THE ATHEISTIC METHOD OF CONTROVERSY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S criticism on Colonel Ingersoll, in the May number of the North American Review, has not been as widely read as it would have been, had it been as easy as it should be to purchase that periodical in this country,—an achievement in which, even in London, the present writer has wholly failed. The paper has a special interest because it calls attention very forcibly to one particular feature of Colonel Ingersoll's polemic, which appears to us, with a few splendid exceptions, characteristic of the negative school of criticism. We refer to its habit of charging the ranks of the believers from a hundred distinct points almost in the same page, so that while one objection is metaphysical and the next moral, and the third historical, and the fourth doctrinal, no one can predict from what point of the compass the next attack will come, and how much preliminary discussion it will require even to reduce it to any clear and intelligible issue. "Denunciation, sarcasm, and invective," says Mr. Gladstone, "may be said to constitute the staple of his [Colonel Ingersoll's] work, and if argument or some favourable admission here and there peeps out for a moment, the writer soon leaves the dry and barren heights for his favourite and more luxurious galloping grounds beneath." Again,—" The method of this reply is not to argue seriously from point to point, but to set out in masses, without the labour of proof, crowds of im- putations which may overwhelm an opponent like balls from a mitrailleuse." This has been a favourite method with negative writers from long before the time of Tom Paine. It was espe- cially against this habit of regarding the Christian revelation of
God as if it displayed an incoherent bundle of separate acts of divine government, instead of a coherent and to us only gradu- ally developed life of character and will, that Bishop Butler pointed his masterly argument in the "Analogy." Of course, an assailant of Christianity who does not trouble himself for a moment to ask what the Christian revelation means as a whole, what is its ideal of man, what its teaching about God, what its view of suffering, what its attitude towards sin, can over- whelm any Christian thinker, however alert, with the mis- cellaneousness, the vehemence, and the scorn of his objections, without even rendering it possible for his opponent to en- counter adequately more than one or two of his assaults. Let us give a few specimens of Colonel Ingersoll's mitrailleuse firing.
First, as proving the irresponsibility of belief :—
"We think in spite of ourselves. The brain thinks as the heart beats, as the eyes see, as the blood pursues its course in the old accustomed ways."—(North American Review for November, 1887, p. 477.)
"You will admit that he who now persecutes for opinion's sake is infamous. And yet the God you worship will, according to your creed" [Dr. Field's Presbyterian creed], "torture through all the endless years, the man who entertains an honest doubt." (p. 477.)
Again, listen to this simply amazing assertion as to the government of the natural world by God :— " Do you not believe that any honest man of average intelligence, having absolute control of the rain, could do vastly better than is being done? Certainly there would be no droughts or floods ; the crops would not be permitted to wither and die, while rain was being wasted in the sea. Is it conceivable that a good man with power to control the winds would not prevent cyclones ? Would you not rather trust a wise and honest man with the lightning ?" (p. 479.) As to the effect of religion on society :— "Religion has been the enemy of social order because it directs the attention of men to another world. Religion teaches its votaries to sacrifice this world for the sake of that other. The effect is to weaken the ties that hold families and States together." (p. 481.) As to the impossibility of a finite being owing anything to an infinite being :— "An Infinite Being must be conditionless, and for that reason there is nothing that a finite being can do that can by any possibility affect the well-being of the conditionless. This being so, man can neither owe nor discharge any debt or duty to an infinite being. The infinite cannot want, and man can do nothing for a being who wants nothing." (p. 483.) As to the falsehood of the view that anything we suffer is the punishment, or anything we enjoy the reward, for previous actions :— " There are no punishments, there are no rewards,—there are consequences. And of one thing you may rest assured, and that is that every soul, no matter what sphere it may inhabit, will have the everlasting opportunity of doing right." (p. 486.) Here one is even more astounded at the concession made in the last sentence,—from the writer's point of view,—than at
the marvellous and silly dogmatism of the first sentence. Here, again, is Colonel Ingersoll's dogmatic decision on necessity or fate :—
" I rid myself of fear, believing as I do that there is no power above, which can help me in any extremity, and believing as I do that there is no power above or below that can injure me in any extremity. I do not believe that Jam the sport of accident, or that I may be dashed in pieces by the blind agency of Nature. There is no accident, and there is no agency. That which happens must happen. The present is the child of all the past, the mother of all the future." (p. 499.) Well may Mr. Gladstone liken Colonel Ingersoll's fire to that of a mitrailleuse. Here is a very small and random assortment of Colonel Ingersoll's statements made in the
course of a single article,—we might easily multiply it by ten,—on the subject of the absolute irresponsibility
of creed and the infamy of punishing for creed ; on the obvious misuse and waste of natural resources under
the laws of Nature; on the fatal effect which the expectation of a life in which we shall be judged and rewarded or punished for our actions here, has had on the constitution of society ; on the necessary indifference of an infinite being to the character and conduct of finite beings; on the intrinsic absurdity of the principle of retribution ; and on the absolute folly of supposing that any spiritual influence exists at all in the invisible world around us to which man is accessible,—a doctrine, by-the-way, which involves Colonel Ingersoll, who does not absolutely reject immortality, nay, hopes for it, in the odd predicament of believing that there may be in existence millions on millions of immortal beings somewhere in the universe who, though under no divine control or veto, can never exert the slightest possible influence over those who survive them, or have succeeded them in this earthly life,—and with whom, of course, they must feel the keenest and most vivid sympathies. Well may Mr. Gladstone say that to reply to an outpouring of convictions of which these are but a very inadequate specimen, is not, in fact, a possible task. To discuss any one of these assertions with any thoroughness, would require an article as long as Colonel Ingersoll's whole "reply." To wander about from one to another of them in the vain attempt to define the various issues and then to judge them, would be the most futile of endeavours.
The only reply of which we can conceive to what Mr. Glad- stone so happily calls this mitrailleuse fire, is to drive,—if it be possible,—into such a mind as *Colonel Ingersoll's, what it is which he has undertaken to attack. Perhaps he knows better than we do the exact creed to which Dr. Field's Presbyterianism commits him, but we should suppose that it is very different from what Colonel Ingersoll assumes it to be ; at all events, what Colonel Ingersoll assumes it to be is as different as possible from the teaching of Christ as we understand it. We should say to Colonel Ingersoll that in the raids which he makes on Christianity, he is for ever beat- ing the air, partly because he assumes human nature to be what it is not, partly because he assumes Christian doctrine to be what it is not, partly because he assumes the divine character to be (by some metaphysical necessity for which he gives no reason worth a moment's consideration) the very opposite of that which it has declared itself, through Christ, to be. If there is no such thing as human freedom and responsibility, and this is Colonel Ingersoll's doctrine, of course good and evil, and sin and virtue, are unmeaning terms ; retribution becomes a dream or a gross injustice, and either remorse or penitence a pure folly. But if this be so, the whole principle of revelation from beginning to end is false. The teaching of the Law, of the Prophets, of Christ and his Apostles, is one long and fatal mistake. But it is idle to attack an elaborate and coherent doctrine and discipline which are reared on special assumptions, as if these assumptions were purely false and obviously arbitrary, without even attempting to show explicitly why they are supposed to be false and arbitrary. Again, Colonel Ingersoll need not trouble himself to show that if the forma- tion of belief be always as inevitable under the conditions of the case, as is the circulation of the blood, the assumption that a belief may bring with it an infinite blessedness, and the failure to believe an infinite loss, is the assumption of an unrighteous government. Of course it is. But is it true that trust is unmoral? Do we not speak of loyal trust and disloyal abandonment of trust, as if trust were one of the most free and responsible of human acts ? And if it be so, then is the universal Christian assumption that men lose by their failure to trust the Saviour, and that they gain by trusting him only in proportion as they really follow their highest nature in so doing, a blunder? Belief is nothing in the world but the intellectual aspect of trust. And the man who says, "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief," declares his belief a moral act, and asks for help to perform that moral act more adequately. Further, if Colonel Ingersoll be right in his demonstration that an Infinite Being can by no possibility care for a finite being or demand anything of him, it is quite obvious that revelation is one long misrepresentation of that being whom it calls eternal, and whom we call in- finite. But surely one would hesitate to say that the greater and wiser and nobler any being becomes, the more indifferent he becomes to the moral attitude and character of the beings around him ; and if we dare not say that, we are landed in this paradox by Colonel Ingersoll's philosophy,— that though the greater any man's goodness becomes, the more he cares for those beneath him, if you suppose his good- ness to become so great as to overflow all limits, you must at once deny it not only all the characteristics of true goodness as it is known to us within limits, but all characteristics whatever. In Colonel Ingersoll's language, " infinitude " is only another term for an absolute blank. Now, what Christians mean by infinitude,—in Revelation itself the term is hardly ever used,—is nothing but the denial of a limit to those highest qualities which we admire most when we see them in a finite form. And why it should be supposed contradictory to believe in a fountain of infinite goodness which is the source of all our human good- ness, only because Colonel Ingersoll chooses to conclude that that which is infinite can want nothing, is quite inexplicable. That which is infinite intellectually, includes all knowledge ; that which is infinite morally, includes all goodness, and to make limitless goodness inconsistent with the existence of all inferior degrees of goodness, and with good will towards the increase of all inferior degrees of goodness, is like making infinite knowledge exclude all inferior degrees of knowledge, and all good will towards the growth of inferior degrees of knowledge. Colonel Ingersoll can only be met by compelling him to recognise what it is that he is bound to assail.
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