The Eclipse of Faith Part 16

"You are hard to please," he replied.

I said I was, except by solid arguments. But does Gibbon offer them?

I asked.

He tells us, for example, that the virtues, energy, and zeal of the early Church was a main instrument of the success of Christianity; whereas it is the very origination of the early Church, with all these efficacious endowments, that we want to account for: it is as though he had told me that we might account for the success of Christianity from the fact that it had succeed to such an extent as to render its further success very probable! As for the rest of his secondary causes, they are difficulties in its way rather than auxiliaries. He asks me to believe that the intolerance of Christianity--by which it refused all alliance with other religions, and insisted in reigning alone or not at all, by which it spat contempt on the whole rabble of the Pantheon--was likely to facilitate its reception among nations, whose pride and whose pleasure alike it was to encourage civilities and compliments between their G.o.ds, each of whom was on gracious visiting terms with its neighbors! He asks me, in effect, to believe that the austerity of the Christians tended to give them favor in the eves of an accommodating and jovial Heathenism; that the severity of manners by which they reproved it, and which to their contemporaries must have appeared (as we know from the Apologists it did) much as Puritan grimace to the court of Charles II., was somehow attractive! That the scruples with which they recoiled from all usages and customs which could be a.s.sociated with the elegant pomp of Pagan wors.h.i.+p, and the suspicion with which, as having been linked with idolatry, they looked on every emanation of that spirit of beauty which reigned over the exterior life of Paganism, would operate as a charm in their favor! That their studied absence from all scenes social hilarity, their grave looks on festal days, their garlanded heads, their simple attire, their utter estrangement from the Graces, which in truth were the legitimate G.o.ds in Greece, and the true mothers of whole family of Olympus, would be likely to conciliate towards the Gospel the favorable dispositions cla.s.sic antiquity! I have not so read history, nor learnt human nature. Again, he asks me to believe that the immortality which Christianity promised Heathen--such an immortality --was another of things which tended to give it success;--on the one hand, a menace of retribution, not for flagrant crimes only, which Heathenism itself punished, nor for the lax manners which the easy spirit of Paganism had made venial but for spiritual vices, of which it took account, some of which it had even consecrated virtues; and, on the other hand, an other of a which promised nothing but delights of a spiritual order; a paradise which, whatever material or imaginative adjuncts it might have, certainly disclosed none; which presented no one thing to gratify the prurient curiosity of man's fancy, or the eager pa.s.sions of his sensual nature; which must, in fact, have been about as inviting to the soul of a Heathen as the promise of an eternal Lent to an epicure! Surely these were resistless seductions. Yet it is to such things as auxiliaries that Gibbon refers me for the success of Christianity. Verily it is not without reason that he is called a master of irony!

My friend fairly acknowledged the difficulties of the subject, but said he could not believe in the truth of Christianity.

I repaired to another infidel acquaintance. "It is a perplexing, a very perplexing controversy, no doubts," was his reply; "but every thing tends to show that Christianity resembles in its princ.i.p.al features all those other religions which you admit to be false.

All have their prodigies and miracles,--their revelations and Inspirations,--their fragments of truth and their ma.s.ses of nonsense. They are all to be rejected together."

I again puzzled for a long time over this aspect of the case. At last I said to him,--This seems a curious way of disposing of the evidence for Christianity; for if there be any true religion, it is likely, as in all other cases, that the counterfeits will have some features in common with it. It would follow, also, that there can be no true philosophy; since, while there are scores of philosophies, only one can be true. But I have another difficulty: on comparing Christianity with other systems, I find vital differences, both as regards theory and fact. As regards theory, I find an insuperable difficulty, not merely in imagining how Jews, Greeks, or Romans, any or all of them, should have been the originators of Christianity, but how human nature should have been fool enough to originate it at all!

For I am asked to believe that man, such as I know him through all history, such as he appears in so many forms of religion which have been his undoubted and most worthy fabrication, did, whether fraudulently or not, whether designedly or unconsciously, frame a religion which is in striking contrast with all his ordinary handiwork of this sort! This religion enjoins the austerest morality; human religions generally enjoin a very lax one:--this demands the most refined purity, even of the thoughts and desires; other religions usually attach to external and ceremonial observances greater weight than to morality itself;--this is singularly simple in its rites; they for the most part consist of little else;--this exhibits a singular silence and abstinence in relation to the future and invisible; they amply indulge the imagination and fancy, and are full of delineations calculated to gratify man's most natural curiosity;--this takes under its special patronage those virtues which man is least likely to love or cultivate, and which men in general regard as pusillanimous infirmities, if not vices; they patronize the must energetic pa.s.sions,--the pa.s.sions which made the demiG.o.ds and heroes of antiquity. I am not saying which is the belief in these respects; I am only saying that human nature appears more true to itself in the last. And so notorious is all this, that the corruptions of Christianity, as years rolled on, have ever been to a.s.similate it to the other religions of the earth; to abate its spirituality; to relax its austere code of morals; to commute its proper claims for external observances; to enc.u.mber its ritual with an infinity of ceremonies; and, above all, to uncover the future and invisible, on which it left a veil, and add a purgatory into the bargain! Thus, whether contrasted with other religions or with its corrupted self, Christianity does not seem a religion which human nature would be pleased to invent.

Again, is it like the other religious products of human nature, in daring to aspire to universal dominion, and that too founded on moral power alone? Never, till Christianity appeared, had such an imagination ever entered the mind of man! Other religions were national affairs; their G.o.ds never dreamed of such an enterprise as that of subduing all nations. They were naturally contented with the country that gave them birth, and the homage of the race that wors.h.i.+pped them. They were, when not themselves a.s.sailed, very tolerant, and did the civil thing by all other G.o.ds of all other nations, and were even content to expire with great propriety (they usually did so) with the political extinction of the race of their votaries! Christianity alone adopts a different tone,--"Go ye, and preach the Gospel to all nations."--and declares, not only that it will reign, but that none other shall. It will not endure a rival; it will not consent to have a statue with the mob of the Pantheon. Whether this ambition--call it pride and folly, if you will, as you well may if the thing be merely human--was likely to suggest itself to man, considering the local and national character of other religions, and the apparent hopelessness of any such enterprise, I have my doubts. Arrogance it may be; but it is not such arrogance as is very natural to man.

These, I said, were amongst a few of the things in which I must say I thought the theory of Christianity very unlike that of any religion human nature was likely to invent.

If, I continued, I examine the past history and present position of Christianity, with an impartial eye, I see that it presents in several most important respects a contrast with other religions in point office.

I shall content myself with enumerating a few. Look, then, at the perpetual spirit of aggression which characterizes this religion; its undeniable power (in whatever it consists, and from whatever it springs) to prompt those who hold it to render it victorious,--a spirit which has more or less characterized its whole history: which still lives, even in its most corrupt forms, and which has not been least active in our own time. I do not see any thing like it in other religions.

Till I see Mollahs from Ispahan, Brahmins from Benares, Bonzes from China, preaching their systems of religion in London, Paris, and Berlin, supported year after year by an enormous expenditure on the part of their zealous compatriots, and the nations who support them taking the liveliest interest in their success or failure, till I see this (call it fanatical if you will, the money thus expended wasted, the men who give it fools), I shall not be able to p.r.o.nounce Christianity simply on a par with other religions.

Till the sacred books of other religions can boast of at least a hundredth part of the same efforts to translate and diffuse them as have been concentrated on the Bible; till we find them in at least half as many languages; till they can render those who possess them at least a tenth part as willing to make costly efforts to insure to them a circulation coextensive with the family of man; till they occupy an equal s.p.a.ce in the literature of the world, and are equally bound up with the philosophy, history, poetry, of the community of civilized nations; till they have given an equal number of human communities a written language, and may thus boast of having imparted to large sections of the human family the germ of all art, science, and civilization; till they can cite an equal amount of testimonies to their beauty and sublimity from those who reject their divine original,--I shall scarcely think Christianity can be put simply on a par with other religions.

Till it can be said that the sacred books of other religions are equally unique in relation to all the literature in which they are imbedded; similar neither to what precedes nor what comes after them, --their enemies themselves being judges; till they can be shown to be as superior to all that is found in contemporaneous authors as the New Testament is to the writings of Christian Fathers or the Jewish Rabbis,--I cannot say that Christianity is just like any other religion.

Till we can find a religion that has stood as many different a.s.saults from infidelity in the midst of it,--educated infidelity, infidelity aided by learning, genius, philosophy, freely employing all the power of argument and all the power of ridicule to disabuse its votaries; till we can find a religion which can point to an equal array of educated men, philosophic in spirit, in learning, and genius, deeply skilled in the investigation of evidence, deliberately declaring that its claims are well sustained.--we cannot say that Christianity is just like any other religion.

Till it can be shown that another religion to an equal extent, has propagated itself without force amongst totally different races, and in the most distant countries, and has survived equal revolutions of thought and opinion, manners and laws, amongst those who have embraced it, it cannot be said that Christianity is simply like any other religion.

Till it can be shown that the sacred books of other religions have contained predictions as definite and as unlikely to be fulfilled as the success of early Christianity against all the opposition of prejudice and persecution,--its voluntary reception amongst different races, contrary to all the a.n.a.logies of religious history,--and the continued preservation of the Jews among all nations without forming a part of any,--I cannot think that Christianity is precisely in the condition of any other religion.

Such, gentlemen, were some few of the differences in fact which seemed to me, not less than its theory, to discriminate Christianity from other religions. Had I in those days of my youth, been favored with the views of modern "spiritualism," I should have added, that till it is shown that some other religion has possessed an equal power of moulding those characters whom Mr. Newman points out as the best examples of "spiritual"

religion, and can point to oracles equally pervaded by that "sentiment"

which he declares is wanting in Greek philosophers, English Deists, and German Pantheists, but which, he admits, pervades the Bible; till I see the devout men whom he extols produced by other religions, or rather. I ought to say, produced without them (where Christianity however is unknown) by the unaided "spiritual faculty,"--I cannot but think that the position of Christianity is somewhat discriminated both from other religions and from "Naturalism."

Such, I said, to conclude, was an imperfect outline of some of my early conflicts, and such the cruel mode in which my unbelieving friends laughed at each other's hypotheses, and left me dest.i.tute of any.

Finding that they conclusively confuted one another, and perceiving at last that the idea of the superhuman origin of Christianity did, and, as Bishop Butler says, alone can resolve all the difficulties of the subject, I was compelled to forego all the advantages of infidelity, and condescended to "depress" my conscience to the "Biblical standard"!

Would to Heaven that it had never been depressed below it!

I am bound to say my auditors listened with courtesy. The conversation was now carried on in little knots: I, who was glad of a rest, was occupied in listening to a conversation between Harrington and his Italian friend, who was urging him to take refuge from such a Babel of discords as his company had uttered, in the only secure asylum.

Harrington told him, with the utmost gravity, that one great objection to the Church of Rome was the unseemly liberty she allowed to the right of private judgment; that he found in her communion distractions the most perplexing, especially as between English and foreign Romanists!

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After the party had broken up, and we were left alone, Mr. Fellows, turning to me, said, "You lay great stress on the origination of such a character as Christ. But can we make its reality a literary problem? May it not have been imaginary? As Mr. Newman says, Human nature is often portrayed in superhuman dignity; Why not in superhuman goodness?

"That the origination;" said I, "of such a Moral Ideal, in so peculiar a form, by such men as Galilean Jews, is unaccountable enough, I fancy all will admit; but it is, you observe, only one of the numberless points which are unaccountable; neither do I make this one feature, or any of the other singular characteristics of the New Testament, merely a literary problem. The whole, you see, is a vast literary, moral, intellectual, spiritual, and historical problem. But it is too much the way with you objectors to say, 'This may, perhaps, be got over,' and 'That may be got over'; the question is, as Bishop Butler says, whether all can be got over; for if all the arguments for it be not false, Christianity is true.

"You charge us with the very conduct," retorted Fellowes, "which Mr.

Newman objects to Christians. They, says he, affirm that this objection is of little weight, and that is of little weight; whereas altogether they amount to considerable weight."

"I admit it," said I; "and those are very unfair who deny it. But still, since there are these things of weight on both sides, the argument returns, on which side does the balance on the sum-total of evidence lie?"

"But," said Fellowes, "how few are competent to compute that!"

"You are really pleasant, Mr. Fellowes," I replied; "I thought the question we were arguing was as to the truth or the falsehood of Christianity, not whether the bulk of mankind are fully competent to form an independent and profound judgment on its evidences: very few are competent to do so either on this or any other complex subject; certainly not (as our differences show) on the subject of your 'spiritualism.' But the incompetency of the great bulk of mankind to deal with complicated evidence makes a thing neither true nor false; perhaps on this, as on so many other subjects, the few must thoroughly sift the matter for the many. If your present objection were of force, what would become of truth in politics, law, medicine, in all which the great majority must trust much to the conclusions of their wiser fellow-creatures? Your observation is no confutation of the evidences for Christianity: it is simply a satire upon G.o.d and the condition of the human creatures he has made!"

"Well, let that pa.s.s," said Fellowes; "I was going to say further, that it is not so clear to every one that Christ is so very wonderful an ideal of humanity. Do you remember that Mr. Newman says in his 'Phases,' that, when he was a boy, he read Benson's Life of Fletcher of Madely, and thought Fletcher a more perfect man than Jesus Christ? and he also says that he imagines, if he were to read the book again, he would think the same. Have you nothing to say to that?"

"NOTHING," said I, "except to point you to the infinitely different estimates of Christ formed by other men who yet think of historical Christianity much as you do. How differently do such writers as Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker speak! How do they almost exhaust the resources of language to express their sentiments of this wonderful character! As to Mr. Newman's impression, I do not think it worth an answer. When a man so far forgets himself as to say what he can hardly help knowing will be unspeakably painful to mult.i.tudes of his fellow-creatures, on the strength of boyish impressions,--not even thinking it worth while to verify those impressions, and see whether, after thirty or forty years, he is not something more than a boy,--I think it is scarcely worth while to reply. Christianity is willing to consider the arguments of men, but not the impressions of boys."

"But we must not be too hard." said Harrington, "upon Mr. Newman; it is evident, from his Hebrew Monarchy, that, as he takes a benevolent pleasure in defending those whom n.o.body else will defend,--in petting Ahab, whom he p.r.o.nounces rather weak than wicked, and palliating Jezebel, whose character was, it seems, grievously deteriorated by contact with the 'prophets of Jehovah,'--so he has a chivalrous habit of depressing those who have been particularly the objects of veneration. Elisha, Samuel, and David are all brought down a great many degrees in the moral scale. He has simply done the same with Christ."

"Well," said Fellowes, "I cannot help agreeing with Mr. Newman in thinking that, when one hears men made the objects of extravagant eulogy, it almost 'tempts one, even though a stranger to their very name, to "pick holes," as the saying is.'"

"It may be so," said I; "but it is a tendency against which we should guard. It would lead us, like him of Athens, to ostracize Aristides: we should be weary of hearing him continually called 'The Just.'"

"However." rejoined Fellowes, "I am weary of hearing Christ so perpetually called our example. As Mr. Newman says, he cannot, except in a very modified sense, be such. 'His garments will not fit us.'"

"Did you ever hear," said I. "that fathers and mothers ought to set an example to their children?"

"Certainly."

"Yet surely not in all things can they be such. Their garments surely will not fit their children."

"No." said Harrington; "those of the father at all events will not, if they are girls, nor of the mother, if they are boys. Fellowes, I think you had better say nothing on this subject. If men of fifty can, in all essential points, be beautiful examples to girls of ten,--in gentleness, in patience, in humility, in kindness, and so forth,--and all the more impressively for the wide interval between them, why, I suppose Jesus Christ may be as much to his disciples."

"But, again," urged Fellowes to me, "you, like so many men, seem to lay such stress on the superiority of the morality of the New Testament.

I cannot see it. I confess, with Mr. Foxton and many more, that it seems to me that it has not such a very great advantage over that of many heathen moralists who have said the same things,--Plato, for example."

I replied, that, of course, it would be of no avail to affirm in general (what I was yet convinced was true), that the New Testament inculcated a system of ethics much more just and comprehensive than any other volume in the world. I told him, however, that I thought he would not deny that its manner of conveying ethical truth was unique; that it not only contained more admirable and varied summaries of duty than any other book whatever, but that we should seek in vain in any other for such a profusion of just maxims and weighty sentiments, expressed with such comprehensive brevity, or ill.u.s.trated with so much beauty and pathos. I remarked that, if he would be pleased to do as I had once done,--compile a selection of the princ.i.p.al precepts and maxims from the most admirable ethical works of antiquity (those of Aristotle, for example), and compare them with two or three of the summaries of similar precepts in the New Testament,--he would at once feel how much more vivid, touching, animated, and even comprehensive, was the Scriptural expression of the same truths. But I further observed, that, even to obtain the means of such comparison, he must reject from Plato or the Stagyrite twenty times the bulk of questionable speculations, and dreary subtilties, which separate by long intervals those gems of moral truth, which everywhere sparkle on the pages of the New Testament.

I told him I could not help laying great stress on the degree and manner in which this element enters into the composition of the New Testament; that ethical truths are there expressed in every variety of form which can fix them upon the imagination and the heart, with an entire absence of those prolix discussions and metaphysical refinements which form so large a portion of Aristotle and Plato. If we find in these writers a moral truth expressed with something approaching the comprehensive beauty and simplicity of the Gospels, we are filled with surprise and rapture, and dig out with joy the glittering fragment from the ma.s.s of earthy matter,--oppressive disquisitions about "ideas" and "essences,"

"energies" and "entelechies," and so forth, in which it is sure to be imbedded. I promised, if health and life were given, to exhibit some day these gems, with a sufficient portion of the surrounding earth still attached to them, and to contrast them with those of the New Testament. "In this strange volume," I continued, "the most beautiful ethical maxims exist in unexampled profusion. After reading Aristotle's ethics, I feel, when I turn to the New Testament, as Linnaeus is said to have felt when he first saw growing wild the ma.s.ses of blooming gorse, which he had never seen in his cold North, except as a sheltered exotic. Whether it was likely that contemporaries of the Pharisees, who were sunk in formalism, and who had glossed away every moral and spiritual the Law, could reach and maintain such elevation of tone, I leave you to judge." But though I felt this, I acknowledged that it was difficult to express it; and said that perhaps the best way to compare the morality of the New Testament with the ethical system of any philosopher, or the code of any legislator, would be to imagine them all universally adopted, and see how much would have to be objected to,--how much "brick" was mingled with the "porphyry." "If, for example," said I, "Plato, who, I admit, so flashes upon us the sublimest and most comprehensive principles of morals, and whose ethical system you say is identical with that of Christianity, had the forming of a republic, you would have community of women property, --women trained to war,---infanticide certain circ.u.mstances,--young children led to battle (though at a safe distance), that 'the young might early scent carnage, and be inured to slaughter! Both with him and Aristotle slavery would be a regularly sanctioned and perfectly natural inst.i.tution. Not only did they entertain very lax notions of the relation of the s.e.xes, but the tone in which they speak of most abominable corruptions--I do not except cannibalism--to which humanity has ever degraded implied that they regarded such things as comparatively venial. I know no greater single names than these, and I presume that these points you would find so, difficulty in digesting." He admitted it.

I told him I supposed he would take equal objections to the Gentoo, or the Roman, or the Spartan code, as also to the Koran. He admitted all this too.

"But now, if we take the Christian code, and suppose the New Testament made the literal guide of in every man, tell me, Mr. Fellowes, what would the consequence? What would you wish otherwise?"

"Why," said Harrington, smiling, "he would, perhaps, object that there would be no more war, and that retaliation would be impossible."

"The former," said I, "we could all endure, I suppose; nor be unwilling to give up the latter, seeing that there would, in that case, be no wrongs to avenge. It would not matter that you would be compelled to turn your right cheek to him who smote you on the left (let the interpretation be as literal as you will), since no one would strike you on the left; nor that you must surrender your cloak to him who took away your coat, since no one would take your coat. But tell me, is there any thing more serious that would follow from the literal and universal adoption of the ethics of the New Testament?" Fellowes acknowledged that he knew of nothing, unless it was a sanction of slavery.

"I do not admit that the New Testament sanctions it," I replied; "and I will, if you like, give my reasons in full, another time. But is there any thing else?"

He said he did not recollect any thing.