PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY.
pROFESSOR HUXLEY'S article in the Nineteenth. Century on "The Evolution of Theology" is not, we think, worthy of his great ability. Perhaps the concluding part, which will, we suppose, appear next month, may give it the higher tone and nobler bearing which so great a subject deserves, and which, however much we may disagree with him, we seldom miss from Professor Huxley's writings ; but in this article we find little that properly justifies the word " evolu- tion " at all, and it is marked by a scornful tone of con- tempt for those who are likely "to meet with anything they dislike" in his pages, which is hardly conceived in good taste, to say nothing of good feeling. We should say, how- ever, that the present writer is certainly not amongst those to whom Professor Huxley addresses his rather contemptuous warn- ing,—namely, those who think that "in dealing with theology we ought to be guided by considerations different from those which would be thought appropriate if the problem lay in the province of chemistry or mineralogy," except, indeed, so far as the difference of province involves necessarily a difference of method. We should be quite as willing, nay, eager, to maintain that there is as genuine evolution in theology, as there is in any human science. If Mr. Spencer is right in holding that
the development of organisation in general, means the gradual increase in the correspondence between the organ and that which environs it, it is as true of the development of theology, as of any other department of human life. But we do not hold, as
some evolutionists appear to hold, that there is no real object external to man into a more complete correspondence with which the evolution of theology brings us ; nor does that appear to us an opinion proper to true evolutionists at all. On the con- trary, we hold that there is such an object ; that that object is the great Being infinitely above us, in whom all the tentatives towards a more complete correspondence between us and him have originated, and from whom they go forth ; and that the Bible, though it undoubtedly is what Pro- fessor Huxley calls it, a literature and not a book, has its unity in the fact that it is the literature of a race specially educated by that great invisible Being himself, to perceive that righteousness is of his essence, and that no " correspondence " between man and God is possible except on condition of a greater and greater reflection by man of that essence. Why it should be held, as it seems to be held by some of the evolutionists, that while every other regular development of man's nature issues in a more delicate and a more comprehensive " correspondence " between man and the universe outside him, theology should be the one exception in which the development of our mind only brings upon ns a liability to greater and greater illusions, we cannot conceive. The nerve which is at first only dimly sensitive to light, is supposed by the evolutionists to emerge at last in that wonderful combination of all kinds of co-operating powers, the eye of man. The nerve which is at first but dimly sensitive to the vibrations of the atmosphere, is supposed by the evolutionists to emerge at last in that wonderful organ to which the oratorio speaks in mystic language such as the highest mind cannot adequately interpret. The feeble faculty of counting on the fingers is supposed by the evolutionists to develop into that wonderful calculus by which we compute the path of the comet, and weigh the sun itself in a balance. Can it possibly be true that the mind and the con- science are exceptions to this law of the senses and the judg- ment? Is the mind alone not in " correspondence " with the law of the environment, when it discerns purpose in the universe ? Is the highest aspect of man's mind, his sense of duty, not in correspondence with the spirit of the environment when it discerns righteousness and purity at the heart of the universe ? If so, surely man is indeed what some of the evolutionists hold, what, indeed, Professor Huxley seems to hold,—a worship- per of magnified ghosts. But why sensitive nerves should bring U3 true knowledge of what is outside us, and sensitive con- sciences false knowledge of what is outside us, it passes our comprehension to say.
Nevertheless, those who read Professor Huxley's article on "The Evolution of Theology" will find him, as it seems to us, extremely anxious to make the most of what we may fairly call the crude theology of the earlier parts of the Old Testament, not with a view to showing how it develops into what is greater and nobler, but with a view, on the contrary, to dwelling with a kind of triumph on its poverty. For our own part, we have no objection to admit to the fullest extent the poverty of these elements. We think it quite probable that, as Professor Huxley holds, the writer of the third chapter of Genesis conceived the Lord God walking in the Garden in the cool of the day as a figure in the form of man. We believe it to be true that in the earlier books of the Bible, Jehovah- ( why does Professor Huxley insist on the pedantic Jahveh ?) —was conceived only as a much mightier God than the gods of the heathen,—a mightier being of the same order. We have no objection to admit that in the earlier days of Israel it was supposed,—as Isaiah certainly shows evidence that it was supposed, or he would not so passionately denounce the im- pression,—that God took delight in the burnt sacrifices. In a word, nothing can be truer than that the Bible shows a steady evolution of the conception of God, from the early chapters of Genesis to the revelation of Christ. If it be true that the teraphitn of the Israelites were something like the lures of the Romans, we are not startled by it But what surprises us in Professor Huxley's essay is the apparent inability to see the vast gulf between the most inchoate forms of Israelite theology and the foolish superstitions of the natives of Torres Straits,—whom, by the way, he and his friend very unjustifi- ably did their best to confirm in the most foolish of those superstitions, simply in order that they might avail themselves of them to widen their own anthropological knowledge,—or of the natives of the Tonga Islands. What we maintain is that nothing can be more instructive than the comparison between these superstitions and the rudest of all the forms of Israelite theology, as showing not only that the latter had the power of firmly impressing spiritual truth from which whole nations have derived their highest elements of civilisation, but also that the earliest germs of the Jewish theology were far beyond what they could have been, had they not been developed ab initio by an impulse not from within, but from above. Take what Professor Huxley calls the "freshest,"—meaning, we think, the oldest and rudest,—of the " fossiliferons strata" in the Books of Judges and Samuel, and compare them with the superstitions which he relates with such gusto as those in which his friend and he confirmed the natives of the Torres Straits, and which Mariner discovered in the Tonga Islands. We seem to be in a totally different world. From the beginning to the end of Jewish history we find the deep, though ever-growing, belief in a personal power, who from the first " killeth and maketh alive, bringeth down to Sheol and bringeth up ;" who sets his brand upon the murderer's forehead ; who tasks to the utmost the love of him whom he recognises as his friend ; who gives a strict moral law to a licentious people, by which they are to be severed from the rest of the nations; who expects his people to recognise the invisible impress of his spirit on the hearts of their judges and prophets, and not only to recognise it, but to recognise also the disloyalty to it of which those judges and prophets were often guilty ; who chooses the king most after his own heart, and then sternly rebukes him when he breaks his law ; who inspires the noblest devotional lyrics which the world has ever known, and the noblest prophecies of a divine univer- salism, amidst the narrowest of fierce race prejudices; and who finally reveals himself in the one character which, after two thousand years, even sceptics treat as raised so high above the level of humanity, that we can only toil after it through the ages with a growing sense of its hopeless superiority to human aspiration. That is what we call "evolution," and evolution of the highest kind. Do the superstitions of the Torres Straits, to which Professor Huxley's friend and he him- self lent their sanction, show any sign of an evolution such as this ? Do the superstitions of the Tonga Islands develope into a great history and divine order such as this ? They are, in fact, what Professor Huxley calls them, "ghost-worship." But, what- ever he may say, there is absolutely no sign of ghost-worship in Israel, unless Saul's visit to the witch of Endor,—a visit which on the face of it was unfaithful to all the higher principles of his own life, and of the law in which his faith had resulted, —is to be so called. We must say that never was a paper with a noble title so disappointing as that in which Professor Huxley endeavours to minimise the true significance of Jewish theology' by grouping together all the poorer elements in the Israelite religion, and showing their (very slight) affinity to the savage superstitions of the present day.
Previous page
