THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM.

MR. GLADSTONE, in his remarkable article in the Contem- porary Review on "The Sixteenth Century Arraigned Before the Nineteenth," and Mr. Baldwin Brown, in his not less remarkable address to the Congregational Union at Liverpool on Tuesday on the explanation of the great sceptical movements of the day, strike the same note. They hold that the truest explana- tion of the shortcomings of scepticism in our generation is the fault of the orthodoxy of the previous generation. It was the practical paganism of the Catholic world, say both, which gave rise to the Reformation ; and it was the onesidedness of the various Reformers which gave rise to the intellectual revolts of the later heresiarchs. Thus, Mr. Baldwin Brown holds that it was Calvinism which caused Unitarianisni. "Take the Unitarian heresy in modern times. He held that the high Calvinistic theology, coming perilously near, as it did, to the presentation of an interior discord in the Triune Nature, which was harmonised by the Atonement, almost inevitably developed a community which could see only the unity, and felt itself called to bear witness to the vital aspect of that truth to the world." And no doubt not only is there very great truth in the general doctrine that the degeneracy of a great faith almost inevitably leads to the sincere proclamation of some half-true but energetic doctrine which is the natural protest against the spurious form in which that faith has been held,—just as idolatrous tendencies in Christianity directly promoted the spread of Mahommedanism,— but those who know the history of Calvinism and Unitarianism know how much there is to be said for Mr. Baldwin Brown's special illustration of it. At the same time, we cannot believe that explicit reaction against a degenerate and implicitly heterodox faith, is the sufficient explanation of all such forms of error. Else what are we to say to the widespread atheism,—or to the still more dangerous, because colder and more indifferent, secularism,—of the present day ? Is that to be ex- plained as a legitimate reaction against the hollowness of any previous form of religious faith ? It can hardly be true that all falsehood is half-truth, and is the proper cure for some de- ficiency in the previous profession of the truth. It may well be indeed that while the people of Europe were slowly learning to believe in a righteous and loving God, it was impossible for them to be taught to believe in physical law ; and it may also be that now when the people of Europe are being taught the meaning and uses of physical law, it is not very easy for them to retain at the highest point,—the point of truth,—their belief in a righteous and loving God. Nobody can say that in dealing with "such creatures as we are, in such a world as the present," it is easy to give us a firm grasp of any great class of truths whatever, without loosening our grasp on some other class of truths, perhaps nobler and more vital, though it may be also, for that very reason, a class of truths less difficult to recover. Still, this is a very different thing from saying that every form of explicit error is due to reaction against some still more serious implicit error in the faith of our fathers. Voltaire may have been raised up as a wholesome scourge of selfish superstitions, and yet it does not follow that every one who follows Voltaire has been driven into the rank of his followers by disgust for such superstitions. So far as we can see, the theory that the spiritual and moral law of action and reaction will account for all dominant errors, is an exagger- ation of the function of a valuable, though limited prin- ciple. Doubtless, asceticism and monasticism lead to re- actions in which the fibre of human character is dangerously relaxed ; doubtless, mysticism encourages the growth of rationalism, and rationalism in its turn some kind of regression to idealism and mysticism. Still, these complementary phases of faith are not

sufficient, or nearly sufficient, to account for all we see ; nor could they be so, unless man were indeed alone in the world, and the Hegelianism which explains all his convictions as partly the growth of, and partly the recoil against, previous convictions, were true. What it leaves out of account is the free, reciprocal action —not necessarily determined by any considerations of this sort,— of God on man, and if we may say so without irreverence, since this is clearly the teaching of Christ,— of man on God. Luther never forgot this most important of all the explanations of the growth or decay of the religious life. "We say to our Lord God," he said, "that if he will have his Church, he must keep it, for we cannot keep it ; and if we could, we should be the proudest asses under heaven." And Luther implied, of course, that it might please God to humble the Church, to make it feel his presence less at one time, as well as more at another ; to give it, for his good purposes, times of aridity, conven- tionality, and artificiality, as well as times of rich and flowing faith. And if it be true, as Christ teaches, that man may take

the initiative with God, as well as God with man,—that times of trust are times of grace, that knocking leads to opening,—

that when man throws himself on God, God pours a new tide of spiritual life into man, then, surely, one of the explanations of a want of faith in the invisible is a previous want of appeal to the invisible,—a self-occupation in thoughts and things which turn us away from the invisible, a life of absorption in the superficial phenomena of existence, a generation of outward interests and outward service. This

is an explanation almost opposite to that of the law of action and reaction. That law would suggest that to an age of too much

outwardness and coldness, an age of pietism or mysticism would inevitably succeed. Yet such is by no means the universal experience of men. On the contrary, the age in which it was

said that "the word of the Lord was precious in those days,—

there was no open vision," immediately preceded the age in which the Jews demanded a king, because their faith in that succession of divine judges by which they had been distinguished from the neighbouring peoples, had in great measure disappeared. The times distinguished by the apparent silence of Heaven frequently lead to periods which are relatively periods of secularism in human history, not to periods of true and deep religious life. And the recent access of Atheism seems to be even more due to an apparent dryness of the spiritual life of man (which may be quite as much due to the will of Heaven as to the will of man) than to any re- action from former superstitions. As Luther would have said, God has not thought fit to keep his Church as he once kept

it. God may have willed that, for a time, it would be better for man to try to the full, what he could, and what he could not

do, without conscious trust in himself. He may have willed,—as lie certainly appears to have willed during ninny generations even of the life of the people who were specially trained to reveal his mind to the world,—to withhold that stream of spiritual inspiration which is perhaps the only thing corresponding, in the religious life, to what the physicists call " verification " in the world of positive phenomena. We hear on all sides the complaint of the Agnostics that it is not their fault if they do not believe in God, —that they will believe at once, if his existence can be verified to them,—that, as Professor Huxley puts it, "no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more tenaciously" than they would clutch a belief in God which could be verified. If they do not exactly cry aloud, they yet seem to cry under their breath, with the prophet, "Oh, that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence !"—in other words, that if only some-

thing physical might " verify " the divine presence for them, they would be only too happy to accept it. And yet in almost the same breath they declare,—and declare most reasonably,—

that nothing physical could prove it, that happen what might, they could only interpret any physical event as a new aspect of nature, that nature is so large and so elastic, that no room is left in it for anything physical to rank as supernatural. Well, it is obvious that such a state of mind as this is one which could be changed by the direct touch of the divine spirit, and by that only, —by an event of thd soul, not an event of the body,—by the power which convinces the conscience, not by any power which only enlarges the experience of the senses.

But it does not follow that because no such event happens,— because the only verification of which the case admits, does not take place,—the Agnostic has either, on the one hand, the least right to suppose himself entitled to assume the negative view to be true ; or on the other band, may fairly be regarded by those who do recognise as final evidence, the influence of God over their

soul as morally inferior to themselves. Neither of these conclusions is true. The Agnostic is not right, for his negative experience, however frequently repeated, cannot outweigh a single clear experience of a positive kind. But none the less, he must not, on account of this negative experience, be treated as morally inferior to one who has verified the existence of a divine will over him and in him ;—for if it has been, as doubtless it has, for the advantage of mankind that hundreds of genera- tions should have felt the need of high social and moral laws, before ever social and moral laws were established and obeyed, and that hundreds of generations more felt the need of a clear recognition of constant physical laws, before physical laws were discovered and turned to account, why should it not also be for the advantage of man that certain classes, even in the modern times of larger knowledge and higher aims, should be taught to feel acutely the need of a divine light for the true interpretation even of those physical principles of order, which they are so strenuous in asserting and enforcing in their apparent divorce from any spiritual principle ? We may say roughly,—a very great thinker indeed did say,—that during the middle-ages thinking men were chiefly occupied in sounding their own minds, to see how much light the careful exploring of those minds might shed on the external order of things ; and that a knowledge of the insuffi- ciency of the study of mind to explain the laws of matter, was the first step to that true study of the laws of matter which followed. And we believe that the eminent Agnostics of the present day may be said to be discharging the similar function, of exaggera- ting indefinitely the influence of material laws in things moral and spiritual,—in order eventually to show their well-marked limits ;—that they are trying (and failing) to prove that material laws are the true keys to the knowledge of mental and moral life, just as the middle-ages tried and failed to show that moral and spiritual laws were the true keys to the knowledge of material life. And it would be just as foolish to suppose the modern physicists inferior to those who do not fall into their error, only because they are not equally fascinated by their truths, as it would have been to denounce the Schoolmen as morally inferior to the first heralds of the new science, only for trying to deduce principles of astronomy out of the a priori and abstract conceptions of the human mind. The truth is, that in every great stage of human progress there is, and must be, an undue appreciation of the step just made. In some sense, it may be said that Providence is the real cause

of that undue appreciation. It is, of course, the divine guidance which determines the main lines of direction and intensity for human thought ; and -if the Creator withdraws himself at times from the vision of men, or of some men, it is no doubt for the benefit of all men that he does so. To speak of those who do not themselves see God as "living without God in the world," is itself atheism. You might as well suppose that before the atmosphere was recognised as having weight and substance, men who did not know the difference between it and a vacuum, lived without the air they breathed. God is not less behind the consciousness of men who have no glimpse of him through their consciousness, than he is within the heart of those who worship him ; and the only real rejection of God is the resistance to his word, whether it be felt as his word, or only as a mysterious claim on the human will which it is impossible adequately to define. We hold that, in a sense, God is himself, in all probability, no unfre- quent cause of the blindness of men to his presence. He retires behind the veil of sense, when he wishes us to explore the boundaries of sense, and to become fully aware of a life beyond. The physicists in every school are doing this great work for us now. They are explaining, defining, mapping all the currents of physical influence, and from time to time crying out, like Professor Huxley, for "the hen-coop" of which, like shipwrecked sailors, they see no sign ; like Professor Tyndall, for the elevating idealism which is conspicuous by its absence in all their investigations ; like Professor Clifford, for something to replace the theism of Kingsley and Martineau. To suppose that the men who are doing this great work,—who are mapping for us the quicksands and sunken rocks of physical scepticism,—are necessarily deserted by God, because they do not see him, is to be more truly atheists than any physicist. There is a scepticism which is of God's making, in order that we may see how many of the highest springs of human life are founded in trust,—how everything else fails, even in the highest minds, to produce order, peace, and calm. The physicists of to-day are suffering for us, as well as for themselves. It is their failure to

' find light, which will show where the light is not, and also where it is. As Mr. Mallock well says, in the best paper he has yet written—that in the Nineteenth Century, on "Faith and Verifica- tion,"—the pitiful cries of modern physicists, as they raise their hands to what they deem a spiritual vacuum, are about the best auguries we could have that it is not in physical science that man can ever find his salvation.