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CHAPTER VII.

COUNTER-CURRENTS.

WE have followed far on the track of the man's life ; we have seen him with the eyes of his associates, of himself, and of the wife of later years; and yet we have not faced, except in glimpses, the field of his deepest energies, or the truest manifestation of his character. For that, we must consider the religious problem of the age, as he met it and as his contemporaries met it.

The effort of the religious mind has always been to discern a relation between the human soul and the power which governs the universe; a relation which shall guide man's action, shall support him under all calamities and fears, and shall justify a perfect trust and hope. Christianity in its own way affirmed such a relation. The stumbling-block which in our age the religious mind has found in Christianity was, in the first instance, that the divine government of human destiny which it presented appeared in one respect unjust and inhuman. William Smith has set forth his own early experience, under the guise of Cyril's revolt against the doctrine of eternal punishment. In a word: "A government of mankind unjust and inhuman therefore unworshipful therefore in

credible!"

The dogma of eternal perdition had not been inconsistent with the general sentiment and practice of Europe in earlier times. The right of every human being to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may in our day be an axiom; to the medieval world it would have been a paradox. Through the laws and manners of those centu

ries there runs a deep vein of savagery. Into the lineage of Christendom, the Jew brought a full share of "Asia's rancor;" the Roman after an insurrection lined his highways with crucified slaves; the Northern people were a fierce, fighting stock. The mild genius of early Christianity, fusing with such elements, in a degree softened them, and in a degree received their impress. The practical attitude of society toward the heretic, the criminal, and the infidel was such as accorded not ill with the belief that Divine Justice assigned a part of its erring creatures to hopeless ruin. But, in the new growth of society, man had now come to feel more tenderly to his fellows, and also to think more highly of himself as man. Christianity itself, in its best phases, had toiled with a new ardor of compassion for the unfortunate classes. While the philosophers of the eighteenth century taught man to think of himself as something better than a guilty worm, while Rousseau gave expression to a great impulse of universal brotherhood, it was also largely due to churchmen like the Wesleys and John Howard, and to the reformers of English jurisprudence, that Englishmen were coming to feel that the wicked and the degraded ought to be saved rather than to be cursed by their fellow-men. By their fellow-men-then why not by their Maker? That was the startling question with which practical Christianity turned back on theoretical Christianity. On just this ground the father of John Stuart Mill broke away from Christianity altogether; to him and to his greater son, "the omnipotent author of hell" was incredible, impossible. So for many others the whole fabric of Christianity went down because of this terrible dogma.

"But why reject the whole? Why give up a historical revelation of God to man, the divine Christ, the faith and aspiration ripened by eighteen hundred years, because some elements of superstition and horror have mingled with it, and ought now to be abandoned?" So felt

and reasoned those men, at once reverent and progressive, who remained within the Christian church, and, against the inertia or hostility of its blindly conservative elements, introduced gradually a more humane and rational teaching. And far more extensive than any explicit renunciation of the dogma of hopeless perdition has been its fading into dimness and unreality in most of those who still think they believe it.

But for another class of minds, the first difficulty, a moral difficulty, led the way to another, an intellectual difficulty. Impelled to reject one article of the church's creed, they were forced upon the inquiry, On what authority does this entire creed rest? Modify this body of doctrine if you will; make its assertions conform to our highest ideals and aspirations; enthrone pure justice and benevolence over the universe; but, after all, be the creed made ever so beautiful and attractive, how do we know that it is true? What foundation of known fact supports it?

The old answer had been, "The church declares it." The mystic, infallible authority of the church has been asserted with so potent an appeal to the imagination and to religious sentiment, that even in our own day a few of the finest minds and an army of the less intelligent respond to it. But the sturdier intellect of Europe has long since concluded that Leo Tenth had no access to the divine counsels beyond what Luther had; that neither baptismal water nor consecrating oil nor papal tiara gives any initiation into mysteries hid from common eyes. But though there be no infallibility of popes or councils, yet in the Bible Protestants still hold we have an infallible book, or, at the least, a trustworthy historical account of a direct revelation made by God to man, consummated in the divine life and teaching of Christ. And on this Protestantism planted itself.

Now, while these ecclesiastical controversies have been

in progress, for some three centuries past another kind of inquiry has been going on. Man has been engaged, with immense interest and growing success, in finding out by actual, close scrutiny, what kind of a world he is living in, what the generations before him were, what his body is, and in fine, what he is himself. For a long while the church had undertaken to tell him all it was necessary to know about these things. "The church," - well, after all it appeared that the church was simply a company of his fellow-men. Certainly they could not tell him all he wanted to know; assuredly this company of his fellows should no longer forbid him to use his eyes and his mind for such knowledge as lay in them to acquire! The Catholic Church was very confident that it knew all about God and the unseen and future worlds; the church's revolted daughters, too, the Protestant sects, were well assured on these themes. So be it, then; let churchmen of all shades hold their knowledge or belief about God and heaven and hell; very likely they may be right. But here meanwhile is this seen and present world, with its rocks and plants and animals and human creatures, and its stars above; let us find out all we can about these! Under this impulse has grown all that wonderful knowledge of which we speak as science.

Now, after a while, this accumulation of knowledge, and this way of regarding man and the world, must needs encounter the assertions which the church has been making as to how the universe is governed, where man came from, where he is going to, and how he ought to conduct himself. And true science, in its exact and scrupulous fashion, will make here no sweeping affirmation or denial as to the vast and various body of tenets which are laid down by individual churches, or by all churches in common. To some of the most familiar ideas of Christian theology, men of the scientific habit will generally be opposed; as to other ideas, they may be favorable, or

divided among themselves; and as to yet others, it may be generally agreed that science proper has nothing to say pro or con; in other words, that they are not matters on which we can have clear and definite knowledge, though they may perhaps have a place and a weight in human life.

The broadest result of scientific inquiry has been the discovery, in every quarter to which its researches could penetrate, of a regular order in the succession of events. It has traced a definite and fixed relation of cause and effect running through all the phenomena of nature, even in those which in earlier ages could be referred only to the inscrutable will and pleasure of God. In the movements of the whirlwind and of the planets, in eclipses and meteors, in pestilence and famine, science has traced the existence of sure, unvarying causes. In a word, the steady tendency of science has been to suggest a perfect unity, an unvarying order, through all the known creation.

Now this idea of universal order collides at several points with the traditional conceptions of Christian theology. It is unfavorable to the belief in a rebellious and hostile power forever warring against the Supreme ruler, and an early infraction of man's normal relations, followed by a costly and imperfect retrieval. It is unfavorable to the belief in a habitual interruption of the natural order of events by special divine interventions. And meantime the study of history has discovered a natural genesis of "miracles," not as wilful impostures, but as products of a fervid and untrained imagination. And at last the inevitable issue is raised, Were the phenomena recorded of the birth of Christianity the genuine credentials of an authoritative revelation from Heaven to man? Or were those miracles simply an imaginative dress, investing the central fact of a very noble but only human personality?

It is through the acceptance of the latter conclusion

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