MR. FREDERIC HARRISON ON THE RELIGIOUS REACTION.
MR. FREDERIC HARRISON in his New Year's address to the Positivists admits frankly that no one who could carry his mind back thirty or forty years could fail to be conscious "of certain changes of thought and feeling which had come over the country in that time. These changes of purpose and influence had a common character, and both acted and reacted upon each other. Some were political and social, others intellectual and religious, and there was a tendency to revert to older aims and ideals. The result had been a return to a new type of popular enthusiasm, and to a weak solution of attenuated theology." Of course, Mr. Harrison denied that this change was deep-seated or at all likely to be permanent. The new theology was "vague and unsettled, otherwise it would be more powerful." But Mr. Harrison added that "an increasing body of men and women had made up their mind to wait until they found something more human and more essential" than, as we understand him, Christian theology of any type. If so, they are of course outside the reaction he had admitted. Does he find "an increasing body of men and women" fixing their eyes on Positivism, which is, we believe, all of it human and all of it, as he holds, "essential." We had not heard of any such increasing number of Positive postulants. There can be no doubt that though Mr. Harrison despises this "weak solution of attenuated theology" to which he is fully aware that considerable portions of English society are harking back, he recognises its greater in-
Einence over his fellow-men and deplores it as the gradual growth of what he thinks a delusion. That of course is exactly what, from his point of view, he is bound to think. But we cannot understand why he does not brace himself up to account for this tendency to resort to what he speaks of as "the Biblical legends and superstitions" which had "fallen to pieces like a fairy-tale." There is no appearance, so far as we know, of our going back to belief in fairy-tales. The new generation who go to see air frozen, and argon eliminated from the air, and the "X" rays illustrated at the Royal Institution, show no disposition to refer these great chemical wonders to ',he agency of genii or afreets. Nevertheless, it would seem that even these great changes are not regarded as uncaused, or as mere unexplained and inexplicable appearances in a procession of phenomena not connected together by any closer ties than the successive figures in a Lord Mayor's show or the twenty- six letters of the alphabet. What a strange thing it is, if the Positivists are right, that year after year and century after century, men should continue to look upwards for some mighty cause of all the marvellous story of human life and death, no lees than for the significance of the great scenery of the heavens and the succession of the seasons, —some cause which would combine in itself the attributes of sublimity, of beauty, of an evolving power, of serene intelli- gence, of moral discrimination, and of intimate sympathy with man. It is to some cause of this kind, that the spectacle of so much order, of so marvellous a develop- ment of unexpected means to still more unexpected ends, naturally leads the mind. The truth is that the Positivist attitude of mind which acquiesces absolutely in any observed succession of events, as Mahommedans acquiesce in destiny, without curiosity and without speculative restlessness or revolt, is one of the most unnatural and almost preternatural, if not, as we may say, ascetically controlled, conditions of the intellect that it is possible to conceive. It is well-nigh im- possible not to ascribe to the Power behind Nature and man attributes and qualities far in excess of those which are re- vealed in Nature and man; and which appear to be in course of evolution through Nature and man. Fairy-tales themselves are far more consonant to the human intelligence than any Positivist abdication of all speculative search after anything more than constant and invariable succession.
It is curious to find Mr. Harrison asserting, in spite of his first concession that there is apparently a real return to the religious beliefs and creeds which thirty years or so ago were going out of fashion, that no more men of sense have retro- graded, as he thinks it, in this way, than had done so at that period. "No one supposed," as the Daily Chronicle reports him, "that more men of sense believed in the dogmas and permanence of ecclesiastical institutions than was the case thirty years ago." Well, if the reaction, then, has taken place only among the weak or the dull or the flighty, we wonder that he should have troubled himself about it, unless he was haunted by the suggestion of St. Paul, that the Cross of Christ was to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness, and yet had his doubts whether what is to the sensible men of the nineteenth century a stumbling-block and foolishness may not to the men of the twentieth or thirtieth century be the very power and wisdom of God. Another remark that puzzles us is Mr. Harrison's denuncia- tion of the "insincere efforts" of Protestant communities to mimic what he calls "the pomps of Rome," without any right or pretension to the faith of Rome. For he holds that, "assuming the dogmas, creeds, and ideals of Christianity to be of divine authority," "then the ritualism of the Church is in his judgment not only legitimate but inevitable." Does that mean that the doctrine of the Incarnation, which nine-tenths of the Protestant Churches believe, is of no grandeur and force to compare with Transub- stantiation, which only the Roman Catholics believe P Surely this would be hardly an intelligible view of Mr. Harrison's that the root and source of the whole Christian creed gives no proper opportunity for the higher symbolism, when he attaches so much importance to what must be wholly secondary to it, quite unmeaning without it, and separable from it. It is no wonder that those who hold fast by the Incarnation should often regard Transubstantiation as a mere piling up on it of extraneous marvel, for the former in no sense involves the latter; but it is simply impossible for any one to hold the latter without the former, which is its root and stock. Therefore, to our thinking, the whole justification for a certain solemn grandeur in the celebration of Christian worship is afforded to all Pro testants who believe that God actually took a human nature and form for the sake of his creatures, whether they accept or whether they reject (as almost all of them do reject) that great miracle of the Roman Catholic Church which is supera.dded in the doctrine of the Mass. We are not, of course, discuss- ing for a moment whether a grand or a studiously simple ceremonial brings home most adequately to the mind the mag- nificence of the great thought at the centre of the Christian Revelation. There will always be difference of conviction on that point, as there always has been difference of conviction on the question whether awe and wonder and gratitude are best expressed by stern reserve or lavish symbolism of gesture and ceremonial. But we cannot agree with Mr. Harrison that, even admitting "the dogmas, creeds, and ideals of Christianity," the ritualism of the Roman Church is not only legitimate but "inevitable," for there always have been, and always will be, those who love to multiply the expressions of outward feeling as much as may be, and also those who find the greatest satisfaction to the spirit in curbing these mani- festations; and again a third class who combine a studious retrenchment of anything like human display of emotion with an equally studious reverence for those objective modes of indicating the magnitude of their faith which are independent of the somewhat dangerous indulgence in the outward signs of personal feeling. To our mind, none of these modes of indicating what is beneath the outward manner is "inevitable," since a great deal must depend on the genius and traditions of race. That which is inseparable from the genius of one race will be alien to the genius of another, even though the underlying faith and awe be identical. But this at least we hold firmly, that in spite of all Mr. Frederic Harrison's sarcasms at the human media of Revelation, and at the errors which have undoubtedly mingled themselves with its divine light, just as errors mingle themselves with every refracting medium through which physical light passes to the eye, it is infinitely easier to believe in a God who has manifested himself freely through human nature, than in a God who has held himself apart in the majesty of divine reserve. A great deal of the higher criticism is per- fectly sound, while a great deal is fanciful and in a sense the superstition of Learning,—that is, the delight that Learning takes in imagining that it is following a real clue beyond the point at which the real clue ended. Yet it is just as reasonable to believe in a divine light which is sometimes, and indeed often, lost in the imperfect medium of cloudy human thoughts and corrupted human hearts or wills, as it is to believe in a sun or star which appears to us to be in one place when it is really in another more or less distant, though none the less without its help we should be quite incapable of finding our way on "the melancholy ocean." Mr. Harrison seems to us to avenge himself on the manifold fallibility of human reason by ignoring altogether the sources of that best of all know- ledge which comes to us directly from beyond ourselves.
Previous page
