Arrows of Freethought
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With the revolutionary movement of '48 came a fresh impulse from France. The great evangel of '89 had not perished; it was only in abeyance; and again it burst upon Europe with its words of fire. We all know how the Republic which was then established was soon suppressed in blood by the gang of adventurers presided over by Napoleon the Little. But the day of retribution came, and the empire went the way of all tyrannies. On its ruins the Republic has been established anew, and now it reckons in its service and among its champions the best intellects and the noblest characters in France; while the masses of the people, taught by the bitter lessons of adversity, are also content to enjoy the benefits of ordered liberty and peaceful progress under its benign sway.
Now French progress has always been a question of ideas no less than of material advantage. The great democratic leaders in France have nearly all been avowed Freethinkers. They have separated themselves alike from "the blood on the hands of the king and the lie at the lips of the priest," being perfectly assured that outward freedom in politics is in the long run impossible without inward freedom of thought. The chief statesman in France, M. Gambetta, has publicly declared himself a disciple of Voltaire, and neither at the marriages nor at the funerals of his friends does he ever enter the doors of a church. He stays outside and quietly allows those who desire it to go in and listen to the mumbling of the priest.
My purpose, however, being literary and not political, I must recur to my remark that a fresh impulse came to us from France after the revolution of '48. Lamartine at first exercised considerable influence here, but gradually Victor Hugo's star ascended, and from the moment it reached the zenith until now, he has been accounted the supreme poet of France, and the greatest contemporary evangelist of the ideas of '89. He is a Freethinker as well as a Republican; and it was inevitable that the younger school of writers in England, who acknowledge him as a lofty master, should drink from his inexhaustible spring the living waters of Democracy and Freethought.
French influence on our very recent literature is evident in such works as Mr. John Morley's Studies on Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Condorcet; Mr. Christie's monumental Life of Etienne Dolet, the Freethought martyr; and Mr. Parton's new Life of Voltaire; all of which demand and will amply requite our attention.
Such are the influences which have conspired to shape the literary activities of the generation in which we live. Now Freethought, like a subtle essence, penetrates everywhere. Every book betrays its presence, and even the periodical literature of our age is affected by it. The Archbishop of Canterbury laments that Christian men cannot introduce the most respectable magazines into their homes without the risk of poisoning the minds of their families with heretical ideas.
One of the signs that Freethought had begun to leaven the educated classes was the publication of the famous "Essays and Reviews." The heresy of that book was exceedingly small, but it roused a great storm in the religious world and led to more than one clerical prosecution. Another sign was the publication of Colenso's learned work on the Pentateuch. This hard-working Colonial Bishop was denounced as a heretic by the idler home Bishops, and Ruskin has said that they would have liked to burn Colenso alive, and make Ludgate Hill easier for the omnibuses with the cinders of him. An antagonist very different from the Bishops was Mr. Matthew Arnold, who severely censured Colenso's whole method of criticism, as a handling of religious questions in an irreligious spirit. Mr. W. R. Greg admirably defended the Bishop, and the controversy ended in a drawn battle.
But what has happened since? The same Matthew Arnold who censured Colenso has himself published two remarkable works on "Literature and Dogma" and "God and the Bible," written it is true on a different plan from Colenso's, but containing a hundred times more heresy than the Bishop crammed into all his big volumes. For Mr. Arnold deprecates the idea of a personal god, likens the Christian Trinity to three Lord Shaftesburys, and says that the Bible miracles must all be given up without reservation. All the positive religion he leaves us is the belief in "An eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness," which is about as nebulous a creed as ever was preached. Now Mr. Arnold is not an insignificant person. He is recognised as a past-master of English letters, a ripe scholar, a fine poet, and an exquisite critic. When such a man carries destructive criticism to its utmost limits, we may well congratulate ourselves on a signal triumph of Freethought. And we may also find comfort in the fact that nobody thinks of flinging a stone at Mr. Arnold for his heresy. By-and-by the censors of religion in the press will cease to throw stones at the Freethought teachers among the masses of the people, who only put into homlier English and publish in a cheaper form the sentiments and ideas which Mr. Arnold expresses for the educated classes at a higher price and in a loftier style.
During the winter a gap was made in the front rank of English literature by the deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot. Neither of these great writers was orthodox. Carlyle was a Freethinker to the extent of discarding Christian supernaturalism. Very early in his life he told Edward Irving that he did not, nor was it likely he ever would, regard Christianity as he did. We all remember, too, his scornful references to Hebrew Old Clothes, and his fierce diatribes against the clergy who, he said, went about with strange gear on their heads, and underneath it such a theory of the universe as he, for one, was thankful to have no concern with. In the "Latter-Day Pamphlets" he likened Christianity to a great tree, sprung from the seed of Nazareth, and since fed by the opulences of fifty generations; which now is perishing at the root, and sways to and fro ever farther and farther from the perpendicular; and which in the end must come down, and leave to those who found shelter beneath it and thought it infinite, a wholesome view of the upper eternal lights. And his contempt for controversial or dogmatic theology may be gauged by his reply to one who asked him whether he was a Pantheist. "No," said Carlyle, "never was; nor a Pot-Theist either."
George Eliot was notoriously a Freethinker. Early in her literary career she translated Strauss and Feuerback into English, and through all her novels there runs a profound Secular spirit. Among her friends she was well known to be a Positivist; and though her creed held forth no promise of personal life beyond the grave, she found inspiration and comfort in the thought that Humanity would advance after she was gone, that though she died the race was practically immortal. Her mind was thoroughly imbued with the scientific spirit, and her writings give some conception of the way in which the Evolution theory affected a mind, fortified by culture and abundant common sense against the crudities of enthusiasm. The doctrine of Evolution did not fill her with despair; on the contrary, it justified and strengthened her ardent hopes for the future of mankind.
Many other novelists betray a strong spirit of Freethought.
It pervades all George Meredith's later writings, and is still more conspicuous in Mrs. Lynn Linton's "True History of Joshua Davidson" and her powerful "Under which Lord?" the hero-husband of that story being an Agnostic gentleman who founds a workmen's institute and delivers Freethought lectures in it.
Almost all the young school of poets are Freethinkers. Browning, our greatest, and Tennyson, our most popular, belong to a generation that is past. Mr. Swinburne is at the head of the new school, and he is a notorious heretic. He never sings more loftily, or with stronger passion, or with finer thought, than when he arraigns and denounces priestcraft and its superstitions before the bar of humanity and truth.
The reception of Mr. Thomsons poems and essays affords another sign of the progress of Freethought. This gentleman for many years contributed to secular journals under the initials of "B. V." He is a pronounced Atheist, and makes no concealment of it in his poems. Yet, while a few critics have expressed horror at his heresy, the majority have treated it as extremely natural in an educated thoughtful man, and confined themselves to the task of estimating the genius he has put into his work.
I must now draw to a close. Freethought, I hold, is an omnipresent active force in the English literature of to-day. It appears alike in the greatest works of scholarship, in the writings of men of science, in the songs of poets, in the productions of novelists, in the most respectable magazines, and in the multitudinous daily press. It is urgent and aggressive, and tolerates no restraint. It indicates the progress we have made towards that time when the mind of man shall play freely on every subject, when no question shall be thought too sacred to be investigated, when reason shall be the sovereign arbiter of all disputes, when priestly authority shall have perished, when every man's thought shall decide his own belief, and his conscience determine the way in which he shall walk.
DEAN STANLEY'S LATEST
(August, 1880.)
At one of Charles Lamb's delightful Wednesday evenings Coleridge had, as usual, consumed more than his fair share of time in talking of some "regenerated" orthodoxy. Leigh Hunt, who was one of the listeners, manifested his surprise at the prodigality and intensity of the poet's religious expressions, and especially at his always speaking of Jesus as "our Savior." Whereupon Lamb, slightly exhilarated by a glass of gooseberry cordial, stammered out, "Ne – ne – never mind what Coleridge says; he's full of fun." This jocular and irreverent criticism is perhaps, after all, the most pertinent that can be passed on the utterances of this school of "regenerated orthodoxy." Coleridge, who had unbounded genius, and was intellectually capable of transforming British philosophy, went on year after year maundering about his "sumject" and "omject," mysteriously alluding to his great projected work on the Logos, and assuring everybody that he knew a way of bringing all ascertained truth within the dogmas of the Church of England. His pupil, Maurice, wasted a noble intellect (as Mill says, few of his contemporaries had so much intellect to waste) in the endeavor to demonstrate that the Thirty-Nine Articles really anticipated all the extremest conclusions of modern thought; afflicting himself perpetually, as has been well said, with those "forty stripes save one." And now we have Dean Stanley, certainly a much smaller man than Maurice, and infinitely smaller than Coleridge, continuing the traditions of the school, of which let us hope he will be the last teacher. What his theology precisely is no mortal can determine. He subscribes the doctrines of the Church of England, but then he interprets them in an esoteric sense; that is, of course, in a Stanleyan sense; for when the letter of doctrine is left for its occult meaning every man "runs" a private interpretation of his own. The Nineteenth Century for August contains a characteristic specimen of his exegesis. It is entitled "The Creed of the Early Christians," but is really a sermon on the Trinity, which doubtless has been preached at Westminster. We shall examine its peculiarities and try to reach its meaning; a task by no means easy, and one which we could pardon anyone for putting aside with Lamb's remark, "It's only his fun."
Dean Stanley has a new theory of the Trinity, partly deduced from other mystics, and partly constructed on the plan of the negro who explained that his wooden doll was made "all by myself, out of my own head." God the Father, in this as in other theories, comes first: not that he is older or greater than the other persons, for they are all three coequal and coëternal; but because you must have a first for the sake of enumeration, or else the most blessed Trinity would be like the Irishman's little pig who ran about so that there was no counting him. There is also another reason. God the Father corresponds to Natural Religion, which of course has priority in the religious development of mankind; coming before Revealed Religion, to which God the Son corresponds, and still more before Spiritual Religion to which corresponds the Holy Ghost.
"We look round the physical world; we see indications of order, design, and good will towards the living creatures which animate it. Often, it is true, we cannot trace any such design; but, whenever we can, the impression upon us is the sense of a Single, Wise, Beneficent Mind, the same now that it was ages before the appearance of man – the same in other parts of the Universe as it is in our own. And in our own hearts and consciences we feel an instinct corresponding to this – a voice, a faculty, that seems to refer us to a higher power than ourselves, and to point to some Invisible Sovereign Will, like to that which we see impressed on the natural world. And further, the more we think of the Supreme, the more we try to imagine what his feelings are towards us, the more our idea of him becomes fixed as in the one simple, all-embracing word that he is Our Father."
The words we have italicised say that design cannot always be traced in nature. We should like to know where it can ever be. Evolution shows that the design argument puts the cart before the horse. Natural Selection, as Dr. Schmidt appositely remarks, accounts for adaptation as a result without requiring the supposition of design as a cause. And if you cannot deduce God from the animate world, you are not likely to deduce him from the inanimate. Dean Stanley himself quotes some remarkable words from Dr. Newman's Apologia– "The being of a god is as certain to me as the certainty of my own existence. Yet when I look out of myself into the world of men, I see a sight which fills me with unspeakable distress. The world of men seems simply to give the lie to that great truth of which my whole being is so full. If I looked into a mirror and did not see my face, I should experience the same sort of difficulty that actually comes upon me when I look into this living busy world and see no reflection of its Creator." How, asks the Dean, is this difficulty to be met? Oh, he replies, | we must turn to God the Son in the person of Jesus Christ, and his utterances will supplement and correct the uncertain sounds of nature; and then there is the Holy Ghost to finally supply all omissions, and clear up all difficulties. Now to our mind this is simply intellectual thimble-rigging. Or rather does it not suggest the three-card trick? One card is useless, two cards are unsafe, but with three cards to shuffle you are almost sure to win. Dr. Newman gets his God through intuition; he maintains that the existence of God is a primary fact of consciousness, and entirely declines the impossible task of proving it from the phænomena of nature. Dean Stanley should do the same. It is not honest to employ an argument and then shirk all the difficulties it raises by resorting to the theological three-card trick, which confounds instead of satisfying the spectator, while emptying his mental pockets of the good cash of common sense.
The Dean's treatment of God the Son is amusing. He writes of Jesus Christ as though he were a principle instead of a person. "The Mahometan," he says, "rightly objects to the introduction of the paternal and filial relations into the idea of God, when they are interpreted in the gross and literal sense. But in the moral spiritual sense it is true that the kindness, tenderness and wisdom we find in Jesus Christ is the reflection of the same kindness, tenderness and wisdom which we recognise in the governance of the universe." This may be called mysticism, but we think it moonshine. Gross and literal sense, forsooth! Why, was not Jesus Christ a man, a most literal fact, "gross as a mountain, open, palpable?" Dean Stanley approves the Mahometan's objection, and yet he knows full well that it contravenes a fundamental dogma of the Christian Church, and is accounted a most damnable heresy. Why this paltering with us in a double sense? To our mind downright blatant orthodoxy, which is at least honest if not subtle, is preferable to this hybrid theology which attempts to reconcile contradictions in order to show respect to truth while sticking to the flesh-pots of error, and evades all difficulties by a patent and patently dishonest method of "interpretation."
Quoting Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," Dean Stanley tells us that one great benefit traceable to God the Son is the recognition of "humility and poverty, mockery and despising, wretchedness and suffering, as divine." Well, if these things are divine, the sooner we all become devilish the better. Nobody thinks them divine when they happen to himself; on the contrary, he cries out lustily against them. But it is a different matter when they happen to others. Then the good Christian considers them divine. How easily, says a French wit, we bear other people's troubles! Undistracted by personal care, pious souls contemplate with serene resignation the suffering of their neighbors, and acknowledge in them the chastening hand of a Divine Father.
God the Holy Ghost represents Spiritual religion: the Father represents God in Nature, the Son represents God in History, and "the Holy Ghost represents to us God in our own hearts and spirits and consciences." Here be truths! An illustration is given. Theodore Parker, when a boy, took up a stone to throw at a tortoise in a pond, but felt himself restrained by something within him; and that something, as his mother told him, was the voice of God, or in other words the Holy Ghost. Now if the Holy Ghost is required to account for every kind impulse of boys and men, there is required also an Unholy Ghost to account for all our unkind impulses. That is, a place in theology must be found for the Devil. The equilateral triangle of theology must be turned into a square, with Old Nick for the fourth side. But Dean Stanley does not like the Devil; he deems him not quite respectable enough for polite society. Let him, then, give up the Holy Ghost too, for the one is the correlative of the other.
"It may be," says the Dean, after interpreting the Trinity, "that the Biblical words in some respects fall short of this high signification." What, God's own language inferior to that of the Dean of Westminster? Surely this is strange arrogance, unless after all "it's only his fun." Perhaps that is how we should take it. Referring to some sacred pictures in the old churches of the East on Mount Athos, intended to represent the doctrine of the Trinity, the Dean says that standing on one side the spectator sees only Christ on the Cross, standing on the other he sees only the Holy Dove, while standing in front he sees only the Eternal Father. Very admirable, no doubt. But there is a more admirable picture described by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his "Study of Sociology," which graphically represents the doctrine of the Trinity in the guise of three persons trying to stand in one pair of boots!
Goethe is cited as a Christian, a believer in the Trinity. Doubtless the Dean forgets his bitter epigram to the effect that he found four things too hard to put up with, and as hateful as poison and serpents; namely, tobacco, garlic, bugs, and the Cross. Heine also is pressed into service, and an excellent prose translation of one of his poems is given, wherein he celebrates the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God. But Dean Stanley has read his Heine to little purpose if he imagines that this radiant and splendid soldier of progress meant by the Spirit of God the third person of the Christian Trinity. Heine was no Christian, and the very opposite of a theologian. We might translate passages of scathing irony on the ascetic creed of the Cross from the De L'Allemagne, but space does not admit. A few of Heine's last words must do instead. To Adolph Stahr he said: "For the man in good health Christianity is an unserviceable religion, with its resignation and one-sided precepts. For the sick man, however, I assure you it is a very good religion." To Alfred Meissner: "When health is used up, money used up, and sound human sense used up, Christianity begins." Once, while lying on his mattress-grave, he said with a sigh: "If I could even get out on crutches, do you know whither I would go? Straight to church." And when his hearer looked incredulous, he added: "Most decidedly to church. Where else should one go with crutches?" Such exquisite and mordant irony is strange indeed in a defender of the holy and blessed Trinity.
Dean Stanley's peroration runs thus: – "Wherever we are taught to know and understand the real nature of the world in which our lot is cast, there is a testimony, however humble, to the name of the Father; wherever we are taught to know and admire the highest and best of human excellence, there is a testimony to the name of the Son: wherever there is implanted in us a presence of freedom, purity and love, there is a testimony to the name of the Holy Ghost." Very fine, no doubt; also very soporific. One is inclined to mutter a sleepy Amen. If this passage means anything at all it implies that all who know truth, admire excellence, and have any share in freedom and virtue, are testators to the names of Father, Son and Holy Ghost; so that many Atheists are Trinitarians without knowing it. "In Christianity," says the Dean, "no thing is of real concern except that which makes us wiser and better." That is precisely what the sceptic says, yet for that coroners reject his service on juries, and rowdy Christians try to keep him out of Parliament when he has a legal right to enter. But the Dean adds: "Everything which does make us wiser and better is the very thing which Christianity intends." That is, Christianity means just what you like to find in it. How can a man of Dean Stanley's eminence and ability write such dishonest trash? Must we charitably, though with a touch of sarcasm, repeat Lamb's words of Coleridge – "Never mind; it's only his fun?"
GOD AND THE QUEEN
(March, 1882.)
The Queen is now safely lodged at Mentone. Although-the political outlook is not very bright, there is pretty sure to be a good solid majority to vote a dowry for Prince Leopold's bride; and so long as royalty is safe it does not much matter what becomes of the people. That dreadful Bradlaugh is gagged; he cannot open his mouth in the House of Commons against perpetual pensions or royal grants. The interests of monarchy are in no immediate peril, and so the Queen is off to Mentone.
Now she is gone, and the loyal hubbub has subsided, it is just the time to consider her late "providential escape" from the bullet which was never fired at her.
What is the meaning of providential? God does all or nothing. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, as well as in the fall of empires. In that case everything is providential. But this is not the ordinary view. When a railway accident occurs those who do not come to grief ascribe their preservation to Providence. Who then is responsible for the fate of those who perish? Centuries ago Christians would have answered, "the Devil." Now they give no answer at all, but treat the question as frivolous or profane.
Thomas Cooper, in his Autobiography, says that the perfecting touch was given to his conversion by an interposition of God. During a collision, the carriage in which he sat was lifted clean on to another line of rails, and thus escaped the fate of the other carriages, which were broken to pieces. Pious Thomas recognised at once the finger of God, and he there and then fell on his knees and offered up a thanksgiving. He was too vain to carry his argument out to its logical end. Why did the Lord protect him, and not his fellow-travellers? Was he of more importance than any of the others? And why, if it was right to thank God for saving Thomas Cooper, would it be wrong to curse him for smashing all the rest?
This superstition of Providence is dying out. Common people are gradually being left to the laws of Nature. If a workhouse were to catch on fire, no one would speak of those who escaped the flames as providentially saved. God does not look after the welfare of paupers; nor is it likely that he would pluck a charwoman's brat out of the fire if it tumbled in during her absence. Such interpositions are absurd. But with kings, queens, princes, princesses, and big nobs in general, the case is different. God looks after the quality. He stretches forth his hand to save them from danger, from the pestilence that walketh by day and the terror that walketh by night. And his worshippers take just the same view of the "swells." When the Queen came to London, a few weeks ago, one of her mounted attendants was thrown and badly hurt; and the next day one of the loyal Tory papers reported that her Majesty had completely recovered from the accident to her outrider!