Part 6 (1/2)

Love, Ruler of the world permeated through and through with pain, and sorrow, and sin? Love, mainspring of a nature whose cruelty is sometimes appalling? Love? Think of the ”martyrdom of man!” Love? Follow the History of the Church! Love? Study the annals of the slave-trade! Love?

Walk the courts and alleys of our towns! It is of no use to try and explain away these things, or cover them up with a veil of silence; it is better to look them fairly in the face, and test our creeds by inexorable facts. It is foolish to keep a tender spot which may not be handled; for a spot which gives pain when it is touched implies the presence of disease: wiser far is it to press firmly against it, and, if danger lurk there, to use the probe or the knife. We have no right to pick out all that is n.o.blest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into s.p.a.ce, and to call them G.o.d. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, enn.o.bled, ”magnified” Man. We have no right to shut our eyes to the sad _revers de la medaille_, and leave out of our conceptions of the Creator the larger half of his creation. If we are to discover the Worker from his works we must not pick and choose amid those works; we must take them as they are, ”good” and ”bad.” If we only want an ideal, let us by all means make one, and call it _G.o.d_, if thus we can reach it better, but if we want a true induction we must take _all_ facts into account. If G.o.d is to be considered as the author of the universe, and we are to learn of him through his works, then we must make room in our conceptions of him for the avalanche and the earthquake, for the tiger's tooth and the serpent's fang, as well as for the tenderness of woman and the strength of man, the radiant glory of the suns.h.i.+ne on the golden harvest, and the gentle lapping of the summer waves on the gleaming s.h.i.+ngled beach.*

* ”I know it is usual for the orthodox when vindicating the moral character of their G.o.d to say:--'All the Evil that exists is of man; All that G.o.d has done is only good.' But granting (which facts do not substantiate) that man is the only author of the sorrow and the wrong that abound in the world, it is difficult to see how the Creator can be free from imputation. Did not G.o.d, according to orthodoxy, plan all things with an infallible perception that the events foreseen must occur? Was not this accurate prescience based upon the inflexibility of G.o.d's Eternal purposes? As, then, the purposes, in the order of nature, at least preceded the prescience and formed the groundwork of it, man has become extensively the instrument of doing mischief in the world simply because the G.o.d of the Christian Church did not choose to prevent man from being bad. In other words, man is as he is by the ordained design of G.o.d, and, therefore, G.o.d is responsible for all the suffering, shame, and error, spread by human agency.--So that the Christian apology for G.o.d in connection with the spectacle of evil falls to pieces.”--Note by the Editor.

The Nature of G.o.d, what is it? Infinite and Absolute, he evades our touch; without human will, without human intelligence, without human love, where can his faculties--the very word is a misnomer--find a meeting-place with ours? Is he everything or nothing? one or many? _We know not. We know nothing._ Such is the conclusion into which we are driven by orthodoxy, with its pretended faith, which is credulity, with its pretended proofs, which are presumptions. It defines and maps out the perfections of Deity, and they dissolve when we try to grasp them; nowhere do these ideas hold water for a moment; nowhere is this position defensible. Orthodoxy drives thinkers into atheism; weary of its contradictions they cry, ”there is _no_ G.o.d”; orthodoxy's leading thinker lands us himself in atheism. No logical, impartial mind can escape from unbelief through the trap-door opened by Dean Mansel: he has taught us reason, and we cannot suppress reason. The ”serpent intellect”--as the Bishop of Peterborough calls it--has twined itself firmly round the tree of knowledge, and in that type we do not see, with the Hebrew, the face of death, but, with the older faiths, we reverence it as the symbol of life.

There is another fact, an historical one, still on the destructive side, which appears to me to be of the gravest importance, and that is the gradual attenuation of the idea of G.o.d before the growing light of true knowledge. To the savage everything is divine; he hears one G.o.d's voice in the clap of the thunder, another's in the roar of the earthquake, he sees a divinity in the trees, a deity smiles at him from the clear depths of the river and the lake; every natural phenomenon is the abode of a G.o.d; every event is controlled by a G.o.d; divine volition is at the root of every incident. To him the rule of the G.o.ds is a stern reality; if he offends them they turn the forces of nature against him; the flood, the famine, the pestilence, are the ministers of the avenging anger of the G.o.ds. As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and G.o.d rules over the whole earth, maketh the clouds his chariot, and reigns above the waterfloods as a king. Physical phenomena are still his agents, working his will among the children of men; he rains great hailstones out of heaven on his enemies, he slays their flocks and desolates their lands, but his chosen ure safe under his protection, even although danger hem them in on every side; ”thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day; for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day. A thousand shall fall besides thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee....

He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers.” (Ps. xci., Prayer-Book.) Experience contradicted this theory rather roughly, and it gave way slowly before the logic of facts; it is, however, still more or less prevalent among ourselves, as we see when the siege of Paris is proclaimed as a judgment on Parisian irreligion, and when the whole nation falls on its knees to acknowledge the cattle-plague as the deserved punishment of its sins! The next step forward was to separate the physical from the moral, and to allow that physical suffering came independently of moral guilt or righteousness: the men crushed under the fallen tower of Siloam were not thereby proved to be more sinful than their countrymen. The birth of science rang the death-knell of an arbitrary and constantly interposing Supreme Power-.

The theory of G.o.d as a miracle worker was dissipated; henceforth if G.o.d ruled at all it must be as in nature and not from outside of nature; he no longer imposed laws on something exterior to himself, the laws could only be the necessary expression of his own being. Laws were, further, found to be immutable in their working, changing not in accordance with prayer, but ever true to a hair's breadth in their action. Slowly, but surely, prayer to G.o.d for the alteration of physical phenomena is being found to be simply a well-meant superst.i.tion; nature swerves not for our pleading, nor falters in her path for our most pa.s.sionate supplication.

The ”reign of law” in physical matters is becoming acknowledged even by theologians. As step by step the knowledge of _the natural_ advances, so step by step does the belief in _the supernatural_ recede; as the kingdom of science extends, so the kingdom of miraculous interference gradually disappears. The effects which of old were thought to be caused by the direct action of G.o.d are now seen to be caused by the uniform and calculable working of certain laws--laws which, when discovered, it is the part of wisdom implicitly to obey. Things which we used to pray for, we now work and wait for, and if we fail we do not ask G.o.d to add his strength to ours, but we sit down and lay our plans more carefully.

How is this to end? Is the future to be like the past, and is science finally to obliterate the conception of a personal G.o.d? It is a question which ought to be pondered in the light of history. Hitherto the supernatural has always been the makeweight of human ignorance; is it, in truth, this and nothing else?

I am forced, with some reluctance, to apply the whole of the above reasoning to every school of thought, whether nominally Christian or non-Christian, which regards G.o.d as a ”magnified man.” The same stern logic cuts every way and destroys alike the Trinitarian and the Unitarian hypothesis, wherever the idea of G.o.d is that of a Creator, standing, as it were, outside his creation. The liberal thinker, whatever his present position, seems driven infallibly to the above conclusions, as soon as he sets himself to realise his idea of his G.o.d.

The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of which all things are evolved under the uncreated conditions and eternal laws of the universe; he must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat oddly puts it, ”the materiality of matter, as well as the spirituality of spirit;”

_i e._, these must both be products of this one substance: a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature, and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a G.o.d possessing the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with nature, co-extensive with the universe; but the G.o.d of the orthodox no longer exists; we may change the signification of G.o.d, and use the word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality which divides him from the rest of the universe. I say that I use these arguments ”with some reluctance,”

because many who have fought and are fighting n.o.bly and bravely in the army of freethought, and to whom all free-thinkers owe much honour, seem to cling to an idea of the Deity, which, however beautiful and poetical, is not logically defensible, and in striking at the orthodox notion of G.o.d, one necessarily strikes also at all idea of a ”Personal” Deity.

There are some Theists who have only cut out the Son and the Holy Ghost from the Triune Jehovah, and have concentrated the Deity in the Person of the Father; they have returned to the old Hebrew idea of G.o.d, the Creator, the Sustainer, only widening it into regarding G.o.d as the Friend and Father of all his creatures, and not of the Jewish nation only. There is much that is n.o.ble and attractive in this idea, and it will possibly serve as a religion of transition to break the shock of the change from the supernatural to the natural. It is reached entirely by a process of giving up; Christian notions are dropped one after another, and the G.o.d who is believed in is the residuum. This Theistic school has not gained its idea of G.o.d from any general survey of nature or from any philosophical induction from facts; it has gained it only by stripping off from an idea already in the mind everything which is degrading and revolting in the dogmas of Trinitarianism. It starts, as I have noticed elsewhere, from a very n.o.ble axiom: ”If there be a G.o.d at all he must be at least as good as his highest creatures,” and thus is instantly swept away the Augustinian idea of a G.o.d,--that monster invented by theological dialectics; but still the same axiom makes G.o.d in the image of man, and never succeeds in getting outside a human representation of the Divinity. It starts from this axiom, and the axiom is prefaced by an ”if.” It a.s.sumes G.o.d, and then argues fairly enough what his character must be. And this ”if” is the very point on which the argument of this paper turns.

”If there be a G.o.d” all the rest follows, but _is there a G.o.d at all_ in the sense in which the word is generally used? And thus I come to the second part of my problem; having seen that the orthodox ”idea of G.o.d is unreasonable and absurd, is there any idea of G.o.d, worthy to be called an idea, which is attainable in the present state of our faculties?”

The argument from design does not seem to me to be a satisfactory one; it either goes too far or not far enough. Why in arguing from the evidences of adaptation should we a.s.sume that they are planned by a mind? It is quite as easy to conceive of matter as self-existent, with inherent vital laws moulding it into varying phenomena, as to conceive of any intelligent mind directly modelling matter, so that the ”heavens declare the glory of G.o.d, and the firmament showeth his handy-work.” It is, I know, customary to sneer at the idea of beautiful forms existing without a conscious designer, to parallel the adaptations of this world to the adaptations in machinery, and then triumphantly to inquire, ”if skill be inferred from the one, why ascribe the other to chance?” We do not believe in chance; the steady action of law is not chance; the exquisite crystals which form themselves under certain conditions are not a ”fortuitous concourse of atoms:” the only question is whether the laws which we all allow to govern nature are immanent in nature, or the outcome of an intelligent mind. If there be a lawmaker, is he self-existent, or does he, in turn, as has been asked again and again by Positivist, Secularist, and Atheist, require a maker? If we think for a moment of the vast mind implied in the existence of a Creator of the universe, is it possible to believe that such a mind is the result of chance? If man's mind imply a master-mind, how much more that of G.o.d? Of course the question seems an absurd one, but it is quite as pertinent as the question about a world-maker. We must come to a stop somewhere, and it is quite as logical to stop at one point as at another. The argument from design would be valuable if we could prove, a priori, as Mr. Gillespie attempted to do,* the existence of a Deity; this being proved we might then fairly argue deductively to the various apparent signs of mind in the universe. Again, if we allow design we must ask, ”how far does design extend?” If some phenomena are designed, why not all? And if not all, on what principle can we separate that which is designed from that which is not? If intellect and love reveal a design, what is revealed by brutality and hate? If the latter are not the result of design, how did they become introduced into the universe?

I repeat that this argument implies either too much or too little.*

* ”The Necessary Existence of Deity.”

There is but one argument that appears to me to have any real weight, and that is the argument from instinct. Man has faculties which appear, at present, as though they were not born of the intellect, and it seems to me to be unphilosophical to exclude this cla.s.s of facts from our survey of nature. The nature of man has in it certain sentiments and emotions which, reasonably or unreasonably, sway him powerfully and continually; they are, in fact, his strongest motive powers, overwhelming the reasoning faculties with resistless strength; true, they need discipline and controlling, but they do not need to be, and they cannot be, destroyed. The sentiments of love, of reverence, of wors.h.i.+p, are not, as yet, reducible to logical processes; they are intuitions, spontaneous emotions, incomprehensible to the keen and cold intellect. They may be laughed at or denied, but they still exist in spite of all; they avenge themselves, when they are not taken into account, by ruining the best laid plans, and they are continually bursting the cords with which reason strives to tie them down. I do not for a moment pretend to deny that these intuitions will, as our knowledge of psychology increases, be reducible to strict laws; we call them instincts and intuitions simply because we are unable to trace them to their source, and this vague expression covers the vagueness of our ideas. Therefore, intuition is not to be accepted as a trustworthy guide, but it may suggest an hypothesis, and this hypothesis must then be submitted to the stern verification of observed facts. We are not as yet able to say to what the instinct in man to wors.h.i.+p points, or what reality answers to his yearning. Increased knowledge will, we may hope, reveal to us* where there lies the true satisfaction of this instinct: so long as the yearning is only an ”instinct” it cannot pretend to be logically defensible, or claim to lay down any rule of faith. But still I think it well to point out that this instinct exists in man, and exists most strongly in some of the n.o.blest souls.

* ”Is there in man any such Instinct? May not the general tendency to wors.h.i.+p a Deity, everywhere be the result of the influence gained by Priests over the mind by the play of the mysterious Unknown and Hereafter upon susceptible imaginations? Besides, what are we to say of the immense number of philosophical Buddhists and Brahmins, for whose comfort or moral guidance the idea of a G.o.d or a hereafter is felt to be quite unnecessary? They cannot comprehend it, and consequently acts of wors.h.i.+p to G.o.d would be deemed by them fanatical. It is traditionalists who either do not think at all, or think only within a narrow, creed-bound circle, that are most devoted to wors.h.i.+pping Deity; and if so, may not the whole history of wors.h.i.+p have its origin in superst.i.tion and priestcraft! In that case, the theory of an instinct of wors.h.i.+p falls to the ground.”--Note by the Editor.

Of all the various sentiments which are thus at present ”intuitional,”

none is so powerful, none so overmastering as this instinct to wors.h.i.+p, this sentiment of religion. It is as natural for man to wors.h.i.+p as to eat. He will do it, be it reasonable or unreasonable. Just as the baby crams everything into his mouth, so does man persist in wors.h.i.+pping something. It may be said that the baby's instinct does not prove that he is right in trying to devour a matchbox; true, but it proves the existence of something eatable; so fetish-wors.h.i.+p, polytheism, theism, do not prove that man has wors.h.i.+pped rightly, but do they not prove the existence of something wors.h.i.+pable! The argument does not, of course, pretend to amount to a demonstration; it is nothing more than the suggestion of an a.n.a.logy. Are we to find that the supply is correlated to the demand throughout nature, and yet believe that this. .h.i.therto invariable system is suddenly altered when we reach the spiritual part of man? I do not deny that this instinct is hereditary, and that it is fostered by habit. The idea of reverence for G.o.d is transmitted from parent to child; it is educated into an abnormal development, and thus almost indefinitely strengthened; but yet it does appear to me that the bent to wors.h.i.+p is an integral part of man's nature. This instinct has also sometimes been considered to have its root in the feeling that one's individual self is but a ”part of a stupendous whole;” that the so-called religious feeling which is evoked by a grand view or a bright starlight night is only the realisation of personal insignificance, and the reverence which rises in the soul in the presence of the mighty universe of which we form a part. Whatever the root and the significance of this instinct, there can be no doubt of its strength; there is nothing rouses men's pa.s.sions as does theology; for religion men rush on death more readily and joyfully than* for any other cause; religious fanaticism is the most fatal, the most terrible power in the world. In studying history I also see the upward tendency of the race, and note that current which Mr. Matthew Arnold has called ”that stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.” Of course, if there be a conscious G.o.d, this tendency is a proof of his moral character, since it would be the outcome of his laws; but here again an argument which would be valuable were the existence of G.o.d already proved, falls blunted from the iron wall of the unknown. The same tendency upwards would naturally exist in any ”realm of law,” although the law were an unconscious force. For righteousness is nothing more than obedience to law, and where there is obedience to law, Nature's mighty forces lend their strength to man, and progress is secured.

Only by obedience to law can advance be made, and this rule applies, of course, to morality as well as to physics. Physical righteousness is obedience to physical laws; moral righteousness is obedience to moral laws: just as physical laws are discovered by the observation of natural phenomena, so must moral laws be discovered by the observation of social phenomena. That which increases the general happiness is right; that which tends to destroy the general happiness is wrong. Utility is the test of morality. But a law must not be drawn from a single fact or phenomenon; facts must be carefully collated, and the general laws of morality drawn from a generalisation of facts. But this subject is too large to enter upon here, and it is only hinted at in order to note that, although there is a moral tendency apparent in the course of events, it is rather a rash a.s.sumption to take it for granted that the power in question is a conscious one: it may be, and that, I think, is all we can justly and reasonably say.

Again, as regards Love. I have protested above against the easiness which talks glibly of the Supreme Love while shutting its eyes to the supreme agony of the world. But here, in putting forward what may be said on the other side of the question, I must remark that there is a possible explanation for sorrow and sin which is consistent with love given immortality of man and beast, and the future gain may then outweigh the present loss. But we are bound to remember that we can only have a _hope_ of immortality; we have no demonstration of it, and this is, therefore, only an a.s.sumption by which we escape from a difficulty.

We ought to be ready to acknowledge, also, that there is love in nature, although there is cruelty too; there is the suns.h.i.+ne as well as the storm, and we must not fix our eyes on the darkness alone and deny the light. In mother-love, in the love of friends, loyal through all doubt, true in spite of danger and difficulty, strongest when most sorely tried, we see gleams of so divine, so unearthly a beauty, that our hearts whisper to us of an universal heart pulsating throughout nature, which, at these rare moments, we cannot believe to be a dream. But there seems, also, to be a vague idea that love and other virtues could not exist unless derived from the Love, &c. It is true that we do conceive certain ideals of virtue which we personify, and to which we apply various terms implying affection; we speak of a love of Truth, devotion to Freedom, and so on. These ideals have, however, a purely subjective existence; they are not objective realities; there is nothing answering to these conceptions in the outside world, nor do we pretend to believe in their individuality. But when we gather up all our ideals, our n.o.blest longings, and bind them into one vast ideal figure, which we call by the name of G.o.d, then we at once attribute to it an objective existence, and complain of coldness and hardness if its reality is questioned, and we demand to know if we can love an abstraction? The n.o.blest souls do love abstractions, and live in their beauty and die for their sake.

There appears, also, to be a possibility of a mind in Nature, although we have seen that intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be perception, memory, comparison, or judgment; but may there not be a perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He is not? It seems to me that to deny his existence is to overstep the boundaries of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it.

We pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.

Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages' of existence?--We have reached a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads on ”the threshold of the unknown.”

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see; But if we could see and hear, this Vision--were it not He?

Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: ”if we could see and hear”; alas! it is always an ”if.”

We come back to the opening of this essay: what is the practical result of our ideas about the Divinity, and how do these ideas affect the daily working life? What conclusions are we to draw from the undeniable fact that, even if there be a ”personal G.o.d,” his nature and existence are beyond our faculties, that ”clouds and darkness are round about him,”

that he is veiled in eternal silence and reveals himself not to men?