CAN MODERN SOCIETY TURN CHRISTIAN? I T is curious to see
the vigorous sceptic of the Pall Mall, after I severely cudgelling Mr. Gladstone for exhibiting Dr. Strauss's eccentric forms of doubt with a note of wonder and warning, carefully following in Mr. Gladstone's steps on the last day of the Old Year, though with a jealous assurance to the public not quite worthy of so strong a writer, and one which no one will misunder- stand, that his sermon on Dr. Strauss's curious sceptical supersti- tion is entirely free from all the objections which applied to Mr. - Gladstone's. However, we have no objection to hear our contem- porary preach a striking short sermon, even though the writer does interpolate the Pharisaic clause "I thank thee that I am not as other men are, nor even as this statesman ;" for there was a pith and earnestness and a righteous gloom about his terse and bitter picture of society becoming practically omnipotent over individuals, and simultaneously becoming conscious of complete ignorance as to how to use that extraordinary power, at a loss in whom to believe, whether to pray, and if it does pray, how to pray and what to pray for, which we do not often find in the shrill and hectic scepticisms of the present day. We feel a strong con- viction that the picture is but little overdrawn. The increas- ing sympathy between the different constituent elements of society has far outrun the means and even the desire of the more leisurely and more cultivated section to teach such convictions as it may have to its less taught or untaught mem- bers. The new growth of sympathy brings dangers with it of a very serious kind. People sympathise so much with each other, that they lose their own selves and such convictions as they have had in the giddiness of the changed point of view. Read the speeches of some of the best of the Radical leaders,—Mr. Auberon Herbert, for example,—and you will observe that beyond their true sympathy with the miserable condition of the working- class, they have very little to teach them, —that they have lost a good deal of their own distinctive and traditional belief, in the very act of sympathy. Such sympathy is likely enough to wear itself out with the relief of physical miseries for want of distinct moral guidance to give it point and value. The man who helps his neighbours to wish for the right thing, is likely to be a great deal more useful to them before long, than even the man who helps his neighbours to realise what wishes they have. It is quite true that with the vast mass of removable ignorance and physical evil in our towns and villages, the time when it will be so may not be quite close at hand. But then if, in the meantime, while you are remov- ing the mischief of gross ignorance and misery in the mass of the people, you are not helping them to shape in any distinct way their moral and spiritual aims as to what they ought to make of themselves, when they have higher means at their disposal for making something of themselves, you are preparing for the most dangerous possible fermentation of vague, tentative hopes and fancies. We sympathise heartily with the humanitarian tendencies of the day, but we say that the true humanitarians will not be content to enthrone democracy without giving democracy any guiding thoughts and spirit of its own. We are drifting into a system in which society will be omni- potent, without having much notion of what it ought to do with its omnipotence after it has once abolished class privileges,— in which religious faith will be tabooed by common consent as a matter on which no one can agree,—and all the principles of moral and domestic life, including the law of marriage and divorce, and the relation of the sexes, will be opened up afresh.
If we cannot help the democracy we are enthroning to know what to love and reverence, we had almost better wait to enthrone it till we can. And we quite agree with the able writer in the Pall Mall, that if the doubts which the highest culture and rudest culture seem to share,—which Dr. Strauss, and Karl Marx, and Mr. Bradlaugh preach, and the Pall Mall grimly notes, though, as it says, without weakly bewailing—we should say there is something very like a grunt of disgust, if not a wail, in its mode of describing it,—are to penetrate much further, we shall very soon have a society that has succeeded in extinguishing class envies and jealousies, only to discover that it has not the least idea what the ideal life of the Whole ought to be.
But is it a bit true, as the Pall Mall tacitly seems to assume, in its grim, silent fashion, that the views of Dr. Strauss and his friends are signs of the times in this sense,—that to return to a profound faith in Christianity is as hopeless as it would have been for the world of the Roman Emperors to have returned to a profound faith in the old mythologies ? Can we descry no conditions under which a great flow of genuine Christian faith would be probable? Are these Dar- winian speculations on the self-adjusting powers of the Universe really undermining not merely the belief in the God of Christ, but the power of believing in a body of supernatural truth of any sort?—or in anything whatever beyond what the scientific men call "working hypotheses," i. e., temporary assumptions made to explain a certain group of facts, without reaching an inch beyond the scope of those facts? We don't believe a word of it. Dr. Strauss shows that he has been doing violence to his own mind in his scepticism, when he gravely substitutes for faith in a Creator the astounding a priori demonstration which we cited from him last week—that our earth, having begun to be, must pass away, on the ground that, if it didn't, it would add something to the totality of the All. When a man declares that it is impossible to believe in "God the Creator of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible," but that it is necessary to believe in the Totality of things, as the capital-fund out of which Heaven and Earth and all things visible and invisible are loaned out for short terms, and into which they are called in again, one sees at once that such credulous scepticism has not destroyed the inherent tendency in man to grasp at a knowledge of things beyond us. And the simple truth is that the habit of answering to thoughts too divine for us to comprehend, though not to apprehend,—to thoughts which are not as our thoughts, and ways that are not as our ways,—is far too deeply rooted in the mind to be surrendered on this injunction to restrain our hearts from springing up in faith at the voice which comes from above and beyond them. Faith means something yet even in human affairs. We recognise and are loyal to greater capacity and power than our own by methods of recognition which no laws of induction would explain. And if once Christ gets hold of our society as he got hold of that of the first centuries, we do not believe these warnings against unscientific leaps of belief,—i.e., leaps of belief not reducible to intelligible rule,—would have any more force with English men of science than they have had apparently with Dr. Strauss.
But is there any such reasonable hope for modern society ? We think there is. England in the eighteenth century certainly had less belief far than we have ;—indeed Christianity has never been more in any age of the world than a thin stratum of poWerf ally modi- fying belief in relation to the great man of its nominal adherents, an ingredient in, rather than the substance of, the world's living prin- ciples ;—and yet the English unbelief of the eighteenth century melted away, and was succeeded by vehement forms of faith like the Wesleyanism, Simeonism, Coleridgeism, Tractarianiam, and Nonconformity of the last half-century. No doubt the tide has again receded rapidly for the last ten years, partly under the influence exerted by a more severe historical criticism, partly under the influence of Mr. Darwin's valuable and masterly, but only half-apprehended speculations. No one, however, who has ever entered truly into the spirit of Christ's life will believe for a moment that either the historical blunders of the Christian records, or evidence, however convincing, of a uniform law of evolution connecting the organisation of man with the lower stages of animal and vegetable life, will eventually diminish the overwhelming force of the evidence of conscious life coming from above our own,—of an imperious mind which guided the whole course of Jewish history, and became a spring of overpowering wonder and fascination in the Gospels. If we needed a proof that this age feels the meaning of that mysterious descent of power from above as much as ever, it would be afforded by the reception which was given to " Ecce Homo" a few years ago,—a book the great- literary point of which was to set forth the absolutely imperative character of Christ's personal claims. We suspect there never
was a time when the belief that man constitutes the apex of the spiritual universe was morally less credible to us than it is now. The Positivists themselves cannot believe it, and have to invent- an ideal humanity as etre supreme, to receive the wealth of the life which they find it impossible to lavish on man as he is. Strauss invents his Universum to fill the void he has created, and makes believe very much to feel a faint loyalty to this dim spectre of the understanding. We do not think that the mind of our own country at least was ever in a less self-dependent and self-satisfied attitude, ever less disposed to find its spiritual law in its physical lineage. Why, then, has Christ lost his hold for the time on the intellect of the day ? We believe simply because while we have got nearer and nearer to the secret and sign of his authority, we have not yielded that obedience to it which is of the essence of the very evidence to which he appeals. We suggested only last week that the secret of our missionary failures is the attempt to treat the missions as if they were ordinary undertakings, to be remunerated in propor- tion to the self-sacrifice involved, instead of undertakings to be remunerated by the self-sacrifice involved. And this -we believe to be the secret of the failure of the whole of our modern Chris- tianity to get hold of the heart of belief. Christ did lay claim, did openly lay claim, to a kind of self-renunciation for his sake, which was to be itself the attestation of his divine right. How can we be surprised that those Churches which do not even pretend to do more than to "make the best of both worlds" are gradually losing all belief in his authority? Dr. Newman was right in saying that the more strenuous religious societies of the Catholic Church resemble—not in their vows and their celibacy, but in their self- denials and their good works—far more closely the Apostles as Christ sent them into the world than anything else in our day, except the very few similar Protestant institutions. Protestant Churches have almost lost the idea of life absolutely devoted to the kingdom of God, and like the rich young man, go away sorrow- ful because of their great possessions. Yet surely if there ever was a miracle in this world which no scientific analysis willaucceed in dissolving,—a miracle that still attests as powerfully, as ever it attested the superhuman life of him who worked it,—it was the miracle of the profound confidence with whioh Christ said to a few poor fishermen on the lake of Galilee,—" Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the king- dom," half fulfilled as it has been by centuries of splendid, though most imperfect achievement. He who could speak of his own immediate death,—to human eyes so far from certain that it was even on its eve not particularly probable, —as founding a new covenant and communion from which the life-blood of a new world was to spring, spoke to a new sense, almost then and there implanted in man, the sense of a supernatural life in death, a supernatural gain in loss ; and without this sense there is no adequate evi- dence of his real divinity. We do not in the least believe that the power of that spell is exhausted or exhaustible,—least of all in a society which is finding every day new evidences of the intensity and number of the ties which bind the highest to the lowest. Only, if the authority of Christ is to assert itself again, it will be in a social movement something like that of the first days of the Gospel, one stripped of the accidents which belonged solely to those days, but of which the principle,—not making war against economy, and science, and the arts, but going far beneath and beyond economy, and science, and the arts,—must be the same as before, the confounding of the mighty things of the world by the things that are weak and base and despised, and the bringing to naught by the things which are not, of the things which are. There lies the true evidence of the supernatural, and there also the secret of the only true "revivals."
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