RELIGIOUS PERPLEXITIES.* A SURVIVOR of the early Tractarians, being asked
whether it never occurred to the Tract party to extend their very out- spoken criticism of the Anglican system in which they found themselves to religious conceptions of a more fundamental sort, answered : "Oh, no ! They would have thought this very wrong." Up to a certain point, if not beyond it, New' man's mind was sceptical ; but that work of genius; the Apologia, leaves the substance of religion untouched. And— omnibus hoc vitium est cantoribus. Of Lightfoot it has been said that "he dabbled in fundamentals " ; the parti pri.f vitiates the atmosphere of the evidential school ; Pitt's judgment of Butler's Analogy was that it raised more doubts than it solved. The science of Apologetic has, not un- deservedly, an indifferent reputation ; and it says much for the irrepressible vitality of Principal Jacks that, in spite of twenty years in the editorial chair of the Hibbert Journal, "his eye is not dim, nor his natural force abated." The per- plexities with which these lectures deal are religious, not ecclesiastical ; primary, not secondary ; and faced, not evaded : the book appeals to the lay mind. It deals, in fact, with some of the central problems of religion in general and Christianity in particular ; and it will come as a relief to those who, while dissatisfied with the thinness of modern theology, are, consciously or unconsciously, seekers after God.
It is often said that the larger and less dogmatic tendencies at work in modern religion water down the hardness of life and the austerer sayings of Christ. The very reverse is the ease. It is ecclesiastical Christianity which does so. A
• Religious Tecate:rifles. By L. D. Jacks, D.D. London : Hodder and Stoughton, as. ed.]
religion of formula and ritual provides a way of escape— for those who can accept it ; it is only when we recognize the futility of evasions of this kind that we find ourselves in the great spaces and on the wind-swept heights :—
"Let nobody suppose that, when Christianity has been reduced to its simplest and most intelligible form, it will be found an easy religion to put into ,practice. It will be found immensely more difficult than before. '
These lectures are an enlargement of Browning's-
" How very hard it is to be A Christian ! "
Dr. Jacks lays stress on the essential adventure of living—in religion as elsewhere ; an adventure which the strong accept and the weak decline : to live is to live dangerously and on the edge of things. And everyone is at once strong and weak, courageous and cowardly :—
" " Religion is a power which develops the hero in the man at the expense of the coward. . . . Faith is neither a substitute for reason nor an addition to it. It is nothing else than reason grown courageous—reason raised to its highest power, expanded to its highest vision. . . . There is such a thing as the will-to- disbelieve; • and, if we fall under its power, we shall indeed be well protected from fraud, but ill-equipped for the creation of new values, either in our own life or in that of others, which is the prime business of man. For this we need the will to believe that the new values are possible, which the will-to-disbelieve can always doubt."
The writer is, perhaps, too indiscriminate in his belittlement of" isms "—Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Modern- ism, 'rrinitarianism, Unitarianism, or any other. They are, indeed, secondary ; but "he jests at scars that never felt a wound " ; in the older Churches their power for evil is still great. Formula is, no doubt, a thing morally indifferent ; neither, if we accept it, are we the better, nor, if we reject it, are we the worse. But when confessions of faith and articles of belief are imposed under threat of spiritual penalties, they cease to be mere matters of formula, and enter into the moral sphere. That "the Christian religion, in the course of its long history, has become entangled with a multitude of things which do not properly belong to it" is true ; "with philo- sophies, with dogmatic systems, with political ideas, with the vested interests of great institutions, and especially with the habits of mind which have grown up with these things : this last, the entanglement with deeply entrenched habits of mind, being the most formidable of them all." There is another side to this, for which the reader may refer to Taine's famous Book V., "On the Church," in the last volume of the Origines. But these elements, however unavoidable, have been, and are, over-emphasized to such a degree that a caricature of religion is presented. And Dr. Jacks is on solid ground when he insists that :—
"Christianity, in the official, or authorized presentation of it, Is a smothered religion ; smothered almost to the point of total asphyxiation and collapse, but not quite. It has an unauthorized version; and it is this that has kept it alive and defied the smotherers even to this day."
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