The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) by George Tyrrell (page 2)

in respect to its expediency and in all its detail. Thus it seemed to him that the ideal for which he had lived was shattered by a self-inflicted blow. The infallible voice of humanity had declared against the cause of humanity. He found himself compelled, in virtue of his principles, to choose between two alternatives. Either the cause of humanity, as he conceived it, was not the cause of God; or else the Pope was not the Vicar of Christ and the divinely-appointed guardian of that cause. But of the two denials the former was now to him the least tolerable. “Catholicism,” he said, “was my life, because it was that of humanity.” _Sacramenta, propter homines_; the Church was made for man, and not man for the Church. Given the dilemma, who shall blame his choice? But the dilemma was purely subjective and imaginary. Though truths are never irreconcilable, the exaggerations of truth may well be so.

Had he possessed that intellectual patience in perplexity, without which not only faith, but true science, is impossible, he would have been driven not to apostasy, but to a careful re-sifting of his views, issuing, perhaps, in a reconciliation of apparently adverse positions, or at all events in a confession of subjective, uncertainty and confusion. Faith, in the wider sense of the word, would have bid him to believe, without seeing, what we have lived to see under Leo XIII.

This seems to be the intellectual aspect of his defection, though of course there were many accelerating causes at work. Perhaps if Gregory XVI. had met his appeal with a few words of simple explanation and advice, instead of with that mysterious reticence which is falsely supposed to be the soul of diplomacy, the issue might have been as happy as it was miserable. De Lamennais himself, in his _Affaires de Rome_, makes the same remark in so many words. Again, the illiberal and ungenerous persecution of his triumphant adversaries, who endeavoured to goad him into some open act of rebellion in order to bring him under still heavier condemnation, can scarcely have failed to embitter and harden a soul naturally disposed to pessimism and melancholy. Nor can we omit from the influences at work upon him, that dramatic instinct which makes a mediocre and colourless attitude impossible for those who are strongly under its influence. Perhaps no nation is more governed by it than the French, with their partiality for _tableaux_ and _sensation_; and in De Lamennais its presence was most marked, as the pages of his _Paroles_ will witness. In the _Too Late_ with which he received the overtures of Pius IX.; in the studied sensationalism of his funeral arrangements, and in many other minute points, we are made sensible that if his life culminated in a tragedy, the tragic aspect of it was not altogether displeasing to him. Still it would be a grievous slur on so great a character to suppose that such a weakness could have had any considerable part in his steady and deliberate refusal to see a priest at the last. This is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that he believed he could not be absolved without accepting the condemnation of his own views, and so abandoning the cause of humanity. While under the spell of his imaginary dilemma, he was constrained to follow the rule for a perplexed conscience, and to choose what seemed to him the less of two evils.

After his ideal had been destroyed, and the Church could no longer be for him the Saviour of the Nations, he threw himself without reserve into the cause of humanity and liberty. But his aims were now almost entirely destructive and revolutionary. His enthusiasm was rather a hatred of the things that were, than an ardent zeal for the things that ought to be; and the bitter elements in his character become more and more accentuated as he finds himself gradually thrust aside and forgotten–cast off by the Church, ignored by the revolution. Even his friends, with one or two exceptions, dropped off one by one; some fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, others perplexed at his obstinacy or offended by his violence; others removed by death or distance; and we see him in his old age poor and lonely, and intensely unhappy.

When dangerously ill in 1827, he exclaimed, on being told that it was a fine night, “For my peace, God grant that it may be my last.” The prayer was not heard, for, as he felt on his recovery, God had a great work for him to do. How that work was done we have just seen. Feli de Lamennais, who would have been buried as a Christian in 1827, was buried as an infidel in 1854.

It is vain to contend that he was not a man of prayer. That he had a keen discernment in spiritual things is evident from his _Commentary on the Imitation_ and his other spiritual writings, as well as from the testimony of his young disciples at La Chenaie, to whom he was not merely a brilliant teacher, a most affectionate friend and father, but also a trusted guide in the things of God. Yet this would be little had we not also assurance of his personal and private devoutness.

All this would make his unfortunate ending a stumbling-block to those who cannot acquiesce in the fact that in every soul tares and wheat in various proportions grow side by side, and that which growth is to be victorious is not possible to predict with certainty; who deem it impossible that one who ends ill could ever have lived well; or that one who loses his faith, or any other virtue, could ever at any time have really possessed it. There is indeed some kind of double personality in us all which is perhaps more observable in strongly-marked characters like De Lamennais, where, so to say, the bifurcating lines are produced further. Proud men have occasional moods of genuine humility; and habitual bitterness is allayed by intervals of sweetness; and conversely, there are ugly streaks in the fairest marble.

And as to the fate of that restless soul, who shall dare to speak dogmatically? We cling gladly to the story of the tear that stole down his face in death, and would fain see in it some confirmation of the view according to which the soul receives in that crucial hour a final choice based on the collective experience of its mortal life. We would hope that as there is a baptism of blood or of charity, so there may perhaps be some uncovenanted absolution for one who so earnestly loved mankind at large, and especially the poor and the oppressed; who in his old age and misery was found by their sick-bed; who willed to be with them in his death and burial. And yet we feel something of that agonizing uncertainty which forced from the aged Abbe Jean the bitter cry, “Feli, Feli, my brother!”

_Jan._ 1897.

XVII.

LIPPO, THE MAN AND THE ARTIST.

“What pains me most,” writes the late Sir Joseph Crowe in the _Nineteenth Century_ for October, 1896, “is to think that the art of Fra Filippo, the loose fish, and seducer of holy women, looks almost as pure, and is often quite as lovely as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of Fiesole.” And indeed, if the fact be admitted, it cannot but be a shock to all those high-minded thinkers who have committed themselves unreservedly to the view that personal sanctity and elevation of character in the artist is an essential condition for the production of any great work of art, and especially of religious art. As regards the fact, we need not concern ourselves very long. If Rio and others, presumably biassed by the same theory, are inclined to see Lippi’s moral depravity betrayed in every stroke of his brush, yet the more general and truer verdict accords him a place among the great masters of his age, albeit beneath Angelico and some others. Beyond all doubt it must be allowed that even in point of spirituality and heavenliness of expression, he stands high above numbers of artists of pure life and blameless reputation; and this fact leaves us face to face with the problem already suggested as to the precise connection between high morality and high art–if any.

Plainly a good man need not be a good artist. Must a good artist be a good man? I suppose from a vague feeling in certain minds that it ought to be so, there rises a belief that it must be so, and that it is so; and from this belief a disposition to see that it is so, and to read facts accordingly. Prominent among the advocates of this view is Mr. Ruskin in his treatment of the relation of morality to art. He holds “that the basis of art is moral; that art cannot be merely pleasant or unpleasant, but must be lawful or unlawful, that every legitimate artistic enjoyment is due to the perception of moral propriety, that every artistic excellence is a moral virtue, every artistic fault is a moral vice; that noble art can spring only from noble feeling, that the whole system of the beautiful is a system of moral emotions, moral selections, and moral appreciation; and that the aim and end of art is the expression of man’s obedience to God’s will, and of his recognition of God’s goodness.” [1]

But a man who can characterize a vulgar pattern as immoral, plainly uses the term “morality” in some transcendental, non-natural sense, and therefore cannot be regarded as an exponent of the precise theory referred to. Still, as this larger idea of morality includes the lesser and more restricted, we may consider Mr. Ruskin and his disciples among those to whom the case of Lippo Lippi and many another presents a distinct difficulty. “Many another,” for the principle ought to extend to every branch of fine art; and we should be prepared to maintain that there never has been, or could have been, a truly great musician, or sculptor, or poet, who was not also a truly good man. In a way the position is defensible enough; for one can, in every contrary instance, patch up the artist’s character or else pick holes in his work. Who is to settle what is a truly great work or a truly good man. But a position may be quite defensible, yet obviously untrue. Again, if by great art we mean that which is subordinated to some great and good purpose, we are characterizing it by a goodness which is extrinsic to it, and is not the goodness of art itself, as such. If the end of fine art is to teach, then its goodness must be estimated by the matter and manner of its teaching, and a “moral pocket-handkerchief” must take precedence of many a Turner. Yet it would even then remain questionable whether a good and great moral teacher is necessarily a good man. In truth, a good man is one who obeys his conscience, and whose conscience guides him right. If, in defect of the latter condition, we allow that a man is good or well-meaning, it is because we suppose that his conscience is erroneous inculpably, and that he is faithful to right order as far as he understands it. But one who sees right and wills wrong is in no sense good, but altogether bad. Allowing that for the solution of some delicate moral problems a certain height of tone and keenness of insight inseparable from habitual conscientiousness is necessary, yet mere intellectual acumen, in the absence of any notably biassing influence, suffices to give us as great a teacher as Aristotle, who, if exonerated from graver charges, offers no example of astonishing elevation of heart at all proportioned to the profundity of his genius. We do not deny that in the case of free assent to beliefs fraught with grave practical consequences, the moral condition of the subject has much to do with the judgments of the intellect. But first principles and their logical issues belong to the domain of necessary truth; while in other matters a teacher may accept current maxims and sentiments with which he has no personal sympathy, and weave from all these a whole system of excellent and orthodox moral teaching. And if one may be a good moralist and a bad man, why _a fortiori_ may one not be a good artist and a bad man? If vice does not necessarily dim the eye to ethical beauty, why should it blind it to aesthetic beauty? In order to get at a solution we must fix somewhat more definitely the notion of fine art and its scope.

I think it is in a child’s book called _The Back of the North Wind_, that a poet is somewhat happily and simply defined as a person who is glad about something and wants to make other people glad about it too. Yet mature reflection shows two flaws in this definition. First of all, the theme of poetry, or any other fine art, need not always be gladsome, but can appeal to some other strong emotion, provided it be high and noble. The tragedian is one who is thrilled with awe and sorrow, and strives to excite a like thrill in others. Again, though the craving for sympathy hardly ever fails to follow close on the experience of deep feeling; and though, as we shall presently see, fine art is but an extension of language whose chief end is intercommunion of ideas, yet this altruist end of fine art is not of its essence, but of its superabundance and overflow. Expression for expression’s sake is a necessity of man’s spiritual nature, in solitude no less than in society. To speak, to give utterance to the truth that he sees, and to the strong emotions that stir within his heart, is that highest energizing in which man finds his natural perfection and his rest. His soul is burdened and in labour until it has brought forth and expressed to its complete satisfaction the word conceived within it. Nor is it only within the mind that he so utters himself in secret self-communing; for he is not a disembodied intelligence, but one clothed with body and senses and imagination. His medium of expression is not merely the spiritual substance of the mind, but his whole complex being. Nor has he uttered his “word” to his full satisfaction till it has passed from his intellect into his imagination, and thence to his lips, his voice, his features, his gesture. And when the mind is more vigorous and the passion for utterance more intense, he will not be at rest while there is any other medium in which he can embody his conception, be it stone, or metal, or line, or colour, or sound, or measure, or imagery, which under his skilled hand can be made to shadow out his hidden thought and emotion. We cannot hold with Max Mueller and others, who make thought dependent and consequent on language.

For it is evident, on a moment’s introspection, that thought makes language for itself to live in, just as a snail makes its own shell or a soul makes its own body. Who has not felt the anguish of not being able to find a word to hit off his thought exactly?–which surely means that the thought was already there unclothed, awaiting its embodiment. As the soul disembodied is not man, so thought not clothed in language is not perfect human thought. Its essence is saved, but not its substantial, or at least its desirable, completeness. A man thinks more fully, more humanly, who thinks not with his mind alone, but with his imagination, his voice, his tongue, his pen, his pencil. If, therefore, solitary contemplative thought is a legitimate end in itself; if it is that _ludus_, or play of the soul, which is the highest occupation of man, a share in the same honour must be allowed to its accompanying embodiment; to the music which delights no ear but the performer’s; to poetry, to painting, to sculpture done for the joy of doing, and without reference to the good of others communicating in that joy. And if the Divine Artist, whose lavish hand fills everything with goodness; who pours out the treasures of His love and wisdom in every corner of our universe; of whose greatness man knows not an appreciable fraction; who “does all things well” for the very love of doing and of doing well; who utters Himself for the sake of uttering, not only in His eternal, co-equal, all-expressive Word, but also in the broken, stammering accents of a myriad finite words or manifestations–if this Divine Artist teaches us anything, it is that man, singly or collectively, is divinest when he finds rest and joy in utterance for its own sake, in “telling the glory of God and showing forth His handiwork,” or, as Catholic doctrine puts it, in praise; for praise is the utterance of love, and love is joy in the truth.

As most of the useful arts perfect man’s executive faculties, and thus are said to improve upon, while in a certain sense they imitate nature; so the fine arts extend and exalt man’s faculty of expression, or self-utterance, regarded not precisely as useful and _propter aliud_; but as pleasurable and _propter se_. Even the most uncultivated savage finds pleasure in some discordant utterance of his subjective frame of mind; and it is really hard to find any tribe so degraded as to show no rudiment of fine art, no sign of reflex pleasure in expression, and of inventiveness in extending the resources nature has provided us with for that end.

The artist as such aims at self-expression for its own sake. It is a necessity of his nature, an outpouring of pent-up feeling, as much as is the song of the lark. Of course we are speaking of the true creative artist, and not of the laborious copyist. If he subordinates his work as a means to some further end; if his aim is morality or immorality, truth or error, pleasure or pain; if it is anything else than the embodiment or utterance of his own soul, so far he is acting riot as an artist, but as a minister of morality, or truth, or pleasure, or their contraries. If we keep this idea steadily in view, we can see how much truth, or how little, is contained in the various theories of fine art which have been advanced from the earliest times. We can see how truly art is a [Greek: mimaesis] an imitating of realities; not that art-objects are, as Plato supposes, faint and defective representations, vicegerent species of the external world, whose beauty is but the transfer and dim reflection of the beauty of nature. Were it so, then the mirror, or the camera, were the best of all artists. As expression, fine art is the imitation of the soul within; of outward realities as received into the mind and heart of the artist, in their ideal and emotional setting. The artist gives word or expression to what he sees; but what he sees is within him. His work is self-expression. We can from this infer where to look for a solution of the controversy between idealism and realism. We can also see how, owing to the essential disproportion between the material and sensible media of expression which art uses, and the immaterial and spiritual realities it would body forth, its utterances must always be symbolic, never literal. We can see how needlessly they embarrass themselves who deny the name of fine art to any work whose theme is not beautiful, or which is not morally didactic. Finally, we can see that if fine art be but an extension of language, there can be no immediate connection between art as art, and general moral character; no more reason for supposing that skilful and beautiful self-utterance is incompatible with immorality, than that its absence is incompatible with sanctity.

Yet, as a matter of fact, and rightly, we judge of art not merely as art, or as expression; but we look to that which is expressed, to the inner soul which is revealed to us, to the “matter” as well as to the “form.” And it maybe questioned whether our estimate of a work is not rather determined in most cases by this non-artistic consideration. Obviously it is possible in our estimate of a landscape, to be drawn away from the artistic to the real beauty; from its merits as a “word,” or expression, to the merits of the thing signified. And still more naturally is our admiration drawn from the artist’s self-utterance, to the self which he endeavours to utter, and we are brought into sympathy with his thought and feeling. Much of the fascination exercised over us by art, which precisely as art is rude and imperfect in many ways, is to be ascribed to this source. Though here we must remember that the soul is often more truly and artistically betrayed by the simple lispings of childhood than by the ornate and finished eloquence of a rhetorician.

It is in regard to the matter expressed, rather than to the mode of expression, that we have a right to look for a difference between such men as Lippo Lippi and Fra Angelico. According to a man’s inner tone and temperament and character, will be the impression produced upon him by the objects of his contemplation. These will determine him largely in the choice of his themes, and in the aspect under which he will treat them. Obviously in many cases there are noble themes of art for whose appreciation no particular delicacy of moral or religious taste is required. There is no reason why such a subject as the Laocoon should make a different impression on a saint and on a profligate. It appeals to the tragic sense, which may be as highly developed in one as in the other. But if the Annunciation be the theme, we can well understand how differently it will impress a man of lively and cultured faith, a contemplative and mystic, with an appreciative and effective love of reverence and purity; and another whose faith is a formula, whose life is impure, frivolous, worldly. Why then is there not a more distinctly marked inferiority in the religious art of Lippi to that of Angelico? Why does it look “almost as pure,” and “often quite as lovely”? Two very clear reasons offer themselves in reply. First of all, the art of such a man as Angelico falls far more hopelessly short of his ideal. Most of the beauties which such a soul would find in the contemplation of Mary, or of Gabriel, are spiritual, moral, non-aesthetic, and can embody themselves in form and feature only most imperfectly. Given equal skill in expression, equal command of words, one man can say all that he feels, and more, while another is tortured with a sense of much more to be uttered, were it not unutterable. Perhaps it is in some hint of this hidden wealth of unuttered meaning that skilled eyes find in Angelico what they can never find in Lippi. A second reason might be found in the external influence exerted on the artist by society, its requirements, fashions, and conventions. It is plain that Lippi, left to himself, would never have chosen religious themes as such: it is equally plain, that having chosen them, he would naturally try to emulate and eclipse what was most admired in the great works of his predecessors and contemporaries. It would need little more than a familiar acquaintance with the great models, together with the artist’s discriminating observance, for a man of Lippi’s talent to catch those lines and shades of form and feature which hint at, rather than express, the inward purity, the reverence, the gentleness, with which he himself was so little in sympathy.

No doubt, were two such men equally skilled in all the arts of expression, in language, in verse, in song and music, in sculpture and painting, and acting, their general treatment of religious themes would be more glaringly different; but within the comparatively narrow limits of painting, we cannot reasonably expect more than we actually find.

The saint, as such, and the artist, as such, are occupied with different facets of the world; the former with its moral, the latter with its aesthetic beauty. Even were the artist formally to recognize that all the beauty in nature is but the created utterance of the Divine thought and love, and that the real, though unknown, term of his abstraction is not the impersonal symbol, but the person symbolized; yet it is not enough for sanctity or morality to be attracted to God viewed simply as the archetype of aesthetic beauty. On the other hand, one may be drawn, through the love of moral beauty in creatures, of justice, and mercy, and liberality, and truthfulness, to the love of God as their archetype, and yet be perfectly obtuse to aesthetic beauty; and thus again we see that high aestheticism is compatible with low morality, and conversely. Doubtless when produced to infinity, all perfections are seen to converge and unite in God, but short of this, they retain their distinctness and opposition. At the same time, it cannot for a moment be denied that keenness of moral, and of aesthetic perception, act and react upon one another. He gains much morally whose eyes are opened to the innumerable traces of the Divine beauty with which he is surrounded, and there are aesthetic joys which are necessarily unknown to a soul which is selfish and gross–still more to a soul from which the glories of revealed religion are hidden, either through unbelief or sluggish indifference. Yet, on the whole, it may be said that sanctity is benefited by art more than art is by sanctity, especially where we deal with so limited a medium of expression as painting. And so it seems to us that, after all, there is nothing to surprise or pain us in the fact that “the art of a Fra Filippo, the loose fish, looks almost as pure, and is often quite as lovely as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of Fiesoli.”

_Dec._ 1896.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: Vernon Lee, _Belcaro_.]

XVIII.

THROUGH ART TO FAITH.

There are few books more difficult to estimate than those in which M. Huysman sets forth the story of a conversion generally supposed to bear no very distant resemblance to his own. It would be easy to find excellent reasons for a somewhat sweeping condemnation of his work, and others as excellent for a most cordial approval; and, indeed, we find critics more than usually at variance with one another in its regard. To be judged justly, these books must be judged slowly. The source of perplexity is to be found in the fact that the author, who has recently passed from negation to Catholicism, carries with him the language, the modes of thought, the taste and temper of the literary school of which he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. _En Route_, and its sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism and faith. “The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau,” and according as the critic centres his attention too exclusively on one or the other, such will his judgment be.

That his works have commanded attention, and awakened keen interest among members of the most varying and opposite schools of thought, is an undeniable fact which at all events proves them to be worth careful consideration.

The story of a soul’s passage from darkness to light, of its wanderings, vacillations, doubts, and temptations, must necessarily exercise a strong fascination over all minds of a reflective cast: “The development of a soul!” says Browning, “little else is worth study. I always thought so; you, with many known and unknown to me, think so; others may one day think so.” [1] It is from this attraction of soul to soul that the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, together with many kindred works, derives its spell; and indeed it is to this that all that is best and greatest in art owes its power and immortal interest. Here, however, is one reason why _The Cathedral_ [2] can never be so attractive as _En Route_, ministering as it does but little to that deepest and most insatiable curiosity concerning the soul and its sorrows. It portrays but little perceptible movement, little in the way of violent revulsion and conflict; the spiritual growth which it registers is mostly underground, a strengthening and spreading of the roots. It deals with a period of quiet healing and convalescence after a severe surgical operation; with the “illuminative” stage of conversion–for there is scarcely any doubt that the three volumes correspond to the “purgative,” “illuminative,” and “unitive” ways respectively.

Between pulling down and building up–both sensational processes, especially the former–there intervenes a sober time of planning and surveying, a quiet taking of information before entering on a new campaign of action. When the affections have been painfully and violently uprooted from earth, then first is the mind sufficiently free from the bias of passion and base attachments to be instructed and illuminated with profit in the things concerning its peace, and to be prepared for the replanting of the affections in the soil of Heaven. The arid desert, with its seemingly aimless wanderings, intervenes between the exodus from Egypt and the entrance into the Land of Promise.

Dealing with this stage of the process of conversion, _The Cathedral_ is comparatively monotonous and barren of spiritual incident. What removes it still further from all chances of anything like popularity in this country is the extent to which it is occupied with matters of purely archaeological and artistic interest, and more especially with the mystical symbolism of the middle ages as chronicled in every detail of the great Cathedral of Chartres. Little as may be the enthusiasm for such lore in France, it is far less in England, where the people have for three centuries been out of all touch with the Catholic Church, and therefore with whatever modicum of mediaevalism she still preserves as part of her heritage from the past. Architecturally we appreciate our dismantled cathedrals to some extent, but their symbolism is far less understood than even the language and theology of the schools, while the study of it meets as much sympathy as would the study of heraldry in a modern democracy. Yet we may say that the bulk of the book consists of an inventory of every symbolic detail in architecture, in sculpture, in painting, in glass-colouring, to be found at Chartres; to which is added a careful elaboration of the symbolism of beasts, flowers, colours, perfumes, all very dreary reading for the uninitiated, and to be criticized only by the expert.

Little scope as the plan of the book offers for any variety or display of character, being mainly occupied with erudite monologue, put sometimes into the mouth of Durtal, sometimes into that of the Abbe Plomb, yet the personalities of these two, as well as those of Geversin, Madame Bavoil, and Madame Mesurat, stand out very vividly, and make us wish for that fuller acquaintance with them which a little more movement and incident would have afforded.

But what will give most offence, and tend to alienate a certain amount of intelligent and valuable sympathy, is the violence, and even the coarseness, with which the author, or at least his hero, handles, not only the opinions, but the very persons of those from whom he differs; the intemperance of his invective, the narrow intolerance and absolute self-confidence with which he sits in judgment on men and things.

As a matter of fact, this is rather a defect of style and expression than of the inner sentiment. It is part and parcel of the realist temper to blurt out the thought in all the clothing or nakedness with which it first surges up into consciousness, before it has been submitted to the censorship of reason; in a word, to do its thinking aloud, or on paper; to give utterance not to the tempered and mature judgment–the last result of refinement and correction, but to display the whole process and working by which it was reached. As it is part of M. Zola’s art to linger lovingly over each little horror of some slaughter-house scene, until the whole lives for us again as in a cinematograph, so M. Huysman, engaged in the portrayal of a spiritual conflict, spares us no link in the chain of causes by which the final result is produced; he bares the brain, and exposes its workings with all the scientific calmness of the vivisector.

Whether we like or dislike this realism, we must allow for it in forming our judgment on these volumes, nor must we treat as final and approved opinions what are often the mere spontaneous suggestions and first thoughts of the mind, the oscillations through which it settles down to rest. Over and over again we shall find that Durtal subsequently raises the very objection to his own view that was on our lips at the first reading of it.

But even making such allowance, it none the less remains a matter of regret that one who, with perhaps some justice, considers that in point of art-appreciation “the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath the profane public,” and chides them for “their incurable lack of artistic sense,” who speaks of “the frightful appetite for the hideous which disgraces the Church of our day,” who himself in many ways, in a hundred passages of sublime thought, of tender piety, of lyrical poesy, has proved beyond all cavil his delicacy of sentiment, his exquisite niceness in matters of taste, his reverence for what is chaste and beautiful, should at times be so deplorably unfaithful to his better instincts, so forgetful of the close and inseparable alliance between restraint and elegance. What can be weaker or uglier, more unbecoming an artist, more becoming a fish-wife, than his description of Lochner’s picture of the Virgin: “The neck of a heifer, and flesh like cream or hasty-pudding, that quivers when it is touched;” or of the picture of St. Ursula’s companions, by the same hand: “Their squab noses poking out of bladders of lard that did duty for their faces;” not to speak of the characterization of a “Sacred Heart” too revolting to reproduce? Surely when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his works as painted with “muck, wine-sauce, and mud,” it is difficult not to answer with a _tu quoque_ as far as this word-painting is concerned–difficult not to see here some morbid and “frightful appetite for the hideous” struggling with the healthy appetite for better things.

However lame and ridiculous an artist’s utterance may be, yet there is a certain reverence sometimes due to what he is endeavouring to say, and even to his desire to say it. We do not think it very witty or tasteful or charitable to laugh at a man because he stammers; still less do we overwhelm him with the coarsest abuse. One may well shudder at most presentments of the Sacred Heart, but even apart from all consideration for the artist, a certain reverence for the idea there travestied and unintentionally dishonoured, should forbid our insulting what after all is so nearly related to that idea, and in the eyes of the untaught very closely identified with it.

But an occasional trespass of this kind, however offensive, is not enough to detract materially from the value of so much that is meritorious; nor again will that outspoken treatment of delicate topics (less observable in _The Cathedral_ than in _En Route_), which makes the book undesirable for many classes of readers, prevent its due appreciation on the part of others–unless we are going to put the Sacred Scriptures on the Index. In this vexed question, M. Huysman takes what seems the more robust and healthy view, but he appears to be quite unaware how many difficulties it involves; and consequently lashes out with his usual intemperance against the contrary tradition, which is undeniably well represented. It is not as though the advocates of the “flight” policy in regard to temptations against this particular virtue were ignorant of the general principle which undoubtedly holds as regards all other temptations, and bids us turn and face the dog that barks at our heels. This counsel is as old as the world. But from the earliest time a special exception has been made to it in the one case of impurity by those who have professedly spoken in the light of experience rather than of _a priori_ inference. Both views are encompassed with difficulty, nor does any compromise suggest itself.

What seems to us one of the most interesting points raised by the story of Durtal’s spiritual re-birth and development is the precise relation between the Catholic religion and fine art.

God has not chosen to save men by logic; so neither has He chosen to save them by fine art. If the “election” of the Apostolic Church counted but few scribes or philosophers among its members–and those few admitted almost on sufferance–we may also be sure that the followers of the Galilean fishermen were not as a body distinguished by a fastidious criticism in matters of fine art. In after ages, when the Church asserted herself and moulded a civilization more or less in accordance with her own exigencies and ideals, it is notorious how she made philosophy and art her own, and subjected them to her service; but whether in so doing she in any way departed from the principles of Apostolic times is what interests us to understand.

There is certainty no more unpardonable fallacy than that of “Bible Christians,” who assume that the Church in the Apostolic age had reached its full expansion and expression, and therefore in respect of polity, liturgy, doctrinal statement and discipline must be regarded as an immutable type for all ages and countries; from which all departure is necessarily a corruption. They take the flexible sapling and compare it with aged knotty oak, and shake their heads over the lamentable unlikeness: “That this should be the natural outgrowth of that! _O tempora, O mores!_”

Like every organism, in its beginning, the Church was soft-bodied and formless in all these respects; but she had within her the power of fashioning to herself a framework suited to her needs, of assuming consistency and definite shape in due time. The old bottles would not serve to hold the new wine, but this did not mean that new bottles were not to be sought. Because the philosophy, the art, the polity of the age in which she was born were already enlisted in the service of other ideas and inextricably associated with error in the minds of men, it was needful for her at first to dissociate herself absolutely from the use of instruments otherwise adaptable in many respects to her own ends, and to wait till she was strong enough to alter them and use them without fear of scandal and misinterpretation.

The Church is many-tongued; but though she can deliver her message in any language, yet she is not for that reason independent of language in general. There is no way to the human ear and heart but through language of some kind or another. It is not her mission to teach languages, but to use the languages she finds to hand for the expression of the truths, the facts, the concrete realities to which her dogmas point. This does not deny that one language may not be more flexible, more graphic than any other, more apt to express the facts of Heaven as well as those of earth. It only denies that any one is absolutely and exclusively the best.

It is no very great violence to include rhetoric, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, ritual, and every form of decorative art in the category of language and to bring them under the same general laws, since even philosophy may to a large extent be treated in the same way. Christ has not commissioned His Church to teach science or philosophy, nor has He given her an infallible _magisterium_ in matters of fine art. She uses what she finds in use and endeavours with the imperfect implements, the limited colours, the coarse materials at her disposal to make the picture of Christ and His truth stand out as faithful to reality as possible; and–to press the illustration somewhat crudely–as what is rightly black, in a study in black and white, may be quite wrongly black in polychrome; so what the Church approves according to one convention, she may condemn according to another. May we not apply to her what Durtal says of our Lady: “She seems to have come under the semblance of every race known to the middle ages; black as an African, tawny as a Mongolian;”–“she unveils herself to the children of the soil … these beings with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, hardly able to express themselves”? The more we study the visions and apparitions with which saints have been favoured and the revelations which have been vouchsafed to them, the more evident is it that they are spoken to in their own language, appealed to through their own imagery. Indeed, were it not so, how could they understand? Our Lady is the all-beautiful for every nation, but the type of human beauty is not the same for all. The Madonna of the Ethiopian might be a rather terrifying apparition in France or Italy.

There is no art too rough or primitive, or even too vulgar, for the Church to disdain, if it offers the only medium of conveying her truth to certain minds. Though custom has made it classical, her liturgical language, whether Latin or Greek, when first assumed, was that of the mob–about as elegant as we consider the dialects of the peasantry. She did not use plain-chaunt for any of those reasons which antiquarians and ecclesiologists urge in its favour now-a-days, but because it was the only music then in vogue. Even to-day the breeziest popular melodies in the East are suggestive of the _Oratio Jeremiae_. Her vestments (even Gothic vestments!) were once simply the “Sunday best” of the fashion of those days. If to-day these things have a different value and excellence, it is in obedience to the law by which what is “romantic” in one age becomes “classical” in the next, or what is at first useful and commonplace becomes at last ceremonial and symbolic; and by which the common tongue of the vulgar comes by mere process of time to be archaic and stately. To “create” ancient custom and ritual on a sudden, or to resuscitate abruptly that which has lapsed into oblivion, is, to say the least, a very Western idea, akin to the pedantry of trying to restore Chaucer’s English to common use. _Nascitur non fit_, is the law in all such matters.

While we assert the Church’s independence of any one in particular of these means of self-expression, her indifference to style and mode of speech so long as substantial fidelity is secured, we must not deny that some of them are, of their own nature, more apt to her purpose than others and allow a fuller revelation of her sense; and that in proportion as her influence is strong in the world she tends to modify human thought and language, to leaven philosophy and fine art, so as to form by a process of selection and refusal, and in some measure even to create, an ever richer and more flexible medium of utterance.

In this sense we can with some caution speak of “Catholic art” in music, architecture, and painting, so far, that is, as we can determine the extent and nature of the Church’s action, and therefore the tendency of her influence in the way of stimulus and restraint with regard to subject and treatment. We do not unjustly discern an author’s style as a personal element distinct from the language and phraseology of which no item is his own. The manner in which he uses that language, his selections and refusals make, in union with the borrowed elements, a tongue that may be called his, in an exclusive sense. The Church, too, has her style, which, though difficult to discern amid her use of a Pentecostal variety of languages, is no doubt always the same–at least in tendency.

Salvation-Army worship is certainly not of the Church’s style, but I do not think, were there no absolute irreverence and scandal to be feared, that she would hesitate to use such a language, were it the only one understood by such a people. St. Francis Xavier’s “catechisms” were often hardly less uncouth. Still, her whole tendency would be towards restraint, order, and exterior reverence. Again, the stoical coldness and formalism of a liturgical worship, centered round no soul-stirring mystery of Divine love where there can be feeling so strong as to need the restraint of liturgy and ritual, has still less of the Church’s style about it. For she is human, not merely in her reason and self-restraint, but in the fulness of her passion and enthusiasm; and restraint is only beautiful and needful where there is something to restrain.

We are now in a position to consider the surface objection that will present itself to many a reader concerning Durtal’s conversion. “He has been converted,” it will be said, “by a fallacy. He has identified the Catholic religion with the cause of plain-chaunt and Gothic architecture, and of all that is, or that he considers to be, best in art. He has laid hold not of Catholicism, but of its merest accessories, which it might shake off any day, and him along with them. Indeed, he scarcely makes any pretence at being in sympathy with the Catholicism of to-day, which he regards as almost entirely philistine and degenerate, if we except La Trappe and Solesmes and a few other corners where the old observances linger on. ‘It was so ugly, so painfully adorned with images, that only by shutting his eyes could Durtal endure to remain in Notre Dame de la Breche.’ Yes, but what sort of convert is this who is so insensible to substantials, so morbidly sensitive about mere accidentals? We come to the Church for the true faith and the sacraments, not for ‘sensations.’ In fine, Durtal has not observed the route prescribed by the apologetics for reaching the door of the sheep-fold, but has climbed over in his own way, like a thief and a robber; he has not (as a recent critic says of him) _tombe entre les bras maternals de l’Eglise selon toutes les regles_.”

Without for a moment denying one of the legitimate claims of scientific apologetic, we may at once dismiss the idea that it pretends to represent a process through which the mind of the convert to Christianity either does or ought necessarily to pass. Its sole purport is to show that if it is not always possible to synthetize Christianity with the current philosophy, science, and history of the day, at least no want of harmony can be positively demonstrated. As secular beliefs and opinions are continually shifting, so too apologetic needs continual adjustment: and as that of a century back is useless to us now, so will ours be in many ways inadequate a century hence. It is fitting for the Church at large that she should in each age and country have a suitable apologetic, taking cognizance of the latest developments of profane knowledge. It is needful for her public honour in the eyes of the world that she should not seem to be in contradiction with truth, but that either the apparent truth should be proved questionable, or else that her own teaching should be shown to be compatible with it. But in no sense is such apologetic always a necessity for the individual, still less a safe or adequate basis for a solid conversion, which in that case would be shaken by every new difficulty unthought of before.

Our subjective faith in the Church must be like the faith of the disciples of Christ, an entirely personal relation; an act of implicit trust based on no lean argument or chain of reasoning, but on the irresistible spell, the overmastering impression created upon us by a character manifested in life, action, speech, even in manner; as impossible to state in its entirety and as impossible to doubt as are our reasons for loving or loathing, for trusting or fearing.

No doubt we hear of men of intellect and learning “reading” or “reasoning” themselves into the Church; but others as able have read and reasoned along the same line, and yet have not come; for in truth, reason at the most can set free a force of attraction created by motives other than reason.

What this attraction is in each case is impossible to specify accurately–“Ask me and I know not,” one might say, “do not ask me and I know.” Each soul is hooked with its own bait, called by its own name, drawn in its own way; and as the attractiveness of Christ is virtually infinite in its multiformity, so is that of His Church, nor is there a more unpardonable narrowness than that of insisting that others shall be drawn in the same way as we ourselves, or not at all.

Let it also be noticed that a very prolonged and minute intimacy is not always necessary in order that we should feel the spell of personality. Much depends on our own gifts of sympathy, insight and apprehension, on the simplicity and strength of the personality in question, on the nature of the incidents by which it is disclosed to us. We know one man in a moment, another only after years of intimacy, while others in regard to the same individuals might experience the converse. We must not then suppose that because in one case the impression is the result of slowly-accumulated observations, and in another the work of an instant, it is less trustworthy in the latter instance than in the former. It may be, or it may not be. St. Augustine needed years to feel the spell that one word, nay, one glance from Christ cast upon St. Peter. Nor again is it always in some striking and notable crisis that a character reveals itself abruptly, but often in the merest nuance–a manner, an intonation, something quite unintentional, unpremeditated. We know well, if we know ourselves at all, how irresistible is the impression created on us at times by such trifles, and yet how more than reasonable it often is.

Who shall say, then, that to an eye and heart attuned to quick sympathy, any indication is too small to betray the inward spirit and character of the Catholic Church, or to magnetize a soul and render it restless, until it obeys her attraction and rests in union with her?

To a sensitively artistic temperament such as Durtal’s, the indications of the Church’s “style,” revealed in her influence upon art, in her creations, in her selections and refusals, would be eloquent of her whole character and ethos; it would be to him what the very tone of Christ’s voice was to the Baptist, or what His glance was to Peter, or what His silence was to Pilate. We have known too many instances of deep-seated and entire conviction, based on seemingly as little or less, to wish for one moment to indulge in any foolish rationalizing or to question the possibility or probability of God’s drawing souls to Himself by such methods.

We must, however, remember that it is not merely by the Church’s mediaeval art that Durtal is attracted, but still more by that mysticism which created it, and by which it was served and fostered in return. Mysticism must necessarily excite the sympathy of one who is in devout pursuit of the highest and most spiritual forms of aesthetic beauty. Whatever be the long-sought and never-to-be-forgotten definition of the Beautiful, of this much at least a mere process of induction will assure us, that men count things beautiful in the measure that they are released from the grossness, formlessness, and heaviness of matter, and by their delicacy, shapeliness, and unearthliness, betray the influence of that principle which is everywhere in conflict with matter and is called spirit. Man at his best is most at home, where at his worst he is least at home, namely, in the world of those super-realities which are touched and felt by the soul, but refuse to be pictured or spoken in the language of the five senses. A hard, “common-sense,” labour-and-wages religion, such as is consonant with the utilitarianism of a commercial civilization, could never appeal to a temperament like Durtal’s.

Doubtless Catholic Christianity admits of being apprehended under the narrower and grosser aspect, which however inadequate and unworthy, is not absolutely false. The Jews were suffered to believe not merely that God rewards the just and punishes the wicked–which is eternally true–but that He does so in this life, which is true only with qualification; and that He rewards them with temporal prosperity and adversity–which is hardly true at all. Catholic truth, in itself the same, can only be received according to the recipient’s capacity and sensitiveness. What one age or country is alive to, another may be dead to; nor can we pretend that here all is progress and no regress, unless we are prepared to say that in no respect have we anything to learn from the past. The Ignatian meditation on the “Kingdom of Christ” evoked heroic response in an age impregnated with the sentiments of chivalry, but to-day it needs to be adapted to a great extent, and some have vainly hoped to gather grapes from a thistle by substituting a parable drawn from some soul-stirring commercial enterprise–a colossal speculation in cheese.

Whatever signs there may be of a reaction, yet the whole temper and spirit of our age is unfavourable to that mysticism which is the very choicest flower of the Catholic religion. The blame is not with the seed, but with the soil. Even where least of all we should look for such indifference, among those who have built up the sepulchres and shrines of the great masters of mysticism, we sometimes observe a profound distrust for what is esteemed an unpractical, unhealthy kind of piety, while every preference is given to what is definite and tangible in the way of little methods and industries, multitudinous practices, lucrative prayers, in a word, to what a critic already quoted describes as _les petitesses des cerveaux etroits et les anguleuses routines_. [3]

It is one of the narrownesses of Durtal himself to ascribe all this to the wilful perversity of a person or persons unknown, and not to see in it the inevitable result of the vulgarizing tendency of modern life upon the masses. Things being as they are, surely it is better that the Church should do the little she can than do nothing at all. The “meditative mind” is incompatible with the rush and worry of a busy life, especially where educational methods substitute information for reflection, and so kill the habit, and eventually the faculty, of thought in so many cases. But if the higher prayer is impossible, the lower is possible and profitable. Again, if the liturgical sense has in a great measure become extinct among the faithful owing to the unavoidable disuse of the public celebration of the Church’s worship, it is well that they should be allowed devotions accommodated to their limited capacity. As the Church would never dream of expecting a keen sympathy with her higher dogmas, her mystical piety, her artistic symbolism, her transcendent liturgy, on the part of a newly-converted tribe of savages, so neither is she impatient with the civilized Philistine, but is willing to speak to him in a language all his own, hoping indeed to tune his tongue one day to something less uncouth. None can sympathize more cordially than the writer does with Durtal in his horror of unauthorized devotions, of insufferable vernacular litanies, of nerveless and sickly hymns, of interminable “acts of consecration” void of a single definite idea, more especially when these things are brought into the very sanctuary itself, with stole and cope and every apparent endeavour to fix the responsibility on the Universal Church. But if the Church is willing to go in rags to save those who are in rags, she is only using her invariable economy. We know well the sort of robe that befits her dignity, and no doubt it is this contrast that makes the trial of her present humiliation more difficult for us to bear.

We do not for a moment allow that the difference between bad taste and good is merely relative, or that a language or art which is externally vulgar can ever be the adequate and appropriate expression of the Catholic religion, whose tendency when unimpeded is ever to refine and purify. But it is perhaps another narrowness to suppose that a reform can only be effected by a return to the past, to mediaeval symbolism and music and architecture. No effort of the kind has ever met with more than seeming success. What is consciously imitated from the past is not the same as that natural growth which it imitates, and which was as congenial to those days as it is uncongenial to ours. It is all the difference between the Mass ceremonial in a Ritualist church and in a Catholic church–the historical sense is violated in one case and satisfied in the other.

What is once really dead can never revive in the same form–at best we get a cast from the dead face. No doubt the old music and the old symbolism always will have a beauty of antiquity that can never belong to the new; but it was not this beauty–the beauty of death, of autumn leaves, that made them once popular, but the beauty of fresh green life and flexibility. The effort to make antiquity popular is almost a contradiction in terms. What we may hope for at most is an improvement in the aesthetic tastes of the Catholic public which comes from freer and healthier surroundings, from saner ideas and wider opportunities of education and liberal culture. When they begin to speak a richer language, the Church will take that language and find in it a fuller expression of her mind than she can in the present _patois_; she will be able again to say to them in other words, as yet unknown, what she said to the middle ages in Gregorian chaunt and Gothic cathedral. She, who in virtue of her Pentecostal gift of tongues, speaks in sundry times and divers manners, may in due season find words as eloquent of her heart and mind as those which she spoke to Durtal in the aisles of Chartres and in the cadences of Solesmes.

_July_, 1898.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: Introduction to Sordello.]

[Footnote 2: _The Cathedral_. By M.T.K. Huysman. Translated by Clare Bell.]

[Footnote 3: R. P. Pacher, S.J., _De Dante a Verlaine_.]

XIX.

TRACTS FOR THE MILLION.

The paradoxes of one generation are the common-places of the next; what the savants of to-day whisper in the ear, the Hyde Park orators of to-morrow will bawl from their platforms. Moreover, it is just when its limits begin to be felt by the critical, when its pretended all-sufficingness can no longer be maintained, that a theory or hypothesis begins to be popular with the uncritical and to work its irrevocable ill-effects on the general mind. In this, as in many other matters, the lower orders adopt the abandoned fashions of their betters, though with less of the well-bred taste which sometimes in the latter makes even absurdity graceful. In this way it has come to pass that at the very moment in which a reaction against the irreligious or anti-religious philosophy of a couple of generations ago is making itself felt in the study, the spreading pestilence of negation and unbelief has gained and continues to gain possession of the street. Some fifty years ago religion and even Christianity, seemed to the sanguine eyes of Catholics so firmly rooted in England that the recovery of the country to their faith depended almost entirely on the settlement of the Anglo-Roman controversy; to which controversy they accordingly devoted, and, in virtue of the still unexhausted impetus of that effort, do still devote their energies, almost exclusively. But together with a dawning consciousness that times and conditions have considerably changed, there is growing up in certain quarters a feeling that we too shall have to make some modifications in order to adapt ourselves to the altered circumstances. It is becoming increasingly evident that even could the said Anglo-Roman controversy be settled by some argument so irresistibly evident as to leave no _locus standi_ to the opponents of the Petrine claims, yet the number of those Anglicans who admit the historical, critical, philosophical, and theological assumptions upon which the controversy is based and which are presumed as common ground, is so small and dwindling that, were they all gained to the Church, we should be still a “feeble folk” in the face of that tidal wave of unbelief whose gathering force bids fair to sweep everything before it. Also the lingering impression left from “Tractarian” days as to the intellectual pre-eminence of the Catholicizing party in the Anglican Church, which pre-eminence might make amends for their numerical insignificance, is gradually giving way to the recognition of the sobering fact that at present that party in no exclusive sense represents the cultivated intellect of the country. It is no disrespect to that party to say that while scholarship and intelligence are therein well represented by scattered individuals, yet it is cumbered, like most religious movements after they have streamed some distance from their source, with a majority of those whose adhesion has little or no pretence to an intellectual basis; and whose occasional accession to the Catholic Church is almost entirely their own gain.

To give the last decisive push to those who are already toppling over the border-line that divides England from Rome, to reap and gather-in the harvest already ripe for the sickle, is a useful, a necessary, and a charitable work; one that calls for a certain kind of patient skill not to be underestimated; but there is a wider and perhaps more fruitful field whose soil is as yet scarcely broken. It may even be asserted with only seeming paradox that the best religious intelligence of the country is to be found in the camp of negation rather than in that of affirmation; among Broad Churchmen, Nonconformists, Unitarians, and Positivists, rather than among those who seek rest in the unstable position of a modified Catholicism. The very instability and difficulty of that position elicits much ingenuity from its theological defenders, though it also divides their counsels not a little; nor do we quarrel with them for affirming instead of denying, but for not affirming enough. But this attempt at compromise, this midway abortion of the natural growth of an idea, even were it justifiable as sometimes happens when legitimate issues are obscured through failure of evidence, repels the great multitude of religious thinkers who are not otherwise sufficiently drawn towards Catholicism to care to examine these claims. To say that there is no logical alternative between Rome and Agnosticism is a sufficiently shallow though popular sophism. At most it means that from certain given premisses one or other of those conclusions must follow syllogistically–a statement that would be more interesting were the said premisses indisputable and admitted by all the world. Still it may be allowed that a criticism of these premisses, which is a third alternative, opens up to religious thought a number of roads, all of which lead away from, rather than towards the extreme Anglican position, and hence that the more searching religious intelligence of the country is as adverse to that position–and for the same reasons–as it is to our own. And by the “religious intelligence” I mean all that intelligence that is interested in the religious problem; be that interest hostile or friendly; be it, in its issue, negative or constructive. For it must not be forgotten that the enemies of a truth are as interested in it as its friends; or that the friendliest interest, the strongest “wish to believe,” may at times issue in reluctant negation. So far then as the great mass of religious intelligence in this country is not “Anglo-Catholic” in its sympathies; and so far as it is chiefly on the “Anglo-Catholic” section that we make any perceptible impression, the conversion of England, for what depends on our own efforts, does not seem to be as imminent a contingency as it would appear to be in the eyes of those foreign critics for whom Lord Halifax is the type of every English Churchman and the English Church co-extensive with the nation–save for a small irreclaimable residue of Liberals and Freemasons.

Those who, influenced by such considerations, would have us extend our efforts from the narrowing circle of Anglo-Catholicism to the ever-widening circle of doubt and negation, are not always clear about the practically important distinction to be drawn between the active leaders of doubt, and those who are passively led; the more or less independent few, and the more or less dependent many; between the man of the study and the man of the street–a distinction analogous to that between the _Ecclesia docens_ and _Ecclesia discens_, and which permeates every well-established school of belief, whether historical, ethical, political, or religious.

Dealing first with the latter, that is, with those who are led; we are becoming more explicitly conscious of the fact that in all departments of knowledge and opinion the beliefs of the many are not determined by reasoning from premisses, but by the authority of reputed specialists in the particular matter, or else by the force of the general consent of those with whom they dwell. There may be other non-rational causes of belief, but these are the principal and more universal. And when we say they are non-rational causes, we do not mean that they are non-reasonable or unreasonable. They provide such a generally trustworthy, though occasionally fallible, method of getting at truth, as is sufficient and possible for the practical needs of life–social, moral, and religious. There is an inborn instinct to think as the crowd does and to be swayed by the confident voice of authority. If at times it fail of its end, as do other instincts, yet it is so trustworthy in the main that to resist it in ordinary conditions is always imprudent. That our eyes sometimes deceive us would not justify us in always distrusting their evidence. If a child is deceived through instinctively trusting the word of its parents, the blame of its error rests with them, not with it. And so, whatever error the many are led into by obeying the instinct of submission to authority or to general consent, is their misfortune, not their fault. Of course there are higher criteria by which the general consent and the opinion of experts can be criticized and modified; but such criticism is not obligatory on the many who have neither leisure nor competence for the task. For here, as elsewhere, a certain diversity of gifts results in a natural division of labour in human society; those who have, giving to those who have not; some ministering spiritual, others temporal benefits to their neighbours. Not that a man can save another’s soul for him any more than he can eat his dinner for him, but he can minister to him better food or worse.

The Mussulman child, then, may be bound, during his intellectual minority, to accept the religious teaching of its parents, just as is the Christian child. That one, in obeying this natural but fallible rule, is led into error, the other into, truth, only verifies the principle that right faith is a gift of God,–a grace, a bit of good fortune. None of those who are not professedly teachers of religion and experts, can be morally bound to a criticism above their competence, or to more than an obedience to those ordinary causes of assent to whose influence they are subjected by their circumstances. The ideal of a Catholic religion is to provide, by means of a divinely guided body of authorities and experts, an universal, international, inter-racial consensus regarding truths that are as obscure as they are vital to individual and social happiness; and thus to afford a means of sure and easy guidance to those uncritical multitudes whose necessary preoccupations forbid their engaging in theology and controversy. This ideal was sufficiently realized for practical purposes in the “ages of faith,” when the whole public opinion of Europe, then believed to be coterminous with civilization, was Catholic; when dissent needed as much independence of character, as in so many places, profession does now. And surely it is a narrow-hearted criticism to prefer the primitive conditions in which none but those strong enough to face persecution could reap the benefits of Christianity. The weak and dependent are ever the majority, and if Christianity had been intended to pass them by or sift them out, “its province were not large,” nor could it claim to be the religion of humanity. The Christian leaven was never meant to be kept apart, but to be hidden and lost in that unleavened mass which it seeks slowly to transform into its own nature. The majority, in respect to religion and civilization, are like unwilling school-boys who need to be coerced for their own benefit, to be kept to their work till they learn (if they ever do) to like it, and to need no more coercion. The support that Catholic surroundings give to numbers, who else were too weak to stand alone, cannot be overvalued, although it may weaken a few who else had exerted themselves more strenuously, or may foster hypocrisy in secret unbelievers who would like to, but dare not withstand public opinion.

Now it is the gradual decay of this support–of this non-rational yet most reasonable cause of belief, that is rendering the religious condition of the man in the street so increasingly unsatisfactory. Not only is there no longer an agreement of experts, and a consequent consensus of nations, touching the broad and fundamental truths of Christianity, but what is far more to the point, the knowledge of this Babylonian confusion has become a commonplace with the multitudes. No doubt there are yet some shaded patches where the dew still struggles with the desiccating sun–old-world sanctuaries of Catholicism whose dwellers hardly realize the existence of unbelief or heresy, or who give at best a lazy, notional assent to the fact. But there are few regions in so-called Christendom where the least educated are not now quite aware that Christianity is but one of many religions in a much larger world than their forefathers were aware of; that the intellect of modern, unlike that of mediaeval Europe, is largely hostile to its claims; that its defenders are infinitely at variance with one another; that there is no longer any social disgrace connected with a non-profession of Christianity; in a word, that the public opinion of the modern world has ceased to be Christian, and that the once all-dominating religion which blocked out the serious consideration of any other claimant, bids fair to be speedily reduced to its primitive helplessness and insignificance. The disintegrating effect of such knowledge on the faith of the masses must be, and manifestly is, simply enormous. Not that there is any rival consensus and authority to take the place of dethroned Catholicism. Even scepticism is too little organized and embodied, too chaotic in its infinite variety of contradictory positions, to create an influential consensus of any positive kind against faith. Its effect, as far as the unthinking masses are concerned, is simply to destroy the chief extrinsic support of their faith and to throw them back on the less regular, less reliable causes of belief. If in addition it teaches them a few catchwords of free-thought, a few smart blasphemies and syllogistic impertinences, this is of less consequence than at first sight appears, since these are attempted after-justifications, and no real causes of their unbelief. For they love the parade of formal reason, as they love big words or technical terms, or a smattering of French or Latin, with all the delight of a child in the mysterious and unfamiliar; but their pretence to be ruled by it is mere affectation, and the tenacity with which they cling to their arguments is rather the tenacity of blind faith in a dogma, than of clear insight into principles.

And this brings us to the problem which gave birth to the present essay.

The growing infection of the uneducated or slightly educated masses of the Catholic laity with the virus of prevalent unbelief is arousing the attention of a few of our clergy to the need of coping with what is to them a new kind of difficulty. Amongst other kindred suggestions, is that of providing tracts for the million dealing not as heretofore with the Protestant, but with the infidel controversy. While the danger was more limited and remote it was felt that, more harm than good would come of giving prominence in the popular mind to the fact and existence of so much unbelief; that in many minds doubts unfelt before would be awakened; that difficulties lay on the surface and were the progeny of shallow-mindedness, whereas the solutions lay deeper down than the vulgar mind could reasonably be expected to go; that on the whole it was better that the few should suffer, than that the many should be disturbed. The docile and obedient could be kept away from contagion, or if infected, could be easily cured by an act of blind confidence in the Church; while the disobedient would go their own way in any case. Hence the idea of entering into controversy with those incompetent to deal with such matters was wisely set aside. But now that the prevalence and growth of unbelief is as evident as the sun at noon–now that it is no longer only the recalcitrant and irreligious, but even the religious and docile-minded who are disturbed by the fact, it seems to some that, a policy of silence and inactivity may be far more fruitful in evil than in good, that reverent reserve must be laid aside and the pearls of truth cast into the trough of popular controversy.

But to this course an almost insuperable objection presents itself at first seeming. Seeing that, the true cause of doubt and unbelief in the uncritical, is to be sought for proximately in the decay of a popular consensus in favour of belief, and ultimately in the disagreements and negations of those who lead and form public opinion, and in no wise in the reasons which they allege when they attempt a criticism that is beyond them; what will it profit to deal with the apparent cause if we cannot strike at the real cause? In practical matters, the reasons men give for their conduct, to themselves as well as to others, are often untrue, never exhaustive. Hence to refute their reasons will not alter their intentions. To dispel the sophisms assigned by the uneducated as the basis of their unbelief, is not really to strike at the root of the matter at all. Besides which, the work is endless; for if they are released from one snare they will be as easily re-entangled in the next; and indeed what can such controversy do but foster in them the false notion that, belief in possession may be dispossessed by every passing difficulty, and that their faith is to be dependent on an intellectual completeness of which they are for ever incapable. Indeed the unavoidable amount of controversy of all kinds, dinned into the ears of the faithful in a country like this, favours a fallacy of intellectualism very prejudicial to the repose of a living faith founded on concrete reasons, more or less experimental.

As far as the many are concerned, much the same difficulty attends the preservation of their faith in these days, as attended its creation in the beginnings of Christianity, before the little flock had grown into a kingdom, when the intellect and power of the world was arrayed against it, when it had neither the force of a world-wide consensus nor the voice of public authority in its favour. In those days it was not by the “persuasive words of human wisdom” that the crowds were gained over to Christ, but by a certain _ostensio virtutis_, by an experimental and not merely by a rational proof of the Gospel–a proof which, if it admitted of any kind of formulation, did not compel them in virtue of the logicality of its form. Further, when the conditions and helps needed by the Church in her infancy, gave way to those belonging to her established strength, it was by her ascendency over the strong, the wealthy, and the learned, that she secured for the crowd,–for the weak and the poor and the ignorant,–the most necessary support of a Christianized, international public opinion, and thereby extended the benefit of her educative influence to those millions whom disinclination or weakness would otherwise have deterred from the profession and practice of the faith.

If the Church of to-day is to retain her hold of the crowd in modernized or modernizing countries, it must either be by renewing her ascendency over those who form and modify public opinion, who even in the purest democracy are ever the few and not the many; or else by a reversion to the methods of primitive times, by some palpable argument that speaks as clearly to the simplest as to the subtlest, if only the heart be right. An outburst of miracle-working and prophecy is hardly to be looked for; while the argument from the tree’s fruits, or from the moral miracle, is at present weakened by the extent to which non-Christians put in practice the morality they have learnt from Christ. Other non-rational causes of belief draw individuals, but they do not draw crowds.

If we cannot see very clearly what is to supply for the support once given to the faith of the millions by public opinion, still their incapacity for dealing with the question on rational grounds will not justify us altogether in silence. For in the first place it is an incapacity of which they are not aware, or which at least they are very unwilling to admit. A candidate at the hustings would run a poor chance of a hearing who, instead of seeming to appeal to the reason of the mob should, in the truthfulness of his soul, try to convince them of their utter incompetence to judge the simplest political point. Again, though unable to decide between cause and cause, yet the rudest can often see that there is much to be said on both sides–though what, he does not understand; and if this fact weakens his confidence in the right, it also weakens it in the wrong; whereas had the right been silent, the wrong, in his judgment, would thereby have been proved victorious. This will justify us at times in talking over the heads of our readers and hearers, and in not sparing sonorous polysyllables, abstruse technicalities, or even the pompous parade of syllogistic arguments with all their unsightly joints sticking out for public admiration. Some hands may be too delicate for this coarse work; but there will always be those to whom it is easy and congenial; and its utility is too evident to allow a mere question of taste to stand in the way.

Moreover, it must be remembered that while many of the class referred to are glad to be free from the pressure of a Christianized public opinion, and are only too willing to grasp at any semblance of a reason for unbelief; others, more religiously disposed, are really troubled by these popular, anti-Christian difficulties, the more so as they are often infected with the fallacy, fostered by ceaseless controversy, which makes one’s faith dependent on the formal reason one can give for it.

Though this is not so, yet moral truthfulness forbids us to assent to what we, however falsely, believe to be untrue. Hence while the virtue of faith remains untouched, its exercise with regard to particular points may be inculpably suspended through ignorance, stupidity, misinformation, and other causes.

In the interest of these well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence than when posed by the difficulties of a “hagnostic” greengrocer, or of a dressmaker fresh from the perusal of “Erbert” Spencer. Face to face with chaos, one knows not where to begin the work of building up an orderly mind; nor will the self-taught genius brook a hint of possible ignorance, or endure the discussion of dull presuppositions, without much pawing of the ground and champing on the bit: “What I want,” he says, “is a plain answer to a plain question.” And when you explain to him that for an answer he must go back very far and become a little child again, and must unravel his mind to the very beginning like an ill-knit stocking, he looks at once incredulous and triumphant as who should say: “There, I told you so!” Yet the same critical incompetence that makes these simple folk quite obtuse to the true and adequate solution of their problems (I am speaking of cases where such solutions are possible), makes them perfectly ready to accept any sort of counter-sophistry or paralogism. A most excellent and genuine “convert” of that class told me that he had stood out for years against the worship of the Blessed Virgin, till one day it had occurred to him that, as a cause equals or exceeds its effect, so the Mother must equal the Son. Another, equally genuine, professed to have been conquered by the reflection that he had all his life been saying: “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,” and he could not see the use of believing in it if he didn’t belong to it. If their faith in Catholicism or in any other religion depended on their logic, men of this widespread class were in a sorry plight. Like many of their betters, these two men probably imagined the assigned reasons to be the entire cause of their conversion, making no account of the many reasonable though non-logical motives by which the change was really brought about. Hence to have abruptly and incautiously corrected them, would perhaps but have been to reduce them to confusion and perplexity, and to “destroy with one’s logic those for whom Christ died.”

That we do not sufficiently realize the dialectical incompetence of the uneducated is partly to be explained by the fact that they often get bits of reasoning by rote, much as young boys learn their Euclid; and that they frequently seem to understand principles because they apply them in the right cases, just as we often quote a proverb appropriately without the slightest idea of its origin or meaning beyond that it is the right thing to say in a certain connection. As we ascend in the scale of education, there is more and more of this reasoning by rote, so that critical incompetence is more easily concealed and may lurk unsuspected even in the pulpit and the professorial chair, where logic alone seems paramount. The “hagnostic” greengrocer, in all the self-confidence of his ignorance, is but the lower extreme of a class that runs up much higher in the social scale and spreads out much wider in every direction.

But when we have realized more adequately how hopelessly incompetent the multitude must necessarily be in the problems of specialists, we shall also see that it is only by inadequate and even sophistical reasoning that most of their intellectual difficulties can be allayed; that the full truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them. If, then, _Tracts for the Million_ seem a necessity, they also seem an impossibility; for what self-respecting man will sit down to weave that tissue of sophistry, special-pleading, violence, and vulgarity, which alone will serve the practical purpose with those to whom trenchency is everything and subtlety nothing? Even though the means involve a violation of taste rather than of morals, yet can they be justified by the goodness of the end? Fortunately, however, the difficulty is met by a particular application of God’s universal method in the education of mankind. In every grade of enlightenment there are found some who are sufficiently in advance of the rest to be able to help them, and not so far in advance as practically to speak a different language. What is a dazzling light for those just emerging from darkness, is darkness for those in a yet stronger light. A statement may be so much less false than another, as to be relatively true; so much less true than a third, as to be relatively false. For a mind wholly unprepared, the full truth is often a light that blinds and darkness; whereas the tempered half-truth prepares the way for a fuller disclosure in due time, even as the law and the prophets prepared the way for the Gospel and Christ, or as the enigmas of faith school us to bear that light which now no man can gaze on and live. Thus, though we may never use a lie in the interest of truth, or bring men from error by arguments we know to be sophistical, yet we have the warrant of Divine example, both in the natural and supernatural education of mankind, for the passive permission of error in the interest of truth, as also of evil in the interest of good. Since then there will ever be found those who in all good faith and sincerity can adapt themselves to the popular need and supply each level of intelligence with the medicine most suited to its digestion, all we ask is that a variety of standards in controversial writings be freely recognized; that each who feels called to such efforts should put forth his very best with a view to helping those minds which are likest his own; that none should deliberately condescend to the use of what from his point of view would be sophistries and vulgarities, remembering at the same time that the superiority of his own taste and judgment is more relative than absolute, and that in the eyes of those who come after, he himself may be but a Philistine.

We conclude then that all that can be done in the way of _Tracts for the Million_ should be done; that seed of every kind should be scattered to the four winds, hoping that each may find some congenial soil.

But even when all that can be done in this way to save the masses from the contagion of unbelief has been done, we shall be as far as ever from having found a substitute for the support which formerly was lent to their faith by a Christianized public opinion. Can we hope for anything more than thus to retard the leakage? The answer to this would take us to the second of our proposed considerations, namely, our attitude towards those who form and modify that public opinion by which the masses are influenced for good or for evil. But it is an answer which for the present must be deferred. [1]

_Nov._ 1900.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: The Introduction to the First Series of these essays attempts to deal with this further question.]

XX.

AN APOSTLE OF NATURALISM.

“A man that could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand” and “did neither look up nor regard, but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and the dust of the floor…. Then said Christiana, ‘Oh, deliver me from this muck-rake.'”–Bunyan.

Naturalism includes various schools which agree in the first principle that nothing is true but what can be justified by those axiomatic truths which every-day experience forces upon our acceptance, not indeed as self-evident, but as inevitable, unless we are to be incapacitated for practical life. It is essentially the philosophy of the unphilosophical, that is, of those who believe what they are accustomed to believe, and because they are so accustomed; who are incapable of distinguishing between the subjective necessity imposed by habits and the objective necessity founded in the nature of things. It is no new philosophy, but as old as the first dawn of philosophic thought, for it is the form towards which the materialistic mind naturally gravitates. Given a population sufficiently educated to philosophize in any fashion, and of necessity the bent of the majority will be in the direction of some form of Naturalism. Hence we find that the “Agnosticism” of Professor Huxley is eminently suited to the capacity and taste of the semi-educated majorities in our large centres of civilization. Still it must not be supposed that the majority really philosophizes at all even to this extent. The pressure of life renders it morally impossible. But they like to think that they do so. The whole temper of mind, begotten and matured by the rationalistic school, is self-sufficient: every man his own prophet, priest, and king; every man his own philosopher. Hence, he who poses as a teacher of the people will not be tolerated. The theorist must come forward with an affectation of modesty, as into the presence of competent critics; he must only expose his wares, win for himself a hearing, and then humbly wait for the _placet_ of the sovereign people. But plainly this is merely a conventional homage to a theory that no serious mind really believes in. We know well enough, that the opinions and beliefs of the multitude are formed almost entirely by tradition, imitation, interest, by in fact any influence rather than that of pure reason. Taught they are, and taught they must be, however they repudiate it. But the most successful teachers and leaders are those who contrive to wound their sense of intellectual self-sufficiency least, and to offer them the strong food of dogmatic assertion sugared over and sparkling with the show of wit and reason.

Philosophy for the million may be studied profitably in one of its popular exponents whose works have gained wide currency among the class referred to. Mr. S. Laing is a very fair type of the average mind-leader, owing his great success to his singular appreciation of the kind of treatment needed to secure a favourable hearing. We do not pretend to review Mr. Laing’s writings for their own sake, but simply as good specimens of a class which is historically rather than philosophically interesting.

We have before us three of his most popular books: _Modern Science and Modern Thought_ (nineteenth thousand), _Problems of the Future_ (thirteenth thousand), _Human Origins_ (twelfth thousand), to which we shall refer as M.S., P.F., H.O., in this essay; taking the responsibility of all italics on ourselves, unless otherwise notified.

Mr. Laing is not regretfully forced into materialism by some mental confusion or obscurity, but he revels in it, and invites all to taste and see how gracious a philosophy it is. There is an ill-concealed levity and coarseness in his handling of religious subjects which breaks,

At seasons, through the gilded pale,

and which warns us from casting reasons before those who would but trample them under foot. It is rather for the sake of those who read such literature, imprudently perhaps, but with no sympathy, and yet find their imagination perplexed and puzzled with a swarm of minute sophistries and difficulties, collectively bewildering, though contemptible singly, that we think it well to form some estimate of the philosophical value of such works.

Nothing in our study of Mr. Laing surprised us more than to discover [1] that he had lived for more than the Scriptural span of three-score and ten years, a life of varied fortunes and many experiences. It seems to us incredible that any man of even average thoughtfulness could, after so many years, find life without God, without immortality, without definite meaning or assignable goal, “worth living,” and that “to be born in a civilized country in the nineteenth century is a boon for which a man can never be sufficiently thankful.” [2] [Thankful to whom? one might ask parenthetically.] In other words, he is a bland optimist, and has nothing but vials of contempt to pour upon the pessimists, from Ecclesiastes down to Carlyle. Pessimism, we are told confidentially, is not an outcome of just reasoning on the miserable residue of hope which materialism leaves to us, but of the indisposition “of those digestive organs upon which the sensation of health and well-being so mainly depends.” “It is among such men, with cultivated intellects, sensitive nerves, and bad digestion, that we find the prophets and disciples of pessimism.” [3] The inference is, that men of uncultivated intellects, coarse nerves, and ostrich livers will coincide with Mr. Laing in his sanguine view of the ruins of religion. The sorrowing dyspeptic asks in despair: “Son of man, thinkest thou that these dry bones will live again?” “I’m cock-sure of it,” answers Mr. Laing, and the ground of his assurance is the healthiness of his liver.

Carlyle, who in other matters is, according to Mr. Laing, a great genius, a more than prophet of the new religion, on this point suddenly collapses into “a dreadful croaker,” styling his own age “barren, brainless, soulless, faithless.” [4] But the reason is, of course, that “he suffered from chronic dyspepsia” and was unable “to eat his three square meals a day.” A very consistent explanation for an avowed materialist, but slightly destructive to the value of his own conclusions, being a two-edged sword. Indeed he almost allows as much. “For such dyspeptic patients there is an excuse. Pessimism is probably as inevitably their creed, as optimism is for the more fortunate mortals who enjoy the _mens sana in corpore sano_.” [5] However, there are some pessimists for whom indigestion can plead no excuse, [6] but for whose intellectual perversity some other cosmic influence must be sought “behind the veil, behind the veil,”–to borrow Mr. Laing’s favourite line from his favourite poem. These are not only “social swells, would-be superior persons and orthodox theologians, but even a man of light and learning like Mr. F. Harrison.” “Religion, they say, is becoming extinct…. Without a lively faith in such a personal, ever-present deity who listens to our prayers, … there can be, they say, no religion; and they hold, and I think rightly hold, that the only support for such a religion is to be found in the assumed inspiration of the Bible and the Divinity of Christ.” “Destroy these and they think the world will become vulgar and materialized, losing not only the surest sanction of morals, but … the spiritual aspiration and tendencies,” &c. [7] “To these gloomy forebodings I venture to return a positive and categorical denial … Scepticism has been the great sweetener of modern life.” [8] How he justifies his denial by maintaining that morality can hold its own when reduced to a physical science; that the “result of advancing civilization” and of the materialistic psychology is “a clearer recognition of the intrinsic sacredness and dignity of every human soul;” [9] that Christianity without dogma, without miracles [or, as he calls it, “Christian agnosticism”], shall retain the essential spirit, the pure morality, the consoling beliefs, and as far as possible even the venerable form and sacred associations of the old faith, may appear later. At present we are concerned directly with pointing out how Mr. Laing’s optimism at once marks him off from those men who, whether believing or misbelieving or unbelieving, have thought deeply and felt deeply, who have seen clearly that materialism leaves nothing for man’s soul but the husks of swine; who have therefore boldly faced the inevitable alternative between spiritualistic philosophy and hope, and materialism with its pessimistic corollary. That a man may be a materialist or atheist and enjoy life thoroughly, who does not know? but then it is just at the expense of his manhood, because he lives without thought, reflection, or aspiration, _i.e.,_ materialistically. Mr. Laing no doubt, as he confesses, has lived pleasantly enough. He has found in what he calls science an endless source of diversion, he betrays himself everywhere as a man of intense intellectual curiosity in every direction, and yet withal so little concerned with the roots of things, so easily satisfied with a little plausible coherence in a theory, as not to have found truth an apparently stern or exacting mistress, not to have felt the anguish of any deep mental conflict. His intellectual labours have been pleasurable because easy, and, in his own eyes, eminently fruitful and satisfactory. He has adopted an established cause, thrown himself into it heart and soul; others indeed had gone before him and laboured, and he has entered into their labours. Indeed, he is frank in disclaiming all originality of discovery or theory; [10] he has not risked the disappointment and anxiety of improving on the Evolution Gospel, but he has collected and sorted and arranged and published the evidence obtained by others. This has always furnished him with an interest in life; [11] but whether it be a rational interest or not depends entirely on the usefulness or hurtfulness of his work. He admits, however, that though life for him has been worth living, “some may find it otherwise from no fault of their own, more by their own fate.” [12] But all can lead fairly happy lives by following his large-type platitudinous maxim, “Fear nothing, make the best of everything.” [13] In other words, the large majority, who are not and never can be so easily and pleasantly circumstanced as Mr. Laing, are told calmly to make the best of it and to rejoice in the thought that their misery is a necessary factor in the evolution of their happier posterity. This is the new gospel: _Pauperes evangelizantur_–“Good news for the poor.” [14] “Progress and not happiness” is the end we are told to make for, over and over again; but, progress towards what, is never explained, nor is any basis for this duty assigned. Indeed, duty means nothing for Mr. Laing but an inherited instinct, which if we choose to disobey or if we happen not to possess, who shall blame us or talk to us of “oughts”?

And now to consider more closely the grounds of Mr. Laing’s very cheerful view of a world in which, for all we know, there is no soul, no God, and certainly no faith. Since of the two former we know and can know nothing, we must build our happiness, our morality, our “religion,” on a basis whereof they form no part. He believes that morality will be able to hold its own distinct, not only from all belief in revelation, in a personal God, and in a spiritual soul, but in spite of a philosophy which by tracing the origin of moral judgments to mere physical laws of hereditary transmission of experienced utilities, robs them of all authority other than prudential, and convicts them of being illusory so far as they seem to be of higher than human origin.

Herein, as usual, he treads in the steps of Professor Huxley, “the greatest living master of English prose” (though why his mastery of prose should add to his weight as a philosopher, we fail to see). “Such ideas _evidently_ come from education, and are not the results either of inherited instinct [15] or of supernatural gift…. Given a being with man’s brain, man’s hands, and erect stature, _it is easy to see_ how … rules of conduct … must have been formed and fixed by successive generations, according to the Darwinian laws.” [16]

He tells us: “We may read the Athanasian Creed less, but we practise Christian charity more in the present than in any former age.” [17] “Faith has diminished, charity increased.” [18]

Of moral principles, he says: “Why do we say that … they carry conviction with them and prove themselves?… Still, there they are, and being what they are … it requires no train of reasoning or laboured reflection to make us _feel_ that ‘right is right,’ and that it is _better_ for ourselves and others to act on such precepts … rather than to reverse these rules and obey the selfish promptings of animal nature.” [19] “It is _clearly_ our highest wisdom to follow right, not from selfish calculation, … but because ‘right is right.’ … For practical purposes it is comparatively unimportant how this standard got there … as an absolute imperative rule.” [20] As to the apprehended ill effect of agnosticism on morals, he says: “The foundations of morals [21] are fortunately built on solid rock and not on shifting sand. It may truly be said in a great many cases that, as individuals and nations become more sceptical, they become more moral.” [22] “_If there is one thing more certain than another_ in the history of evolution, it is that morals have been evolved by the same laws as regulate the development of species.” [23]

These citations embody Mr. Laing’s opinions on this point, and show very clearly his utter incapacity for elementary philosophic thought. Here, as elsewhere, as soon as he leaves the bare record of facts and embarks in any kind of speculation, he shows himself helpless; however, he tries to fortify his own courage and that of his readers, with “it is clear,” “it is evident,” “it is certain.”

To say that “right is right,” sounds very oracular; but it either means that “right” is an ultimate spring of action, inexplicable on evolutionist principles, or that right is the will of the strongest, or an illusory inherited foreboding of pain, or a calculation of future pleasure and pain, or something which, in no sense, is a true account of what men _do_ mean by right. To say that moral principles “carry conviction with them, and prove themselves” _(i.e._, are self-evident), unless, as we suspect, it is mere verbiage conveying nothing particular to Mr. Laing’s brain, is to deny that right has reference to the consequences of action as bearing on human progress and evolution, which is to deny the very theory he wishes to uphold. No intuitionist could have spoken more strongly. Then we are assured that we “feel” rightness, or that “right is right”–apparently as a simple irresoluble quality of certain actions–and with same breath, that “it is _better_ for ourselves and others to act on these rules,” where he jumps off to utilitarianism again; and then we are forbidden to “obey the selfish impulses of our animal nature”–a strange prohibition for one who sees in us nothing but animal nature, who denies us any free power to withstand its impulses. Then it is “clearly our highest wisdom to follow right”–an appeal to prudential motives–“not from any selfish calculations”–a repudiation of prudential motives–“but because ‘right is right'”–an appeal to a blind unreasoning instinct, and a prohibition to question its authority. We are told that for practical purposes it matters little whence this absolute imperative rule originates. Was there ever a more unpractical and short-sighted assertion! Convince men that the dictates of conscience are those of fear or selfishness, that they are all mere animal instincts, that they are anything less than divine, and who will care for Mr. Laing’s appeal to blind faith in the “rightness of right”?

As long as Christian tradition lives on, as it will for years among the masses, the effects of materialist ethics will not be felt; but as these new theories filter down from the few to the many, they will inevitably produce their logical consequences in practical matters. No one with open eyes can fail to see how the leaven is spreading already. Still the majority act and speak to a great extent under the influence of the old belief, which they have repudiated, in the freedom of man’s will and the Divine origin of right. It is quite plain that Mr. Laing has either never had patience to think the matter out, or has found it beyond his compass. Having thus established morality on a foundation independent of religion and of everything else, making “right” rest on “right,” he assumes the prophetic robe, and on the strength of his seventy years of experience and philosophy poses as a _Cato Major_ for the edification of the semi-scientific millions of young persons to whom he addresses his volumes. We have a whole chapter on Practical Life, [24] on self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, full of portentous platitudes and ancient saws; St. Paul’s doctrine of charity, and all that is best in the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, is liberated from its degrading association with the belief in a God who rewards and punishes.[25] We are “to act strenuously in that direction which, after _conscientious_ inquiry, seems the best, … and trust to what religious men call Providence, and scientific men Evolution, for the result,” and all this simply on the bold assertion of this sage whose sole aim is “to leave the world a little better rather than a little worse for my individual unit of existence.” [26]

And here we may inquire parenthetically as to the motive which urges Mr. Laing to throw himself into the labours of the apostolate and to become such an active propagandist of agnosticism. We are told[27] that the enlightened should be “liberal and tolerant towards traditional opinions and traditional practices, and trust with cheerful faith to evolution to bring about _gradually_ changes of form,” &c.; that the influence of the clergy is “on the whole exerted for good,” and it is frankly acknowledged that Christianity has been a potent factor in the evolution of modern civilization. It has, however, nearly run its course, and the old order must give place to the new, _i.e._, to agnosticism. But even allowing, what we dare say Mr. Laing would not ask, that the speculative side of the new religion is fully defined and worked out, and ready to displace the old dogmatic creeds, yet its practical aspect is so vague that he writes: “I think the time is come when the intellectual victory of agnosticism is so far assured, that it behoves thinking men to _begin to consider_ what practical results are likely to follow from it.” [28] In the face of this confession we find Mr. Laing industriously addressing himself to “those who lack time and opportunity for studying,” [29] to the “minds of my younger readers, and of the working classes who are striving after culture,” [30] “to what may be called the semi-scientific readers, … who have already acquired some elementary ideas about science,” “to the millions;” [31] and endeavouring by all means in his power to destroy the last vestige of their faith in that religion which alone provides for them a definite code of morality strengthened by apparent sanctions of the highest order, and venerable at least by its antiquity and universality. [32] And while he is thus busily pulling down the old scaffolding, he is calmly _beginning_ to consider the practical results. This is his method of “leaving the world a little better than he found it.” He professes to understand and appreciate “In Memoriam.” Has he ever reflected on the lines: “O thou that after toil and storm,” [33] when the practical conclusion is–

Leave thou thy sister, when she prays, Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadowed hint infuse A life that leads melodious days.
Her faith through form is pure as thine, Her hands are quicker unto good;
O sacred be the flesh and blood,
To which she links a truth divine.

On his own principles he is convicted of being a lover of mischief. No, one is sorely tempted to think that these men are well aware that the moral sense which sound philosophy and Christian faith have developed, is still strong in the minds and deeper conscience of the English-speaking races, and that were they to present materialism in all its loathsome nudity to the public gaze, they would be hissed off the stage. And so they dress it up in the clothes of the old religion just for the present, with many a quiet wink between themselves at the expense of the “semi-scientific” reader.

We have already adverted to Mr. Laing’s utter incapacity for anything like philosophy, except so far as that term can be applied to a power of raking together, selecting, and piling up into “a popular shape” the scraps of information which favour the view whose correctness he was convinced of ere he began. A few further remarks may justify this somewhat severe estimate. After stating that in the solution of life and soul problems, science stops short at germs and nucleated cells, he proceeds with the usual tirade against metaphysics: “Take Descartes’ fundamental axiom: _Cogito ergo sum_…. Is it really an axiom?… If the fact that I am conscious of thinking proves the fact that I exist, is the converse true that whatever does not think does not exist?… Does a child only begin to exist when it begins to think? If _Cogito ergo sum_ is an institution to which we can trust, why is not _Non cogito ergo non sum?_” [34] Here is a man posing before the gaping millions as a philosopher and a severe logician, who thinks that the proposition, “every cow is a quadruped,” is disproved by the evident falsehood of, “what is not a cow is not a quadruped,” which he calls “the converse.” He sums up magnificently by saying: “These are questions to which no metaphysical system that I have ever seen, can return the semblance of an answer;” giving the impression of a life devoted to a deep and exhaustive study of all schools of philosophy. Mr. Laing here surely is addressing his “younger readers.”

He tells us elsewhere [35] that, “when analyzed by science, spiritualism leads straight to materialism;” free-will “can be annihilated by the simple mechanical expedient of looking at a black wafer stuck on a white wall;” that if “Smith falls into a trance and believes himself to be Jones, he really is Jones, and Smith has become a stranger to him while the trance lasts…. I often ask myself the question, If he died during one of these trances, which would he be, Smith or Jones? and I confess it takes some one wiser than I am to answer it.” Without pretending to be wiser than Mr. Laing, we hope it will not be too presumptuous for us to suggest that if Smith dies in a trance _believing_ himself to be Jones, he is under a delusion, and that he really is Smith. Else it would be very awkward for poor Jones, who in nowise believes himself to be Smith. Mr. Laing would have to break it gently to Jones, that, “in fact, my dear sir, Smith borrowed your personality, and unfortunately died before returning it; and as to whether you are yourself or Smith, as to whether you are alive or dead, ‘I confess it takes some one wiser than I am to decide.'” That a man’s own name, own surroundings, own antecedents, are all objects of his thought, and distinguished from the _self, ego,_ or _subject_ which contemplates them, has never suggested itself to Mr. Laing. That though Smith may mistake every one of these, yet the term “I” necessarily and invariably means the same for him, the one central, constant unity to which every _non-ego_ is opposed. And this from a man who elsewhere claims an easy familiarity with Kant. “Again what can be said of love and hate if under given circumstances they can be transformed into one another by a magnet?” What indeed? And how is it that the gold-fish make no difference in the weight of the globe of water?

His conclusion to these inquiries is: “When Shakespeare said, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of,’ he enumerates what has become a scientific fact. The ‘stuff’ is in all cases the same–vibratory motions of nerve particles.” [36] Thus knowledge, self-consciousness, free-choice, is as much a function of matter as fermentation, or crystallisation–a mode of motion, not dissimilar from heat, perhaps transformable therewith.

Recapitulating this farrago of nonsense on p. 188, he adds a new difficulty which ought to make him pause in his wild career. “What is the value of the evidence of the senses if a suggestion can make us see the hat, but not the man who wears it; or dance half the night with an imaginary partner? Am I ‘I myself, I,’ or am I a barrel-organ playing ‘God save the Queen,’ if the stops are set in the normal fashion, but the ‘Marseillaise’ if some cunning hand has altered them without my knowledge? These are questions which I cannot answer.” He cannot answer a question on which the value of his whole system of physical philosophy depends; uncertain about his own identity, about the evidence of his senses, he would make the latter the sole rule and measure of certitude, and deny to man any higher faculty by which alone he can justify his trust in his cognitive faculties. Another instance of his absolute ignorance of common philosophic terminology is when he asserts that according to theology we know the dogmas of religion by “intuition.” [37]

This doctrine rests on Cardinal Newman’s celebrated theory of the “Illative Sense.” Surely a moment’s reflection on the meaning of words, not to speak of a slight acquaintance with the book referred to, would have saved him from confounding two notions so sharply distinguished as “intuition” and “inference.” Again, “There can be no doubt there are men often of great piety and excellence who have, or fancy they have, a sort of sixth sense, or, as Cardinal Newman calls it, an ‘illative sense,’ by which they see by intuition … things unprovable or disprovable by ordinary reason.” [38] Can a man who makes such reckless travesties of a view which he manifestly has never studied, be credited with intellectual honesty?

Doubtless, the semi-scientific millions will be much impressed by the wideness of Mr. Laing’s reading and his profound grasp of all that he has read, when they are told casually that “space and time are, … to use the phraseology of Kant, ‘imperative categories;'” [39] but perhaps to other readers it may convey nothing more than that he has heard a dim something somewhere about Kant, about the categories, about space and time being schemata of sense, and about the _categorical imperative._ It is only one instance of the unscrupulous recklessness which shows itself everywhere. Akin to this is his absolute misapprehension of the Christian religion which he labours to refute. He never for a moment questions his perfect understanding of it, and of all it has got to say for itself. Brought up apparently among Protestants, who hold to a verbal inspiration [40] and literal interpretation of the Scriptures, who have no traditional or authoritative interpretation of it, he concludes at once that his own crude, boyish conception of Christianity is the genuine one, and that every deviation therefrom is a “climbing down,” or a minimizing. He has no suspicion that the wider views of interpretation are as old as Christianity itself, and have always co-existed with the narrower.

He regards the Christian idea of God as essentially anthropomorphic. Indeed, whether in good faith or for the sake of effect, he brings forward the old difficulties which have been answered _ad nauseam_ with an air of freshness, as though unearthed for the first time, and therefore as setting religion in new and unheard-of straits. So, at all events, it will seem to the millions of his young readers and to the working classes.

Let us follow him in some of his destructive criticism, or rather denunciations, in order to observe his mode of procedure. “The discoveries of science … make it impossible for _sincere_ men to retain the faith,” &c., [41] therefore all who differ from Mr. Laing are insincere. “It is _absolutely certain_ that portions of the Bible are not true; and those, important portions.” [42] This is based on two premisses which are therefore absolutely certain, (i) Mr. Laing’s conclusions about the antiquity of man–of which more anon; (43) his baldly literal interpretation of the Bible as delivered to him in his early “infancy. On p. 253, we have the ancient difficulty from the New Testament prophecy of the proximate end of the world, without the faintest indication that it was felt 1800 years ago, and has been dealt with over and over again. Papias [44] is lionized [45] in order to upset the antiquity of the four Gospels–which upsetting, however, depends on a dogmatic interpretation of an ambiguous phrase, and the absence of positive testimony. Here again there is no evidence that Mr. Laing has read any elementary text-book on the authenticity of the Gospels. He is “perfectly clear” as to the fourth Gospel being a forgery; again for reasons which he alone has discovered. [46] Paul is the first inventor of Christian dogma, without any doubt or hesitation. But the undoubted results of modern science … shatter to pieces the whole fabric. _It is as certain as that_ 2 + 2 = 4 that the world was not created in the manner described in Genesis.”

As regards harmonistic difficulties of the Old and New Testaments, he assumes the same confident tone of bold assertion without feeling any obligation to notice the solutions that have been suggested. It makes for his purpose to represent the orthodox as suddenly struck dumb and confounded by these amazing discoveries of his. He sees discrepancies everywhere in the Gospel narrative, e.g.: [47]

“Judas’ death is _differently_ described.” “Herod is introduced by Luke and not mentioned by the others.” “Jesus carried His own Cross in one account, while Simon of Cyrene bore it in another. Jesus gave no answer to Pilate, says Matthew; He explains that His Kingdom was not of the world, says John. Mary His Mother sat _(sic)_ at the foot of the Cross, according to St. John; it was not His Mother, but Mary the mother of Salome _(sic)_ ‘who beheld Him from afar,’ according to Mark and Matthew. There was a guard set to watch the tomb, says Matthew; there is no mention of one by the others.”

At first we thought Mr. Laing must have meant _differences_ and not discrepancies; but the following paragraph forbade so lenient an interpretation. “The only other mention of Mary by St. John, who describes her as sitting _(sic)_ by the foot of the Cross, is apocryphal, being directly contradicted by the very precise statement [48] in the three other Gospels, that the Mary who was present on that occasion was a different woman, the mother of Salome.” Even his youngest readers ought to open their eyes at this. Similarly he thinks the omission of the Lord’s Prayer by St. Mark tells strongly against its authenticity. [49]

II.

We must now say something about the great facts of evolutionary philosophy which have shattered dogmatic Christianity to pieces, and have made it impossible for any sincere man to remain a Christian. To say that Mr. Laing is absolutely certain of the all-sufficiency of evolutionism to explain everything that is knowable to the human mind, that he does not hint for a moment that this philosophy is found by the “bell-wethers” of science to be every day less satisfactory as a complete _rationale_ of the physical cosmos; is really to understate the case for sheer lack of words to express the intensity of his conviction. His fundamental fact is that, however theologians may shuffle out of the first chapter of Genesis by converting days into periods, when we come to the story of the Noachean Deluge, we are confronted with such a glaring absurdity that we must at once allow that the Bible is full of myths. For history and science show that man existed probably two hundred thousand years ago, at all events not less than twenty thousand; also that five thousand B.C., a highly organized civilization existed in Egypt, whose monuments of that date give evidence to the full development of racial and linguistic differences as now existing among men; that this plants the common stem from which these have branched off, in an indefinitely remote pre-historic period; that to suppose that the present races and tongues are all derived from one man (Noe), who lived only two thousand B.C., is a monstrous impossibility; still more so, to believe that the countless thousands of species of animals which populate the world were collected from the four quarters of the globe, were housed and fed in the Ark, landed on Mount Ararat, and thence spread themselves out over the world again regardless of interjacent seas. Hence the Bible story of human origins is a mere myth; man has not fallen, but has risen by slow evolution from some ancestor common to him and apes, at a remote period, long sons prior even to the miocene period, which shows man to have been then as obstinately differentiated from the apes as ever. Therefore “all did not die in Adam,” and seeing this is the foundation of the dogmatic Christianity invented by Paul, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. [45]

And indeed, given that the Bible means what Mr. Laing says it means, and that science has proved what he says it has proved, that the two results are incompatible, few would care to deny. As regards the latter condition, let us see some of his reasonings. We are told that “modern science shows that uninterrupted historical records, confirmed by contemporary monuments, carry history back at least one thousand years before the supposed creation of man … and show then no trace of a commencement, but populous cities, celebrated temples, great engineering works, and a high state of the arts and of civilization already existing.” [46] Strange to say, Mr. Laing developes a sudden reverence for the testimony of _priests_ at the outset of his historical inquiries, and finds that history begins with “priestly organizations;” [47] that the royal records are “made and preserved by special castes of priestly colleges and learned scribes, and that they are to a great extent precise in date and accurate in fact.” Of course this does not include Christian priests, but the priests of barbarous cults of many thousand years ago, who, as well as their royal masters, are at once credited with all the delicacy of the accurate criticism which we boast of in these days–how vainly, God knows. We are told one moment that Herodotus “was credulous, and not very critical in distinguishing between fact and fable,” that his “sources of information were often not much better than vague popular traditions, or the tales told by guides;” [48] and yet we are to lay great stress on his assertion that the Egyptian priests told him “that during the long succession of ages of the three hundred and forty-five high priests of Heliopolis, whose statues they showed him in the Temple of the Sun, there had been no change in the length of human life or the course of nature.” [49] A valuable piece of evidence _if_ Herodotus reports rightly, and _if_ the priest was not like the average guide, and _if_ the statues answered to real existences, and _if_ each of the three hundred and forty-five high priests made a truthful assertion of the above to his successor for the benefit of posterity.

Manetho’s History is, however, the chief source of our information as to the antiquity of Egyptian civilization. He was commissioned to compile this History by Ptolemy Philadelphus, “from the most authentic temple records and other sources of information,” [50] whose infallibility is taken for granted. He was “eminently qualified for such a task, being,” as Mr. Laing will vouch, [51] “a learned and judicious man, and a priest of Sebbenytus, one of the oldest and most famous temples.” Let us by all means read Manetho’s History; but where is it? It is “unfortunately lost, … but fragments of it have been preserved in the works of Josephus, Eusebius, Julius Africanus, and Syncellus…. With the curious want of critical faculty of almost all the Christian Fathers” [52] (so different from the learned, judicious, upright priests of the sun), “these extracts, though professing to be quotations from the same book, contain many inconsistencies and in several instances they have been obviously tampered with, especially by Eusebius, in order to bring their chronology more in accordance with that of the Old Testament, … but there can be _no doubt_ that his original work assigned an antiquity to Menes of over 5500 B.C.” [53] “On the whole, we have to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history.”

Manetho, however, needed confirmation against the aspersions of the orthodox, who thought he might be deficient in critical delicacy, and prone to exaggerate as even later historians had done. Their casuistic minds also suggested that his list comprised Kings who had ruled different provinces simultaneously. But this “effugium” was cut off by the witness of contemporary monuments and manuscripts. “This has now been done to such an extent that it may be fairly said that Manetho is confirmed, and it is fully established, as a fact acquired by science, that nearly all his Kings and dynasties are proved by monuments to have existed, and that, successively.” [54]

What is needed for the validity of this argument is a concurrence, which could not possibly be fortuitous, between the clear and undoubted testimony of Manetho and of the monuments. But first of all, what sort of probability is there left of our possessing anything approximately like the results of Manetho: and if we had them, of their historical accuracy? Secondly, is it at all credible that so fragmentary and fortuitous a record as survives in monuments (allowing again their very dubious historical worth) should just happen to coincide with the