THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW ON SECULARISM.* THE Westminster Review for this
quarter contains a startling, and in many ways remarkable, article on the progress and position of English Secularism. It is written in the half-scoffing Voltairean tone now so rare among thinkers, and which to men who think human life the most worthy, if not the most intricate of problems, is so inde- scribably offensive, but it is full of facts, many of which demand a careful examination. The writer's proposition is, that "a large mi- nority of the English working-classes," including most of its repre- presentative men, are Secularists, and he defines Secularism thus; "Its followers regard this world as the be-all and the end-all, and man as the highest form of existence. There may be other worlds; but as they do not know, they think it presumptuous to affirm them, and a waste of energy to live for them • there may be higher beings than man, but if so they shroud themselves in mystery, leave us unaided in weakness, and break not the eternal silence in reply to our prayers, so that to worship them is to give reality to dreams, and unphilosophically to project from ourselves an imaginary perfection, call it Deity, and strive to grow like it." Of course with the belief in God disappears that in the immor- tality of the soul, in the religions basis of morality, and generally in everything of a spiritual character. The followers of this unlovely creed, the writer says, are spread through the country, hold meetings in London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Rochdale, Oldham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Halifax, Devonport, Ashton, and other towns, assemble just outside Huddersfield to the number of 5000 every June, and have some kind of shifting organization and coherence. They main- tain three papers, the Counsellor, Barker's Review, and the National 'Wormer, the latter apparently the most violent, its position being that "the belief in God is an Atlas of error on whose broad shoulders rests a world of immoralities," and its conductors strike the word "God" out even of quoted poetry :
"Bryant has a good verse :
Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again—
The eternal years of God are hers ; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies amidst her worshippers.'
Lest it should lend countenance to the mistaken God-idea,' the second line is altered into- ' Surely eternal years are hers.'
Truth may be external, but God cannot be permitted to have a momentary poetical existence."
A practice in which the expression of Atheism seems to reach its climax, the theistic belief being treated as not only unsound, but actually mischievous, and which is beyond the ideas of the majority even of Secularists, who generally deny without hating. Holyoake, for ex- ample, puts his Atheism, complete as it may be, on a totally different basis :
"God cannot be a First Cause, all cause is bifold. God cannot be a power, that is, an attribute of matter and never impersonal. It cannot be a spirit, that is the negation of matter, the negation of all we know. It cannot be light, light is subject to law. It cannot be intelligence, that grows, and has conditions of development It cannot be consciousness that is human. It cannot be love, that is a personal attribute called forth by external and relative objects. It cannot be a principle, that is either a ma- terial force or a logical rule. God is the eternal, unanswered Why ? to which no man has replied. It presses upon us the universal question to which there is no answer in life. It met the first man, it seems likely to perplex the last It is the Infinite Enigma which no Sphinx has solved ; the solemn and sublime Mystery, which we die to find out."
In other words, he neither affirms nor denies, but simply con- fesses ignorance while seeming to disbelieve, and this is the condi. tion of the majority of his followers. The Reasoner, which expressed these views, had once a circulation of 3500, and their more violent ex- ponent, the National Reformer, rose to 7800, but has since materially declined; for one of the difficulties of Secularism is its inability to maintain any organization whatever. Like all purely negative here- sies, with the exception of the Chinese form of Buddhism, it has a tendency to split into endless subdivisions:
"Almost every secular society has a history of change more curious than that of the Vicar of Bray. It alters its name, it modifies its rules, it widens or narrows its aims. The one peculiarity which the Vicar, through all his transformations, possessed, was that Whatsoever king should reign, he'd still be Vicar of Bray;' and the one peculiarity which a secular society possesses in each of its metamorphoses, is that it is always in opposition. In Bradford, it has a chameleon nature. In London, the different members of the body war with one another, so that a metropolitan life is impos- sible, and the fable of Menenius Agrippa and St. Paul receives a modern illustration. In Manchester, it has passed from death to life, and from life to death again, many a time, and at present is dead, though the materials for organization are more abundant than ever. The history of the Liver- pool society is perhaps a fair type of the vicissitudes common to them all. It was Socialism in the active days of Robert Owen, and after his time had
• The Westminster Review. No. XLL G. Manwaring.
a period of hybernation. Then it became a Free Protestant Association, or Rational and Moral Reform Society ;' then the Alliance,' teaching the religion of action,' and seeking the ennoblement of man.' with ' one legis- lature common to all nations and people ;' then a Universal Free Church,' with prayers and lectures, and its service so arranged that the praying members knew their time and the non-praying members knew when the prayers would end and the lectures begin ; then, lastly, a secular society, whose working power we believe to be at present nearly embodied in one honest, shrewd, painstaking artisan."
Many Secularists, too, have gone off to Spiritualism, and the Spi- ritual Telegraph, circulated chiefly among the working men of the north, on whom also secularism has the fiercest hold.
We have stated the writer's case very nearly in his own words, and even so stated we cannot regard it with any approach to alarm. That any considerable number of men should entertain such views even for a time, is of course, to all minds which can the for a mo- ment above this present life, matter of personal pain. Atheism, even if it were true, would still be the saddest of beliefs, for it leaves man only the highest brute imprisoned in the grasp of a power, call it chance, or nature, or fate, or what you will, which is stronger than he, and which is as often malignant as it is kindly. Its logical termination is suicide, whenever the body is permanently afflicted. Why bear an incurable complaint, or go on toiling in hopeless poverty, or enduring irksome but unavoidable labour, or wearied to death with unsatisfied desires ? Even admitting, for the sake of argument, that the morals can have a foundation other than the righteous will of God—and it is an enormous admission—what is the reason for continued endurance? In another column we have related Miss Cobbe's experience among workhouse hospitals, a horrible record of human misery. Why, if Secularism be sound, should all that snf- fering be endured, as it so frequently is, with a meek patience, which seems to human observers slavish, though perhaps to higher eyes some- thing infinitely noble. If we are animals, why not die when convenient, and be done with it all ? The Buddhist, who was a Secularist three thousand years before Mr. Holyoake was born, and who consequently has never advanced since, draws just that conclusion, and whenever life becomes intolerable, just provides for his family and quietly kills him- self. And why not, if his creed be true, and his continued existence a clear misfortune to himself or to others? But though this state of feeling is, as we said, painful to all who think this life a mere fragment of a far greater and nobler cycle of existence, it is no matter for alarm. The day when a negative creed might have seized on the mass is rapidly passing away. So far from Secularism spreading in England, it is decreasing, and only seems formidable because it has become conscious of its own existence. A. hundred years ago a third of the population were Secularists, men who lived without a thought of anything but the present, who worked, and ate, and died, as un- conscious of higher ends of life as the dogs among which they lived. That is all gone, except in special localities, and with it has deparCed the possibility of Secularism as the creed of any great class of the population. Men once awakened out of the animal state never go back, anymore than men who have once renounced image worshipever believe in their painted figures again, or than men once fairly awake can sum- mon sleep at will. There will always be a hunger after some positive faith, something which tells of an existence brighter than this sor- rowful one, as instinctive and as irresistible as the hunger of the body. The positive faith may not be Christianity, and, on that point, the danger of some wild superstition seizing hold of half-opened minds— as Mormonism, and Spiritualism, and one or two other isms have done—Englishmen do well to be watchful ; but mere negation is re- jected by instincts beyond argument. The reviewer supports his theory by quoting the census of 1851 as to church attendance, and alleging that the habit has decreased in the last decade. We should have expected that argument in the Record, but it has an odd sound from a Westminster reviewer. It proves quite conclusively that the population is not fond of going to church, and it may indicate that the masses are over-indifferent to a valuable practice of Christian men, but it has nothing on earth to do with Secularism. Hundreds of thousands who believe in an immortal state never go near a church, and the sect whose creed is of all the most opposed to Secularism, the Plymouth Brethren, never enter a public place of worship. The causes of the emptiness of the churches are not Secularism, or irreligion, but civilization and bad preaching. People who can only breathe fresh air on a Sunday will breathe it, be the clergy never so horrorstruck, while those who are under no physical temptation, who do not desire, like the artisans, to see something beyond the pavement, or, like the peasantry, to feel that for a few hours they may do nothing at pleasure, and who yet abstain from church, are often restrained by a rooted contempt for the modern style of preaching. Let the clergy but talk of things divine as they do of things human, let sermons be only as varied and vital as chemical lectures, and the churches will be as thronged as the class-rooms or lecture-halls. The other proof offered, the tone of secular publications tells all the other way. They seem bad enough to womanish minds, who fancy open Atheism worse than Atheism when concealed, but they are a great deal better than the same publications of fifty years ago. Holyoake is a great advance on Carlyle, and the Reasoner on the broadsheets which used, in 1830, to issue in thousands, full, not of Atheistic attempts at reasoning, but of God-hating blasphemy. We believe Secularism in its conscious form to be a diseased de- velopment, and a very transient one, of the modern spirit of benevo- lence. Men have come to be conscious of human misery, to relieve it, to inquire into its causes, to ask why such anomalies should exist in the scheme of Divine government. In some, the result is a pro- found but but somewhat resigned faith ; in others, it is a revolt against what they mistakenly conceive to be a moral injustice. The first has been the result among English philanthropists, who are to-day almost universally Christian. The latter spirit showed itself in the French philanthropists, who, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, braved God while incurring martyrdom for the sake of His creatures. There remain a few, chiefly in over-practical England, where men never see that a true idea—say, for example, two plus two are four— is as much a fact as a steam-engine ; who, in utter inability to recon- cile the problem, deny there is one, fall back on what they can do, as a refuge from their inability to imagine, declare their mental recoil to be a faith, and are, under various names, Atheistic Secularists. The Reviewer says the recoil is from orthodox dogmatism, and he may be partly correct, though the motive given would rather produce ordi- nary infidelity than Secularism. But the main cause is weariness, and Secularism is the rest which minds of a certain class take from their efforts to reconcile the outer facts of the world with the goodness of its Creator,—to solve, in short, a problem, of which, as of Fate and Free-will, all we can say is, that both the conditions are, and must be, eternally true.
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