THE NEW REFORMATION.
MRS. HUMPHRY WARD has produced, in the March number of the Nineteenth Century, a fresh chapter in her apology for the New Reformation. It is not so effective, we think, as many of the chapters in "Robert Elsmere " which are intended to point to the same conclusion, chiefly because it is not furnished with those effective backgrounds and impressive domestic accessories which the machinery of her fascinating story provided for her. She has no better endowment to bestow on the orthodox participant in her dialogue than that " vibrating " voice of which she made so much too prominent a feature in "Robert Elsmere." Ronalds, in this dialogue, has an ascetic face and a von vibrans et prxterea nihil. It is not pretended that he knows anything of German theological criticism at first-hand, and he is a baby in discussion with Merriman, who brings down a cataract of German criticism upon him, without, however, giving it much unity of drift. For Merriman is little more than Robert Elsmere over again, as completely devoid of in- dividual character, and as full of general enthusiasm and love of the truth. The dialogue is really a monologue, and not a very luminous monologue except on one point, and that is the point to which we wish to draw attention. It is the key to "the New Reformation" as Mrs. Humphry Ward understands it. The whole purport of her plea is that we must so " translate " our accounts of the older religious teaching, whether in rela- tion to Judaism or Christianity, or any other religion, to the mind of to-day, as to magnify the human and subjective element in the original story of the incipient and rising faith. And the justification for this principle is that we always magnify the same element now, that we dissolve and dissipate the divine ele- ment, resolving all religions or apparently supernatural events into their human factors. What Merriman,—or, rather, Mrs. Humphry Ward,—means by an adequate " translation " of the phenomena of Christianity as they are related to us in the Gospels and Epistles, into the proper equivalents in modern speech, is, in effect, treating them very much as the scientific men,—the late Dr. Carpenter, for instance,—treated the pheno- mena of stigmatism or any other description of ecstasy, or as a high-and-dry thinker of Mrs. Ward's school would treat the mass of phenomena accumulated and digested by the Society for Psychical Research. Well, we fully under- stand that that is what Mrs. Ward means to preach as the leading principle of "the New Reformation ;" but we desire an answer to this question,—If that magnifying of the human and subjective aspect of religious phenomena is to be pushed as far as Mrs. Ward evidently intends that it should be pushed, where will be the central life of all religion, of all revelation,—where will God be when the process is complete? Mrs. Ward is compelled to admit that the result of the process in Germany, the country which is the home of this critical method, has not been satisfactory, though she has a lame explanation of her own why the critical method has successfully eliminated God from the minds of those who have been most devoted to it :—" Germany is in a religious state very difficult to understand, and the future of which is very difficult to forecast To my mind, the chief evils of it come from that fierce reaction after '48, which prevented the convictions of liberal theology from mingling with the life and institutions of the people. Religion was for years made a question of politics and bureau- cracy; and though the freedom of teaching was never seriously interfered with, the Church which was for a long time the tool of political conservatism, organised itself against the liberal theological faculties, and the result has been a divorce between common life and speculative belief, which affects the greater part of the cultivated class. The destructive forces of scientific theology have made them indifferent to dogma and formulse, and reaction in Church and State has made it im- possible for the new spiritual conceptions which belong to that theology to find new forms of religions action and expression." That reads to us laboured in the extreme. How has "reaction in Church and State" "made it impossible for the new spiritual conceptions which belong to that theology to find new forms of religious action and expression," when, as Mrs. Humphry Ward has just admitted, "the freedom of religious teaching was never seriously interfered with " ? At the time of the first Reformation there was plenty of reaction in both Church and State,—say, in England under Henry VDT., Mary, and Elizabeth,—and, moreover, the freedom of religious teaching was then seriously interfered with, and yet the new religious doctrines were eagerly embraced and spread like wildfire. The secret of the German languor, in our opinion, is not in the least the reaction after 1848, but the thinning-off of all genuine religions residuum under the spell of the criticism which Mrs. Ward so much admires, till there was nothing left that was palpable enough to take hold of the human soul at all. Ronalds, the shadowy orthodox inter- locutor in Mrs. Ward's dialogue, feels this ; and when the pleader for a New Reformation asks, "What religion is possible to men for whom God is the only reality, and Jesus that friend of God and Man in whom, through all human and necessary imperfection, they see the natural leader of their inmost life, the symbol of those religious forces in man which are primitive, essential, and universal," he retorts impatiently, "What can a mere man, however good and eminent, matter to me eighteen centuries after his death P The idea that Christianity can be reconstructed on any such basis is the merest dream." Whereupon the representative of Robert Elsmere's ideas rejoins :—" Then, if so, history is realising a dream. For while you and those who think with you, Ronalds, are discussing whether a certain combination is possible, that combination is slowly and silently establishing itself in human life all about you ! You dispute and debate,—So/vitur ambulando. All over the world, in quiet German towns, in Holland, in circles which represent some of the best life of France, in large sections of Scotch and English life, and in large sections of American life, these ideas which you ridicule as chimerical are being carried day by day into action, tried by all the tests which evil and pain can apply, and proving their power to help, inspire, and console human beings. All round us,'--and the speaker drew himself up, an in- describable air of energy and hope pervading look and frame,—' all round us I feel the New Reformation preparing, straggling into utterance and being ! It is the product, the compromise of two forces, the scientific and the religious. In the English reformed Church of the future, to which the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, the Presby- terians, the Congregationalists, the Independents, and the Unitarians will all contribute, and wherein the liberal forces now rising in each body will ultimately coalesce, science will find the religion with which, as it has long since declared, through its wisest mouths, it has no rightful quarrel, and religion will find the science which belongs to it and which it needs. Ah ! but when, when ?'—and the tone changed to one of yearning and passion,"—as, indeed, it well might, for there is not a word in this prophecy of the New Reformation which Mr. Frederic Harrison, or any of the Positivists, might not adopt as predicting the advent of that religion in which everything shall be human and nothing at all divine. It is perfectly true, and we rejoice to think that it is true, that a humaner mode of thought and life is beginning to animate men of all creeds, from the Roman Catholic to the agnostic, and it is a great satisfaction to us to think that this humaner tone of thought and life has been deepest and strongest in those who have adored Christ most devoutly ; but the question is, how far that humaner mode of thought and life will go, if the subjective mode of interpreting religious phenomena is to be pushed to the point to which the New Reformation is evidently intended to push it, till its leaders are compelled to say with Merriman in the persent dialogue : "God,—though I can find no names for Him,—is more real, more present to me than ever before,"—while, if you come to even the shadow of an intellectual apprehension of God, Merriman would no doubt say, with Robert Elsmere, that it is quite as legitimate to deny intelligence to God as to attribute it to him.
Where we differ so profoundly from the whole drift of "Robert Elsmere" and "The New Reformation" is in this,— that we hold the recognition of a Revelation, coming from above and educating man, stretching his nature and mind to the utmost, and keeping him on the stretch in order to discern at least the rhythm and movement of those ways which are higher than our ways, and those thoughts which are higher than our thoughts, to be the great truth which is dropping out of our modern life, and which is dropping out of it greatly in consequence of this habit which Mrs. Humphry Ward so greatly admires of translating the thoughts of a time when the divine word was real and keen and "sharper than any two- edged sword," into what are ironically termed the equivalent thoughts of a time when the memory of that Revelation is dim and faded, and at best what moonlight is to sunlight. We hold that the translation should not be the watering-down of the intense religious insight of the first century to the languid religious insight of the nineteenth, but vice vend. We are quite ready to admit that the human media of Revelation were ignorant, prejudiced, subject to error, in that centin7 as in this. But the sort of error to which they were most subject, was very different indeed from the sort of error to which we are most subject ; and it appears to us that what a great deal of the German criticism has suc- ceeded in effecting, and what the "New Reformation" prin- cipally aims at, is the washing-out of the principal truths which Revelation had to teach us, till they are hardly to be discerned at all, and giving us in their place an immensely magnified image of certain historic prepossessions and certain limita- tions of thought and feeling so as to discredit all that is divine in Christianity, and leave us with nothing better than the vague and nameless God of whom it is held to be just as impossible to say that he hears and understands our prayers, as it is to say that we can measure his ways or fathom his thoughts. The "New Reformation" is so bent on magnifying the refracting element in human feeling and intelligence, that it virtually eliminates the steady controlling and expanding power of divine light and purpose. The subjective criticism looks most steadily at the wrong thing, when it studies the story of that Revelation. It looks at the mind to which God reveals himself, to the exclusion of the mind re- vealed. Instead of tracing the gradual evolution of some clear apprehension of the mind and character and power of the Infinite Being in the awakening heart and mind of man, it seizes eagerly on every trace of human weakness and error, and ignores the characteristic features of that mighty life in com- parison with which human life shrinks into insignificance. And in the end, it explains away God into human prepossessions, in- stead of explaining human- life,—but not explaining it away,— by the divine purpose. It dilutes inspiration till it means nothing but genius, and wraps up the signs of divine power so effectually in the folds of human weakness, that the greatest of all realities suffers a total eclipse. When this eclipse reaches totality, the "New Reformation" will have had its perfect work.
Previous page
