THE MAGNANIMITY OF UNBELIEF, TN the papers which Mr. Frederic
Harrison has contributed I to the Nineteenth Century on " The Soul and Future Life," and in his reply to the many criticisms whom those papers drew down upon him, there is visible precisely the same state of mind which is so curiously illustrated in Harriet Martineau's " Auto- biography,"—the state of mind, we mean, which Miss Cobbe, in her striking contribution to the Theological Review of this month, happily terms one of " magnanimous atheism." Any one who has seen a shrunken and withered apple apparently revive under the ex- hausted receiver of an air-pump, may perhaps have some notion, derived from that analogy, of the reason of this swelling of the heart in a sort of triumphant relief at the imaginary evanescence of the religious influences under the pressure of which it had lived. The apple swells out because the atmospheric pres- sure on the outside is removed, and the confined air in it consequently expands till it seems as sound and plump as it was while all its juices were rich and full. And so, we take it, the elation of mind which Harriet Martineau so vividly describes, the gratulation wherewith she looked up to the midnight stars, and thought within herself that the creeds of her youth were a system of illusions which she and Mr. Atkinson had contrived to throw off, was due to the cessation of the pressure of that sense of constant obligation and claim under which she had formerly been living, and its exchange for the conviction that instead of trying to interpret painfully the demands of another and higher spirit upon her ow; all she had to do was to give free vent to her own aspirations, and follow the impulses of her own thought. " When," wrote Miss Martineau,* "in the evenings of that spring, I went out (as I always do when in health) to meet the midnight on my terrace, or in bad weather in the porch, and saw and felt what I always do see and feel there at that hour, what did it matter whether people who wero nothing to mo had smiled or frowned when I passed them in the village in the morning? When I experienced the still now joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security of its ever- lasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destination of my race is infinitely nobler than the highest prepared under a scheme of divine moral government, how could it matter to me that the ad- herents of a decaying mythology (the Christian following the heathen as the heathen followed the barbaric-fetish) were fiercely clinging to their Man-God, their scheme of salvation, their reward and punishment, their essential pay-system, as ordered by their mythology? . . . . To the emancipated, it is a small matter that those who remain imprisoned are shocked at the daring which goes forth into the sunshine and under the stars to study and enjoy, without leave asked, or the fear of penalty." How like the breath of relief with which Miss Martineau observes that the displeasure or pleasure of her neighbours is nothing to her, is that with which she remarks that to go and " meet the midnight " was delightful to her after sup- posing as she used to suppose, that at such times she went to meet a spirit who was conducting a divine moral government,' and had promised to reward and punish men according to their works, It is, as she expressly says, the feeling that "the midnight" she went to meet, though resting on "the security of everlasting laws," was entirely " out of the sphere of human attributes," entirely unrelated to the Man-God of Christian worship, which filled her with this sense of elation. In precisely the same tone, Mr. Frederic Harrison expounds his religion of humanity,' and throws off all the beliefs of the theolo- gians, as constructed out of " dithyrambic hypotheses and evasive tropes." There is in all the Positivists, a note of scornful triumph as they clear their souls of what they call the superstitions of ages, and exhort us to be content with worshipping the providence which the race of man exercises over indi- " Autobiography," Vol. II, p. 855. vidual men, and with anticipating the 4. posthumous acti- vities ' which are to be the somewhat worthless, but the only conceivable, equivalents for immortal growth. In all the soliloquies and all the homilies to which the Positivists give utterance, you can see the same sense of relief, in fact the air which Miss Cobbe so well describes as the air of magnanimity,—as if they were doing something rather grand, and rising in their own estimation, as they cast to the winds the old faiths. Yet Miss Martineau, as Miss Cobbe reminds us, was almost dismayed when oho thought of the pain which her new belief in personal annihilation would carry to the heart of some friends of hers who were widows, and who lived in the hope not only of a future life in God, but of a future reunion with the objects of their warmest earthly love, and whom she feared it might oven deprive of reason to have this hope taken away from them. Yet with all this dismay, she speaks of her new disbelief as a potent remedy for human ills which it would be selfish in her to keep to herself. "My com- rade and I both care for our kind, and we could not see them suffering as we had suffered, without imparting to them our con- solation and our joy. Having found, as my friend said, a spring in the desert, should we see the multitude wandering in desolation and not show them our refreshment ?" Whereupon Miss Cobbe remarks, " Would it not have been amore appropriate simile to say, Having found that the promised land was a mirage, we hastened back joyfully to bring the interesting tidings to our friends in the wilderness, some of whom we expected would go mad when they received our intelligence, to which, from their great respect for us, we knew they would attach the. utmost importance. By some strange fortuity, however, they did not spite believe our report, and went on their way as before, under the pillar of cloud' ?" Yet it is evident that while, on the one hand, the Positivists are conscious that they are trying to remove a faith in which the human spirit profoundly rests, they do really feel, on the other hand, as if those who can share their point of view were throwing off a weight of care, and growing freer and nobler and more dignified beings in so doing,—as if in fact, to use Miss Martineau's phrase, going "to meet the midnight" were an infinitely freer and less humiliating act of mind than going to meet God. They move more easily when they imagine themselves merely under the midnight than they could under the eye of Divine righteousness, and they become higher beings in their own estimation, just as the apple blooms out again under the exhausted receiver. Mr. Harrison, indeed, expressly finds fault with the Christian order of thought for thinking so poorly of man as he is. He speaks of the view of their own lives taken by men who hold that much of what they have done will result in ' posthumous activities' of a very unsatisfactory kind, and a great proportion of their past in posthumous activities that are simply morally indifferent, being neither bad nor good, as mere pessimists, and adds, " Pessimism as to the essential dignity of man, and the steady development of his race, is one of the surest marks of the enervating influence of this dream of a celestial glory." In other words, to Mr. Harrison, as certainly to Miss Martineau, all humiliation is pessimism,—even though it touches in no way the essential dignity of man, but rather only the unsuccessful attempts of the individual ego to reach that essential dignity of man. As the belief in God vanishes, the satisfaction with our- selves as we are, grows, and we begin to bo quite sure that the vast majority of all our "posthumous activities" will go to increase the store of testimony accumulating to all future ages of "the essential dignity of man." Now, we are far from blaming the Positivists for this result of their scepticism. It seems to us to be in most cases a certain result of it ;—of course not in all cases, because the vanishing of the belief in God does not in the least extinguish Him ; and to those few who are real enough to see the truth about themselves., in spite of the intellectual bewilderment in which they may live as to the Author of their being, the consciousness of the poverty of their motives, and of the vein of selfishness in even their best actions, of the half-and-halfness of their aspirations, of the mixture of self-love in their affections, and of the dull edge of their virtue, must be as keen as if they fully recognised the Presence which really shows them all this about themselves. But there are very few of us who are thus realists. Inevitably, in the cultivated at least, the failure to recognise anything higher than man above us must make man himself,—even as he is,— seem a more satisfactory being than lie can ever seem to those who compare him constantly with Christ. As certainly as the failure to recognise the attraction of the sun led our forefathers into all sorts of exaggerations of the stability of the earth, the failure to recognise the divine love and righteousness, will lead those who miss them to exaggerate the worth and value of human love and righteousness. It is the weight of our debt and obligation which makes us see what poor creatures, except through the divine help, we really are. Remove the sense of these higher obligations, and we grow inevitably in our own estimation, just as the withered apple revives when the air ceases to press upon it. Indeed, the real issue between the Positivist and the Christian might fairly well be summed-up in the one question whether humility be a morbid and misleading quality, or the very truth and core of all real self-knowledge. If the former, the Posi. tivists are right ; if the latter, the Christians. But what shall be the test? Why surely the experience of the past affords us test enough. Mr. Harrison says in effect that the tendency to think lightly of man as he is is the result,—and we agree with him,—of man's "dream of celestial glory." Well, but what has been the moral fruit of that stoic self-estimation and magnanimity which is now again lifting up its head, as compared with the attitude of moral humiliation which Mr. Harrison calls " pessimism" ? Whence have the great bene- ficent moral agencies of the world sprung? From the optimism of self-satisfied human dignity, or from the pessimism,—if so it is to be called,—of the ages of humility ? Surely all that is morally great in man, from the greater works of charity to the greater triumphs of the spirit of truth, have sprung out of that spirit of humility which has ascribed all its achievements to the power of God, and has found the con- fidence necessary for effecting even the greatest revolutions in human society only because it believed itself to be driven on by Him. The grand, picturesque magnanimity of the Stoic school has done nothing for humanity, compared with the spirit of Christian humiliation ; and, tested by the past at least, the equanimity or magnanimity which seems to spring from doubt will be barren indeed, compared with the self- depreciation, or even, if you please to call it so, self-disgust, springing out of the knowledge of a diviner Presence and a mightier Will.
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