Three Books on Faith
I Believe in God. By Maude Boyden. (Bonn. 75. 6d.)
THE modern man's attitude to religion exhibits two notable characteristics ; he shows a growing interest in religious ques- tions and a growing distrust of the answers which the orthodox religions have made to them. To put the point in another way, there is a re-awakening of the religious spirit combined with a refusal to let it flow into the old receptacles. In view of this re-awakening the three books here reviewed should have and deserve to have success ; they are all exceedingly well written, they all bring religion to the bar of modern problems, and only Father Knox commits himself to an orthodox creed. This creed is that of the Roman Catholic Church, the only religious body which, as Father Knox points out, grows year by year in numbers and in popularity. The articles of this creed are well known ; nothing is added to them, nothing indeed could have been added to them by Father Knox, and beyond mentioning the extraordinary brilliance of some of his writing, I do not propose to comment
further upon his book. Miss Royden is indeed as nearly orthodox as is compatible in these days of doubt and distraction with being a non-
Catholic of obviously first-rate intelligence. " She avows herself an Anglican, commits herself to most of the leading doctrines of the Anglican Church, and dislikes the rigid logic of extreme creeds, whether High or Low; Catholic or agnostic. She evinces indeed throughout her book a general distrust of logic which consorts ill with the closeness of her own reasoning. The validity of an argument is for her almost a guarantee of its falsity. "A completely logical solution" Of the problem a evil "would," she tells us, "be wrong because it would be of necessity false." A dangerous doctrine this ; if she believed it, Miss Boyden would do well to give up arguing and trust to the light of pure revelation. Yet nothing could be further from her purpose. She endeavours to establish the existence of God on 'Orthodox Paleyan lines.: the order and wisdom of the universe Point inevitably to an ordering mind.; we know, for instance,
t hat there are ninety-two chemical elements, yet only ninety -have been discovered ; hOw, then, do we know that two are missing ? Because of our faith in the rationality of the universe, a faith which the discoveries of science only tend to -confirm, by showing the universe to be more wonderful :because vaster and mere complex than even Paley imagined.
But, as Kant pointed out long ago, we must be honest about the argtinient for design. If the universe exhibits design, it also exhibits lack of design ; if it bears witness to providential forethought, it bears witness also to cruelty and waste. There 4's, for example, the .alnisst incredible ingenuity and
plexity of the devices by means of which the Mosquito is enabled to spread malaria, and, as we read Mr. Ihndey's :accounts of the extravagances of Nature, we cannot help likening her mode of Operation to that Of a man who, wishing to build a house, built a city, and then allowed all the houses to decay except-one, or, wishing to shoot a hare, surrounded a field with a million rifles and caused all the rifles to be let off together. Miss Boyden does not shirk the problem ; what is :more she is fully alive to the inadequacy of the traditional solutions. Manicheanism, the view that there are two Gods, one good and one evil, she rejects as incompatible with our
✓ iinvietion of the unity of the universe, a conviction which :science seems to her irresistibly to support ; and she will have 'none of the soothing syrup doctrine that evil, pain and dis- order are in some sense illusory, the products of our own minds. This, in her opinion, is to shift the problem, not to solve it.
For Miss Boyden, then, God created the universe, and its laws are the embodiment of His will. It is here that she parts company with Mr. Huxley. Miss Boyden believes in God, Mr. Huxley in life. Mr. Huxley indeed has little Patience with the omnipotent personal Creator, still less ;with the traditional religions in whieh His nature is revealed. This is not to say that Mr. Huxley is an iconoclast ; far from it. Few have written more eloquently of the evils for which orthodox religion has been responsible in the past ; few have exposed more ruthlessly its bankruptcy in the present. Mr. Huxley indeed has written a very powerful book, and whether it commands our agreement or arouses our opposition, he must be praised for its clarity and courage. But though he destroys, he desttoys only to build tip ; his object is to sketch the fundamentals of a new attitude to the universe, one which, broad based upon the teaching of science, will be capable of infinite modification to embrace the discoveries of the future. It is this attitude or reaction to the universe as a whole which he calls religiOn.
He begins with an affirmation of the unity and uniformity of nature. By the unity of nature he means that everything that exists is an expression of one ultimate world substance ; by its uniformity, that there is nothing outside this ultimate substance, neither law, force, ideal agency or personal being which can interfere with its continuous and necessary de- velopment. Thus he disclaims all forms of dualism, as, for example, between life and matter or _life and God,. and he denies the supernatural. God, if we like to use the term, 'is simply "the Universe as it impinges on our lives and makes part of our thought." But within the unity of the -univerie three different aspects may be distinguished which are sym.. hazed by the three persons of the Christian Trinity. Matter, the forces which govern the physical universe, whatever in short appears external to and unaffected by man, stands for the First Person of the Trinity ; the world of ideals, beauty, goodness-and'-truth, the. world which we seek to realize in art of experience in religious contemplation; for the Third and human .beings who mediate_ between the impersonality ana infinitY of:the ide:al and the. cOnefete fact of aettial existence, by making the ideal actual in their individual lives., for the Second.
This thesis is applied by Mr. Huxley with great ingenuity in every department of life and knowledge. If I may permit myself one -criticism, it is-that in denying the externality of God, it fails to do justice, as any monistic system must do, to the uniqUe character of religious and especially of mystically religions experience. For Mr. Huxley the universe is essentially one and continuous ; there is no gap Of real - discontinuity th separate the changing and the imperfect from the changeleth- and the perfect. The changeless and the perfect, indeed, exists only as an ideal in the mind of the changing and the imperfect, and, in contemplating it, mind is .contemplating projection of what is ultimately itself. There is thus nothing to reveal in religion, because the universe is merely an exten- sion of that which is already known. Thus the denial of God as existing here and now, as a being independent of the move- ment of life Which seeks to realize him, is only part of the general denial of a changeless, perfect and permanent element in the universe.
Yet the experience of all the great mystics, an experience of which we, too, have vague and fleeting intimations in moments of aesthetic and religions:insight, bears witness to the funda--' mental duality between God and life. That what they con- template should be recognized as different from themselves, and from any possible extension of themselves,, different in point of its changeless perfection, has been for them a necessary condition Of the feeling of ecstatic "Worship that they have entertained for it. A fundamental dualism seenisto be the indispensable presuPpOsition of mystical experience.
C. E. M. Join. •
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