DR. TAIT ON THEISM.
E Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Charge delivered at
Dover on Tuesday—a charge marked by great argumen- tative force and a fine spirit of toleration—does, in the first part of his discourse, a considerable injustice to modern Theists.
He professes himself unable to explain the difference between a Theist and a Deist, intimates that the names are interchangeable, and entertains a belief that there is danger of England sinking into a " cold " Deism or Theism, like that of the eighteenth century. We need not say we hold Theism to be only a part of the truth, and a faith which by itself does not satisfy human needs, while it almost certainly would not, as compared with Christianity, conduce to human progress ; but Dr. Tait is, neverthe- less, scarcely just to Theists. The name by which they describe themselves may be philologically a little absurd, the distinction between " Deus " and eE0C being of the most subtle or imperceptible kind, but they have succeeded in imparting to the words in usage very different shades of meaning. The Deist, in usual theological parlance, is a man who believes that God was the Creator of the Universe, and still exists, but having placed His creation under fixed laws, He has ceased to ;nterfere with his own work, and disappeared from the ken of His own creatures, with whom, except as original laW-giver, He maintains no relation. That, indeed, is a "cold " faith, scarcely distinguishable from the Atheism for which it was often a mere cover, and only separable by philo- sophers from Pantheism, in which the whole universe is it- self the God. The difference between a Godhead which never existed and a Godhead which is suspended, though very con- siderable in reality, inasmuch as if God was Creator, his laws, when discernible, are divine, and not even potentially blunders, is theologically very trifling, and if the latter is accompanied, as is customary, with disbelief in a future state, is practically of no im- portance at all. If the course of events here is immutably fixed, and there is no hereafter, God disappears for man into a phrase, a theory through which he avoids the intellectual trouble of searching into the origin of things. The Theists repudiate this view altogether, and have changed the word "Deist" into "Theist," in order to express their repudiation. They hold that God not only was, but is ; not only created the world, but governs it ; has a permanent and vital relation to His creatures, may suspend or modify His laws, having, like all other thinking beings, free-will, and is at all events cognisant of their prayers, aspirations, and efforts to approach Him. That faith, carrying with it as it does some belief in the utility of prayer, a strong inclination towards worship, and a stronger desire to obey all that can be ascertained of His will, is, though we fully admit it to be insufficient, not by any means necessarily a " cold" one. On the contrary, it may be a very hot one. There is a class of men, as the Archbishop must be well aware, to whom the idea of God and his theocracy is intensely
attractive, who strain themselves in the effort to form a concep- tion of Him, who have but the single thought to find and do His will, and who so develope in themselves the passion of loyalty to their invisible Sovereign, that when non-Christians they make of God a personal or tribal chieftain, and even when Christians they almost forget alike Christ and his teaching.
The Jew faith, which was strictly Theism, though modified either, as the Archbishop would believe, by inspiration, or, as sceptics would say, by the genius of the people for
lofty moral conceptions, was not a " cold " one ; and we have illustrations nearer home than Judaism. We shall pro- duce a shower of remonstrances when we say that the very spirit of Theism, dominating and sometimes suppressing Christianity, appears in all forms of Calvinism, is prominent in all Scotch theology of the popular kind—we believe that thousands of Scotchmen hold right and wrong to be dis- tinguished from each other because God has distinguished them —and is the very soul and vital principle of the theology of New England and the sterner division of the Puritans. God is so present to their minds—God the ruler—that Christ sinks out of sight. The faith hitherto has not appeared, except in individuals, unaccompanied by a belief that God has directly revealed himself to man; but it is appearing now, and it would not necessarily be a cold one. On the contrary, it would probably be a very warm one, would be obeyed by its votaries, so far as they could see, implicitly; and would gradually, if maintained for any length of time, form a race with tempers of iron, ready to persecute to the death all who disbelieved, and therefore rebelled, pitilessly moral, though the morality might not be ours, and at once as resigned and as stern as the true Legitimists usually are. The danger of such a creed, if diffused throughout a people, would not be coldness and in- difference, but ardour in the maintenance and diffusion of doctrines evolved from the believers' own minds. For as man when he believes in a God grows hungrily anxious to discern His will, these men, rejecting Christianity, or any other external revelation now in real or supposed ex- istence, would be sure to find this law at last in their own deepest convictions, and make of them terrible instruments of coercion and oppression. Does not the Archbishop see traces of that spirit already P We certainly do. We know of few things more palpable than the tendency of earnest Theists to become convinced that some idea, usually a philanthropic one—for they feel unconsciously the effect of the Christian atmosphere around—is God's idea also, and to insist on its acceptance with the vehemence and intolerance of opposition with which the older religionists pressed their beliefs. Your true Theist, relieved of the pressure of circumambient Christi- anity, would believe and declare that God, as revealed in Nature, was inexorable, would harden his own heart in imitation, and would punish infractions, say, of sanitary laws, as he would assert, and truly from his point of view, that God does. Miasma kills, why keep alive the man who spreads miasma, much less the worst poisoner of all,—the man who spreads the miasmatic disbelief in the only Sovereign P Theists imagining that temperance was the will of God, which is quite true, would enforce temperance, if necessary, as Wahabees under the same conviction do, by killing the intemperate. The faith, in the long-run, when men had had time to form absolute but different conceptions of the will of their King, would be an utterly bad one, and probably end as it always tends to end, in a profound conviction that loyalty, i.e., belief, is the one thing required of man, and that morality and mercy are superfluities—not an', unknown state of mind, either in Jewish, or Christian, or Mahommedan history ;— but it would not be a cold one. We could conceive of the Eng- lish people, which has something Jewish in its turn of mind, adopting it, and should expect them thenceforward to be the most terrible and the most merciless of rulers, till the reaction came, and men in pure horror fled back to Christ for guidance as to the true will of the Divine King.
This is not, of course, the Theism of which the Archbishop of Canterbury stands in dread ; he is fearing a Theism which is old Deism; and we wonder if his dread has much foundation. We should think not. No individual, or group of individuals, can quite trace all the directions in which the mind of a nation is drifting; but we should say that the phase of indifference to religion which appears from time to time in English life is just now very distant, and that when it arrives it will not be based upon the notion of a God in a state of suspended animation. That form of Deism never got down very deep, and never will. There is none of the comfort of negation in it. It is a religion, but a religion for the content, and the body of English-speaking mankind at all events will not speedily be content, will demand some solace under its miseries which Deism does not offer, and some guidance which it rather sneeringly declines to afford. Men have waked up far enough to wish the problem solved, and, after all, it is a double problem, and not a single one. Deism tells us authoritatively the Whence—though it gives wonderfully little evidence, never accounting at all for evil, or attributing it to the Creator—but it tells us nothing of the Whither, rather implicitly denies the existence of any Whither at all. We are not much afraid of that form of belief taking any serious hold, but rather of a form of Agnosticism which has its root in perplexity and anger. We think we see signs of a disposition to declare that the great problem is in- soluble, that whatever rules, be it a Mind or only a Force, he or it does not intend the truth to be known, if there is a truth, and to go on, both in action and speculation, as if the problem had no existence. That is the condition of mind, we know, of many of the cultivated who are not sceptics, nor doubters, nor inquirers, but who think they are as certain of their point as they are that the circle will not be squared. They are, they think, in presence of a recurring decimal, and they are not going to spend life in the effort to resolve it. If no God exists, they will save their time ; and if He does exist, He must have set up the im- penetrable wall. A distinct belief of that kind, not a vague, pulpy impression, but a formulated belief, exists, we know, in the most unsuspected places, its holders not unfrequently professing Christianity, as at all events the best of the illusions ; and it has sunk very far down in the ladder of society. We find it catch classes which have suddenly become aware that there is a serious doubt afloat, and have caught something of its extent and force, till they fancy they have in the doubt a revelation as certainly true as they once thought the old certainty. We should not wonder at all if, with the spread of education, that form of Agnosticism spread also, all the more rapidly because it is apt to be silent, acquiescent, and a little contemptuous, and is so entirely neglected by religious teachers. They understand any faith better than a faith that a faith cannot be. If the Arch- bishop can wake the clergy out of their indifference to this condition of mind and furnish them with arguments against it, he will do great service to his cause, for he may rely on it that the evil exists, and may spread here as fast as in Ger- many, where the decision we have described is that of whole communities. There are entire cities there where the discussion of religion in any shape is tacitly pro- hibited, the' good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, equally holding that that way madness lies,—that nothing can be possibly known, and that there is something of moral wrong in striving to know—just what many good people think about Spiritualism. We believe the feeling to be at the root of Secular- ism, so far as Secularism is a faith, though aided among the lower Secularists by what we regard as the most painful, as it is often the most incurable, form of Atheism,—the Atheism arising from a sort of horror of the idea of an Omnipo- tent Being permitting such a proportion of misery among the majority of his creatures. The Socialists of Berlin say that openly, and thousands of men, and more women, in England think it, and are determined Agnostics from self-pity and philanthropy. In both instances, the result is a tendency in all who so believe towards excessive earthiness, not always ignoble, or selfish, or sensual in its manifestation, but still a state of mind in which the proved inconvenience or inutility of any action, or any line of thought, is a final reason against it. The world is to be made happier, and happier only ; and though, of course, individuals see that happiness in nobility, and there are Agnostics who are also determined ascetics or stoics, still, happiness is the end, and to the mass happiness is as much sugar as they wish. There can be no worse condition of mind ; and it is of this, and not of dull Deism, that among the suffering masses there is danger.
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