"U MR. PAGE ROBERTS ON GOD AS A DOMINANT IDEA. R.
PAGE ROBERTS, in a thoughtful sermon preached last month before the University of Cambridge, and since published in the Church of England Pulpit for June 19th, dwells with much effect on the strange power which we possess to give to certain ideas an artificial dominancy, no less than to enhance the natural dominion of ideas properly dominant. He remarks that there are one-ideaed people who can strike only one
who attain a sort of visionary and inexplicable command of a certain sphere of personal influence and knowledge, simply by the constant habit of dwelling upon that special theme, in season and out of season, till it begins to confer on them a new control over it,—a sort of involuntary ability to handle it with effect,—
a command yielded not so much to the consciousness, as to the growing tact of the unconscious familiarity with it. Thus the mathematician who dreams of mathematics will sometimes do
even more wonderful mathematical feats in his dreams than in his waking hours, and the lawyer who is haunted by his law will in rare cases find himself solving difficulties in a trance which had foiled him in his most lucid moments. And it is easy enough, as Mr. Page Roberts shows, for men to be dominated by false ideas, or by partially true ideas which are not applicable to all the subjects to which they are applied, or by wholly true ideas which are yet liable to be pushed beyond their proper field; or finally, by wholly true ideas which are as wide in their applicability as they are dominant in every field to which they are applied. And his object in preaching before the University of Cambridge was to enforce on his hearers that the most applicable of all these dominant ideas to the whole field of human experience, and the most ennobling if applied, is the idea of God. The great majority of men, he says, do not allow any one idea to order, focus, con- centrate, and direct their life:-
" I am afraid that the groat majority of men allow their lives, as they do their beliefs, to go anyhow. They have never formed a distinct opinion as to the shape their life is to take, and they have never said calmly and strongly to themselves, This is the intention which is to rule my life.' They play the part of the sculptor who has no model and no fixed idea. There is the marble, and they knock a piece out hero and another there, but no man can predict the final result. Eating and drinking, working and playing, and all the time gliding swiftly on to the grave,—this is the distracted existence so many of us are living. What shall we be, what shall we do to- morrow ? We really cannot toll. It will depend upon the people we meet, the things which are said to ns. We have no real rule. if we are tempted to do wrong, it is possible, it is even probable, that we may do it, unless it is some very bad thing quite out of our way. It is not impossible we may say that which is untrue, that for our own gain we may deceive this person and attack with anger that. If opportunity befalls us, we may yield to intemperance or take the dark road of impurity. We may be good-natured, or fly off into fiery passion. We may help some one who is in trouble, or strike a blow by word, or act at a rival or an enemy. We do not know what we shall do, because we have no plan, no decision. Instead of our lives being like some well-ordered State, they are more like mob-anarchy, twisted and twirled by the last breath and the latest appeal—a shapeless jumble of good, bad, and indifferent. Is not this a disgraceful state of things, which ought to make sensible men hang down their heads with shame ? How are we to get rid of it ? This is no mere question of theology. It is a question we ought to settle, even if there be no God at all. To be trundled into a grave by anybody who will deign to give us a push, is not a very fine business for the heirs- of all the ages.' God or no God—this anarchy ought to cease. How can it be made to do so ? Clearly, by setting up some governing authority endowed with abso- lute power."
And if we understand Mr. Page Roberts rightly, even those un- fortunate people who do not believe that God is a governing mind, endowed with all moral power, cannot do better than set up the idea of God in the place of God, and for want of any belief in a true ruler, make to themselves a sort of artificially dominant idea to rule them in his place. He points out that even those who do not believe in God have been forced to admit that the idea of God has sprung up naturally in the human mind, and grown with the ages ; that just as the ideas of space and time, though you may formally explain them away as illu- sions, will control your thoughts of everything that exists in space and that happens in time, all the same, so the idea of God will haunt the imagination even of the Positivist and the Agnostic, long after they have said to themselves that " God " is a human name for a power of which we know nothing. And, if, as we said, we understand Mr. Roberts rightly, he argues that so it ought to be,—that the profoundest Agnostic will do better with a "dominant idea" of God—confessed to his own mind only as an idea,—used to give a certain order, and unity, and meaning to an otherwise haphazard existence, than he would, if, allowing himself to dwell on what he supposes to be the void at the origin of all things, he lets one fancy after another take hold of his mind, and passes through all the caprices of a strictly speaking Godless existence. This is very near indeed to Voltaire's assertion that, if there were no God, it would become necessary to make one,— or to the saying of the interlocutor in one of M. Renan's dialogues, that the highest thought of the day, after organising Society, must _proceed to "organise God." We need not, of course, guard our readers against supposing that this suggestion of Mr. Page Roberts,—if we have understood it rightly,—is, on his part, in any degree a concession to the scepticism of the .day. There is no more thorough-going believer in God and Christ, in the best sense of the word " belief," than Mr. Page Roberts, and if we rightly apprehend the idea of his sermon before the University of Cambridge, he is not making the smallest concession to the Agnostics, but only arguing with them that even on their own premises, the idea of God has sprung up so inevitably in the story of man, that though they may choose to think it a subjective illusion of humanity, they should none the less treat it as if it were an illu- sion of which it is quite impossible to rid themselves with- out involving themselves in all kinds of falsehoods even to human nature ; and suggesting, therefore, that it is quite allowable to humour the idea, as one may say, and while reserving their judgment as to its absolute truth, to treat it practically as if it were true. For Mr. Page Roberts shows us that even false ideas may be made most potent by being treated with a certain constant respect, just as it is supposed that an ordinary bee-grub is made a queen-bee by being fed on a special kind of food. Now, as it is obvious that lives dominated by no great idea go to pieces and waste away, he thinks it may be right for a man haunted by doubt to turn even a great idea of the truth of which he entertains profound distrust, into a sort of queen-bee idea, and to confer on that idea an artificial potency, rather than to leave the inward life without a principle of order or authority at all.
Now, fully as we recognise the high purpose and the honest desire to promote, in an age of moral and intellectual anarchy, what we may call a provisional piety and hypothetical order, in this sermon of Mr. Page Roberts, we cannot subscribe to its doc- trine. We cannot accept his great sentence," God or no God- -this anarchy ought to cease," as expressing even the shadow of a truth. Why ought it to cease, if there be no God ? The reason it ought to cease in God's universe is that the anarchy arises from not obeying the divine promptings with which all men are prompted; and that so far as these begin to be obeyed, the new order begins to replace the anarchy, and the anarchy begins to disappear. But on the other assumption, why should it cease ? If something has come out of nothing, is there any reason why .something should not return to nothing ? The Agnostic will say that, to him, man stands in the very place which the Theist gives to God, and that if man recognises one phase of existence as better than another, and can do anything to promote that better phase and suppress the worse, then, " God, or no God," he is bound to do so. And there we quite agree with him. But then that is because such men have already got a ruling idea of their own, not because they are bound to make .one. By all means let the Agnostic who feels himself, so far as he knows, his own best guide, guide himself in the best line of advance he can. It is no excuse for him in not doing his best, sup- posing be sees a best to do, that he knows of no inward command to do it other than that which he imposes on himself. But what Mr. Page Roberts is speaking of is not", man who sees a best and will not do it, but a man who feels one capricious desire rising after another, and sees no coherent rule at all in his life; and of him he says that having no rule of life, he is bound to make one, because otherwise his life will be a succession of fragments, and run to waste. Now, that is just what we could not say. Of course, if, as we believe, every man who finds his life falling to bits in this way, is pursued by an interior remorse at this moral anarchy, he is bound to recast his crinnbling existence. But why P Because of the authority within him against which he finds himself rebelling ; because he recognises a superior Being, against whose law he is sinning ; because he is in a false position towards the life within his life, towards the light by mis- sing which he went astray. But once grant that there is no such inward light protesting against his misuse of his opportunity, and the very motive for a moral resurrection is gone. If a man find nothing but transient caprices within him, if he is better satisfied with himself when obeying transient caprices, than he would be if he tried to make for himself an artificial ruling idea, which, like all artificial ideas, would pro- bably rule him very badly, why change? It seems to us that Mr. Page Roberts is making a forced march, which will lead nowhere, when he tries to persuade people who find no God within their hearts, that they cannot do better than give artificial prominence to a dominant " idea" of God. This is one of those fundamental issues which you cannot push off into a siding. You cannot " turn," as strategists say, this fundamental doubt ; you must face and fight it. if the origin of things be not in any divine mind, it is impossible to act as if it were in a divine mind. You must work the question out on the facts. Positivists are bound, of course, to do what they hold to be their duty, whether they recognise a God or not. But those who find no law of duty within themselves—if there be any such—cannot be bound to make such a law only to give their lives coherence and dignity. The very obligation to put coherence and dignity into our life, as we now feel it, assumes some divine stan- dard, some divine order, at the root of life. If that idea be doubtful, all is doubtful. If there is no government at the source of things, anarchy may crop up anywhere at the surface. So far as we can see, there is no possibility of solving provisionally, as it were, so deep a question as this. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel for a blessing, men must struggle with the problem of " God, or no God," till it is solved, and cannot give it the go-by, or find for it a provisional solution. Either there is or there is not a commanding voice, which it is our truest life to hear and to obey. if there is, life becomes one thing ; if there is not, it becomes another ; and there is no mode of compromising between the two. You cannot make an "idea of God," however noble, do duty for God. You will soon learn you are deceiving yourself, and cast the unreal figment contemptuously away.
Previous page
