Produced by Al Haines










The Religious Situation


BY

GOLDWIN SMITH




TORONTO

WM. TYRRELL & COMPANY

1908




COPYRIGHT, 1908

BY THE

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW PUBLISHING COMPANY



COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1908

BY

GOLDWIN SMITH




[Transcriber's note:  This book was originally part of Smith's "No
Refuge but in Truth."  It was split into a separate e-book because it
had its own title and verso page.]




THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION.

(From the _North American Review_.)


"I express myself," says Bishop Butler, "with caution, lest I should be
mistaken to vilify reason, which is, indeed, the only faculty which we
have to judge concerning anything, even revelation itself; or be
misunderstood to assert that a supposed revelation cannot be proved
false from internal characters."  "The faculty of reason," he says, "is
the candle of the Lord within us against vilifying which we must be
very cautious."

What would the world be without religion?  That is the dread question
which seems now to be everywhere presenting itself.  Would even the
social fabric remain unshaken?  Has not its stability partly depended
on the general belief that the dispensation, with all its inequalities,
was the ordinance of the Creator, and that for inequalities here there
would be compensation hereafter?  The belief may not in common minds
have been very present; but it would seem to have had its influence.
Apparently, it is now departing.  In some places it seems to have fled.
Scepticism, with social unrest, comes in its room.

What is now the position of the clergy?  Keepers and ministers of
truth, as they are understood to be, they alone are debarred by
ordination vows and tests from the free quest of truth.  They are
ecclesiastically bound not only to hold, but to teach and preach, as
divinely revealed, what many of them must feel to have been disproved
or to have become doubtful.  Their uneasiness is shown by writings,
such as "Lux Mundi," struggling to reconcile orthodoxy with free
thought.  It is shown by a growing tendency on the part of pastors to
slide from the office of spiritual guide into that of leader of
philanthropic effort and social reform.  It is seen, perhaps, even in
the tendency to give increased prominence to musical attraction in the
service.  Sermons grow more secular.

Clerical biographies, such as that of Jowett, sometimes reveal private
misgivings.  The writer has even seen the pastorate of a large parish
assumed by one who in private society was an evident rationalist and
must have satisfied his conscience by promising to himself that he
would do a great deal of social good.  There is, no doubt, practically,
more latitude than there was; heresy trials seem to have ceased, and
one of the writers of "Essays and Reviews" became, without serious
outcry, Primate of the Church of England.  But ordination vows remain;
so does the performance of a religious service which includes the
repetition of creeds and forms a practical confession of faith.  Hollow
profession cannot fail to impair mental integrity, or, if generally
suspected, to kill confidence in our guides.  Read Canon Farrar's "Life
of Christ" and you will see to what shifts orthodoxy puts a clerical
writer who was, no doubt, a sincere lover of truth.

The religious disturbance shows itself at the same time in the
prevalence of wild superstitions, such as Spiritualism, rising out of
the grave of religious faith, and attesting the lingering craving for
the supernatural, somewhat like the mysteries of Isis after the fall of
national religion at Rome.

The crisis has come on us rather suddenly, in consequence partly of
great physical discoveries.  The writer as a young student heard
Buckland struggling to reconcile geology with Genesis.  Now the
struggle is to reconcile Genesis with geology.  Before this wonderful
advance of science and criticism combined, there had been comparatively
little of avowed, still less of popular, scepticism.  Rousseau was a
sentimental theist; Voltaire erected a church to God.  This vast
"Modernism," as the poor, quaking Pope rather happily calls the
ascendancy of science and criticism, has changed all.  It is
conceivable that, now as on some former occasions, the range of
discovery may have been overrated and the pendulum of opinion may
consequently have swung too far.  Evolution, apparently, has still a
wide space to traverse, even in what may be assumed to be the material
sphere.  What can it make of the marvellous stores of memory or of the
apparently boundless play of the imagination, which by its working in
sleep, sometimes with no assignable materials for the fancy, seems
almost to show creative power?

Has Deity directly revealed itself to man?  It has if the Bible is
inspired.  Otherwise, apparently, it has not.  About the Koran or the
Zendavesta it is hardly necessary to speak.  "The Bible" we call the
Old Testament and the New bound up together, as though they contained
the two halves of the same dispensation and the moral ideal of both
were the same.  The historical importance of the Old Testament can
hardly be overrated; nor can the literary grandeur of parts of it, or
the advance made in social character and in law.  When in connection
with the question of American slavery attention was specially directed
to the social law of Moses, no careful reader could fail to be greatly
struck by its advanced humanity and civilization.  Nevertheless, the
morality of the Old Testament is tribal, while that of the New
Testament is universal.  The tribal character of the Old Testament
morality is seen in the destruction of the first-born in Egypt in order
to force Pharaoh to let the Chosen People go; in the invasion of Canaan
and the slaughter of the Canaanites; in the murder of Sisera; in the
approval of the treason of Rahab; in David's putting to torture the
inhabitants of a captured city.  The attempt to reconcile all this with
universal morality by styling it the course of "Evolution" can hardly
avail, since the spirit of tribal separatism dominates in the latest
books of the Old Testament, Ezra and Nehemiah, where Israelites are not
only forbidden for the future to marry with Gentiles, but bidden to put
away Gentile wives.  It is true there are glimpses of a universal
dominion of the God of Israel, and of the happiness to be enjoyed by
all nations under it.  Still, Jehovah is Israel's God.

Were the Old Testament a Divine revelation it would certainly be free
from error concerning the works of Deity, which plainly it is not.  The
narrative in Genesis of creation, compared with other primitive
cosmogonies, is rational as well as sublime.  But if Professor Buckland
could persuade his hearers he could not persuade himself.

Largely good the influence of the Old Testament has no doubt been;
largely also it prepared the way for the New.  That its influence has
been wholly good cannot be said.  It has furnished fanaticism with
aliment and excuse.  It has found mottoes for the black flag of
religious war.

Is it possible to believe, in face of doubtful authenticity,
contradictions as to fact, and traces of local superstition, that the
New Testament any more than the Old was dictated by Deity?  Inspired by
the creative power, in common with the other works of creative
beneficence, as a part of the general plan, the New Testament may have
been.  Its morality is not tribal, but universal.  "God is a Spirit;
and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth,"
this beside the well of Samaria by the Founder himself was proclaimed.
If there is any privilege it is in favour not of race, but of class,
the class being the poor, whose poverty seems counted to them as
virtue, perhaps rather to the disparagement of active goodness.

Had the New Testament been divinely inspired, would not its authority
have been clearly attested?  Would not the authorship of its books have
been made known?  Would the slightest error or self-contradiction have
been allowed to appear in it?  What is the fact?  The authenticity of a
large portion of the Epistles of St. Paul seems admitted by critics; of
other books of the New Testament the authorship is regarded as
doubtful.  The three Synoptic Gospels have a large element common to
them all, and are evidently grafts upon a single document which is
lost, and which the critics generally seem inclined to place not
earlier than the latter part of the first century.  The Synoptics all
tell us that when Jesus expired the veil of the Temple was rent.  One
adds that there was preternatural darkness; a third that the earth
quaked, that the rocks were rent, that the graves opened, and many
bodies of the saints which slept arose, came out of the graves after
the resurrection of Jesus, went into the holy city, and appeared to
many.  Such apparitions plainly must have produced an immense
sensation; such a sensation, it may be assumed, as would have brought
scepticism to its knees.  This surely must be legendary, and the legend
must have had time to grow.

Though grafts on the same original stock, the Gospels are often at
variance with each other; as in the case of the genealogy of Jesus,
upon which the harmonists labor in vain; in that of the marvels
attending his birth; in that of his Last Supper; in that of the
resurrection, which again baffles the skill of the harmonists.  Here,
surely, is proof that the pens of the narrators were not guided by
Omniscience.

Concerning the miracles of the casting out of devils generally, and in
particular of the casting out of a legion of devils into a herd of two
thousand swine at Gadara, what is to be said?  Are these not clearly
cases of human imagination set at work by a Jewish superstition?  Is it
possible that they should have had a place in a divine narrative of the
life of the Saviour of the world?  The Fourth Gospel omits them.
Orthodoxy would fain persuade itself that this was to avoid unnecessary
repetition.

Satan from the top of a mountain shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the
earth.  This seems to imply belief that the earth is a plane.  The
movement of the star of the Nativity seems to imply belief in the
rotation of the heavens.

About the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and, consequently, about its
title to belief, there has been endless controversy among the learned.
But there are pretty plain indications, in the shape of the omission of
demoniac miracles and some lack of local knowledge, that it is not the
work of a Palestinian Jew.  Opening with a reference to the Logos, it
strikes the key of Alexandrian philosophy.  It is, indeed, rather
theological than historical, so that it has been not inaptly compared
to the Platonic, in contrast to the Xenophontic, account of Socrates,
the theology seems like that of a post-evangelical era.  Martineau's
conclusion is that "the only Gospel which is composed and not merely
compiled and edited, and for which, therefore, a single writer is
responsible, has its birthday in the middle of the second century, and
is not the work of a witness at all."  Historically, this Gospel is at
variance with the others in its narrative of the Last Supper.  "The
incidents," says the highly orthodox Speaker's Commentary, "are
parallel with sections of the Synoptic Gospels; but there are very few
points of actual correspondence in detail between the narratives of the
Synoptists and of St. John."  There appears to have been much
disputation among critics and commentators, but no room for disputation
surely would have been left concerning narratives, equally authentic
and inspired, of a momentous crisis in the life of the Saviour.

"At this point, that is to say the beginning of the Galilean ministry,
we are again met by difficulties in the chronology, which are not only
various, but to the certain solution of which there appears to be no
clue.  If we follow exclusively the order given by one Evangelist we
appear to run counter to the scattered indications which may be found
in another.  That it should be so will cause no difficulty to the
candid mind.  The Evangelists do not profess to be guided by
chronological sequences."  So writes Dean Farrar in despair.  Is it
likely that such confusion would be found in a Divine revelation?
Would not the narratives have been as well arranged and clear as, by
the admission of orthodoxy, they are the reverse?  Would the names of
the authors of the Gospels, their warrants and the sources of their
information, have been withheld?  Providence surely was not there.

If there was a miraculous revelation on which salvation depended, why
was it not universal?  Why has it all this time been withheld from
nations even more in need of it than those to whom it was given?  Are
we to suppose that the salvation of these myriads was a matter of
indifference to their Creator, or that Heaven preferred the slow and
precarious working of the missionary to the instantaneous action of its
own fiat?  This is the question which scepticism asks, and which the
great author of the "Analogy of Religion" fails to answer.

What did Jesus think of himself and his mission, and of his relation to
Deity?  This it seems impossible without more authentic records clearly
to decide.  The Gospel of St. John, which is the most theological,
would appear to be the least trustworthy of the four.  Its author,
apparently, sees its subject through a theosophic medium of his own.
The idea of the teacher in the mind of the disciples would naturally
rise with his ascendancy; so, perhaps, would his own idea.  If Jesus is
rightly reported he believed himself to be the Son of God, exalted to
union and participation in spiritual dominion with the Father, and
destined together with the Father to judge the world.  But, in his
mortal hour of anguish in Gethsemane, he prays to the Father to let the
cup pass from him; an act hardly consistent with the doctrines of the
Athanasian Creed.  In the immortality of the soul and judgment after
death he plainly believes.  But he does not substantiate the belief by
any explanation of the mode of survival; nor, in separating the two
flocks of sheep and goats, does he say how mixed characters are to be
treated.  Tribalism seems slightly to cling to his conception of the
just gathered in Abraham's bosom.  Of his apologue of Dives and
Lazarus, the last part appears to show that the world beyond the grave
was to him a realm of the imagination.

The Sermon on the Mount would appear, by the strong impress of
character it bears, to have special claims to authenticity.  So may the
Parables habitually employed as instruments of teaching and wearing
apparently the stamp of a single imagination.

That with Jesus of Nazareth there came into the world, and by his
example and teaching was introduced and propagated a moral ideal which,
embodied in Christendom, and surviving through all these centuries the
action of hostile forces the most powerful, not only from without, but
from within, has uplifted, purified, and blessed humanity is a
historical fact.  With the civilization of Christendom no other
civilization can compare.  But we have been accustomed to believe that
there was a miraculous revelation of the Deity.  A revelation of the
Deity, though not miraculous, Christianity may be believed to have been.

Revelation, direct and assured, of the nature, will, designs, or
relation to us of the Deity through the Bible or in any other way we
cannot be truly said to have.  All that we apparently can be said to
have, besides the religious instinct in ourselves, is the evidence of
beneficent design in the universe; balanced, we must sadly admit, by
much that with our present imperfect knowledge appears to us at
variance with beneficence; by plagues, earthquakes, famines, torturing
diseases, infant deaths; by the sufferings of animals preyed on by
other animals or breeding beyond the means of subsistence; by
inevitable accidents of all kinds; by the Tower of Siloam everywhere
falling on the just as well as on the sinner.  There may be a key,
there may be a plan, disciplinary or of some other kind, and in the end
the mystery may be solved.  At present there seems to be no key other
than that which may be suggested by the connection of effort with
virtue and the progress of a collective humanity.

At the same time, we may apparently dismiss belief in a great personal
power of evil and in his realm of everlasting torture.  The independent
origin of such a power of evil is unthinkable; so is the struggle
between the two powers and its end.  There is no absolutely distinct
line between good and evil.  The shades of character are numberless.

Another great change, rather of impression than of conviction, has been
creeping over the religious scene.  We have hitherto, largely, perhaps,
under the influence of the Bible, been fancying rather than thinking
that this little earth of ours was the centre of all things, the
special object of interest to the Creator; and that the grand drama of
existence was that enacted on this terrestrial stage and culminating in
Redemption.  Astronomical science is now making us distinctly feel that
this world is only one, and, if magnitude is to be the measure, very
far from the most important, of myriads of worlds governed by the same
physical laws as ours, forming a system of which ours is a member,
while the destiny of the whole system is to us utterly inscrutable;
proofs of the most sublime and glorious order presenting themselves on
the one hand, while on the other we see signs of disorder and
destruction, errant bodies such as comets and aerolites, a moon without
an atmosphere, the conflagration of a star.  Whether the whole is
moving towards any end and, if it is, what that end is to be, we cannot
hope to divine.  When with Infinity we take into our thought Eternity,
past and future, if in Eternity there can be said to be past or future,
our minds are completely overwhelmed.

Is belief in a future life generally holding its ground?  My friend,
the late Mr. Chamberlain, was by no means alone in resigning it.  But
if this life is all, how can we continue to hold our faith in divine
justice?  Mr. Chamberlain, as I said before, was evidently happy as
well as good.  His life, though short and regarded by him as ending in
the grave, was to him so much gain, and proved beneficence on the part
of the Author of his being.  But if Mr. Chamberlain's theory is true,
what is to be said in the case of the myriads to whom life has been
wretchedness, ending perhaps in agony, often without the slightest
responsibility on their part?  For these unhappy ones would it be well,
as Mr. Chamberlain holds it was for him, that there should be no
hereafter?  Is their being brought into existence only to suffer
compatible with our faith in supreme benevolence?  Is confidence in
supreme justice compatible with the conviction that the tyrant and the
tortured victims of his tyranny, alike, repose forever in the grave?
Such, it is true, was the belief of the Hebrew; indication of any other
belief, at all events, he has left us none, unless it be a faint
glimpse of Sheol.  The philosophy of Job halts accordingly.  The Hebrew
believed that he would be rewarded or punished in his posterity.

Bishop Butler's grand argument for belief in the possibility of a
future life goes upon the supposition that our conscious personality is
distinct and separable from our perishable frame, and is in itself
"indiscerptible," so that there is no reason why it should not survive
the death of the body.  To prove that it ever has survived the death of
the body, or to show the mode of its survival, the Bishop does not
attempt.  But Butler lived long before Evolution and the general
advance of physiology in these later days.  Johnson, who was no
sceptic, owned that he yearned for more light on the "spiritual world,"
by which he apparently meant immortality.

Positivism tenders us endless existence as particles in a collective
humanity, the "colossal man."  But would there be much satisfaction in
existence when individuality and personal consciousness had been lost?
Would the prospect lead the ordinary man to work and suffer for
generations to come, at all events, for any beyond the circle of the
immediate objects of his love?  What the end of the colossal man is to
be seems undetermined.  The Positivist Church has produced very good
and beautiful lives, but its power as a religion to go alone would be
more clearly seen were not Christianity at its side.

Is there or is there not after all something in human nature apparently
unsusceptible of physical explanation and seeming to point to the
possibility of a higher state of being?  Evolution may ultimately
explain our general frame, emotional and intellectual, as well as
physical.  It may in time explain the marvels of imagination and
memory.  It may explain our aesthetic nature with our music and art.
It may explain even our social and political frame and our habit of
conformity to law.  But beyond conformity to law, social or political,
is there not, in the highest specimens of our race at least, a
conception of an ideal of character and an effort to rise to it which
seem to point to a more spiritual sphere?











End of Project Gutenberg's The Religious Situation, by Goldwin Smith