Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885. Various
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of life. Religion has been to us hitherto (to rank it at its lowest), like a great mountain in a beautiful land. When the clouds descend and hide the mountain, the grandeur of the scene is gone. A stranger entering that land at such a time will commend the sweetness of the vales and woods; but those who know it best will say, “Ichabod! – The glory has departed.” To do justice to the eminent man whose opinion concerning the practical unimportance of religion I am endeavoring to combat, he has seen clearly and frankly avowed this ennobling influence of religion, and, as a corollary, would, I presume, admit the minifying consequences of its general abandonment.2 If the window which Religion opens out on the infinite expanse of God and Heaven, immeasurably enlarges and lightens our abode of clay, the walling of it up cannot fail to narrow and darken it beyond all telling. Human nature, ever pulled two ways by downward and by aspiring tendencies, cannot afford to lose all the aid which religious ideas offer to its upward flight. Only when they disappear will men perceive how the two thoughts – of this world as God’s world, and of ourselves as Immortal beings, – have, between them, lighted up in rainbow hues the dull plains of earth. When they fade away, all things, Nature, Art, Duty, Love, and Death, will seem to grow grey and cold. Everything which casts a glamour over life will be gone.
Even from the point of view of Art (of which in these days perhaps too much is made), life will lose poetry if it lose religion. Nothing ever stirs our sympathies like it, or like a glimpse into the inner self of our brother man, as affected by repentance, hope, and prayer. The great genius, of George Eliot revealed this to her; and, Agnostic as she was, she rarely failed to strike this resonant string of human nature, as in “Adam Bede,” “Silas Marner,” and “Janet’s Repentance.” French novelists who have no knowledge of it, and who describe the death of a man as they might do that of an ox, while they galvanize our imaginations, rarely touch the outer hem of our sympathies. Religion in its old anthropomorphic forms was the great inspirer of sculpture, painting, poetry, science, and almost the creator of architecture. Phidias, Dante, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Milton, Handel, and the builders of the Egyptian temples and mediæval cathedrals, were all filled with the religious spirit, nor can we imagine what they would have been without it. In the purer modern types of religion, while music and architecture would still remain in its direct service, we should expect painting and sculpture to be less immediately concerned with it than in old days, because unable to touch such purely spiritual ideas. But the elevation, aspiration, and reverence which have their root in religion must continue to inspire those arts likewise, or they will fall into triviality on one side (as there seems danger in England), or into obscene materialism on the other, as is already annually exemplified on the walls of the Paris Salon.
Again, it will not merely belittle life, it will carnalize it to take Religion out of it. The lump without the leaven will be grosser and heavier than we have dreamed. Civilization, as we all know, bore under Imperial Rome, and may assume again any day, the hateful type in which luxury and cruelty, art and sensuality, go hand in hand. That it ever changed its character and has come to mean with us refinement, self-restraint, chivalry, and freedom from the coarser vices, is surely due to the fact that it has grown up pari passu with Christianity. In truth it needs no argument to prove that, as the bestial tendencies in us have scarcely been kept down while we believed ourselves to be immortal souls, they will have it still more their own way when we feel assured we are only mortal bodies.
And the life thus belittled and carnalized will be a more cowardly life than men have been wont to lead while they had a Providence over them and a heaven waiting for them. Already, I fear, we may see some signs of this new poltroonery of reflective prudence, which holds that death is the greatest of all evils, and disease the next greatest; and teaches men to prefer a “whole skin” to honor and patriotism, and health to duty. Writing of this Hygeiolatry elsewhere, I have remarked that it has almost come to be accepted as a canon of morals that any practice which, in the opinion of experts, conduces to bodily health, or tends to the cure of disease, becomes ipso facto lawful; and that there are signs apparent that this principle is bearing fruit, and that men and women are beginning to be systematically selfish and self-indulgent where their health is concerned, in modes not hitherto witnessed. In public life it is notorious that whenever a Bill comes before Parliament concerning itself with sanitary matters there is exhibited by many of the speakers, and by the journalists who discuss it, a readiness to trample on personal and parental rights in a way forming a new feature in English legislation, and well deserving of the rebuke it has received from Mr. Herbert Spencer. As to military courage, I fear it will also wane amongst us, as it seemed to have waned amongst the French atheistic soldiery at Metz and Sedan. Great as are the evils of war, those of a peace only maintained by the nations because it had become no longer possible to raise troops who would stand fire, would be immeasurably worse.
From the general results on the community, I now pass to consider those on the life of the individual which may be expected to follow the collapse of Religion.
Mr. Mallock in his “New Republic,” made the original and droll remark that even Vice would lose much of its savor were there no longer any morality against which it might sin. As Morality will probably not expire – though its vigor must be considerably reduced – by the demise of its Siamese twin, Religion, it would seem that Vice need not fear, even in such a contingency, the entire loss of the pleasures of disobedience. Nevertheless (to speak seriously), it is pretty certain that the temperature of all moral sentiments will fall so considerably when the sun of religion ceases to warm them that not a few will perish of cold. The “Faithless World” will pass through a moral Glacial Period, wherein much of our present fauna and flora will disappear. What, for example, can become, in that frigid epoch of godlessness, of Aspiration, the sacred passion, the ambition sainte to become perfect and holy, which has stirred at one time or other in the breast of every son of God; the longing to attain the crowning heights of truth, goodness, and purity? This is surely not a sentiment which can live without faith in a Divine Perfection, existing somewhere in the universe, and an Immortal Life wherein the infinite progress may be carried on. Even the man whose opinions on the general unimportance of religion I am venturing to question in these pages, admits frankly enough that it is not the heroic or saintly character which will be cultivated after the extinction of faith. Among the changes which he anticipates, one will be that “the respectable man of the world, the lukewarm, nominal Christian, who believed as much of his creed as happened to suit him, and led an easy life, will turn out to have been right after all,” Precisely so. The easy life will be the ideal life in the “Faithless World;” and the life of Aspiration, the life which is a prayer, will be lived no more. And the “lukewarm” men of the world, in their “easy lives,” will be all the easier and more lukewarm for leading them thenceforth unrebuked by any higher example.
Again, Repentance as well as aspiration will disappear under the snows of atheism. I have written before on this subject in this Review,3 and will now briefly say that Mr. Darwin’s almost ludicrously false definition of Repentance is an illustration of the inability of the modern scientific mind to comprehend spiritual phenomena; much less to be the subject of them. In his Descent of Man, this great thinker and most amiable man describes Repentance as a natural return, after the satisfaction of selfish passions, to “the instinct of sympathy and good will to his fellows which is still present and ever in some degree active” in a man’s mind… “And then, a sense of dissatisfaction will inevitably be felt” (Descent of Man, p. 90). Thus even on the showing of the great philosopher of evolution himself, Repentance (or rather the “dissatisfaction” he confounds with that awful convulsion of the soul) is only to be looked for under the very exceptional circumstances of men in whom the “instinct of sympathy and good will to their fellows” is ever present, and moreover reasserts itself after they have injured them– in flat opposition to ordinary human experience as noted by Tacitus, Humani generis proprium est odisse quem læseris.
The results of the real spiritual phenomenon of Repentance (not Mr. Darwin’s child’s-play) are so profound and far-reaching that it cannot but happen that striking them out of human experience will leave life more shallow. No soul will survive with the deeper and riper character which comes out of that ordeal. As Hawthorne illustrated it in his exquisite parable
He says: “The leading doctrines of theology are noble and glorious;” and he acknowledges that people who were able to accept them are “ennobled by their creed.” They are “carried above and beyond the petty side of life; and if the virtue of propositions depended, not upon the evidence by which they may be supported, but their intrinsic beauty and utility, they might vindicate their creed against all others” (p. 917). To some of us the notion of “noble and glorious”
“Agnostic Morality,” Contemporary Review, June, 1883.