" UNREAL WORDS " IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
IF any one idea has been common to the religious and to the sceptical thinkers on religious subjects in this curious century of ours,—a century in which the most profoundly reli- gious men have shown their deep appreciation of the serious character of religious difficulties, and in which the most profound sceptics have shown their equally deep appreciation of the depth of the religious element in our nature,—that common idea has been the duty of not using "unreal words " on religions sabjects. Cardinal Newman was the first to inculcate this, in one of the earliest and finest of his Oxford sermons. Carlyle's whole teaching was founded upon it, and directed against the slightest " unve- raeity " of thought in confronting those Bternities and Immensi- ties in treating of which, to the mind of the present writer at least, he so often sinned against his own doctrine. Mr. Raskin has echoed the same warning in every one of the many planes of thought with which he has concerned himself. Sir James Stephen has harped on the same lesson in that remarkable book on " Liberty, Fraternity, Equality," in which he endeavours to expose some a the falsehoods of modern political sentiment. Dr. Martineau, in sermon and essay alike, has dwelt on the same theme. He has warned the Evangelicals that they cannot really believe in the damnation of those with whom they dine and joke on the most cordial terms, and that if they profess to do so, either the sincerity of their belief or the cordiality of their social feelings will suffer as a consequence. Some of Professor Huxley's lay sermons and essays have had for their main drift to make men more sincere in conforming their professions of faith to the implicit standard recognised in their highest actions. Mr. Spencer has taken religious people to task for the implicit contradictions in their creeds. Mr. Frederic Harrison has taxed Mr. Spencer with his fancy for "the ghost of religion." And Sir James Stephen has found fault with the palpably fantastic pretensions of both Mr. Spencer's and Mr. Harrison's gospels. Mr. Wilfrid Ward, in his very witty and intersting essays on "The Clothes of Religion" and " Pickwickian Positivism," which he has just repub- lished from the National Review,* has insisted exclusively on the utter "unreality " of popular Positivism, and has done so with so much power, that we doubt whether any one who reads his essays can for the future be again taken in by the religious side of Positivism, however tenaciously he may cling to the philosophical negations which it adopts. Indeed, the most impressive thing in his little book is the demonstration he gives us that Mr. Frederic Harrison himself, while he refuses to give up the verbal phraseology in which the extraordinary pretensions of Positivism to a religious character appear to be enshrined, yet himself explains away that phraseology so as to reduce the religious pretensions of the system to empty sounds. We do not, however, return to the subject in order to prick a bladder which has already quite collapsed. What with Sir James Stephen's vigorous blows and Mr. Wilfrid Ward's subtler irony, we are sure that the pretensions of Positivism to supply mankind with religious consolations and religious hopes in the hour of affliction and of death are pretty completely ex- ploded, and that we shall hear as little of them for some years to come as we are likely to hear of Mr. Spencer's " Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." These phantom creeds will never take the place of the real creeds, whether the real creeds hold their ground or not. The most these phantom creeds can do is to signal, as it were, impressively to mankind that even when the substance of a .theology is wanting, the yearnings of men will create in its place some simulacrum of a creed to witness to the still unsatisfied want. They will not even tend to stimulate the philanthropic feelings, but rather, wethink, bring them into contempt. As Mr. Wilfrid Ward admirably says : —" To idealise the human race by picturing it, not as what it is at its best, but as what it is not,—to speak not of the beauty of human love and human goodness, but of a Supreme Being, a Providence, a Power, to whom we turn in death, whom we serve, a unique and mysterious conception, and the rest,—to idealise humanity, not by picturing ideal humanity, but by building up a sort of god in its place,—is at once laughable and useless in kindling benevolence in any well-balanced mind. If I had a pet mouse, and wanted my neighbours to be kind to it, I might try and enlist their interest and sympathy by describing it as the most ideal mouse I had ever seen, with all the qualities that can render a mouse attractive,—whatever those qualities may be. But if I were to lay stress on its enormous teeth, its long proboscis, its enormous size and strength, and to speak of it generally as though it were an elephant, my friends would probably think I had gone mad, and I should not succeed in arousing much affection or enthusiasm for my mouse. And if I were to plead that my reason for exaggeration was my wish to kindle in them the excellent feeling of kindness and tender- ness for the mow, they would perhaps say that I had not gone the right way to make them like a mouse by describing an elephant." The only effect of the attempt to magnify humanity • The Clothes of Religion : a Reply to Popular Positivism. In two Essays and a Postscript. By Wilfrid Ward. Landon: Thous and Oates
till its attributes sound as if they were the attributes of deity, will be to advertise us all that there is in man a craving for deity, which, after all, humanity cannot satisfy.
We return, however, to this subject of the " unreal words " which sceptics so often use when they want to persuade men that they may have all the good of a faith without having a faith, not for the purpose of seconding attacks that have com- pletely routed the foe, but in order to recall Cardinal New- man's original lesson, namely, that " unreal words " preceed too?
• often from those who have real creeds, and therefore should have no temptation to invent the mere phantasmagoria of creeds. And yet surely there is much less excuse for unreal words in those who believe earnestly in God, and hold that GO has revealed to them as much about himself as they are com- petent to understand, than there is in those who hold that man's consciousness is the highest summit of existence, and that what man feels, lie feels as a poet or maker who has no greater poet or maker within or above him. There seems to us to be an excuse for inflated and half-veracious expressions of feeling on the part of such as these, which there is not at all on the part of those who believe that the only truth they have on the subject of religion, is a truth imparted to them from above, as a help towards the gradual acquisition of more and better truth. Unreal words, bad enough in those who regard themselves as the only authorised interpreters of an otherwise dumb and in- articulate universe, are infinitely worse in those who regard themselves as taught from above all that they know, and there- fore as bound to weigh the significance of every word that they have been taught, and not to repeat it mechanically in the airy fashion in which a child may not unreasonably repeat that which mere fancy has suggested to him. Unreality of speech, so com- mon, and in some respects so pardonable, in those who do pot believe that they have any guidance but their own, is, compara- tively speaking, unpardonable in those who believe that their highest creeds reflect the very teaching of God, and therefore, that to utter what he has taught them without understanding or weighing its full significance, is to incur the responsibiliky of travestying that teaching to the world. It is, we seriously believe, the too numerous and most "unreal words" uttered by thole who profess to speak with the full authority of revelation, which form the best justification for the unreal words uttered by those who believe in no such authority at all. And we hold it to be the best omen for the future, that while the sceptics have wandered off into dreams as fantastic as those of religious Posi- tivism and the Agnostic Metaphysics, theology has become more and more sensible of its great responsibility, and has begun to measure its words with the most anxious desire neither to exaggerate nor to minimise the true drift of the Divine message to man, but to discriminate carefully all the human elements mingled in that message from that which it was intended by God to convey. " Unreal words," still much too common on the lips of religious teachers, are, we sincerely believe, growing has common day by day,--as, indeed, they ought to be; for there can be nothing at once more difficult, and more a matter of obliga- tion, than for those who believe that God has really been teaching us through human media, to distinguish the drift of that teaching from the guesses and prepossessions and errors with which huinan bias has alloyed it. Theologians should be the first to free their minds from cant, as Dr. Johnson used to advise all his friends to do ; for in the mouths of theologians, cant is infinitely worse than in any other mouth, since it dishonours God as well as man. Yet we are all apt to be severe on the cant of agnostics and sceptics, though the cant of agnostics and sceptics, bad as it is, is not near as bad, er near as mischievous, as the cant of religious teachers who repeat the conventionalisms of the schools as if they were infallible lessons of the Almighty, and who too often render revelation incredible, by identifying with revelation rash assumptions of their own which they themselves have neither weighed nor even adequately understood. If theologians had always felt the greatness of their responsibility as deeply as in the present age they have begun to feel it, we should hardly have had the number of sceptics of whom this century can boast. It is the unreal words of the believers which have multiplied so largely the unreal words of the unbelievers. Unreal words which come professedly as the exposition of Divine inspiration, are far more unreal than unreal words which do not even profess to stand for anything beyond the thoughts of finite and fallible beings.
But seriously as we hold to the far greater mischief of un- reality when it professes to represent something Divine, we do also hold that the volume of unreal words talked in the present age against religion, by men of genius, has been indefinitely greater than the volume of unreal words talked by men of genius in its name. Carlyle has been one of the greatest of those who have warned us against "the Unveraeities," and no man has said truer and nobler things on the subject than Carlyle. And yet the volume of windy talk in which Carlyle has been false to his own teaching, and has uttered a sort of cant peculiar to himself, seems to us fearfully large. Carlyle insisting on the Divine quality of reticence ; Mr. Spencer preaching the awe with which we ought to regard " the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed;" and Mr. _Frederic Harrison lecturing to the Positivist pilgrims on the grand continuity of the Comtist religion, and showing them the sacred locality in which Auguste Comte " suffered and died " no fewer than twenty-eight years ago,—are surely warnings which we cannot afford to ignore, against the unreality of the prophets of the age. If it is a good omen for the theologians that they are beginning to guard the door of their lips, and to " minimise," as it is called, when they interpret the teaching of inspiration, it is not a good sign for the negative teachers that they indulge more and more in the rhodomontade of unreal sentiment, after they have expressed their scepticism as to the source from which alone such religions sentiment could be safely derived.
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