other witness to the light be-
sides this faint and sorrowful witness of
shadow. There has been delicate, signifi-
cant reaction all along, within the strictest
limits of the agnostic movement; there
has been a stronger reaction apart from
the movement altogether, by thought
which discards the agnostic assumption
and returns, consciously or not, to a super-
natural basis. The force of this reaction,
independently of the churches, is evident
if we look at literature. It is yet more
visible in the tone of thought all around
us. Uncompromising rigor of denial be-
comes less and less popular; a return to
theistic conceptions is more and more
marked ; and the vogue of wild and crude
philosophies, avowedly from the East, or
originating one hardly knows where in
thought's provincial byways, witnesses to

144 THB IV IT NESS Oh' DEN 1/1 L

the insistent demand for genuine and sin-
cere faith in the Spirit, and to reaction to-
ward even an unsafe and unbalanced mys-
ticism on the part of a generation which
was assuredly drawn for a brief moment
toward a material interpretation of life.

Among all the shifting phases of modern
spiritual thought and passion there is one
which has remained constant, which no
attack has been able to shake, which con-
troversy does but intensify, which may
well be both center and starting-point for
the positive faith of the future. It is the
attitude toward the Lord of the Church.
For, through all its conflict, all its denial,
the nineteenth century will not let Christ
go. Eighteen hundred years ago lived
and died this Galilean working-man. Since
then our universe has been enlarged by
the discoveries of countless worlds, our
minds enriched by new arts, sciences, phi-
losophies, new knowledge of the history of
our race. Still the eyes of the Aryan

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 145

world remain fixed on this one Man — a
Man obscure in life, ignominious in death.
Still this gracious Figure, shining down
the centuries, draws the hearts and
thoughts of men supremely to Himself.
Christ came to bring the message of a
Father above, of a Spirit within, saving us
unto life eternal. This message men dis-
card. Nay, the very record of Christ's life
and death they criticize in its every detail,
reducing the gospel story to a mosaic of
legend and sentiment in which fragments
of truth may with difficulty be discerned.
Christ's message they disbelieve. His story
they distrust. Yet this mythical character,
this Jesus of Nazareth, of whom we know
next to nothing, whose intellectual con-
ceptions are childishness to enlightened
days — this obscure Jew is the center of
human experience to-day, as for eighteen
hundred years He has been the center of
human history. Concerning His nature men
quarrel ; His historic existence they doubt ;

146 THE IV UN ESS OF DENIAL.

but escape Ilim they cannot. Agnostic of
every order — scientist, ethicist, apostle of
culture, man of art — all bow before Him
in utter reverence, as they hail Him Master
of the human race.

Ours, we said at the outset, has been a
century of the inner life. The eighteenth
centur}', apart from a limited area, ques-
tioned far less than we, but it believed
less intensely. To us are given the signs
of a new life, new yet old. Denial has
spent its force. In its very depths was a
witness full yet faint, as the cries of the
soul claimed unconsciously element after
element of the faith which it discarded.
Meanwhile the fervent reaction toward
theism, the reassertion of the Spirit, the
devotion to the person and the teaching of
Christ, all whisper promise of the day to be.

What of the Christian Church? As the
movement toward belief has developed,
directly and indirectly, without her limits,
has she been stagnant or still ?

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 147

Surely not. Yet in grief and grave
regret her own children must be first to
arraign her for her shortcomings. To-
ward each phase of denial the Church in
England opposed at first a blank antag-
onism. She met the skepticism of the
eighteenth century with an appeal to
respectability and the Estabhshment. In
the ardent social awakening of the Revo-
lution she stood selfishly for alliance with
the old social order. She confronted the
eager discoveries of science with the literal
authority of an infallible Book ; and since,
by a certain poetic justice, the higher criti-
cism, with keen historical analysis, has
denied this authority, she has too often
fallen back on simple self-assertion.

She has her reward. The appeal to
authority with which she has met each
new cry of freedom falls dead upon our
ears. Men may and do seek thankfully
the shelter of the Church ; they are guided
thither by no orthodox traditions, but by

148 THH IVlTNf-SS OF DENIAL.

individual prayer and struiiglc. They may
and must, in choosing their creed, be deeply
influenced by the faith of the past ; but that
faith is to them a form, not of authority,
but of testimony. In matters religious as
in matters social we must form our creeds
for ourselves. If the blessing of faith is
granted us it is becau.se our own ears have
heard a Voice, on our own path a Light
has shined. The power of the Church is
yet might}', but lier old prestige is gone.
She speaks with no lack of assurance, but
henceforth she must convince before she
can command.

Yet this change is no loss to the Church
of Christ; it is surely rather gain. Shak-
ing aside " the torpor of assurance," she
has risen in renewed vigor of life. From
the time of Coleridoe, indeed, from whom
she received so sharp an intellectual stimu-
lus, her sluggishness was at an end. In
the Oxford IMovement came a sudden
and mighty spiritual re\i\al. In the

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 149

movement, less formal, but no less vital,
inaugurated by Frederic Denison Maurice
the spiritual emphasis was reinforced for
the first time by the social, and the church
gained the inspiration of new and more
exacting ideals. Since the time of Maurice
that social renascence, which is also essen-
tially a Christian renascence, has steadily
gained momentum. It has become the
dominant spiritual fact in the closing cen-
tury-decade, and bids fair to be the great
and living interest leading us into the
world of the future. Toward this social
renascence what will be the attitude of the
Church of Christ? Now is her hour of
trial. One hundred years ago a like test
was offered her and she failed. To-day
the opportunity is hers once more. How
will she meet it?

Hints of the answer come in each new
phase of the industrial crisis ; but in full it
is not yet given. Yet surely we need not
doubt nor fear. One hundred years ago

150 THE H^'ITNHSS OF DEN ML

there lay behind the Church a century of
respectability and indolence. To-day there
lies behind her a century of life. Challenge
and attack ha\e roused her, fierce heart-
searchings have shaken her, intellectual
prestige has deserted her, social prestige is
no longer tied exclusively to her train. Free,
she is learning to rejoice in her freedom ;
poor, in her poverty; while her very rejec-
tion by the proud in spirit and intellect may
well teach her to turn to those whom she
has neglected, but among whom her true
home is to be found — the ignorant, the
oppressed, and the humble. A mighty
future lies, if she will, before her. Her ex-
ternal authority is gone. A necessary safe-
guard in her youth, she can dispense with
it in her maturity. Her attitude of hostility
to other thought is ceasing also. The fear
of doubt is an evil form of doubt ; for

" The man who fearcth, Lord, to doubt,
In tliat fear doubteth Tlice."

From Christianity all modern faith, how-

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 151

ever unconsciously, springs ; to Christianity
it must return. The sense of finite igno-
rance, the passionate love for men, the rec-
ognition of force making for righteousness
— all these, with their colored and partial
glory, unite in the white and simple light
of the Christian faith. And in the ideal
Church of Christ are found waiting the
means by which these great truths may
be made part of the daily life of men.
Through her the glory of the Infinite is re-
vealed to that humanity which, standing at
the height of natural evolution, serves as a
meeting-place between the material and the
divine. In her as the family of brethren,
nay, the very body of Christ, is fully re-
alized the collective conception of the race
as an organic whole. Her great sacraments
present not only types of spiritual truth,
but channels through which the influx of
the Spirit of righteousness may purify and
feed the human soul. No ecclesiastical or-
ganization to force faith on reluctant minds,

152 THl^ IVITNHSS OF DENIAL

no club lo formulate a do<^nnalic theology
or to unite men in ]>ractical beneficence,
but the might}' mother who feeds her chil-
dren with the very bread of life, the Church
Catholic may in the future command al-
legiance, not by the claims she asserts, but
by the power she reveals; not by an au-
thority imposed from without, but by a life
manifest from within.

O Spirit, Purifier from all sin, purify the
inward eyes of our nature, that we may
see the Light of Truth, and by His light
may see the supreme Father, whom none
but the pure in heart may behold. Come,
O blessed Spirit, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

THE END.

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