Chapter 7 THEORY OF RELIGIOUS LIBERALISM.

The Eclectic method of Philosophy, which was first exemplified in the celebrated School of Alexandria, and which has been recently revived under the auspices of M. Cousin in the Schools of Paris, may be regarded, in one of its aspects, as the most legitimate, and, indeed, as the only practicable course of successful intellectual research.

If by "eclecticism" we were to understand the habit of culling from every system that portion or fragment of truth which may be contained in it, and of rejecting the error with which it may have been associated or alloyed,-in other words, the art of "sifting the wheat from the chaff," so as to preserve the former, while the latter is dissipated and dispersed,-there could be no valid objection to it which would not equally apply to every method of Inductive Inquiry. But this is not the sense in which "eclecticism" has been adopted and eulogized by the Parisian School. For, not content with affirming that the same system may contain both truth and error, and that it is our duty to separate the one from the other,-which is the only rational "eclecticism,"-M. Cousin maintains that error itself is only a partial or incomplete truth; that if it be an evil, it is a necessary evil, and an eventual good, since it is a means, according to a fundamental law of human development, of evolving truth and advancing philosophy; and that thus the grossest errors may exert a salutary influence, insomuch that Atheism itself may be regarded as providential.[224] In this form, Eclecticism becomes a huge and heterogeneous system of Syncretism, including all varieties of opinion, whether true or false; and it has a natural and inevitable tendency to issue in a spirit of Indifference to the claims of truth, which may assume the form either of Philosophical Skepticism or of Religious Liberalism, according to the taste and temperament of the individual who embraces it.

In the form of Religious Liberalism, it has often been exemplified in our own country by those who, averse from definite articles of faith, and prone to latitudinarian license, have studiously set themselves to disparage the importance of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity, and even to obliterate the distinction between the various forms of Religion, natural and revealed, by representing them all as so many varieties of the same religious sentiment, so many diverse, but not antagonistic, embodiments of the same radical principle. In the writings of Pope, several expressions occur which are easily susceptible of this construction, and which have often been quoted and applied in defence of Religious Liberalism, notwithstanding his explicit disavowal of it in his letter to the younger Racine, prefixed to the collected edition of his works. But on the continent of Europe, Syncretism has been much more fully developed, and fearlessly applied to every department of human thought. Pushed to its ultimate consequences, it obliterates the distinction not only between truth and error, but also between virtue and vice, nay even between Religion and Atheism; and represents them all as constituent parts of a scheme, which is developed under a law of "fatal necessity," but which is described also as a scheme of "optimism." Its range is supposed to be unlimited: for it has been applied to the History of Philosophy, by Cousin, to the theory of the Passions, by Fourier, to the doctrines of Christianity, by Quinet and Michelet, and to the Philosophy of Religion, by Benjamin Constant. The practical result of such speculations is a growing skepticism or indifference in regard to the distinction between truth and error, and a very faint impression of the difference between good and evil.[225] The speculations of Pierre Leroux, the head, if not the founder, of the Humanitarian School, are strongly tinged with this spirit: they amount to a justification of evil, an apotheosis of man.[226]

We do not class these speculations among the formal systems of Atheism, although they have often been associated with it; but we advert to them as specimens of that style of thinking which has a natural tendency to induce an atheistic frame of mind.[227] The profession of such sentiments is a symptom rather of incipient danger, than of confirmed disease. But that danger is far from being either doubtful or insignificant. For should the distinction between "truth and error" be obliterated or even feebly discerned, should it come to be regarded as a matter of comparative indifference whether our beliefs be true or false, should it, above all, become our prevailing habit to "call good evil, and evil good," we can scarcely fail, in such circumstances, to fall into a course of practical Atheism; and this, as all experience testifies, will leave us an easy prey, especially in seasons of peculiar temptation and trial, to any form of speculative Infidelity that may happen to acquire a temporary ascendancy. If there be no dogmatic Atheism involved in this state of mind, there is at least the germ of skepticism, which may soon grow and ripen into the open and avowed denial of religious truth. At the very least, it will issue in that heartless indifference to all creeds and all definite articles of faith, which, under the plausible but surreptitious disguise of "freethinking" and "liberalism," is the nearest practical approximation to utter Infidelity.[228]

The system which is known under the name of Religious Liberalism or Indifference has been recently avowed in our own country with a frankness and boldness which can leave no room for doubt in regard to its ultimate tendency. The late Blanco White avowed it as his mature conviction, that "to declare any one unworthy of the name of Christian because he does not agree with your belief, is to fall into the intolerance of the articled Churches; that the moment the name Christian is made necessarily to contain in its signification belief in certain historical or metaphysical propositions, that moment the name itself becomes a creed,-the length of that creed is of little consequence."[229] This is the extreme on one side, and it plainly implies that no one article of faith is necessary, and that a man may be a Christian who neither acknowledges an historical Christ, nor believes a single doctrine which He taught! But there is an extreme also on the other side, which is exemplified in the singularly eloquent, but equally unsatisfactory, treatise of the Abbé Lamennais,[230] in which, as then an ardent and somewhat arrogant advocate of the Romish Church, he attempts to fasten the charge of Indifference or Liberalism on the Protestant system, and to prove that there can be no true faith, and of course no salvation, beyond the Catholic pale. The chief interest of his treatise depends on his peculiar "theory of certitude," to which we shall have occasion to advert in the sequel; in the meantime, we may notice briefly the grievous error into which he has fallen in treating of the faith which is necessary to salvation. He overstates the case as much, at least, as it has been understated by the abettors of Liberalism. The latter deny the necessity of any articles of faith; the former demands the implicit reception of every doctrine propounded by the Romish Church. He repudiates the distinction between fundamentals and non-fundamentals in Religion, and insists that, as every truth is declared by the same infallible authority, so every truth must be received with the same unquestioning faith. He forgets that while all the truths of Scripture ought to be believed by reason of the Divine authority on which they rest, yet some truths are more directly connected with our salvation than others, as well as more clearly and explicitly revealed. Nor are we justly liable to the charge of "Indifference" or "Liberalism" when we tolerate a difference of opinion, on some points, among men who are, in all important respects, substantially agreed: for true toleration is the fruit, not of unbelief or indifference, but of charity and candor; and it is sanctioned in Scripture, which enjoins that we should "receive those who are weak in the faith, but not to doubtful disputations," and that "every man should be fully persuaded in his own mind."[231]

But it is not so much in its relation to the articles of the Christian faith, as in its bearing on the different forms of true and false religion, that the theory of Liberalism comes into collision with the cause of Theism, and evinces its infidel tendencies. If any one can regard with the same complacency, or with the same apathetic indifference, all the varieties of religious or superstitious belief and worship; if he can discern no radical or important difference between Monotheism and Polytheism, or between the Protestant and Popish systems; if he be disposed to treat each of these as equally true or equally false, as alike beneficial or injurious in their practical influence, then this may be regarded as a sufficient proof that he is ignorant of the evidence, and blind to the claims, of truth,-a mere skeptical dreamer, if not a speculative Atheist.

An attempt has recently been made to place the theory of Religious Liberalism on a philosophical basis, by representing religion as a mere sentiment, which may be equally elicited and exemplified in various forms of belief and worship. Several writers, following in the wake of Schleiermacher, who gave such a powerful impulse to the mind of Germany, have made Religion to consist either in a sense of dependence, or in a consciousness of the infinite; and this sentiment, as well as the spontaneous intuitions of reason with which it is associated, is said to be alike natural, universal, and invariable, the essential principle of all Religion, the root whence have sprung all the various forms of belief and worship. These varieties are supposed to be more or less rational and salutary, according to the conception which they respectively exhibit of the nature and character of God,-a conception which may be endlessly diversified by the intellect, or the imagination, or the passions of different men; while all the forms of belief are radically identical, since they all spring from the same ground-principle, and are only so many distinct manifestations of it. Thus Mr. Parker tells us that, stripping the "religious sentiment" in man "of all accidental circumstances peculiar to the age, nation, sect, or individual, and pursuing a sharp and final analysis till the subject and predicate can no longer be separated, we find as the ultimate fact, that the religious sentiment is this,-'a sense of dependence.' This sentiment does not itself disclose the character, and still less the nature and essence, of the object on which it depends, no more than the senses declare the nature of their objects. Like them it acts spontaneously and unconsciously, as soon as the outward occasion offers, with no effort of will, forethought, or making up the mind. But the religious sentiment implies its object; ... and there is but one religion, though many theologies."[232]

There is, as it appears to us, a mixture of some truth with much grave and dangerous error, in these and similar speculations. It is an important truth, and one which has been too often overlooked in treating the evidences of Natural Theology, that the sentiments of the human mind, not less than its intuitive perceptions or logical processes, have a close relation to the subject of inquiry; but it is an error to suppose that all the sentiments having a religious tendency can be reduced to one, whether it be called "a sense of dependence" or "a consciousness of the infinite," for there are other sentiments besides these which are equally subservient to the uses of Religion, such as the sense of moral obligation, of the true, of the ideal, of the sublime, and of the beautiful. It is also an important truth, that there are spontaneous "intuitions of reason," or fundamental and invariable "laws of thought," which come into action at the first dawn of experience, and which have a close connection with the proof of the being and perfections of God; but it is an error to suppose that the proof depends exclusively on these, or that it could be made out irrespective of the evidence afforded by the works of Creation and Providence. It is further an important truth, that the religious sentiment, or religious tendency, is natural to man, and that it may appear either in the form of Religion or Superstition: but it is an error to suppose that "there is but one religion, although many theologies;" for these theologies must spring from fundamentally different "conceptions of God," and what are these conceptions, in their ultimate analysis, but so many beliefs, doctrines, or dogmas, which, whether formally defined or not in articles of faith, have in them the self-same essence which is supposed to belong only to the bigotry of "articled churches?" But the fundamental, the fatal error of all these speculations, is the denial of any stable and permanent standard of objective truth. Truth is made purely subjective, and, of course, it must also be progressive, insomuch that the truth of a former age may be an error in the present, and the supposed truth of the present age may become obsolete hereafter. So that there is really nothing certain in human knowledge; and "truth" may be justly described as never existing, but only becoming, as never possessed, though ever pursued; it is a verité mobile, a truth not in esse, but in fieri. Hence we read in recent speculations of a "new Christianity," of a "new Gospel," and of "the Church of the Future," as if there could be any other Christianity than that of the New Testament, any other Gospel than that of Jesus Christ, or any other Church than that of apostolic times.

I have adverted to this theory, because, while it is of little value in a speculative point of view, it is often found to exert a powerful practical influence, especially on "men of affairs," men who have travelled in various countries, or who have been employed in the arts of diplomacy and government; and who, finding religious worship everywhere, but clothed in different forms, and marking its subserviency to social and political interests, have been too prone to place all the varieties of belief in the same category, if not precisely on the same level, and to regard with indifference, perhaps even with indulgence, the grossest corruptions both of Natural and Revealed Religion. The world is surely old enough, and its history sufficiently instructive, to prove, even to the most indifferent statesmen, that truth is always salutary, and error noxious, to the commonwealth, and that nowhere is society more safe, orderly, or stable, than in those countries which are blessed with "pure and undefiled religion." But let the opinion spread from the prince to the peasant, from the aristocracy to the artisans, from the philosopher to the public, that there is either no difference, or only a slight and trivial one, between truth and error, that it matters little what a man believes, or whether he believes at all: let the general mind of the community become indoctrinated with such lessons, and it needs no prophetic foresight to predict a crisis of unprecedented peril, an era of reckless revolution. A philosophic dreamer may affect a calm indifference, a bland and benignant Liberalism; but a nation, a community, cannot be neutral or inert in regard to matters of faith: it must and will be either religious or irreligious, it must either love the truth or hate it: it is too sharp-sighted, and too much guided by homely common sense, to believe that systems so opposite as Paganism and Christianity, or Popery and Protestantism, are harmonious manifestations of the same religious principle, or equally beneficial to the State.

FOOTNOTES:

[224] M. Cousin, "Introduction," I. 318, 391, 405, 419; II. 134. Ibid., "Fragmens Philosophiques." Preface, VII.

[225] Valroger, "Etudes Critiques," pp. 115, 126, 151, 308, 316. Maret, "Essai sur Pantheisme," p. 249.

[226] P. Leroux, "Sur l'Humanité," 2 vols.

[227] Budd?us, "De Atheismo et Superstitione," pp. 184, 212.

[228] Richard Bentley, "On Freethinking," Boyle Lectures. Villemandy, "Scepticismus Debellatus," III. His words are remarkable:-"Passim haec, aliaque generis ejusdem, placita disseminantur,-neque verum neque bonum, qualia sunt in seipsis, posse dignosci; hinc que adeo sectandam esse duntaxat cum veri, tum boni, similitudinem: qu? si stent ac valeant,-illud omne erit verum, illud omne ?quum,-illud omne pium et religiosum,-illud omne utile, quod cuiquam tale videatur; privatam cujusque conscientiam supremam esse agendorum, vel non agendorum, normam."

[229] James Martineau, "Rationale of Religious Inquiry," p. 108.

[230] F. de Lamennais, "Essai sur l'Indifference en matiere de la Religion," 4 vols. Paris, 1844.

[231] Romans 14: 1, 5.

[232] Theodore Parker, "Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion," pp. 14, 17.

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