RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND DOUBT.
THE Pall Mall Gazelle of Tuesday, in one of its lucid, mascu- line, positive-thonghted articles on the negative side of religious subjects, asserts, as we understand it, that religious liberty is due to doubt, and to nothing but doubt. There is, says the writer, one unfailing test of how much faith any religion gets, namely, the willingness of the ruling classes to concede it political power. "Dien will submit, in matters of legislation, to a religion which they really, and in their heart of hearts, believe to be true. When they talk about dividing the temporal from the spiritual power—about a free Church in a free State, when they legislate in civil matters upon an independent basis, when, as in Spain and Italy, they proclaim religious liberty, they show, in different ways, more or less smooth and civil, that they no longer believe what they used to believe. Now, the determination of every nation in Europe to follow this path under one set of phrases or another, is at least as well marked a phenomenon as the increased popularity of Romanism amongst the classes which were always specially open to its influence." And, undoubtedly, when a Church like the church of Rome, claiming infallibility over the whole circle of human duty as well as belief, claiming to have an infallible divine guidance in the proper application to human life of the specu- lative principles revealed to it, fails to persuade the best and most powerful minds in every civilized state that it has any such guidance, it is pretty clear that it is losing its hold of human nature ; for in the case of such a Church, to .dispute its authority in the least particular is as fatal as disput- ing its authority in the greatest. If its infallibility be a mistake, its whole pretensions are a mistake ; and to be guilty of the breach of the least of its commandments is to be guilty of all. But when the writer in the Pall Mall applies the same test to the reality of the theological convictions of members of other Churches which snake no such claim to ecclesiastical infallibility, when he seems to say, as in effect he does, "If these men's theological convictions were genuine, then those who entertain them would be quite willing to entwine their creed with the civil power in any really efficient manner, and their reluctance to do so is virtually a polite way of saying they have little absolute belief in the truth of their theology,"—he surely makes an assertion that is demonstrably false and misleading ; he supplies us with a test of the real influence of a theology over the mind, which is not only no test, but not even, in the case of Protestant faiths, a common symptom .of true moral dominion. So far from religious liberty being the specially legitimate offspring of Doubt, secret or confessed, it is surely a far more legitimate offspring of any and every type of faith which assumes a spiritual influence only over the higher intellect, the conscience, and the heart, and trusts the development of that influence, its rendering into the rules and customs and laws of practical life, to the necessary tendency of inward convic- tion to grow and eventually to bear fruit in outward action.
It is very easy to illustrate and even demonstrate what we mean. Is there not in every man worthy of the name, and every society that is a living society at all, a vast number of moral principles and convictions which are of the very breath of health and life, which yet no man of sense or wisdom would for a moment dream of allowing the State to enforce,—which, indeed, the mere attempt to systematize and enforce by any public authority would so com- pletely deprive of all their virtue and spirit, that the effect would
only be to eliminate them from the moral atmosphere, without introducing them in any tangible shape into the legal code ? What, for instance, would any man be worth without a sense—more or less vivid—of the obligations entailed upon him by his own most intimate intellectual convictions? What would any woman be worth without a sense—more or less vivid—of the obligations entailed upon her by her most genuine affections ? We all know what immensely purifying and powerful springs of action each of these principles really is in minds of any depth. We all know how much they pervade and purify even the most corrupt and apparently rotten societies, and how the characters which they tend to form, differ vastly for the better from what they would be if this refined class of obligations were not everywhere held more or less sacred. Yet who would think for a moment of trying to embody this highly volatile spirit of the higher morality in an external code of laws? Who does not admit
that this higher and finer class of moral and spiritual truths, which depend far too much on delicate individual appreciations to admit of any general formula for applying them to actual life, would be utterly lost and trampled in the mud if once the State attempted to incorporate them in any external institutions? Why, every one knows that a good many even of the commoner rules of practical morality cannot be enforced by law, on the very simple ground that the morality of the penal law, to be beneficial at all, must be a great way beneath instead of above the morality of the social conscience,—that the finer and more elevated any sort of moral principle is, the more absolutely it demands perfect liberty and the full sense of independence for its free development. For example, the difficulty of enforcing the law against bribery is, that the law is at present decidedly above the standard of the
average English morality,—that the true appreciation of the illiberality or servility of nature implied in taking a bribe has not yet been attained by the moral imagination of the English people. Unless the higher moral convictions have full liberty— free air—to grow and move in, they are choked before they take hold at all. Attempt to legislate too soon, and you create a violent rebellion and reaction against the very principles you want to sustain. There is a moral region in which the love for liberty no more means doubt, than the dislike of liberty means certainty. In proportion as your spiritual principle is inward, one governing not mere external acts but the higher reason and the higher affections, the necessity for liberty is more and more deeply felt. We should go so far as to say that one of the signs that spiritual and theological conviction has gone
deeper since the Reformation than it ever went before except in the first age of the Church, is that men have felt so much more deeply the necessity for freedom, for free play of heart and thought, around the central truths of the religious life. For centuries there was not enough vitality about the popular belief to need this inner freedom of spirit ; all the moods of conviction were traditionally cut and dried, and treated as if you could realize them, enter into them, make them your own, as you might the truths of the multi- plication-table or the rules of grammar. With Protestantism came first the emphatic demand for liberty of thought and feeling, not from less real conviction, but from more. The satirist has said of Luther, with sufficient truth, that this was precisely his
blunder,—that he brought back a genuine theology upon Europe after it had all but faded away :-
"'Luther, they say, was unwise ; like a half-taught German, he could not See that old follies were passing most tranquilly out of remembrance... He must, forsooth, make a fuss, and distend his huge Wittenberg lungs, and Bring back theology once yet again in a flood upon Europe."
And unquestionably this was so ; the demand for new spiritual liberty, the revolt against the yoke of that Church which arrogated to itself an infallible system of formulating revelation for use in life, and applying its principles to the minutest matters, was not a sign of failing but of returning faith ;—the faith in the infallible
practical guidance dying in order that the faith in the spiritual inspiration might be renewed. Protestant theology, in vindicat- ing the spiritual truth of the revelation of God given in the Bible, was compelled to clear a space, as it were, round the human spirit, in order to find the room for the new faith and new enthusiasm to
which it gave birth. Liberty might have been perhaps a result of temperate doubt ; but as a matter of historic fact, it was at the time of the Reformation a natural result of new and intensely individual belief in the Divine Spirit as self-revealed in the Bible. That belief was too profound and too individual, too much at the very core of the human character, to admit of being formulated and codified as the Roman Catholic Church had formulated and codified it ; and what the Roman Catholic Church had failed in
doing, of course the Protestant State was not at all likely to succeed in doing.
Christian theology, whether true or false, consists, as we understand it, in a special representation of the character of God, of what God is, a representation illustrated by His own acts or what the revelation asserts to be His own acts, and also by the motives, principles, and actions which He has approved or disapproved, marked by His sympathy or His displeasure under certain variable historical circumstances, in men. Well, we maintain that that representation, when taken to heart, is far too inward, far too much a matter of the most complex and subtle spiritual appreciation, to admit of being coined into a set of external regulations by the State, without losing all that is of value in it, all that exalts and restrains the inner will, all the very spirit of its life. Liberty in a very plain sense is a sine qua non of the popularization of this theology-. Those who maintain, as many do maintain very strongly, that the State, though it may ally itself with a Church, cannot properly attempt to force this Christian theology on any man without obliterating all faith in a hundred hearts for every heart that it could win, do not thereby show their own doubt ; they only show that they fully understand the true law of faith, that it must spring up unforced in the interior nature, and show its vitality and its power by generating subtle shades of moral feeling and religious sentiment which could never germinate in any atmosphere but that of perfect liberty. It seems to us the most extraordinary misunderstanding of the genius of Christian theology, considered as a form of spiritual truth, to speak of it as having any natural tendency to seek and obtain the authoritative interference of the civil power on its behalf. Doubtless an infallible practical organization, such as the Roman Church claims to be, an organization as infallible in reducing ecclesiastical principles to a political system, in reducing the spiritual law to a code of moral casuistry, as it is in interpreting the character of God, such an organization may fairly claim the arm of the State to enforce its political and moral rules. But true Protestant theology,— the theology which maintains that every individual must find his separate way to God by the use of his own intellect, his own conscience, and his own spirit,— the theology which represents revelation as beginning and ending in a true picture of the nature and spirit and acts of God in relation to man, and which leaves the moral absorption into society and the fructification in society of the impressions so produced, to the natural processes of the mind and heart,—this theology, we maintain, is so far from show- ing doubt and mistrust and hesitation in its refusal to avail itself of proper political agencies (except as the merest material props) that we cannot understand how otherwise it could prove the sincerity and depth of its conviction. The more truly the civil power believes in the exalted spiritual influence of Christianity, the more anxiously, we maintain, will it refrain from hindering its development by any authoritative meddling. The more truly the spiritual power believes in its own strength, the more anxious it will be to use that strength in the proper sphere for using it, —the region of the higher affections, the conscience, and the will, without asking for the coarser, perilous, and disturbing aid of compulsory legislation.
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