THE FUTURE BIAS OF CHRISTIANITY.
(To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOE."] Sra,—In your interesting article on my essay on "The The Spirit of the Nineteenth Centuiy" you say that the Edinburgh Reviewer preserves a "non-committal attitude" on the ques- tion whether the future of Christianity is or is not to witness a relinquishment of Church authority and of the" subtleties of dogma." You confess, moreover, your own opinion that "it is the social and spiritual, as contrasted with the purely dog. matic, side of Christianity which will be the more prominent and the more powerful in the coming century." I had no wish to take up a "non-committal attitude" on this subject, although it is not the question I contemplated in the passage to which you especially refer. I rather meant to ask what was in the future to take the place of the sustaining power so long supplied by the all-pervading influence of the mediseval Church which "subdued the imagination" of Western Christendom, and the surviving traditions of which helped so much, long after its disappearance, to support the faith of the many. Taking the question, however, in the form in which you put it, my line of argument was designed to suggest that the "subtleties of dogma" sometimes appear futile because we lose sight of their historical significance. Mr. Froude has placed it on record that Carlyle, who in early life regarded the controversy between the Orthodox and the Seml Arians as quarrelling over a diphthong, came later on to hold that Christianity itself was at stake. The tiresome subtlety belongs less to the definitions of dogma than to the intellectual conditions of the ages which gave them birth. However futile and over-subtle the controversies which issued in the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon appear to one who looks at them with no endeavour to realise the conditions of thought in which they were carried on, the definitions may have been absolutely necessary to preserve, amid discussions some of which we should never have raised, the belief which is important, to us now as to our forefathers then, that there was in Christ a human nature and a divine nature. I may hold with you that the "social and spiritual side of Christianity" will be more prominent than the " dogmatic " in the future, because discussions natural to the Greek mind of the fifth century are quite alien to our habits of thought, whereas social and spiritual questions are congenial to us. Yet I may refuse to admit that the dogmatic side, properly understood, has been nothing better than wanton theological snbtlety. Your quotation from Mr. Balfour, far from telling against this view of the case, rather illustrates it. If religion, like science, is in the future to witness a "closer con- nection between theoretic knowledge and its utilitarian application," such a prospect implies that the "theoretic knowledge" has its own truth and value. It was the convic- tion that scientific knowledge was valid, and its consequent development, which issued in its successful application to practical life. And in a manner partly, though not wholly, similar, certain central beliefs which dogmatic development has preserved must ever be the necessary stimulus to Christian endeavour in its highest form. The acceptance, then, of his- torical dogma, as having real meaning and value, appears to me indispensable to that fullest development of the "social and spiritual side of Christianity" to which you look forward. But that does not at all mean that " theological subtlety" will have as prominent a place in the active energising life of Christianity in the future as it had when the subtle Greek intellect raised its questions as to the relations of Christ to the Godhead, or again, as it had in the days of the twelfth and thirteenth century schoolmen. We may accept the truths which dogmatic decisions have preserved, yet we may now be little affected by the philosophical problems which drew them forth. That the future will, however, have its own intellectual problems, I cannot doubt. And in the future, as in the past, the authority of the corporate Christian consciousness will, I believe, have its value in correcting the vagaries of individualism. I cannot, however, trespass so far on your space as to explain fully my position on this matter, which is beyond the scope of my article.—I am, Sir, &c.,
THE " EDINBURGH " REVIEWER.
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