WILL CULTURE OUTGROW CHRISTIANITY ?
Tis the question asked by Professor Upton in his thoughtful address to the students of a Theological College which has just entered on its second century of existence,— Manchester New College. It is certainly a very fundamental question for theology to propose, for if it is answered in the affirmative, a Theological College will be concerned with ex- plaining a creed which it can only offer, and of course with more and more of diffidence, to the acceptance of those who appear to be unfitted to survive in the conflict for existence. There may be men who can teach with energy and eloquence a doctrine which they fully expect to find less and less acceptable to the majority of mankind ; but if there be such men, they must combine to a very singular degree personal energy with despair of the victory of truth. As a rule, the teacher who believes that the permanent current of men's thoughts is against him, will either distrust his own teaching, or despair of the learn- ing capacity of ordinary men,—and. either condition of mind will be fatal to his power as a teacher.
Professor Upton, however, does not think that culture is destined to outgrow Christianity. He thinks that the tide of naturalism is beginning to ebb, that the belief in a being who, to use Mr. Spencer's phrase, is above personality rather than below it (whatever that may mean), is returning even to the high priests of evolution,—nay, that, in Professor Upton's own happy phrase, it is simply absurd to expect "the sublime process of evolution to end in the melancholy fiasco of the generation, as its highest product, of a being utterly unsuited to his sur- roundings ; a being who hungers and thirsts for satisfactions which Nature is powerless to provide, and who in pessimistic despair longs at length to shuffle off the hated burden of existence."
Bat while Professor Upton chooses strong ground when he uses the very conception of evolution to refute the view that this process should have produced a religious being only to disappoint cruelly all the religious instincts it had fostered, he seems to us to ignore in some degree the strength of the evidence that for some time back culture has been so far outgrowing Christianity as to deprive a much larger portion of the culti- vated world of its Christian faith than ever was deprived of that faith by culture, at least since the revival of learning. Bishop Butler, indeed, testifies to the existence of a fashionable world in the time of George II. when it was not so much as considered worth while to regard the truth of the Christian revelation as even deserving investigation,—and some of the divines even of Butler's day were probably rationalists of the Deistic type. But even then it was not culture which had produced this decay of belief half so much as general torpor of con- science and worldliness of habit. Where life and thought were most vivid, belief revived. It was not then as it is now,—the abundance of thought, the rush of fastidious criticism, the perplexity of the intellect amongst the multitude of counsels, the giddiness of speculative earnestness, the bewilder- ment engendered in the throng of competing opinion, which paralysed men's faith. It was less culture than cynicism which paralysed Christian feeling. But now it may be said in a very real sense that it is culture which endangers Christianity,—the consciousness of the wideness of the field of knowledge, of the number and minuteness of the difficulties in the way of con- viction, the daunting certainty that not even the most learned of men can survey, much less grapple with, the multitude of the considerations which may be fairly and honestly said to bear directly on the truth or falsehood of the Christian creed. Libraries may be collected on but one aspect of the question ; philology, scholarship, critical learning ask to be heard on one great class of questions; philosophy, psychology, physiology put in their claims to a hearing on another ; then comes science with its claim to establish the a priori improbability, or if it be very rash it. will say, impossibility, of the Christian story ; and then, finally, the student of mythologies and of the various superstitions of the different savage tribes, claims to have his account of the matter heard, in order that the believer may learn from it a legitimate self-distrust. Amidst this wilderness of evidence of all kinds, the man of culture not unnaturally gets dazed and paralysed by all these cross-claims on his judgment, and so it happens that in his mind culture tends to outgrow Christianity. In relation to all aspects of it he finds in himself a number of half-matured thoughts and half-finished trains of reasoning, and his mind becomes a mass
(of suspended judgments and postponed investigations. Is it or is it not likely that, in this sense, culture will outgrow Christianity P It can hardly be denied that in our own age culture has frequently outgrown the political doctrines of all ages, the economical doctrines of the last age, and the social convictions on which the cohesion of society rested ; and that in many cultivated minds, nihilism, socialism, anarchism, have been the result, while, in a very much larger number of cultivated minds, a deep despair of ever attaining to certainty solid enough to convince the multitude, has superseded all the old and firmly established convictions. Will not the same process unsettle still more effectually religions conviction ? Will any clear guiding belief grow out of the crowd of suspended beliefs in which the tournament of controversialists has ended P
We should be disposed to think that culture would very quickly outgrow Christianity, if Christianity did not positively prevent men from sitting still only to imbibe culture. If life were limited to the study of theology, the study of theology would soon become impossible. But as Christianity was from the very first mainly a gospel for the poor and for those who were not poor only so far as they found themselves unable to separate themselves from their fellow-men, so Christianity now will outgrow culture, because it supplies the one kind of food requisite to turn culture from a solvent of all action into the light and safeguard of wise action. Just as the great German thinker to whom Professor Upton alludes at the end of his lecture, found in the imperative demands of the practical reason the real key to the insoluble riddles of the speculative reason, so we may say that all great thinkers have found in the needs and urgencies of the practical life the solution of the insoluble difficulties of religious thought. Professor Upton himself contends that it is the witness in us to the force and urgency of something deeper and higher than ourselves in the act of resisting sin or straining after duty, which proves to us the reality of God, and renders impossible the view of the idealist that we are merely following the beckoning of our own spiritual fancies. Well, that is very true ; but it would hold, we think, of the claim of Christianity on us in a sense which Professor Upton appears to ignore, when he makes light of the claim of Christianity to reveal to us not only the love of a spiritual father, but the grace of an atoning sufferer who died a" ransom for many." It is in the practical power which Christianity applies to stir us to combat with overwhelming evils, and to assuage the sufferings of penitent guilt and self-abhorring contrition, that it brings certitude to the suspended judgment of pure culture, and reveals the force which even the impotent paralytic of the intellect may share. Christianity reveals its meaning not to the thinker, as such, but to the man who is overwhelmed by the sense of the needs and miseries of his race, and who grasps at that power, as a power from on high, which will enable him to grapple with these. Its language is not, " Sit and be convinced," but, " Rise and walk." And already we seem to see evidence that in this age, as in other ages, we shall find our Christianity again in the strenuous effort to meet the violence, the impurity, the wretchedness, the poverty, the squalor, the despair of the most miserable of our people. As Christianity wanes at the West End of London, it revives at the East. It flickers and goes out in the breast of the student, while it flames up in the heart of the man who is really attacking evil in its worst strongholds. Culture is a wet-blanket for Christian faith only so long as the attitude of the mind towards evil is passive. It becomes subservient to Christian faith in the heart of the man who is really following in the footsteps of his Master.
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