LITMIR.BIZ

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human brotherhood shall have supplanted all exclusive institutions, and banded society together under the vow of mutual aid and the hope of everlasting progress, our work will be done, our reward before us, and our little community of reformers lost in the wide fraternity of enlightened and benevolent men.

      The day is yet distant, and can be won only by the toil of earnest and faithful minds. In the mean while, it is no light solace to see that the tendencies of Providence are towards its accelerated approach. And however dispiriting may sometimes be the variety and conflicts of human sentiment—however remote the dissonance of controversy from that harmony of will which would seem essential to perfected society, it is through this very process that the great ends of improvement are to be attained. Hereafter it will be seen, much more clearly than we can see it now, that opinion generates knowledge. Like the ethereal waves, whose inconceivable rapidity and number are said to impart the sensation of vision, the undulations of opinion are speeding on to produce the perception of truth. They are the infinitely complex and delicate movements of that universal Human Mind, whose quiescence is darkness—whose agitation, light.

      To the fit and numerous readers whom we trust they will find, these papers are now submitted, in the earnest hope that the author will at no distant day follow them with some more systematic and rounded survey of the same great subject—the components and developments of Christianity.

      W. R. A.

STUDIES OF CHRISTIANITY.

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DISTINCTIVE TYPES OF CHRISTIANITY.

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      If unity be the character of truth, no generation was ever so far gone in errors as our own: nor is the weariness surprising, with which statesmen and philosophers turn away from the Babel of Divinity, and, in despair of scaling the heavens, apply themselves to found and adorn the politics of this world. But the confusion of tongues is too positive and obtrusive a fact to be escaped by mere retreat: it bids defiance to polite evasion: it pursues life into every public place and private haunt; invades the home, the school, the college, the court, the legislature; and, besides the problems which it fails to solve, constitutes in itself a new one, not undeserving the closest study and reflection. To the believers in doctrinal finality, who imagine the whole sacred economy to be settled by a documentary revelation, the reopening of every question, down to the very basis of religious faith, must be an appalling phenomenon, charging either failure on the presumed designs of God or a traitorous perversity on even the most gifted and upright of men. And not a whit better is the conclusion of a conceited illuminism, which, either boldly recalling the human mind to the sciences of induction, despises all faith as false alike; or, conscious at least of its own incompetency, pleases itself with a more indulgent scepticism, and accepts them all as true. If no better revenge can be taken on pious dogmatism than by falling into the cant of an eclectic neutrality or an impious despair, there is little encouragement for any high-minded man to take part against the bigotries of the present on behalf of sickly negations in the future. The world is better left in the hands of the poorest interpreter of Paul, and most degenerate heirs of Augustine and Pascal, than transferred to the dialectic of Proclus or the materialism of the living "Fondateur de la Religion de l'Humanité."[1] There are those, however, who deny that we are left to any such alternative; who cannot conceive that human aspirations after divine reality shall for ever pine and sigh in vain; who contend that objective truth in reference to morals and religion is attainable, and has been largely attained;—and who, accordingly, despairing of neither philosophy nor Christianity, require only the free intercommunion of the two to appreciate the contradictions of the present without foregoing the hope of greater unity in the future. The controversies of the hour are but ill understood by one who remains enclosed within them, and judges them only on their own assumptions. Like a village brawl, which, with only the sound of vulgar noise, may be the ripe fruit of oppression and the germ of revolution, they have an assigned place in the unfolding of modern civilization; and not till their place is computed in the life of the human race, and the law which brings them up in our age is observed, can their real significance be apprehended, and all anger at their clamorous littleness be lost in hope of their ulterior issues. Regarded from this higher point, the surface of religious belief in England, at first sight a mere troubled fermentation of struggling elements, betrays some organic principle of order, and many salient points of promise.

      We hazard no theory of religion in saying that there is a natural correspondence between the genius of a people and the form of their belief. Each mood of mind brings its own wants and aspirations, colors its own ideal, and interprets best that part of life and the universe with which it is in sympathy. John Knox would have been misplaced in Athens, and Tanler could not have lived on the moralism of Kant. No doubt the ultimate seat of human faith lies deep down below the special propensities of individuals or tribes—in a consciousness and faculty common to the race. But ere it comes to the surface, and disengages itself in a concrete shape, its type and color will be affected by the strata of thought and feeling through which it emerges into the light. Without pretending to an exhaustive classification, we find four chief temperaments of mind expressed in the theologies and scepticisms of civilized Europe: the quest of physical order, the sense of right, the instinct of beauty, and the consciousness of tempestuous impulses carrying the will off its feet. Variously blended in the characters of average persons, these tendencies are liable to separate their intensities, and severally dominate almost alone in minds of great force and periods of special action or reaction. Were each left to itself to form its own unaided creed, the doctrine of mere Science would be atheistic; of Conscience, theistic; of Art, pantheistic; of Passion, sacrificial. The evidence of this distribution of tendencies is equally conclusive, whether we look to its rational ground or to its historical exemplification; and a few words on each head will suffice to clear and justify it.

      Notwithstanding some occasional attempts to exhibit natural theology as a necessary extension of natural philosophy, it is plain that the maxims, which are ultimate for physical Science, stop short of contact with Religion; that the final appeal of the two is carried to different faculties; and that the scope and sphere of the one may be complete without borrowing any conception from the other. The assumption, for instance, that "we can know nothing but phenomena," directly excludes all permanent and eternal Being as the possible object of rational thought. And as "phenomena" are apprehensible only by the observing faculties, whatever refuses to put in an appearance in their court is nonsuited as an unreality. And again, physical knowledge has accomplished its aim, as soon as it can predict all the successions that lie within its field of time and space; and nowhere in this system of series, nor in the calculated forces which yield it to the view, does any divine Person look in upon the mind. Whoever, by the restraints of a hypothetical necessity, detains his intellect within nature, debars himself ipso facto from any faith that transcends nature, and recognizes no reserve of supernatural possibilities, hidden in a Mind of which the actual universe is but the finite expression. We do not, of course, intend to affirm that scientific culture cannot coexist with religious belief;—so preposterous an assertion would be confuted by a manifold experience;—but only that, where the canons of inductive knowledge are invested with unconditional universality, and are logically carried out as valid for all thought, they shut the door upon the sources of faith. It is the old battle, of which history supplies such abundant illustration; which brought Parmenides and Protagoras upon the lists at opposite ends on the field of philosophy; which Bacon profoundly avoided by assigning separate empires, without common boundary, to science and religion; but which his modern disciples have rashly renewed, by invading the realm left sacred by him. Uneasy relations have always subsisted in Christendom between the investigators of nature and the trustees of the faith: the men of science rarely quitting, unless for signs of unequivocal aversion, the attitude of polite indifference to the Church; and in their turn watched with the jealous eye of sacerdotal vigilance.

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