BL2775 .S76 1873 Strauss, David Friediicli, 1808-1874. Old faith and the new : a confession / THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES. Sermons by tlie Rev. H. R. IlAWEis, author of "Music and Morals." 12mö, $1.50. "He aims at nothing less than laying down the fir.«t principles of that new liberal theology which is to characterize what he calls the Church of the Future. Mr. Haweis •writes not only fearlessly, but with remarkable freshness and vigor." — Saturday Eeview. "It contains much to interest, entertain, and instruct; . . . [his] illustrations are always good." — London Spectator, THE LIFE AND ^^/VORKS OF GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING. From the German of Adolph Stahr. By E. P. Evans, Ph.D., Professor of Modem Languages and Literature in the University of Michigan. 2 vols. 8vo, $5.00. "A work of permanent value. It is the best of the maty books which have been \rritten and compiled for the purpose of portraying the character and career of one of the most illustrious scholars and thinkers that even Germany has ever produced. It combines judicious selection with ample information, criticism with narration, and presents with comparative brevity an outline of labors, the benefits of which the world is now enjoying in almost every department of learning and culture." — Nation. FIRST HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS OFCHRISTIANITY. From the French of Athanase Coquerel the younger. By E. P. EvANS, Ph.D. 12mo, $1.50. ßSSAYS, PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGI- CAL. By James Martine Au, 2 vols. 8vo, $5.00. Mr. Maitineau is considered one of the profoundcst thinkers and most brilliant writers of this century. His contributions to the Pi-ospective, Westminster, National, and other Reviews attracted the attention of the best minds in both England and America, and produced a marked and favorable impression upon men of all de- nondnations. HEISJ-RV HOLT & CO., Fubli slier s, 3 5 I50IVD ST., IVE^V YORTt. The Old Faith and the New A CONFESSION BY DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION FROM THE SIXTH EDITION BY MATHILDE BLIND Two vohtincs in one. The traiislaiion revised and partly rewritten, and preceded by an Ai/ierican version of the Author's ''Prefatory Postscript." "I have never det^ired, nor do I now def^ire, to disturb the contentnient or the faith of any one. Bu! where the!?e are already shaken, I desire to point out the direcuon in which I believe a liimer soil is to be found."— pp. 9, 10. NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1^73 Eütfi-fd accor.liiiL,' t.. Act of Con-ix-s^;. in Üu; yi-ar 187o, b HRXHY HOLT, in die Ort'.'- 1)1" the Liliraiiau dl" Coniirer-s at Wa.-?lHni:t<)! T/it .\iirlni r«//i St r it-vt i/jx- Co. PßEFxiTOPiY POSTSCRIPT. (Translated hy J. Fitzgerald^ THE little book wliicli three months after its first appearance is now about to come before the world in a fourth edition, was originally left, and still remains, without a preface. It must speak for itself, thought I; and in point of fact it left very little room for doubt whether as to its motive or its object. But so much has been said against it in several quar- ters, and that with such vehemence, and in some cases with such force, that some reply will be ex- pected from the author. There is material enough at hand for a whole series of polemical works on subjects the most dissimilar — philosophy and theol- ogy, natural and political science. Still, not alone the vastness of such an undertakins^ but also the very nature of the matter in hand, requires that I should restrict myself to a narrower field. This is a Confession; it does not assail the position held by others, but only defends its own. Meanwhile, however briefly I may express what I have to say, these pages, if appended to my purposely compend- ious work, would weight it down, and therefore I iv Prefatory Postscript. let it go forth by itself. It will serve not only as a preface to the new edition, but also as a postscript to the readers of the earlier ones.* Lessing, as we know, was content to be less be- praised than Klopstock, provided he was more dili- gently read. Indeed we know that he made no objection, if lack of approval now and then was changed into hearty disapprobation. In such a frame of mind as that, I should.be perfectly satisfied with the recep- tion my Confession of Faith has met wdth. Strike, but listen, exclaimed the Athenian general and statesman to his opponent. In truth, when a man has been condemned not without a hearing the pre- sumption that he is innocent is so far lessened. If I had been condemned by all who have read my book, I should be without excuse. But I have reasons for believing that such is not the case. Over against the thousands of my readers stand a score or so of my public accusers — an inconsiderable minority — and it w^ould be hard for them to show tliat they are exactly the fliithful interpreters of the former. If in a matter like this persons who do not understand the question have been foremost in crying aloud while those who do understand have been content with quiet acquiescence, the reason is to be found in cer- tain circumstances with which we are all familiar. It * The German edition of tins postscript was issued in a small pamphlet. Prefatory Postscript. v is all very well to ask in derision who are tlie we of whom I speak ; but my questioners know as well as as I do how the matter stands. Here again I make no account of an expedient which I might turn to good use; and such neg- lect might well appear to be unpardonable in a lite- rary veteran. The apostle Paul (at least as he is rep- resented in the Acts) used other strategy. When standing in presence of the High Council at Jerusa- lem, so soon as he saw before him the Pharisees and Sadducees, whilom enemies, now brethren, banded together against him, he contrived to break up this ominous coalition and to bring the Pharisees over to his side, by throwing out the assertion that his of- fence was only this, that he taught the resurrection of \hQ dead. If one were to-day, in imitation of the Apostle of the Gentiles, to declare before the theo- logical world : '' It is because of my denial of Christ's godhead that these men condemn me, notwithstand- ing that I have no hesitation in acknowledging the man Jesus as Pedeemer and Eternal Head of the Church : '' he w^ould secure himself against attack from the side of the Orthodox * of the Protestant League. In like manner he who, disregarding the reproach of materialism, upholds the right of Science to explain the universe, man included, has merely to avoid mention of certain topics, certain measures, if he has nothing to say in favor of them, and he will * So the author. Q;a. What then is heterodoxy ? — Trans. vi Prefatory Postscript. have nearly all tlie democrats and socialists on his side. But what is to be thought of that man's judgment who on every occasion knowingly incurs the dis- pleasure of both sides and exposes himself to the cross-fire of orthodox and progressive theologians; of conservatives and socialistic democrats % Well, be the estimate of his judgment what it will, his can- dor is not to be questioned. According to a reviewer in the Weser- Zeitung, my book is like a declaration of war against the Protestant League and the Old Catholics. This ac- cusation is as unjust as it well could be, and I will come back to it again, but it was quite natural that when once the book was regarded in that light, thereafter all those who are of one mind wäth the Protestant League, viz. the writers in the Deutsche Allgemeine and the Weser-Zeitimg, as also the Old- Catholic professor who opened out on me in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (to say nothing of the Protestantische Zeitung) should pass as unfavorable a sentence upon it as the Kreutz- Zeitung itself or the Orthodox Kirchen- Zeitung s. In this respect some Socialist-democratic periodicals were fairer, inasmuch as they did not suffer the indignation they felt at my political principles to prevent their appreciation of the critical and philosophical portion of my book. And if the writers and publicists of that party are prone to employ in controversy a style of language which is hardly what you might suppose to be dic- tated by good taste or by etiquette, at least such Prefatory Postscript. vii manners are not in contradiction with their funda- mental principles. On the other hand, we have grown accustomed to similar language on the part of the Clericals ; but then we can conceive how in their eyes courtesy and respect shown to one who is held to be damned everlastingly, must appear to be simple hypocrisy. Contrariwise the educated middle party are wont to claim the credit of complying with the usages of respectable society even in controversy. If on the present occasion even they have departed from this policy in their treatment of me, there must be some special reasons for the phenomenon. When I compare the tone in which most of the criticisms of my latest work are expressed, with that in which for some years past it has been usual in Ger- man literature to make reference to me, it is not sur- prising that I should be profoundly pained at the sudden change that has come about. After the tu- mults of former, contests had subsided, people had gradually accustomed themselves to meet me with some degree of respect ; on many sides even I was done the unsolicited honor of beino; ranked as a sort of classical writer of prose. This esteem it appears I have now forfeited for good and all by my latest work; the newspapers think they must address me with a lofty air, as though I were some beginner, some chance comer. But fortunately this new tone of the press is nothing new at all to me : rather is it the very first greeting I received when I entered on my literary career with the " Life of Jesus.'' That I observe that viii Prefatory Postscript. same tone now, when I am approaching tlie goal, is for me a sign that, unlike many a literary veteran, I am unchanged, and that I have persisted in the line of mj vocation. It were affectation in me to deny the profound gratification I felt at the applause bestowed in all quarters upon my books on Ulrich von Hütten and Voltaire, or at the warm approval with which my letters to Ernest Eenan were greeted in every part of the German Fatherland ; it was a great satisfaction to me to find myself in harmony with my contempo- raries and countrymen — a thing which after all is the object of all honorable literary ambition. And yet — people may believe it or not as they please, but the event shows that I was not mistaken — I had ever with me an inward monitor that said to me, " such tri- fling is not for you ; others can do it better." I do not mean to belittle those writings which have brought me so much valued sympathy. It were ingratitude towards my genius, were I not glad that in addition to a remorseless spirit of criticism there was also given me an innocent delight in artistic forms. But my proper calling lies not in the latter province, and when by returning to the former I forfeited those S3"mpathies, I had only to take things as they came, in the full consciousness that I had but done my duty. It is in truth an ungracious and thankless office to have to tell the world what it least wishes to hear. The world lives with no end of outlay, like some Prefatory Postscript. ix grand lord ; takes and spends so long as there is any- thing to spend ; but let somebody reckon up the cost and call attention to the balance, and he is regarded as a mischief-maker. And precisely to such office as that have I ever been inclined by natural disposition and by mental constitution. Forty years ago, before my Life of Jesus appeared, the impression had long been looming up before the minds of thoughtful students of theology, that no such supernatural things could have occurred in Jesus' career as were narrated in the gospels and had been believed by the church down to that period ; neither could they believe in the un- naturally-natural interpretations offered by the ration- alistic expositors of scripture ; doubts too as to the apostolic origin of the gospels and as to the historical character of these writings in general had sprung up here and there. And yet when I brought these fragments of thought together and showed that the evangelic narratives are neither apostolical nor histori- cal ; that the miracles they recount belong to Myth rather than to History ; that everything about Jesus wasinrealityperfectly natural, albeit we can not now give an account of every circumstance of his life — when in my Life of Jesus I put all these things to- gether in consecutive order, every one, young and old, was indignant, and the author's name " the synonym for ev'ry deed accurst." -^ Upwards of a generation passed away, and the matter of that work, after having been in many re- spects more accurately determined, but yet on the X Prefatory Postscript. whole simply confirmed, by the investii^cations of others, had forced its way not only into theological science, but also into the convictions of educated peo- ple in general. People began to leave me and my infidelity alone, as I left the world and its self-de- stroying belief in peace, and the fruits of my taste for description and narration newly awakened during this period of calm, were received with pleasure. But the further development of Science again placed me in a position to gather up the fragmentary thoughts and so give ofi*ence again, for progress' sake. I had now no longer to deal with merely theological ques- tions, but to see how I might combine the conclusions reached in that field with the results especially of Natural Science. On the one hand was a Christ, no longer son of God, but purely and simply man, who notwithstanding was in a fair way to be honored forevermore in the church established for the God- man. On the other hand men were feelino- them- selves more and more impelled from day to day, to ex- plain the origin of the Universe in all its complexity and in its entire comprehension up to Man himself, without the aid of a Creator, and without the inter- vention of miracle. Sundry investigators and ama- teurs of science have accepted these scientific results, without a thought of the consequences they must have for religion and theology; while on the other hand tlieojogians of modern views have looked with all the indifference of laymen, on the rising flood of scientific investigation, and cared not for their ecclesiastical Prefatory Postscript. xi groundwork wliicli was imperilled. ]^ow snrelj was the time to gather together all these scattered thoughts — apiece of work possessed of such attractions for me that I could no more forego it than I could my pre- vious work. When day by day the prospect grows brighter for our eventually demonstrating the con- ditions under which life has been developed in accord- ance with natural laws out of what was lifeless, and consciousness out of the unconscious ; when further- more everything leads us more and more to conceive of the Universe, Being, as a primitive datum^ which we cannot do away with even in thought ; what then becomes of the personal Creator, who is supposed to have mii-aculously called into being the Universe, and then the various orders of living things ? Then, in view of this theory of a strictly natural evolution of things, what becomes of the church, whose whole system of faith is based upon a miraculous begin- ning, (creation) a violent interruption, (fall of man) and a specially miraculous resumption of the devel- opment of the w^orld and of the human race '{ (re- demption). There is doubtless many a one who, wdiile noting the problem here presented, and perhaps solving it for himself, has passed it by quietly, and therein shown his prudence. One must not rouse the sleep- ing lion, unless one is ready to fight with him for life and death. Mankind have no doubt made great advances iu civilization. Not only may one now-a- days affirm the revolution of the earth around the xii Prefatory Postscript. sun without being imprisoned and pnt to the torture, but one may even deny the divinity of Christ with- out any risk of being burned at the stake. There is a limit however. IS'o man is now burned alive for seeing in Jesus only a mere man, for refusing to acknowledge God's personality, for not believing in a future life, or for declining to attach himself in the present life to any christian organization of what creed soever : but yet these things are noted down against him, and when he brings his views and the arguments for them before the public, he finds him- self in disgrace. He has set himself above the con- ventional fashions of thought and life, has offended against good taste, and must not be surprised if peo- ple in dealing with him leave good taste out of consideration. As an author he is thenceforth out- lawed ; he must not expect ever again to have shown him what under any other circumstances would be his right by a sort of Jus gentiimi in literary war- fare. This I learned by exj)erience after the publi- cation of my Life of Jesus, and this I am now learn- again. Here is seen again how much of our modern civilization is made up merely of forms of speech. Is there anything that we have heard oftener repeated, or witli greater emphasis, for some years past, than this, that now-a-days the point is not what a man believes, but how he behaves ; as regards the writer, not what he teaches men to believe, but how he instructs them to act ? Yery well ; but now comes one Prefatory Postscript, xiii who takes all this in earnest, and who sincerely believes that a man's creed is no longer taken into account. He removes certain pillars of the Faith, which he has found to be in a state of decay, without however offering to mankind anything new with regard to moral conduct ; simply exhorting them to the practice of much the same virtues they re- garded as sacred before, though from somewhat loss selfish motives. Surely the man will not be molested on account of what he has said, but will be treated with as much respect as ever before. Undoubtedly he would, if our boasted liberality were anything more than a mere phrase ! On the public highway of'literature, whoever will may load him with abuse. I make no complaint, however, against the gentle- men who write literary criticisms. Accustomed and necessitated as they are to live from hand to mouth, they commonly think more of delivering a brilliant judgment about a particular point, than of appre- ciating a coherent system of the universe ; old and new, faith and enlightenment, are in their minds sometimes wonderfully harmonized ; and owing to the press of occupations their brains become as con- tracted as their closets. Then, too, from year's end to year's end they find themselves tied down to all sorts of considerations — deference to eminent Masters, or to influential cliques, or to dominant prejudices, etc., and it must be a real pleasure for them to come across a writer whom they may treat sans ceremonie, whom they may abuse to their hearts' content, with xiv Prefatory Postscript. the full consent of tlie mass of their readers. But as I have said, I do not complain of these gentlemen, though I cannot esteem it either brave or generous, to attack a man just because the bystanders will not ' lift a hand to save him. Thus then a number of critics have again enjoy- ed hearty satisfaction at my expense. Their contest with me exalts them into the cheeriest frame of mind, so easily is it carried on under existing circumstan- ces. One need not be particular as to the thrusts he makes at his adversary, when partial galleries are the judges of the combat. For instance, when I ob- serve, with regard to Jesus' teaching, among other l^oints this, that instead of ennobling the acquisition of wealth by subordinating it to higher aims, it spurns it in advance, and evinces no conception of-its I agency in promoting civilization and enlightenment — \one has only to say with Herr Dove that I " expect the founder of a religion to give counsel about mon- ey-matters," or, with still finer wit, to speak of " Je- sus' hopeless unfitness to be a dealer in stocks ;'' and then of course I am sent to the ground amid the boisterous applause of the npper tier. Another case : the man who does not see that what I say about Lessing in section 86 comes warm from the heart, must be very obtuse. I Avill venture to say, Herr Hove is nothing of the kind, and yet he has the face, while enjoying a little sport at my expense, to talk of my '' bowing and scraping before Lessing." And not alone the promising young man who in ri'cfatory Postscript. xv sncli sprightly fiisliion handles the helm of the Im Neuen lielch, but even the sedate old-catholic profess- or of Philosophy who writes for the Allgemeine Zei- tung adopts the same tone when dealing with me. When, with a view to deter men from the commis-* sion of certain crimes, I favor the retention of the death penalty, the professor playfully insists that the same argument would justify the barbarous practice of putting criminals to death slowly — a punishment which would inspire far greater terror than instan- taneous death. I am confident that in his heart Herr Huber knows very well that this does not follow, and that besides death, that ultima linea rerum, nothing more is needed to inspire fear — least of all anything which, by blunting human feeling, would produce as much mischief in the contrary direction, as simply capital punishment could produce good : all this, I say, Herr Huber of course knows perfectly well, but still he judges the argument good enough to employ against his esteemed adversary. If my memory is not at fault it is the reviewer of the Hamburg Corre- spondent who has so low an opinion of my book that he says it is just the thing to read over your coffee and cigar. "Well, it was never composed amid such surroundings, and I will not venture to decide whether they would help a man in the understanding of it ; but the utterances of the critics are to a great extent of such a kind as to justify one in thinking that they are not unconnected with coliee and cigars. The English Premier does not appeal' to have taken xvi Prefatory Postscript. np my book in so trifling a spirit, for not long since he found it worth his while, in a speech de- livered at Liverpool, to controvert its positions at length. Mr. Gladstone has not understood me quite correctly, and attacks me after a fashion which even to many of my German critics will appear weak ; but my countrymen might learn from this foreigner how the earnest candid statesman recos^nizes earnest- ness and candor even in a writer whose work he re- gards as pernicious, and how the true gentleman speaks of a man who, as he must admit, has devoted a long life to the investigation of truth and sacrificed to the profession of what appears to him to be truth, all his prospects in life. In like manner, what the Daily News says in opposition to Gladstone's speech, shows more understanding and more genuine tact than any- thing that has yet appeared in German publications with reference to my book.* Inasmuch as my renunciation of the current reli- gion is based, indirectly at least, on the data of J^at- ural Science, the aim of my opponents must be to remove that ground from under me and to show that the great authorities in that department of knowledge are by no means on my side. Almost simultaneously with my work appeared Dubois-Eeymond's essay on the Limits of Natural Science, and in various quar- ters this was held up before me like Minerva's shield * The " Kritik gegen Kritik" {criticism vs. criticism) of the Allgemeine -^eiY///?^, and tlie notice in the Deutsche Presse came to hand only after these pages were written. Prefatory Postscript. xvii with tLe Gorgon's head. Herr Dove, in alhision to that work, adopts for his review of my book, the motto, " Confession or Discretion % '' — as thongh he should say : Look, good reader : on the one side you have a great Student of N'ature, who is so modest and dis- creet as to say that his knowledge extends to a certain point, and who lets you believe as you please beyond that limit ; and on the other side a reputed philosopher who, regardless of such limitations, would push his confession of infidelity out beyond. This limitation established by Dubois-Keymond Herr Dove holds himself justified in calling by the flattering title of "a Kantian performance." In Kant's times too, there were not wanting individuals who welcomed the critical limitation of the Reason, in hopes that now on the outer side of the boundary they could without hindrance chase every phantom of ancient faith and superstition. Of course Kant himself would have nothing to do with this kind of adherents ; the Critic of Reason had no thought of ever promo- ting the interests of stagnant reason. In like manner I doubt if Dubois-Reymond ever intended to leave room outside of the line he has drawn, not only for ancient dualism, but also for his young admirer's dreams about the pre-existence and transmigration of souls. At least the fundamental proposition of all Dual- ism viz. : the regarding of body and soul as two dif- ferent substances appears to our Scientist as purely erroneous. In conclusions so utterly at variance with xvlii Prefatory Postscript. the reality as the Cartesio-Leibnitzian theories wi*h regard to the concurrence of mind and body he recog- nizes " an apagogical demonstration against the cor- rectness of the suppositions which led to them." With Fechter he thinks that in his simile of two watches Leibnitz forgot one very simple supposition, viz : that possibly the two watches whose concordant motion is to be explained, are after all only one. The deriyation of the organic from the inorganic Da- bois-Eeymond holds to be scientifically demonstrable, as I gather from his earlier writings. "It is a mis- take," says he in his latest essay, "to see in the first appearance of living beings on the earth anything supernatural or indeed an^^thing more than an ex- tremely difficult problem in mechanics." So then the limit of our knowledge of Kature is not here ; but there is a point where the thread is broken, where we must acknowledge our ignorance, our enduring ignorance eyen. That point is, where consciousness comes in ; not the consciousness of the human mind, but consciousness in its widest sense, includino: its lowest grades. " Essentially," says he, almost in the words of ;Yoltaire, " it is no more difficult to conceiye of the most exalted mental activity, than of the lowest "grade of consciousness, sensation, as being the result of material conditions : with the first feeling of pleas- ure or pain experienced at the beginning of animal jlife by the most elementary creature, an impassable chasm was made." Prefatory Postscript. xlx There are three points in the ascending evolu- tion of Nature to which more particularly the note of the Inconceivable appears to attach. The}^ are the three questions: How did the living spring from the lifeless, the sensible from the senseless, the reasoning from the irrational? — and they all three ecpially baffle the mind, and extort from it the old explica- tion for all perplexities, God. The scientist of whom we are speaking, holds as we have seen, that the difficulty as to the first point is not insuperable — the evolution of the organic out of the inorganic appears to him conceivable. At one time, as he tells us, he thought he recognized the limit of our knowing only in the third point, i. e., in the problem of free-will, which would be a corollary of Reason. At that time therefore, the second problem, that of consciousness or sensation, must have been held by him capable of solution. I am very sure that a man of science like Dubois- Keymond, would never consent to be made an au- thority of as he is by Herr Dove. The true thinker is always pleased when others too tlihik over his'*^ words. I would therefore say candidly, that as far as I can see, these three questions are alike as regards their being solvable or insolvable. If faith is justi- fied in bringing in God and miracle in all three cases, then science has the right to try and make this intervention unnecessary. Nor does Dubois- Reymond after all controvert this position : all he says is, that Science can aid us in the first, and in XX Prefatory Postscript. the third point, but tliat she can give us no assistance nor ever even expect to, as regards the second. I confess, I could more readily understand what was meant, were some one to say ; A {i. e. life) is, and must ever be inexplicable ; but supposing A once granted, B and C (i. e., sensation and thought) follow of course, that is to say by natural development. Or suppose it read : A and B are conceivable, but at C (self-consciousness) our understanding fails us. Either of these statements, as I have said, appears to me to be more tenable at first sight and in general, than the other which would make the middle stadium only impassable. The first of the three problems i. e. the origin of Life is held by the Katural Science of our day to be solvable, it being, in the words of Dubois-Reymond, a difficult problem, yet simply a mechanical one. It involves a mode of motion difi'erent from any we are acquainted with, and far more complex, but yet sim- ply motion, and so involves nothing that is absolutely new or fundamentally different from known modes of motion. As for the third problem — that of Eea- son and freedom of the will — our author appears to find its solution in the fact that it is most inti- mately connected with the second, Eeason being only the highest stage of consciousness. But as regards the insolvability of that second problem he expresses himself thus: The most accurate knowledge of the essential soul organism reveals to us only matter in motion : but be- Prefatory Postscript. xxi tween this material movement and my feeling pain or pleasure, experiencing a sweet taste, seeing red, etc., with the conclusion Hherefore I exist, ^^ there is a profound gulf ; and it remains ^' utterly and forever inconceivable why to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, etc., it should not be a matter of indiffer- ence how they lie, or how they move : nor can we in any wise tell how consciousness should result from their concurrent action." Whether these Yerha Magistri are indeed the " last word" on the subject, time only can tell. I can accept the doctrine provis. ionally without essential injury to my position, for what says Dubois-Reymond further? The question, says he, whether mental operations will ever be for us intelligible by means of material conditions is a very different one from that other, whether these operations are not in themselves the re- sults of material conditions. Now even if you with our author reply to the first question in the negative, still the other remains unanswered, as it is by no means negatived with the first. On the contrary, in accord- ance with the familiar principle of investigation, that the simplest theory as to the cause of a phenomenon is to have the preference until proved false, our thought will ever incline to an affirmative answer to the ques- tion. For if we had but a conception of the essential nature of Matterand Force — which according to Du- bois-Reymond constitutes the second, or rather the first limit of ]N"atural Science — then too should we under- stand "how the substance underlying them might xxii Prefatory Postscript. sense, and desire and think." We shall of course never clear up these matters ; but the more absolute- ly the investigator of Is"ature recognizes this double limitation of his science, the freer will he be, without the illusions of dogmas and philosophemata, to con- struct his notions of the relations between mind and matter inductively. He will clearly perceive the multifarious dependences of man's mental life on his organic constitution : no theological prejudice will hinder him, like Descartes, from seeing in the souls of brutes souls kindred to that of man, members of the same evolutionary series, though standing at a lower level. Finally he would be led by the Theory of Descent, coupled with the Doctrine of Natural Se- lection, to hold that what is called Soul, came into existence as the gradually resulting effect of certain material conditions and that, like other heritable gifts of service in the struggle for existence, it has gone on advancing and perfecting itself through a long se- ries of generations. Here the question arises, can it be the intention of a scientist who uses this language, that obsolete hypotheses and defunct dogmas should find a new resting-place beyond the limits of exact Natural Science, as placed by him ? Why he fires a regular bomb-shell into these regions out beyond the signal- liglits ! Even in his famous Leipsic discourse, he says that no man must reproach the investigator of J^ature with recognizing in plants no soul-life, on the ground that they possess no nervous system. ^' But what," Prefatory Postscript. xxili continues the orator, " if before assenting to the notion of a World-Soul, he were to demand that you point out to him some\yhere in the Universe a system of ganglia and nerves, imbedded in neurilemma, and nourished with arterial blood under due pressure, and corresponding in its comprehensiveness to the mental power of such a soul ? " I am very careful not to attribute to any one, least of all to so distin- guished a man as Dubois-Reymond, a thought which he does not distinctly avow ; but he can make no objection if I on my own account make an applica- tion of his sentence to the question of a Personal God. The remaining objections brought on scientific grounds against my w^ork, are of minor importance. As for tlie scientific specialists, none of them have as yet expressed an opinion, and I confidently await their judgment. But whatever further objections have been urged, have chiefly to do with certain breaks in the demonstration of IN'ature's gradual evolution — a circumstance which is to be accounted for, partly by the unavoidable brevity of my exposi- tion, partly by the insufiiciency of the observations hitherto made, and partly too, by the imperfection of all human knowledge. Sometimes also, instances have been cited as disregarded by me, though in fact I had not overlooked them at all, but simply regarded them as of no special importance. Thus Olbers's assertion that supposing the number of "worlds, of fixed stars, to be infinite, then the whole xxiv Prefatory Postscript. firmament would radiate as mucli light and lieat as tlie sun. Here, however, even tlie man who is no astronomer. Prof. Huber, for instance, can see quite as well as I, that though the number be infinite, the in- finite distance of the stars diminishes their light. As for Clausius's calculation, that eventually all the motion in the Universe will suflfer impairment, I am not in " direct contradiction" with it, as this critic aflfirms; I contradict it only indirectly, for in my view cessation of movement is on the one hand an incident of the individual worlds, and on the other, is but a transition state like everythiiig else in the Universe that is conditioned. Certain more or less gross misconceptions entertained by my critics, particularly with regard to the Darwinian Theory, I leave to the special expounders of that theory for correction. For the rest, it was not without a pur- pose that in the title of my work, I opposed to the old Faith not a new knowledge, but a new Faith. In constructing a comprehensive view of the Uni- verse, which shall take the place of the cl lurch's equally comprehensive Faith, we not only may take what is inductively demonstrable, but to this we must append whatever postulates or consequences the mind requires to complete the system. With the like intent I called my book a Confession, and this affords me opportunity for bestowing some attention on the theological objections that have been urged against the work. First then it is charged — particularly by Herr Prefatory Postscript. xxv liuber in tlie Allgemeine Zeitung — that in this later work I have " apostatized " from my earlier and higher estimate of the person of Jesus and of Chris- tianity. Now apostasy, as this lively champion of Old Catholicism must kuow from home experience, usually is the result of very definite motives. It commonly takes a direction the reverse of that taken by me, retreating from some extreme and exposed ground to one that is moi'e defensible and less dan- gerous. My apostasy, therefore, which took the con- trary direction, could find its extrinsic motive only in the fact that, at most, certain considerations which once restrained me had now lost their force. Bat in fact the case was otherwise ; in the composition of those earlier writings I enjoyed the same complete independence as I do to-day. The supposed apostasy must therefore proceed from purely intrinsic grounds, in consequence of a change in my convictions ; and here was no occasion for self-reproach. But the simple fact is that there is no apostasy in the case at all. True, in my earlier writings and also particularly in the new revision of the Life of Jesus, I was at great pains to collect into one image the scattered touches found in the gospels, so as to present a picture of Jesus possessiug a human interest. My adversa- ries found the likeness I drew faint and shadowy, and demanded more life-like and definite lineaments, while I on the other hand was fain to confess to my- self that, considering how little we really know of xxvi Prefatory Postscript. Jesus, the lines were far too bold and distinct. There- fore was it that in the last part of my book I com- plained of the meagreness and uncertainty of our his- torical information about Jesus, and said that no well instructed and candid person would say me nay when I affirmed that " there are but few great historical personages of whom we have such unsatisfactory in- formation as of him." Even at that period Jesus' discourses about his return in the clouds annoyed me, nor could I but with labored and specious argument defend him against the reproach of fanaticism and self-glorification. Finally, when in my latest work I consider Jesus in the light of the Centre and Stay of our rehgions life, I find there are chiefly two reasons why he cannot be so regarded : first, he cannot be the centre, for our knowledge of him is too fragment- ary ; then he cannot be the stay, for what we do know about him indicates a person of fantastic fanati- cism. In all this there is clearly no apostasy but only the normal result attending the development of scien- tific convictions, viz. that now I gave full swing to certain reflections which previously I thought I could push aside. For some people you cannot repeat a thing too often, and so I recur again to a point already referred to. I have no intention of disputing that Jesus was an extraordinary man. What I hold is only this : It is not because oi what he w^as, but because of what lie was not ; not because of the truth he tauglit, but on the strength of a prediction which was not fulfilled, Prefatory Postscript. xxvii and wliicli therefore was not true, that he has been made the central point of a church, of a cult. So soon as we see that he was not that, because of w^hich he was raised to such a position, then we have no further ground, nor even, if we would be truthful, anj right to belong to such a church. Mere human excellence even at its highest perfec- tion— sinlessness disappeared simultaneously with supernaturalism and is henceforth to be classed as fraud — gives no title to ecclesiastical veneration ; least of all can it give such title when, having its root in conditions and in spheres of thought which are re- mote from ours, and to some extent the reverse of ours, it grows daily less fitted to be the pattern for our lives and our thoughts. That with such views in regard to the person of Jesus that person can no longer be the object of re- Mgious faith, Avas my conviction full thirty years ago, as expressed in my " Dogmatik." Even so early as then I held it to be an error to *' suppose that the mere moral teaching of Jesus, including his doctrine con- cerning God and retribution, constitutes Christiani- ty ; for it is an essential character of that system to regard us as in relation with these ideas only through the mediation of Christ, and to resign into liis hands every thing noble that adds dignity to man, and every suffering that afflicts him, in order to get them back again in the sliape of grace and mercy. He who has outgrown this idea of self-abnegation, which is the essence of Christianity, may have his reasons xxvlii Prefatory Postscript, indeed for calling himself a Christian, but reason for the name he has none." The question as to onr rela- tion to Christianity, Herr Dove puts in this form, whether the religions movement which began with Jesus still extends so unmistakably to our views of the world and of life as to justify us in coupling with his name our religious principles. But this is not one but two questions, one of which may be answer- ed affirmatively, the other negatively. That the re- ligious movement which began with Jesus goes on in our own time, no one will deny — though with every decade of years it comes in conflict more and more plainly with the truths of Science and with the prac- tical maxims of modern times. The phrase '^ coup- ling with his name our religious principles," is far from saying all that is required in this case. The question is whether we can still honor him with a cultuB^ or consider him as the head of a special ar- rangement for procuring salvation : and I hold that, from our standpoint, such views are no longer justi- fiable. When the author of the notice in the Allgemeine Zeitung perceives that I do not bestow praise on some special good quality of the Christian system, he is ready with the explanation that I have no capacity for appreciating it. For example, the ser- vices rendered by Christianitj^ in the moral culture of the race. But I have not tailed to speak of these services ; and if I did not treat of them at greater length, it was because the object of my work did not Prefatory Postscript. xxix require it. The book is, as I have said, a Confession, not a liistorical essay. The question I liad to do with was not, What has Christianity done for the race ? but. Be its past action what it will — and it will act on in any case — can one who is possessed of certain convictions continue to adhere to it as to a church ? I might make a similar reply to the charge brought against me by the critic of the Cologne Zeitung, viz. that I make no account of the impor- tance of the imao^ination in relii^ion. As to whether I am capable of appreciating this importance, I would refer Herr Bacmeister to one work of mine among otliers, that on Reimarus. But he who has seen what an important role the imagination plays in religion, has left religious illusion far behind ; and whether now those w^ho are freed from such illusions, are forever to go on acting as though they were under their influence, is the question raised in my book. As has been already observed, the reviewer in the Weser Zeitung looks on my book as a declaration of war against the Protestant League and Old-Cath- olicism. He even adds that I " very categorically deny the right of either to exist." And yet I had to do with either the League or with Old Catholicism only incidentally ; and when in the Introduction I admitted that the vast majority of the malcontents, and of those who are striving to advance, belong to these two parties, I think that by that very admis- sion, I conceded their historic right to exist. This XXX Prefatory Postscript. right can only rest on tlie fact that, for a large num- ber of people in these days, the force of advancing knowledo-e on the one hand, and on the other the weii>'ht of old convictions and habits, find their equilibrium just at the point which ansv^'ers to Old- Catholicism and the Protestant League. But if I do not place myself and those of one mind with me at either of these stand-points, the reason simply is that I deny to both the logical right to exist, i. 6., I hold them to be only transition stages beyond which we have passed as our views developed. The objection is urged that while all this may be true enough of individuals, it does uot hold for the majority ; that we must not break with this majority of our fellow-men, must not sever the sacred tie of relio^ious association which binds us to them. " Why" asks Herr Dove, " Why do we, w^ho have banished far away from us every phantom of Kevelation and Miracle, attach so much importance to the name of Christian % The reason is, says he, " because wo would not break away from those of our brethren who still anxiously cling to all these phantoms as though they were something real ; and because Wv3 see in them Christians still, not in that they believe in these phantoms, but in spite of such belief." But once make the experiment of addressing those Christian brethren in that strain ; tell them candidly and plainly that you regard Revelation and Mirac'e to be phantoms ; that you hold themselves however tobe Christians "notwithstanding'' their beliefs-- Prefatory Postscript. xxxi and see if tliey will thencefortli reckon yon as of their Chnrcli. In short, unless backed by accomo- dation by disguise and secrecy, by manifold deception, in a word by falseliood, such compromises are bonnd to fail ; but if honesty and truthfulness must rule any wliere, surely it must be in the domain of relig- ion. In politics compromise is indispensable ; but there it does not of necessity imply deceit or false- hood, because in political aifairs we are not concerned about convictions but about measures, not about the true but about the useful. " I can understand," wrote Dahlmann to Gervin- us, on occasion of the latter's work on the Mission of the German Catholics.* " I can understand how one mio^ht live without a church : I so live ravself, although I would it were otherwise. But how one can build up a church simply on Christian morals, I cannot so readily understand. It appears to me that those (clergymen) who themselves cleave to Christ ; who preach about the mysteries of his birth and res- urrection and about his promises ; and the believ- ing multitude who listen, constitute the church ; and when we others go in and out we cause a draught, but bring no warmth.-' This is precisely what I myself think, all but the wish it were otherwise. We have quit the church in a perfectly honorable way, and here outside of it we lack nothing : why then should we complain that we are not within? This very thing, viz., the desire of firmly impressing on * Seceders from Roman Catliolic Church (1845). xxxü Prefatory Postscript. our minds what we possess even without a Church, and so counteracting that " wish it were otherwise/' was my chief motive in the composition and publica- tion of my Confession. To the same end I recount- ed the incredible and contradictory dogmas we left behind when we quit the church, and the cruciiixion of reason and truthfulness which we escaped when we took that step. But still these arguments were, as I have declared over and over again, never intended to make living in the church unpleasant to any man ; who chooses to remain there. We only desired to jform a definite and coherent idea for ourselves as to tlie grounds of our separation from her. The pur- pose was, not controversy with those who differ, but an understanding with tliose who agree with us. I wanted however, to make those who agree with me recognize not alone what we have, but also what we still lack. In laying before them a statement of our then possessions in the way of knowledge and opinions, of excitements and appease- ments, I wished to call their attention to points where there is need of further light, and to induce them, on their part, to contribute to the common stock of knowledge. Kot only are there still great gaps in our theory of the universe, we are still more backward in our doctrine of duty and virtue. Here I could only indicate the places where the foundation stones are to be laid, rather than point to a completed structure. The reason of this is that we are in Prefatory Postscript. xxxili practice accustomed to fall back upon our old notions, and half unconsciously to derive from them the mo- tives of our conduct. But we must become and remain clearly conscious of the untenable character of these notions, so that we shall be compelled to look for and find the firm grounds of our moral conduct in man's nature as known to us, and not in any pre- tended superhuman revelation. The natural effort of our times to sever the tie between church and state ; the inevitable breaking lip of state churches into sects and free societies, must at no distant period make it possible for num- bers of citizens to belong to no church at all, even externally. The course of mental development especially for the past ten years has favored the formation of such groups ; and the more purely they act out themselves, and the less they stultify them- selves by concessions to others' views, the more bene- ficial will be their influence on mental and moral culture in general. There is no necessity in the world for our interfering with one another: there is] nothing to hinder our standing up like men and, getting our rights. The right to do just this was all; I demanded in my Confession, with regard to which I still hold that in it I did a good work and earned the thanks of a less biased future. The day will come, as it came for the Life of Jesus, when my book shall be understood, — only this time I shall not live to see it. THE OLD FAITH AND THE NEW. rpHE great politico-military movement wliicli, in the course of the last six years, has transformed the internal and external relations of German}^, has been promptly followed by one of an ecclesiastical character, which evinces tendencies scarcely less mili- tant. In the accession of power which seemed to accrue to Protestantism in consequence of Austria's exclusion by Prussia and the formation of the l^orth German Confederation, Poman Catholicism recognized a sum- mons to declare the Pope infallible and to concentrate in his hands its entire ecclesiastico-secular authority. Within the pale of the Catholic Church itself, how- ever, the new dogma encountered resistance, which has since assumed distinct shape in the pai'ty of the so-called Old Catholics ; while the recently founded 2 The Old Faith and the Ä^eit\ German Executive seems determined at last, after a too protracted laissez faire, inherited from the Prussian policy of the last thirty years, vigorously to repel these menacing ecclesiastical encroachments. In view of this perturbation in the Catholic Church, the Protestant may for the moment appear the more stable of the two. Nevertheless, it is not without an internal fermentation of its own; the difference consisting in the fact that, from the nature of its creed, this partakes more of the character of a religious than of a politico-ecclesi- astical movement. . At bottom, nevertheless, a dog- matic and religious difference of opinions underlies the antagonism between the hierarchical tendency of the old consistorial government on the one hand, and the democratic character of those efforts which aim at establishing a synodical constitution on the other. The contest between Lutheran ortho- doxy and the Unionists, and still more, the men of the Protestant League, is, in fact, one concerning religious questions, concerning irreconcilable con- ceptions of Christianity and of Protestantism itself. If this Protestant agitation does not attract as much notice as the Catholic, it is solely due to the fact tliat questions directly bearing on political power naturally make more ado than those which concern Introduction. 3 faith, so long as tlie latter continue merely subjects of theological dispute. Be this as it may : on every side people are at least stirring, speaking out, preparing for conflict; only we, it seems, remain silent and look on with folded arms. What means this We ? For at present surely it is but a simple I which speaks, and one which, moreover, so far as yet appears, without allies, without adherents, occupies a singularly isolated position. Oh, much less than that ; this / has not even a position, and exercises only the degree of influence which the world may be willing to concede to its mere word. And this again applies only to the written and printed word ; for it has neither the ability nor the inclination to address meetings, or become the itinerant missionary of its convictions. But it is possible to be without position and yet not prostrate; to belong to no society and yet not to stand alone. If I say We, I know that I am entitled to do so. The We I mean no longer counts only by thou- sands. True, we do not constitute a church, a congregation, or even a society ; but we know the reason why. u,\ . ^U^ ^^ J-4 ^ c^c^^l , Innumerable assuredly is the multitude of those 4 The Old Faith and the New, who are no lonixer satisfied with the old faith, the old church, be it Protestant or Catholic; of those who either dimly apprehend, or distinctly perceive, the contradiction into which both are forced more and more with the knowledge, the view of life and the world, the social and political growths of the present age, and who in consequence regard a change, a modification, as an urgent necessity. At this point, however, the mass of the dissatis- fied and the progressive divide. One party — and undeniably it forms the great majority in both confessions — considers it sufficient to lop ofi* the notoriously decayed branches of the ancient tree in hopes of thereby imparting to it fresh vitality and fruitfulness. Here people will let the Pope pass, only he must not be infallible ; there they are quite ready to keep fast hold of Christ, but let him no longer be proclaimed the Son of God. In the main, however, both churches are to continue as they were : the one shall retain its priests and bishops set apart from the laity as consecrated dis- pensers of the ecclesiastical means of grace; the other, although with an elective clergy and a consti- tution prescribed by itself, must continue preaching Christ, the distribution of the sacraments as by him ordained, the celebration of the fe.^tivab, which Introduction, 5 serve to retain the chief events of his life in our memory. Side by side with this majority there exists, however, a minority not to be overlooked. Tliese lay great stress upon the mutual dependence of parts in the ecclesiastical system, in short, on logical sequence. They consider that if you once admit a distinctive dif- ference between clergy and laity, if you admit a need inherent in mankind of always obtaining infallible teaching in religion and morals, from an authority in- stituted by God himself through Christ, you must like- wise be prepared to give your adherence to the dogma of an infallible pope, as one equally required by this need. And in like manner, if you no longer consideFl Jesus as the Son of God, but as a man, however excel- lent, they think that you are no longer justified in pray- ing to him, in cleaving to him as the centre of a cultus, in year after year preaching about his actions, his for- tunes, and his utterances ; more especially when you discern the most important of these actions and inci- dents to be fabulous, while those utterances and teach- ings are recognized by you as for the most part irre- concilable with our actual views of life and the uni- verse. And if this minority thus notes the giving v/ay of the close circle of ecclesiastical dogma, it 6 TJie Old Faith and the N'ew, confesses to not seeing what further needs a cultiL8 still subserves, and proceeds to call in question the use of a distinct society like the church existing by the side of the state and the school, of science /and art, the common property of all. The minority which holds these opinions consti- tutes the We in whose name I undertake to speak. 2. But it is a fact that no influence can be exercised on the world if we do not hold together, arrive at the knowledge of each other's convictions, and act accordinor to these convictions with united strenq;th. We ought thus, it would seem, in opposition to the old and new ecclesiastical societies, to found a non- ecclesiastical, a purely humanitarian or rationalistic one. This, however, we have not done, and where a few ivj to effect something of the kind they make themselves ridiculous. TF^need not be scared at this, as we have but to do better. Such is tlie opinion of many, but it is not ours. We rather recognize a con- tradiction in the idea of abolishing one society by in- stituting another. If we would demonstrate the in- utility of a church, we must not establish a something which would itself be a sort of church. Introduction, 7 l^evertlieless, we would and should come to a mutual understanding. Tiiis, liowev'^r, we can effect in our time without a distinct organization. We have public speaking, and above all, we have the press. It is through this latter medi um that I now tiy to come to an understanding with the rest of those I call We. And this medium is quite sufficient for all those purposes which we at present can have in view. Tor the present we wish no change whatever in the world at large. It does not occur to us to wish to destroy any church, as we know that a church is still a necessity for a large majority. For a new con- structive organization (not of a church, but after the latter s ultimate decay, a fresh co-ordination of the ideal elements in the life of nations), the times seem to us not yet ripe. But neither do we wish to repair or prop up the old structures, for we discern in these a hindrance to the process of transformation. "We would only exert our influence so that a new growth should in the future develop of itself from the inevitable dissolution of the old. For this end — mutual understauflino^ without formal oro-anization — the inspiriting power of free speech will be found to suffice. I am well aware thai what I purpose delineating 8 The Old Faith and the New, in the following pages is known to multitudes as well as to myself, to some even much better. A few have already spoken out on the subject. Am I therefore to keep silence ? I think not. For do we not all supply each other's deficiencies ? If another is better informed a.s regards many things, I may perhaps be as to some ; while others again are known and viewed by me in a different light. Out with it, then I let my colours be displayed, that it may be seen whether they are genuine or not. To this I may add something more as regards myself personally. It is now close upon forty years that as a man of letters I have laboured in the same direction, that I have fought on and on for that which has appeared to me as truth, and still more perhaps against that which has appeared to me as error ; and in the pursuit of this object I have attained, nay, overstepped the threshold of old age. I have reached the time when every earnest- minded man hears the whisper of an inner voice- " Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou niay- est be no longer steward." ]^ow I am not conscious of having been an unjust steward. x\n unskilful one at times, too probaljy also a negligent one, I may, heaven knows, have been ; but on the whole I have done what the strength and Introduction, 9 impulse within prompted me to do, and have done it without looking to the right or left, without currying the favour or shunning the displeasure of any. But what is it that I have done ? No doubt one has in one's own mind a certain unity of con- ception, but usually this finds only a fragmentary kind of expression : now do these fragments also ne- cessarily cohere from some inherent connection ? In the ardour of the moment we shatter much that is old, but have we something new in readiness which we can substitute in place of it ? This accusation of merely destroying without reconstructing is perpetually cast in the teeth of those who labour in this direction. In a certain sense I care not to defend myself against this ac- cusation; only that I do not acknowledge it as such. For I have already pointed out that it never lay in my intention to immediately construct any-- thing external, simply because I do not judge the time' for such action to have arrived. Our concern for the moment is with an inward preparation, a prepara- tion moreover of those who feel themselves no lons^er satisfied with the old, no longer to be appeased by half measures. I have never desired, nor do I now desire to disturb the contentment or the faith of any one. lO The Old Faith and the Nezv. But wliere these are already sliaken, I desire to point out the direction in which I beheve a firmer soil is to be found. This, as I take it, can be no other than that which we call the modern Cosmic conception, the result painfully educed from continued scientific and historical research, as contrasted with that from Christian theology. But it is precisely this modern Cosmic conce])tion, as it commends itself to me, to which I have hitherto given fragmentary and allusive expression, but never as yet an ample and explicit one. I have not yet adequately endeavoured to prove whether this conception is possessed :f a firm basis, of the capacity of self-support, of unity and consistency with itself. The effort :o do this I acknowledge to be a debt which I owe, not only to others, but to myself. We are apt to combine many things half-dreamily in our own minds which, when called upon to give them distinct c j.tlines in the form of words and sentences, we disci^er to be wholly incoherent. Neither do T, by ary means, pledge myself that this attempt will pro\o success- ful throughout, that some gaps, some contradictions w^ill not remain. But from the fact that J shall not try to hide these latter, the inquirer may recognise the honesty of my purpose, and by refiGcting on Introduction, 1 1 these matters himself he will be in a position to judge on which side exist more of the obscuri- ties and insufficiencies unavoidable in human speculation, whether on the side of the ancient orthodoxy or on that of modern science. I shall, therefore, have a double task to ])erform ; first, to expound our position towards the old creed, and then the fundamental principles of that new Cosmic conception which we acknowledge as ours. The creed is Christianity. Our first question therefore resolves itself into how and in what sense we still are Christians. Christianity is a definite form of religion, the generic essence of which is distinct from any form ; it is possible to have severed oneself from Christianity and still to be religious. Out of this first question therefore arises ^ the next, whether we still possess religion. Our-' second leading question concerning the new Cos- mic conception also, upon examination, resolves itself into two. In the first place, we would know in Avhat this Cosmic conception consists, on what evidence it rests, and what especially, as com- pared with the old ecclesiastical view, are its 12 TJlc Old Faith and the New. characteristic principles. And in the second place we would learn whether this modern Cosmic concep- tion performs the same services as did the Christian dogma for its votaries, whether it performs them better or worse, whether it is more or less adapted to serve as a basis on which to erect the structure of a life truly human, that is to say truly moral, and be- cause moral, happy. IVe ask, therefore, in the first place : 13 ARE WE STILL CHRISTIANS ? CHRISTIANS in what sense ? For the word at present has a diverse meaning, not only in regard to the confessions themselves, but still more in view of the various gradations now extant between faith and rationalism. It will be taken for granted, after what has been said, that we are no longer Christians in the sense attached to the term by the ancient creed of any denomination • and whether we shall be able to yield our assent to any of the diverse nuances assumed by the Christianity of the day, can with us be a question only in so far as it has refejence to the most advanced and enlightened among them. Nevertheless, even as to this many things would remain incomprehensible if we had not, at least in its outlines, first brought the old Christian faith before our mind's eye ; as only by aid of the pure aboriginal form will mixed forms be found possible of comprehension. 14 TJie Old Faith and the New. Would we know the nature of the old, unadul- terated creed, and the effect it would produce upon us to-day, then let us not go to a modern theologian, even an orthodox one, with whom it akeady in- variably appears in a diluted form; but let us draw it at the fountain-head, from one of the old confessions of faith. We will take that which is fundamentally the most ancient, and which still continues to be used by the Church, the so-called Apostles' Creed, while occasionally supplementing and elucidating it by later doctrinal definitions. The Apostles' Creed is divided into three articles, according to the pattern of the Divine Trinity, the fundamental dogma of ancient orthodoxy. This Trinity itself it does not further express ; but the later confessions of faith, the Niccne and the so- called Athanasian Creed, do this all the more. " The Catholic Faith," says the latter, " is this : That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor divid- ing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost : and yet all three are but one God." It would really seem as if the more ignorant those old Christians were of all the facts of nature, the more brain-iorce they possessed lor such like trans- Arc We Still Christians f 15 cendental subtleties ; for the kinds of claims on tlieir reasoning faculties, which it simply paralyzes ours to recognize, such as conceiving of three as one and one as three, were a trifle to them, nay, a favourite pursuit, in which they lived and had their being, about which they could fight for centuries with all the weapons of acumen and of sophistry, but at the same time with a passion which did not shrink from violence and the shedding of blood. One of the reformers even condemned to the stake a meritorious physician and naturalist, whose only weakness was that he could not let theology alone, for holding heretical notions as to this doctrine. We moderns can no longer either excite or even interest ourselves about such a dogma; nay, we are only capable of conceiving the matter at all when we conceive something else in regard to it, i.e.y put an interpretation of our own upon it ; in- stead of which, however, we shall do better to make clear to ourselves how the ancient Christians gradu- ally came by so strange a doctrine. This, however, belongs to the church history, which also shows us in what manner Christians of more recent times again drifted away from this belief, for if still outwardly professed, it has nevertheless lost its former vitalitv even in circles otherwise orthodox. 1 6 The Old Faith and the New, 5. The first article of the Apostles' Creed simply declares at once the belief in God the Almighty Fathei-, the maker of heaven and earth. We shall have occasion to recur to this general conception ; of a world-creating Deity, as being a primitive reli- /gious conception; now let us cast a glance at those more particular definitions which the ecclesiastical idea of creation derived from the biblical narrative in the first chapter of Genesis, and which forthwith became stereotyped articles of faith. This is the famous doctrine of the six days' work, according to which God did not create the worl 1 by one simple act of volition once for all, but little by little, according to the Jewish division of a week into six days. If we accept this narrative as it stands, if we conceive of it as a product of its time, compar- ing it with the traditions of creation or cosmogonies which obtained among the ancients, then with all its childishness we shall find it pregnant w^ith sugges- tion, and regard it with a mixture of pleasure and respect. Nor shall we make it a reproach to the old Hebrew prophet that he was ignorant of the \ system of Copernicus, of the modern discoveries in geology. How unjust to such a biblical narrative, Are We Still Christians ? 1 7 in itself dear and venerable, to thus petrify it into a dogma ! For it becomes then at once a barrier, an obstructive rampart, against which the whole onset of progressive reason and all the battering-rams of criticism now strike with passionate antipathy. So especially has it fared with the Mosaic cosmogony, which, once erected into a dogma, arrayed all modern science in arms against itself. The order in which, according to its version, the creation of the various heavenly bodies succeeds each other, met with the strongest opposition. These, according to it, appear too late on the scene of action in every respect. The creation of the sun takes place on the fourth day only, when the changes of day and night, inconceivable with the sun omitted, are stated to have already taken place for three days. Moreover, the creation of the earth precedes that of the sun by several days, and to the latter as well as to the moon is ascribed a subordinate posi- tion with regard to the earthy while only casual mention is made of the stars : a perversion of the true relations governing heavenly bodies unbecom- ing a divinely-inspired account of the creation. A fact no less striking is the statement that God took no less than five days to create and fashion forth the earth, while for the making of VOL. I. C 1 8 The Old Faith and the New, the sun, tlie whole starry host as well as the planets — not such in the biblical narrative, it is true, but merely lighted candles, — he allowed himself only one day. If such were the scruples of astronomy, geology soon added others of no less moment. The sea and earth are said to have been divided from each other on the third day, and vegetation more- over created in all its forms; whereas our geolo- gists now no longer speak of thousands but of hundreds of thousands of years as having been required by formative processes of this nature. On the sixth day — excepting the fowl, which were made on the one preceding it — all the beasts of the earth, not omitting every creeping thing, and man himself at the last, are said to have been called into being ; processes of growth for which, as shown by modern science, periods of immeasurable duration were no less requisite. 6. Now there exist, it is true, not only theologians but even naturalists of our own time who are prepared with all sorts of little nostrums for cases of this sort. That God made the sun three days after he had already made the earth means, according to them. Are We Still Christians 1 19 that then for the first time it became visible to the cloud-environed globe of earth; and the days, although included unmistakably between sunset and dawn, are explained as referring not to days of twelve or twenty-four hours each, but as being geological periods, capable of being extended to any length that may be considered requisite. He, however, who is seriously convinced of the old Christian belief, ought on the contrary to say : "A fig for science ; thus it stands in the Bible, and the Bible is the word of God." The Church, and more especially the Protestant Church, takes this designa- tion avb pied de la lettre. The various books of Holy Scripture were, it is admitted, written by men, but these were not abandoned to their own imperfect memory and fallacious reason, but God himself (i.e. the Holy Spirit) was the inspirer of these writings ; and what God inspires must 1 be infallible truth. The narrative of these books is therefore to be accepted with unqualified historical assent, their teaching is no less unreservedly to be received as the standard by which our actions and our faith are to be regulated. There can be no question in the Bible of false and contradictory statements, of mistaken opinions and judgments. Let reason recoil ever so much from what it relates 20 The Old Faith and the New, or would enjoin on us; when God speaks, then a modest silence can alone befit the mere human understanding. "But what if Scripture were not the word of God ? " Indeed; then explain how Isaiah could by merely human knowledge have predicted that Jesus should be the offspring of a virgin; how Micah could have foretold that he would be born at Bethlehem. How could tiie same Isaiah, a century and a half before the Persian C3rrus, have named him as the deliverer of the Jews from the Baby- lonian captivity, which had not then taken place ? How, without divine inspiration, could Daniel, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, have fore- told so many particular incidents in the history of Alexander the Great and his successors down to Antiochus Epiphanes ? Alas ! all this has now found but too satisfactory a solution — satisfactor}^ for science that is to say, very unsatisfactory indeed for the old religion. Isaiah prophesying of the virgin's son, Micah with his ruler from Bethlehem, had not the most remote . idea of our Jesus. The last third-part of the so-called prophecies of Isaiah proceeds from a contemporary of Cyrus, the entire book of Daniel from a contem- porary of Antiochus, of whom therefore they could Are We Still Christimis ? 2 1 prophesy in a very human manner indeed, after or during the fulfihnent of their predictions. Facts of a similar nature have long since been ascertained in reo'ard to other books of the Bible : we no long^er 1-eckon a Moses, a Samuel, amongst its authors ; the writings bearing their names have been recognized as compilations of much later dato, into which older pieces of various epochs have been inserted with but small discernment and much deliberate design. It is known that in regard to the writings of the New Testament there has been a like result in the main, and of this we shall presently have occasion to give a more detailed account. 7. We liave already been led far away from the Apostles' Creed, but its first article is really too con- cise. Let us rather therefore take one more step in Genesis, the second and third chapters of which have, like the first, served as a basis for the Christian dogma. The history of creation is succeeded by the so-called Fall of Man : a point of far-reaching im- portance, as, in order to abolish its consequences, the Saviour was, in the course of time, to be sent into the world. Here, as in the history of creation, we shall find 2 2 The Old Faith and the Ä^ew, that in the ancient story we have to deal with a didactic poem, which, of itself deserving our esteem, has, on account of its erection into a dogma, had the misfortune to incur much misinterpretation, then censure and antagonism. The poet wishes to ex- plain how all the evil and misery under which man suffers at present came into a world which God must undoubtedly have created good. The fault of God it cannot be, entirely man's it must not be. A tempter, therefore, is introduced, who persuades our first parents to transgress the divine commandment. This tempter is the serpent. By it the author of the story simply meant the well-known mysterious animal of which remote antiquity could relate so many marvels ; but sub- sequent Judaism and Christendom understood by it the devil, who having emigrated from the Zend religion into the Jewish, was destined to play so im- portant a part in it, and one still more so in Chris- tianity. Only think of Luther, who lived and had his being in the doctrine of demonism. At every step he took, he fell foul of the arch-fiend. Not only evil thoughts and temptations, nay, even outward misfortunes to which man is subject, such as disease and sudden death, destructive fires and hailstorms, Are We Still Christians ? 2^ were ascribed by him to the immediate influence of the devil and his infernal crew. However undeni- ably this proves the low state of his scientific knowledge, as well as of his general culture, never- theless the delusions of great men may occasionally assume grand proportions. Eveiybody knows Luther's utterance about the devils at Worms : " Were there as many of them as tiles upon the houses;" but on his way thither he had already had a tussle with the old enemy of mankind. Wliile he was preaching, on his passage through Erfurt, the overcrowded church-gallery began to crack. Great was the dismay, a sudden panic and a consequent catastrophe might be apprehended. Then Luther from his pulpit began to thunder at the devil, whose hand he clearly recognized in the mischief, but whom he would counsel to bide quiet for the future ; and behold quiet is restored, and Luther able to conclude his sermon. Eut who sups with the devil should liave a long spoon. He could not be burned, fire being his ele- ment ; but it was quite otherwise with those poor old women, who were reported to have wrought by his aid those very evils, such as maladies, hail- storms, etc., which Luther scrupled not to ascribe to Satan. And while trials for witchcraft form one 24 The Old Faith a7id the Neiv, of the most horrible and shameful records of Chris- tianity, one of its ugliest features is the belief in the devil, and the degree in which this formidable caricature still rules people's minds or has been ejected thence, is a very fair measure of their civi- lization. On the other hand, however, the removal of so essential a support is fraught with danger to the entire Christian edifice. Goethe in his youth once remarked to Bahrdt, that this, if any, was a tho- roughly biblical conception. If Christ, as St. John writes, appeared on earth in order to destroy the 1 works of the devil, he might have been dispensed with if no devil had existed. 8. But the serpent was not the only Hebrew symbol upon which a different construction was put by the Christian dogma. The author of the story wished to explain man's misery ; the Christian interpreta- tion made him first explain man's sinfulness. Again, he had actually understood physical death as that with which God punished the disobedience of our first parents; the Christian dogma under- stood it as signifying also spiritual death, i.e., ever- lasting perdition. Through the fall of Adam and Are We Still Christians ? 25 Eve, sin, as well as damnation, is tlie inheritance of the whole human race. This is the notorious doctrine of original sin, one of the pillars of Christendom. The Augsl^urg creed defines it thus : "After the fall of Adam all naturally- begotten men (here a margin is left for the excep- tional case of Christ) are born in sin, i.e., without the fear of, or trust in, God, and with the propensity to evil; and further, this hereditary disease or fault constitutes in very deed a sin, even now bringing death everlasting to those not born again through baptism and the Holy Ghost." On the plea of a corruption, therefore, of which the individual has not been himself the cause, of which neither is it given him to free himself of his own power, he is to be condemned, he and the entire progeny of a childish and inexperienced pair — not excepting even the innocent little ones who die unbaptized — to the everlasting torments of hell! It is astonishing how a conception equally revolt- ing to man's reason and sense of justice, a con- ception which transforms God from an object of adoration and affection into a hideous and detest- able being, could at any time, however barbarous, have been found acceptable, or how the casuistries by which people strove to modify its harshness 26 The Old Faith and the New, could ever even have been listened to with common patience. ' 9. But we shall be reminded here that Christ was sent into the world to cure the mischief caused by the devil, and thus are brought back to the Apostles' Creed, of which the second article, arising out of the first concerning God the Father, is as follows : And I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord ; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried ; He descended into hell; on the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come again to judge the quick and the dead." The singularity here is that of all the different points enumerated we at this day accord belief, iiay, are onJy able to attach some sort of an idea to those which, as regards belief in the sense of dogma, have no specific value of their own, because they only predicate that of Christ which might equally aijply to any man. What the only begotten Son of God the Father may be we no longer can tell. The " conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Are We Still CJirisiiaiis? 27 Virgin Mary," savours of mythology, only that Greek incarnations appear to us more felicitously invented than this Christian one. The agony and crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, we, as before mentioned, have no desire to dispute, as not unlikely in itself, and having moreover the Roman histo- rian's testimony in its support. All the more won- derful is that which now follows. The descent into hell is not attested by even one Evangelist. On the other hand, they all bear testimony to the resurrection, but not one of them was an eye- witness, and it is described in a different manner by all; in short, attested like any other event that we are compelled to regard as unhistorical. And what sort of an event ? One so impossible, in such direct antagonism to every laAV of nature, that it would require a testimony of tenfold reliability/ to be as much as discussed, not scouted from the very first. Finally, comes the ascension into heaven, where we know the heavenly bodies, but no longer the throne of God at whose right hand it would be possible to sit ; then the return to judgment on the day of doom, a thing which we can form no idea of, as we admit either no divine judgment, or only such as fulfils itself hour by hour and day by day. 28 Tlie Old FaitJi a?td the New, Tliese, however, are not the fantastic notions of a later creed, but, like the devil himself, emphatically the doctrines of the Nevs^ Testament. 10. The second article of the Apostles' Creed is termed by the abridged Lutheran Catechism that of the scheme of salvation, and it therefore comments upon it especially from this point of view. It speaks of Christ as Him " who has redeemed me, a lost and ruined man, and delivered me from all sin, from death and the power of Satan, not by silver and gold, but by His sacred precious blood and His sinless agony and death." This is the only genuine ecclesiastical conception of a Redeemer and his redemption. We, by the fall of our first parents, as well as by our own sin, had deserved death and everlasting damnation, had already been delivered to the dominion of Satan, but Jesus came, took upon himself death in its most painful form, bore the Divine wrath in our stead, and in consequence delivered us — if only we will believe in him and the efficacy of his death — from the punishment which was our due, or at least from its principal feature, eternal domination. Luther contrasts this death, by means of Avhich Are IV e Still Christians ? 29 Christ ransomed us, with gold and silver, which could have accomplished nothing. But these, althougli biblical expressions, no longer represent the original antithesis ; this is to be found in the Epistle to the Hebrews : it says that, not by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own, had Christ achieved this deliverance. The Christian scheme of the atonement had its origin in the sacrificial rites of the ancient Jews. A pious sentiment is no doubt at the root of this extremely ancient usage of propitiatory offerings, but it is enveloped in a rough husk, and we can by no means regard the transmu- tation it has undergone by Christianity in the light of a purification. On the contrary, everybody knows that the sacrifices whereby rude nations fancied they could pacify the anger of their gods were originally' / sacrifices of human beings. It was therefore a pro- gress towards refinement when they began to sacrifice animals in their stead. But now, once again, the human sacrifice was substituted for that of the animal. True, it was only by way of an allegory ; there was no question of a victim offered up with formal sacrificial rites, on the contrary, the criminal condemnation and execution of the Messiah, the Son of God, who resigned himself meekly to his fate — decreed by a deluded people and its rulers — was 30 The Old Faith and the JVezv, looked upon as an atoning sacrifice. But, as hap- pens in such cases, the allegory was not suiFered to remain such. God himself had pre-ordained it thus; and the condition on which he would or could extend his pardon to men was that Jesus should let himself be slaughtered for their sakes. 11. If the life of an innocent person is taken at all, whether by rude violence or an unjust sentence, — and especially if this happen in consequence of a truth he has enunciated, of a good cause by him represented, and for which he suffers a martyr's death, — an effect never fails to ensue, varying only in kind and influence according to the position and the importance of the murdered man. The execu- tion of a Socrates and a Giordano Bruno, of a Charles I. and a Louis XVI., of an Oklenbarne- veldt and a Jean Galas, each produced an impres- sion of a certain nature and within a certain sphere. What these cases had in common, however, was that their efficacy was of a moral nature, the result of the impression they had wrought on men's minds. A like moral efficacy belonged to the death of Jesus; the profound and moving impression it Are We Still Christians ? 3 \ made on the minds of his disciples, the change of their views as to the mission of the Messiah and of the nature of his kingdom which it produced in them is matter of history. According to the cliurcli, however, this was the most insignificant part of the result. The chief efficacy of the death of Jesus, and its especial object, was rather, so to speak, a metaphysical one ; not mainly in the minds of men, but above all in the relation of God to man some- thing was to be changed, and actually was changed, by this death ; it, as we have heard already, satisfied the wrath, the severe justice of God, and enabled him, in spite of their sins, again to bestow his mercy upon mankind. It can scarcely need to be pointed out that a per- fect jumble of the crudest conceptions is comprised in this one of an atoning death, of a propitiation by proxy. To punish some one for another's trans- gression, to accept even the voluntarysufFeringof the innocent and let the guilty escape scathless in con- sequence, this, everybody admits now, is a barbarous action ; to consider it matter of indifference in re- gard to a moral or a pecuniary debt, whether it be discharged by the debtor or by some one else in his stead, is, everybody now admits, a barbarous conception. ^2 The Old FaiiJi and the Ahw, If the impossibility of such a transfer has once been acknowledged, then it no longer signifies whether the vicarious sufferer to be transferred is an ordinary man or the incarnate God. On this point, however, the Church notoriously laid especial stress. " If I believe," said Luther, " that by His human nature alone did Christ suffer for my sake, I should account Him but a sorry Saviour who needed a Saviour himself. True, the Godhead cannot suffer and die, but the Person that is very God doth suffer and dies ; it is right therefore to say, the Son of God has died for me." This union of the two natures in the single per- son of Christ, and the interchange of their mutual properties, was still further developed into a system by the Church, the super-subtle doctrines of which must needs completely extinguish the historic human personality of Christ, wiiile the relation which the heavenly Father bore to this atonement of the Son, inspired a Diderot with the sarcasm : " II n'y a point de bon pere qui voulut ressembler a notre pere celeste." 12. The Apostles' Creed concludes its scheme of the Christian faith by the third article, which reads as Are We Still Christians'^ 33 follows: "I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the for- giveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." The second person of the Godhead, in its union with human nature, has, as stated, obtained for us the remission of sins ; but, in order that we may actually become partakers in this, the third person, the Holy Ghost, must also now emerge into activity and, so to speak, transmit it to us. This is effected by the Church and the means of grace which are especially presided over by this alleged third person of the Deity. The Word of God is preached in the Church, and this in its essence is preaching the cross, i.e., the doctrine of the remission of sins by the death of Christ, and that because of our faith in this effect of Jesus' death we shall be justified before God, with- out respect to works, to the improvement of our lives, by which, indeed, a genuine faith must necessarily be attended, but which does not signify in the sight of God, who only regards us as righteous in so far as we shall by this faith have vicariously acquired Christ's righteousness. Thus spake Luther, in opposition to the Catholic practice of his days, which thought to obtain justification in 34 The Old Faith and the Neiv, the sight of God by outward Avorks, fasting, pil- grimage, and the like. If in contrast to these tri\ial superficialities Luther had emphasized the moral disposition as the one thing needful, had he further proclaimed that God is satisfied to take account of earnestness and purity of heart, for, whatever man may accomplish, the fulfilment of the moral pur- pose must always remain very imperfect in him : then we must have awarded him the palm above the Catholic Church for the refinement and pro- fundity of his conception of man's relations to God. But his doctrine of justifying faith, to which uprightness of intention was quite subordinate, was strained to excess on the one hand, and ex- tremely perilous to morality on the other. In addition to the Word, the Sacraments act in the Church as channels of the remission of sin. Of these the Eucharist, as everybody knows, has caused about the same amount of strife and warfare in the West as the doctrine of the Trinity in the East. And yet to us in our day the question, so violently debated in the time of the Reformation, as to whether and how something of the actual body of Chiist w^ere partaken of in the Communion, has become as indifferent and incomprehensible as that other, whether God the Son is of the Are We Still Christians J 35 same or only of similar essence with the Father. In the interdependence of the Christian system, how- ever, the other principal sacrament, Baptism, plays a still more important part. " He who believe.^ and is baptised shall be saved," Christ had said : he therefore, who is not baptised, shall be damned. But is it always man's own fault that he is not baptised ? What of the little children, for example, who die before baptism ? Or of those millions of . pagans who died ere baptism was instituted ? Or of those millions of heathens who even now in distant regions know scarcely anything of baptism and Christianity ? The Augsburg Confession ex- pressly says : " We condemn the Anabaptists, who assert that unbaptised children can be saved." Only the humanist Zwingli was humane enough to translate virtuous pagans like Socrates and Aiis- tides to heaven, in spite of their unbaptised condi- tion, without further ado. 13. The conception of the resurrection of the borly, so acceptable to Jewish believers in the Messiah and to Hebrew Christians, has in our own time become a stumbling-block to orthodoxy itself The Jew was by no means inclined to lose his share 36 The Old Faith and the Neiü, in the anticipated glories of the Messiah's day, even if it should find him in his grave ; but this could only be his portion if his spirit, recalled by God or the Messiah from the shadowy realm where in the meanwhile it had drao^cred on a dismal existence, and reunited to the resuscitated body, should thus be rendered once more capable of life and enjoy- ment. And although the conception of the delights of the Messiah's kingdom gradually assumed a more refined character in Christendom, a certain ma- terialism nevertheless continued to adhere to the Church (with which on our part we do not Cjuarrel), in that she could not conceive of a true and complete life of the soul without corporeal essence. The difficulties inherent in the restoration of so many mouldered human frames — frames, more properly speaking, utterly annihilated — were naturally no trouble to the Church ; to overcome them was the businass of omnipotence. Our superior scientific knowledge renders us but a poor service in demon- strating the simple preposterousness of such a conception. And besides, it is precisely the most ardent believers in immortality who have now-a- days come to be such arrant spiritualists, that, although fully trusting in the possibility of pre- serving their precious souls to all eternity, they Are We Still Christians'^ 2>1 are yet at a loss to know what to do with their bodies, at least, after life has forsaken its earthly tabernacle. The resuscitated enter upon eternal life, but by no means all, for there is a twofold resurrection, one unto life, the other unto judgment, i.e., to everlasting perdition. And unfortunately it ap- pears that the number of the reprobate infinitely exceeds that of the elect. Damned, in the first place, is the whole of the human race before Christ, excepting a few chosen souls, such as those of the Jewish patriarchs, who are liberated from hell by a special interposition ; damned, again, the heathen of our own time, and Jews and Moham- medans, as well as the heretics and the godless in Christendom itself; and of these, the latter only because of their personal guilt, all the others solely on account of Adam's sin ; their inaccessibility to Christianity, (with a few exceptions among those born after Christ's time) being no fault of theirs. This is but an unsatisfactory winding up ; and any expectation we might have entertained of being indemnified for so much that is revolting in the first principles of the ecclesiastical creed, notably the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin, proves to have been a bitter deception. " For tlie most part, 38 The Old Fait It and the New. nevertheless," says Reimams, " men go to the devil, and hardly one in a thousand is saved." My pious and pensive grandfather, brooding over these things, was during the whole of his life tormented by this idea ; even as in a hive there is but one queen to many thousand bees, even so, argued he, with men also there only was one soul saved, to thousands doomed to the flames of hell. 14 Such was in outline the old belief of Christen- dom, and for the object we have in view, the diver- sity of confessions makes but little difference. Emerging in this shape from the age of the Refor- mation, it encountered the spirit of modern times, whose first stirrings were already perceptible in the seventeenth century, more especially in England and the Netherlands. Reason, fortified by historical and scientific research, developed apace, and as it in- creased in vigour found itself less disposed to accept the ecclesiastical tradition. This commotion of intellects first passed in the eighteenth century from England into France, already prepared for it by Bayle, then to Germany as well ; so that in the process of attacking the old dogma we find a special part undertaken by each of these countries. Are We Still Christians ? 59 To England's sliare fell that of the first assault, and of the forging of the weapons, the work of the so- called free-thinkers or deists ; Frenchmen then brought these weapons across the Channel, and knew how to wield them with briskness and adroitness in incessant light skirmishing ; while in Germany it was chiefly one man who silently undertook the investment in form of the Zion of Orthodoxy. France and Germany especially seemed to divide between them the parts of seriousness and mockery; a Voltaire on the one side, a Hermann Samuel Reimarus on the other, fully typified the genius of their respective nations. The result of the attentive scrutiny to which the latter had subjected the Bible and Christianity had proved thoroughly unfavourable to both. They fared no better at the hands of the grave Reimarus than with the scoffer Voltaire. In the whole course of biblical history Reimarus had not only failed to discover traces of the divine, but had found on the other hand much of what is human in the worst sense : the patriarchs he pronounced worldly, selfish, and crafty men ; Moses an ambitious per- sonage, unscrupulous enough to procure the enact- ment of an indifferent code by deceit and crime; and David, the ''man after God's own heart," a 40 The Old Faith and the New, cruel, voluptuous, and hypocritical despot. Even as regards Jesus, Reimarus found cause to regret that he had not confined himself to the conver- sion of mankind, instead of regarding it only as a preparation toward his ambitious scheme of found- incr the Messiah's kino-dom on earth. This was his ruin, and his disciples then stole his corpse in order to declare him risen from the dead, and in consequence make this fraud the basis of their new religious system and of their spiritual power. Nor does the Christian system, according to Reimarus, belie its origin. Its axioms are false and full of contradictions, entirely opposed to all rational reli- gious ideas, and decidedly unfavourable to the moral improvement of our race. The tenets of the early Church, which formed the justification of this judg- ment, have been given in the foregoing exposition. But the more seriously this negative result pre- sented itself to the German intellect, a result which the investigation of the old faith from an altei-ed intellectual standpoint seemed to render inevitable, the more keenly did we feel the necessity of effecting a compromise. To turn to-day with loathing and contempt from what but yesterday was to us and the whole of society a sacred object of reverence, may be possible to him who can get over the glaring Are We Still Christians'^ 41 contradiction by raillery and ridicule, but he who is impressed by the gravity of the subject will soon find this contradiction unendurable. Therefore it was that Germany, and not France, became the cradle of Rationalism. 15. Rationalism is a compromise between the tenets of the early Church and tlie distinctly nqgative result of its investigation by modern enlightened reason.. It deems that although everything in biblical history took place naturally, yet in the main it took place honestly. The representative men of the Old Testament it judges to have been men even as we, but not worse than we, on the contrary, eminent in many respects; Jesus, it is true, was no Son of God as the Christian dogma has it, but neither was he ambitious, nor eager to thrust himself forward as an earthly Messiah, but rather one who was inspired by a genuine love for God and h^s fellow-men, who perished as a martyr in endeavouring to promulgate a purer moral and religious creed among his countrymen. The nume- rous stories of miracles in the Bible, especially in the Gospels, are founded not on fraud but on mis- conception, natural occurrences being sometimes 42 The Old Faith a7id the New, considered miracles by eye-witnesses or historians, and tlie reader at other times putting a miraculous interpretation upon circumstances which the nar- rator did not intend to relate as prodigies. The position which Kationalism occupies in rela- tion to the ultra standpoint of a Reimarus shall be illustrated by two examples, one taken from the beginning of Holy Writ, the other from the end. The account of the Fall of man, which, indeed, he considered as fabulous, had chiefly been denounced as immoral by Reimarus because it made of God — from the fact of his having planted the seductive tree in sight of a primitive inexperienced pair, stimulated their desire by means of the arbitrary prohibition, and admitted the instigating serpent — the veritable author of the whole catastrophe. But then, questioned the rationalist" Eichhorn, Who knows whether the prohit»ition to eat of the fruit was really arbitrary ? The tree was probably a poison- ous one, whose fruits were noxious to mankind. True, the prohibiting deity was as great a puzzle to Rationalism as the talking serpent; but perhaps primaeval man had once observed that on partaking of the fruit a serpent had expired in convulsions, while at another time no harm had occurred to the reptile, and thus, in spite of these warning Are We Still Christians''^ 43 symptoms, had been emboldened to venture upon a gratification which, although not im.mediately fatal, yet by degrees brought death on himself, and bane- fuUy affected the physical and moral condition of his posterity. The other example shall be the resurrection of Jesus. Here, as we know, our Reimarus considers nothing as more certain than that the Apostles had abstracted the corpse of their Master from the sepulchre, in order to proclaim his resuscitation, and be able thenceforth to make this the founda- tion of a new fanatical system of religion, which commended itself to their ambition and self-interest. Nothing of the sort! again interposes the rationalist The disciples were the farther from such baseness the less they stood in need of it. Jesus was not really dead, although supposed to be so, when taken down from the cross and laid with^ spices in the sepulchral vault; here he again recovered con- sciousness, and by his reappearance astonished his disciples, who thenceforth, as long as he still abode among them, in spite of all his efforts to convince them of the contrary, regarded him as a super- natural being. This method of dealing with biblical history was also pursued by rationalism with respect to the 44 The Old Faiih and the New. doctrines of Christianity. It evaded the offence which the radicalism of the free-thinkers had con- ceived as postulates antagonistic to reason, or deductions perilous to morality, by breaking off or blunting its point. The Trinity in its eyes was a misunderstood phrase; mankind not corrupt and accursed on Adam's account, but certainly weak and sensual by natural constitution ; Jesus not a Saviour by his atoning death, but nevertheless such by his teaching and example, which exercise an elevating, therefore a redeeming, influence upon us all ; men are justified not through faith in another's righteousness, but by faithfulness to their ovvn con- viction, by the earnest endeavour always to shape action by a recognised standard of duty. 16. When F. C. Schlosser, fifty-six years ago, began the consecutive narrative of his "Universal History," he engaged the mystic T. F. von Meyer, of Frankfort, to insert his own version of Jewish history. He mentioned in his preface that he could not credit himself with the pious disposition of his learned friend, but it is easy to read between the lines. He neither wished to play the hypocrite, nor to place a stumbling-block at the threshold of his Are We Still Christicuis ? 45 deeply-planned undertaking. But if now, on the other hand, we glance over one of the more recent text-books of ancient or Jewish history, not one written to the order of the Ministry of Worship, we shall find that the better the book the more will Jewish history be placed on exactly the same foot- ing as that of Greece or Rome, the more will the criticism which is brought to bear on Herodotus and Livy be applied also to Genesis and the Book of Kings ; that Moses will be appreciated no other- wise than Numa or Lycurgus, and especially will the miraculous stories of the Old Testament be treated exactly in the manner of those occurring in Greek and Roman historians.« Thus the study of the Old Testament, regarded hitherto as a branch of theologi- cal science, has become the study of Jewish literature in the same secular sense as if it were the literature of Germany, France, and England. The difficulty of applying the purely historical view and method of treatment is of course increased when we come to the primitive history of Chris- tianity and the writings of the New Testament. A resolute beginning, however, is made, a solid foun- dation secured. No modern theologian, who is also a scholar, now considers any of the four Gospels to be the work of its pretended author, or in fact to 46 The Old Faith and the Neiv. be by an apostle or the colleague of an apostle. The first three Gospels, as well as the Acts, pass for doctrinal compilations of the beginning of the second century after Christ, the fourth, since Baur's epoch-making investigation, as a dogma- tising composition of the middle of the same century. The drift of the first is decided by the difierent positions which their authors (and in the second place, their sources) had occupied in the disputes between Jewish Christianity and that of St. Paul ; the dogma which the fourth Evangelist proposed to demonstrate in his narrative is the Judaico- Alexandrine conception of Jesus as the incarnate Logos. Foremost among the undisputed writings of the New Testament are the first four Epistles of the Apostle Paul; but the present readiness of critics to acknowledge the Revelation of St. John as genuine is almost unwelcome to modern orthodoxy. After the admission had once necessarily to be made that the two writings could not possibly be by the same author, it would gladly have got rid of that fantastic Judaico-zelotical book for the sake of more securely retaining the Gospel according to St. John in its place. And now a malicious criticism simply in- verted the thing : reft the Evangelist of his Gospel and left him the Apocalypse : and noted in addition that Are We Still Christians? 47 the entire prophecy turned upon the expectation of the fallen Nero's return in the character of Antichrist, and had therefore certainly not been insj)ired by the Holy Spirit, but by a delusion incident to the author's age and nation. lY. Things had not as yet come to such a pass, but it needed no extraordinary acumen to foresee that they soon would do so, when Schleiermacher — gifted with perhaps but too much acumen, — propounded his system of theology. He resigned himself from the first to the possible necessity of yield- ing the point of the genuineness of the greater part of the biblical writings, after having of his own accord surrendered that of the tradi- tional conception of Jewish history, as well as that of primitive Christianity. For him, no less than for the Rationalists, the historical and dog- matic value of the biblical account of Creation and \ the Fall of man was null, and like them also, only with rather better taste, he knew how, on purely rational grounds, to explain the miracles recorded in the Gospels, not excluding the cardinal one of the Resurrection of Christ. Neither did he retain the origjinal sense of any of the Chris- 48 TJic Old Faith and the Neiu. tiaii dogmas ; the difference consisting only in tlie greater ingenuity, tliongli sometimes also in the more artificial character, of his interpretation. Of one article of belief only did he keep firm hold, and that certainly the central dogma of Christianity; the doctrine regarding the person of Christ. In this instance the well-meaning, didactic, and itinerant rabbi of the Rationalists was almost too insignificant, I might say, too prosaic, for him. He believed himself able to prove that Christ had played a more important, a more exceptional part. But whence obtain those proofs if, after all, so little reliance could be placed on the Gospels ? One of these, as we shall see, he considered as more authentic than the rest ; the real and certain proof, however, in his opinion, lay nearer than any document of Scripture. The early Christians had been fond of alluding to the witness of the Holy Spirit, as the first assurance of the truth of Scripture ; Schleiermacher appealed to the witness of the Christian conscious- ;! ness as giving us complete certainty in regard to the Saviour. We, as members of the Christian community, become conscious of something within us which can only be explained as being the efiect of such a cause. This is the advancement of our reli- gious life, the increased facility v/e find in efiecting Are We Still Christians? 49 a harmonious union between the lower and the higher elements of our characters. The union we always find to be impeded if we are left to our own nnregenerate nature: our fellow-Christians, we are aware, are no better off in this respect than our- selves; whence, then, proceeds this stimulus of which we are actually conscious when members of the Christian church ? It can only be derived from the founder of the community, Jesus himself;' and if we find this furtherance of the religious life to proceed from him for ever, and from him alone, it follows that the religious life must in him have been absolute and perfect, that the lower and higher consciousness must have been entirelj?" one in him. Man's higher consciousness is the consciousness of God, which in us, on account of the manifold obstructions opposed to it, can only be called a feeble reflection ; whereas in Jesus, where its opera- tion was unimpeded, it interpenetrated his entire nature, as revealed in feeling, thought, and action, a perfect realization, a presence of God in the form of consciousness. Thus, in a fashion of his ov\^n, Schleiermacher again evolves the divine man, not in the least conceiving, however, as did the ecclesiastical dogma the union of the human nature 50 The Old Faith and the Nezv, with the divine, but rather representing to himself a mere human soul so imbued with the conscious- ness of divinity that this constitutes its sole actu- ating principle. Schleiermacher also expresses this in more modern phraseology : Christ, the historically unique, he says, was at the same time the originally typical, i.e., on the one hand, the ideal type in him became completely historical, and on the other hand, the course of his earthly existence was wholly con- ditioned by the original typical idea. This neces- sarily involves his sinlessness, for although even in Jesus this higher consciousness was only gradually developed along with the lower, yet the relative strength of each always preserved the same propor- tion, insomuch that the higher maintained an inva- riable preponderance, and thus controlled the lower without wavering and without aberration. The influence which redeems us in Jesus, there- fore, is the imparting to us this sitmulus in the religious life by means of the church which he established. His crucifixion is of no pai-ticular importance, and if SclileieiTQacher turns the eccle- siastical expression "vicarious satisfaction" into " satisfactory substitution," it is easy to perceive that in reality he is only trifling with these primitive Christian cr»nceptions. Are We Still Christians'^ 51 18. Schleiermaclier looking at tlie first tliree Gospels found indeed but little to correspond with that con- ception of Christ which he had entirely constructed out of his supposed subjective experience ; it accord- ingly cost him little to concede the point of their apostolic origin, and to regard them as later com- pilations of very qualified authority. Not so with the fourth Gospel. There he seemed to be greeted by tones in happiest accordance with the image he himself had constructed of Christ. In such utterances of the Johannine Christ as : the Son can do nothing of himself, but only what he seeth the Father do; he who hath seen me hath seen the Father ; all that is mine is thine also, and what is thine is also mine ; in such and similar expressions Schleiermacher recognized, so it appeared to him, a perfect resemblance to his own Redeemer, whose consciousness of God was in truth the very God in him. This entire Gospel, in fact, with its mystic profundity, yet dialectical acuteness, its peculiar strangeness of spirit, was so wholly to Schleier- macher's mind that he clung passionately to the belief in its genuineness, and resolutely shut bis eyes even to all the evident reasons for distrust 52 The Old Faith and the New. which, during his own life-time, Bretschneider marshalled against this Gospel in compact array. - But only a few years after Schleiermacher 's death it came to pass that, in the first place, the New Tes- tament bulwark of his Christology, the so-called Gospel of St. John, succumbed past recovery to a renewed onslaught of criticism. Nor did its internal basis, the inference deduced from the facts of Christian consciousness as to the nature of the founder of the Christian community, prove itself less vulnerable. It is an absolutely gratuitous suppo- sition, and, properly speaking, a remnant of the doctrine of origiüal sin, which Schleiermacher tried, in fact, to set up again after a fashion of his own, I to assume that the hindiance of the religious life 1 is exclusively due to ourselves, and that therefoi'e any furtherance of this same life experienced by us must necessarily have a source external to us. On the contrary, in all of us there is an incessant war- fare between the higher and the lower consciousness, between the promptings of reason and of sense ; our religious and ethical nature meets, from ourselves as well as from others, not with obstructions only but also with encouragement; and even in the most favourable instances this has nevertheless always been but a relative kind of stimulus, we are not Are We Still Christians 1 53 therefore obKged to seek an originator, in wtom it should exist absokitely. But, granting even tliat such had been the case with Christ, that he as individual man had, at each moment of his life, personified within himself the pure typical image of mankind, that he in the course of his development had been free from fault or vacillation, error and sin, then he would have essentially diifered from all other men : a conclusion indeed allowable to the Church, which regarded him as begotten by the Holy Ghost, but not to Schleiermacher, according to .whom he came into the world in the ordinary course of nature. 19. It may perhaps surprise us that the debate as to the truth of Christianity has at last narrowed itself into one as to the personality of its founder, that the decisive battle of Christian theology should take place on the field of Christ's life; but in reality this is but what might have been expected. The value of a scientific or artistic production in no way depends on our acquaintance with the private life of him who produced it. Not one tittle the less highly do we rate the author of Hamlet because we know so little of his life, nor is our assurance of the worth of his contemporary Bacon's reformation of 54 The Old Faith and the N'ew. science impaired by our cognisance of many unfavour- able features in his character. Even in the domain of religious history it is indeed of importance to assure ourselves that Moses and Mohammed were no impostors ; but in other respects the religions established by them must be judged according to their own deserts, irrespectively of the greater or less accuracy of our acquaintance with their founders' lives. The reason is obvious. They are only the founders, not at the same time the objects of the religions they instituted. While withdrawing the veil from the new revelation, they themselves modestly stand aside. They are indeed objects of reverence, but not of adoration. This is notoriously otherwise with Christianity. Here the founder is at the same time the most pro- minent object of worship ; the system based upon him loses its support as soon as he is shown to be lacking in the qualiti^es appropriate to an object of religious worship. This, indeed has long been apparent; for an object of religious adoration must be a Divinity, and thinking men have long since ceased to regard the founder of Christianity as such. But it is said now that he himself never aspired to this, that his deification has only been a later impor- tation into the Church, and that if we seriously look Are We Still CJiristians? 55 upon liim as man, we shall occupy the stanrlpoint which was also bis own. But even admittino- this o to be the case, nevertheless the whole res^ulation of our churches, Protestant as well as Catholic, is accommodated to the former hypothesis ; the Christ- ian cultus, this garment cut out to fit an incarnate God, looks slovenly and shapeless when but a mere man is invested with its ample folds. At least he must have been such a man as the man framed by Schleiermacher who thoroughly ap- preciates the needs of the Church; a man so fashioned that in Sehleiermachers view the constitution of our religious life is still, and must ever remain, dependent on him, and that we shall certainly have cause to keep him always present to our minds, to recall him to re- membrance at our religious meetings, to repeat and carefully ponder his words, and incessantly to dwell upon the main factors of his life. Sehleiermachers reasons for regarding Jesus as/ such a man have not convinced us ; but then, who' knows ? after all, he may have been something similar ; he it may be, after all, to whom mankind must look more than to any one else for the per- fecting of its inner life. Of this we shall only be able to judge by study- ing those records of his life which we still possess. 56 The Old Faith and the New. 20. How could Schleiermaclier be so liiglily edified by the Jesus of the fourth Gospel ? If he was in truth the incarnate word of God, this, of course, alters the case; but he was not so for Schleier- macher, for him he was mere man, but one whose religious and moral faculties were completely developed. Will such an one dare to use such tremendous words as : *'I and the Father are one ; who seeth me seeth the Father also'' \ And if he does use them shall we not be forced, for that very reason, to question his own religious feeling ? The more pious the man, the more sedulously will his awe observe the line of demarcation which divides him from that which he esteems as divine. As we cannot believe Jesus a God, we should lose our faith in his excellence as a mail if we were forced to believe that he uttered those words, and we should lose our faith in the soundness of his reason, if compelled to seriously believe that in prayer he had reminded God of the glory which he had shared with him before the world was. And moreover we should be ashamed now-a-days to make use of the perverting exegesis by means of which Schleiermacher strove to make utterances of such a nature acceptable. Are We Still Christians'^ 57 Happily it is only the fourth Evangelist who attri- butes such phrases to Jesus, and he derived thein not from historic information, but merely from the conception which in harmony with a philosophic scheme of his own he had formed of him a century later. The veritable Christ is only to be found, if at all, in the first three Gospels. There we have no figure tortured into accordance with Alexandrine speculation, we have reminiscences of the very man, gathered and garnered on the very spot. Not that here even there is an entire absence of effort to mould these after a particular pattern. For was not Jesus, according to his adherents, the Messiah, and what his attributes, and destinies were, had long been known, down to the minutest detail, by the devout and expectant Jewish people. It was of course self-evident to tlie faithful that everything which had been fore- told as about to happen to and by the Messiah, actually had happened to and by the instrumen- tality of the Jesus they had known. These things came to pass that it might be fulfilled as it is written, is the invariable comment of our honest Matthew, whenever he has been relating something that never came to pass at all. Thus, for example, the name of Nazareth, Christ's native town, adhered to him 58 TJie Old Faith and the Akw, even after his death ; but according to a passage in Micah, as then expounded, the Messiah, like to his ancestor David, would be born in Bethlehem; there- fore of course it was obligatory that he should be born there, not in Nazareth, as sure as he was the Messiah. But, in order to be convinced that we have not here matter of actual history, but only concoctions with especial reference to the expecta- tions entertained respecting the Messiah, we need only observe how diametrically opposed to each other are the manners in which Matthew and Luke set about proving tlie fulfilment of the prophecy, the one by removing Christ's parents after his birth from Bethlehem to Nazareth, the other by re- moving them before his birth from Nazareth to Bethlehem. No less obviously manufactured, and equally betraying their character by the discre- pancy of their statements, are the two genealogies which are designed to prove that the supposed son of David actually was a descendant of his ; while in truth all they prove is, that at the time they were first promulgated, Christ still passed for the son of Joseph, and that therefore that other title ot the Messiah, the term " Son of God," had not yet come to be applied to him in the coarsely literal sense. But the Messiah was also the second Moses Are We Still Christians 1 59 and the chief of the prophets, and the events and actions in the lives of the lawgiver and of the fore- most prophets must necessarily be repeated in that of the Messiah and of Jesus, if Messiah indeed were come. As Pliaraoh had sought to slay the infant Moses, Herod must have made the like attempt on the infant Christ ; at a later period he must have been tempted like Israel in the wilderness, only that he passed the examien rigorosuni more credit- ably; then again he must be transfigured on a mountain, even as his prototype Moses had de- scended from his Mount Sinai with shining counte- nance. It was necessary that he should have raised the dead, that he should have multiplied insufficient food, else would he have lagged behind Elijah and Elisha. His whole career 'had to be one un- broken chain of miracles of healing. For had not Isaiah spoken in his prophecies of the advent of the Messiah as a time when the eyes of the blind, and the ears of the deaf should be opened, when the lame should leap, and the tongue of the dumb utter rejoicings ? 21. A large portion indeed of the actions and fortunes of Jesus, as narrated by the Evangelists, ueces- 6o The Old Faith and the A'ew. sarily vanishes when the tissue of marvels apper- taining to his supposed Messianic character is again disengaged from his life by criticism ; but this is by no means all, nor even half of that against which criticism finds reason to object. Even as regards the discourses in the Gospels grave doubts have arisen. When Bretschneider first discerned Christ's speeches in tlie fourth Gospel to be independent compositions of the Evangelist he pointed to those contained in the first three Gospels as samples of Christ's actual mamier of expressing himself. So firm was the prevalent belief in their authenticity gene- rally speaking, and as compared to that of the fourth Gospel, not without cause. Such had been the style of teaching, such the range of his ideas, such doubtless at times also the very words of Christ. But how strange! In that case he must often have glaringly contradicted himself. When, at the beginning of his career, he first sent his apoptles forth, he is stated to have prohibited them from addressing themselves to the heathen and Samari- tans ; at a later period, however, while on his way to Jerusalem, it is reported of him that he — as in his parable of the good Samaritan, and the healing of the ten lepers — had contrasted members of this Are We Still Christiansi 6 1 mongrel race with his compatriots, to the disadvan- tage of the latter ; then, again, ia his parables of the vineyard and of the roval marriage feast, in the tem- ple at Jerusalem, he had predicted the rejection of the stubborn Jews and the election of the Gentiles in their stead ; and lastly, when, after his alleged resurrection, he gave the disciples his parting direc- tions, he is said to have distinctly bidden them preach the gospel to all, without distinction of race. This, of course, would not be incredible, for in the interval which must have elapsed between this pro- hibition and the prediction and injunction which came later, it would have been quite possible that his horizon should have become enlarged in consequence of a wider experience. But even previous to the above-mentioned prohibition, Jesus had unhesitat- ingly aided the centurion of Capernaum, a Gentile, and on occasion of the latter's faith had foretold the future reception of the Gentiles, instead of the unbelieving Jews, into the Messiah's kingdom ; by the above-mentioned interdict, therefore, he would have prohibited his disciples from acting as he him- self had done, and from preparing the way to the fulfilment of his prophecy; nay, in the still later case of the Canaanitish woman, he himself would have acted in a spirit entirely adverse to that 62 The Old Faith and the New. manifested towards the centurion, and, witli the utmost harslmess of Hebrew exchisiveness, would have allowed himself only to he softened at last by the humble persistency of the woman. This is more than we can make allowance for, and is not sufficiently explained by the supposition that the arrangement of the different narratives in the first three Gospels is not chronological. For in that case how shall we obtain any informa- tion whatever as to their proper chronological order ? But we are seasonably reminded that the period in which our first three Gospels were in process of formation was that of the most violent conflict between the two parties into which the infant Church had been sundered by the decided action of the Apostle Paul. To judge by their pro- ceedings, as disclosed by St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, as well as by the Apocalypse, if genuine, the first apostles seem only to have conceived of the kingdom of their crucified Messiah as exclusively intended for the posterity of Abraham, or for such as by accepting the circumcision and the law should be incorporated with the chosen people. St. Paul, on the contrary, enunciated the principle, and made it the guide of his apostolic mission, that the law had been superseded by Christ's death, and that Are We Still Christians ? 63 only faith (implying baptism) was requisite in order to gain admission into liis kingdom ; that the Gen- tiles, therefore, were entitled to it fully as much as the Jews. The national egotism of the Jewish proselytes to the new sect rebelled all the more passionately against this doctrine, as the successes of St. Paul amongst the Gentiles increased, and as, in conse- quence, the anticipated share in the glories of the Messiah's day (destined only for the true sons of Abraham) seemed in danger of being diminished by the numerous interlopers. The dissensions thence occasioned were carried on with much virulence for a considerable time after the death of the Apostle Paul; the stubborn Ilebrew-Ghristians called him the malevolent, the lawless one, the false apostle, es- pecially obnoxious because of his hostile behaviour towards Peter at Antioch ; and it required the sheer force of flicts, as manifested on the one hand, in the destruction of the Hebrew state, on the other, in the ever wider dissemination of Christianity among the Greeks and Pomans, to bring about a reconciliation of parties, and render possible a peace- ful juxtaposition of the two apostles, Peter and Paul. The origin and attempted pacification of these difierences are related in the epistles of St. Paul, 64 TJie Old Faith and the New, and also in the Acts, but in the spirit of conciliation, and of mitigation, and suppression. Now, the battle-field of these conflicts, as they continued to exist even after the death of the apostle of the Gentiles and the destruction of the Hebrew commonwealth, lies before us in the first three Gospels. We observe in them the fluctuation of the strife, discover the spots where halts were made, tents pitched, and fortifications erected ; but we note at the same time how, in cases of retreat or advance, these intrenchments were abandoned and new ones cast up in other places in their stead. 22. Of course after the manner in which relimous documents were produced at that time, or indeed, at any time, it followed naturally that what was considered as truth by a party or its leader must have been believed to be the doctrine of Jesus him- self. If we were still in possession of a gospel written from a severely Hebrew-Christian standpoint, Christ's discourses would unquestionably wear a very difierent aspect. But such a gospel we no longer possess, nor have we one composed entirely from the point of view of St. Paul ; for in every one of the first Gospels (the fourth not counting as an historical document) Are We Still Christiaiisl 65 the two standpoints lie over and across each other, like the strata of a geological formation. In St. Matthew the Hebrew-Christian spirit is still the most apparent, being nevertheless much mitigated and alloyed by philo-Gentile elements; while in Luke, on the contrary, a bias towards St. Paul's views is unmistakable; but, as if to preserve the equilibrium, he has also inserted pieces of a pecu- liarly uncompromising Judaical character. If some- times, therefore, we read in documents of this kind that Jesus forbade his disciples to preach the Gospel to heathens and Samaritans, because (the passage of the Sermon on the Mount refers unquestionably to the same subject) this was giving holy things to dogs and casting pearls before swine ; while, on the other hand, we are told that he bade them bear the glad tidings to all nations ; we, in point of fact, only learn what, at different times and in different circles, were the convictions of earliest Christianity on this head; while the standpoint occupied by Jesus himself remains doubtful. Thus, in the nar- rative of the Canaanitish woman we discern the disposition of a time which, although it could no longer prevent the admission of the Gentiles, had yet given way with the utmost reluctance ; while that of the Centurion of Capernaum either dates VOL. I. F - 66 The Old Faith and the New, from a later period, or proceeds from a more liberal circle, by which Gentile believers were made wel- come without demur. It is possible that the former passages make Jesus appear more narrow-minded than he really was, but it is also possible that the latter make him out to be more liberal-minded; and when we consider the position which after his death his foremost apostles occupied in relation to St. Paul's undertaking, we shall be inclined to judge the latter hypothesis the more probable. I cannot here enter on a closer investigation ; I have only wished to throw out a hint as to the un- certainty of everything on this head, how we cannot make sure of the sa3dngs and teachings of Christ on any one point, whether we really have his own words and thoughts before us, or only such as later times found it convenient to ascribe to him. 23. If a recent delineator of Buddhism finds its sio-ni- ficance to have consisted in its '^ havins^ found a Brahminism grown decrepid in mythology and the- ology, scholasticism and speculation, ceremonies and outward observances of every sort, meretricious works and hypocrisy, sacerdotal and philosophical pride ; and opposed it by placing the essence of sanctity in Are We Still Christians f Sj the heart, in j)unt3^ of life and conversation, in benev- olence, compassion, pliilanthropy and nnbounded alacrity of self-sacrifice ; and its having consistently- appealed from wild, dreary traditions and priestly formulas, oppressive to the mind and heart, from abstrnse scholastic sophistry, and high-flying specvda- tion, to the natural feeling and the common sense of mankind as the liighest tribunal in religious mat- ters : " we cannot fail to recognize the similarity of position and of activity between the Indian sage of the times of Darius and Xerxes and the Jewish sage of the period of Augustus and Tiberius. The Hindu*s rigid system of caste had now for counterpart the invidious line of demarcation be- tween Jews, Gentiles, and Samaritans; not to mention later proselytes to Christianity. A kind of mythology and speculative philosophy had been gradually formed among the Jews, at least, among the sect of the Essenes, whilst a species of subtle scholasticism obtained among the scribes of the other two sects. Ecclesiastical formulae, cere- monial observances, meritorious works, and hypo- crisy were equally rampant in either religion ; and in both instances the new teacher souo^ht to convince his disciples of the importance of substi- 68 The Old Faith and the New, tuting an inward for an outward life, a change of lieartfor mere external observances; and inculcated humility, charity, and tolei'ance instead of j)ride, self-seeking, and hatred. The way of life traced out by Sakhyamuni is called by the Buddhists simply "the way," precisely the same expression as that applied to the new Messianic faith by the Acts; the same reason held good in both cases, Buddhism as well as Christianity being originally more practical than theoretic, more of a compen- dious doctrine of salvation than of a voluminous system of belief. It would appear nevertheless as though Sakhy- amuni had effected a more complete rupture with the established religion of Brahma than Jesus with Mosaism. The former not only abolished the Brah- minical organization of caste but its whole body of ritual also, with its sacrificial observances and penances, nay, its very heaven, with its deities. The raying of Buddha, "My law is a law of mercy for all," which was specially addressed by him against the vile system of caste, has at the same time a certain Christian savour, only that, as above men- tioned, we know not for certain whether such large- heartedness, extending beyond the limits of the chosen people, was actually reduced to practice Are We Still Christians ? 69 by Jesus, or only in the first instance by St. Paul. That other saying of the Indian reformer comes home to us with as Christian a sound, " To honour your father and mother is better than to serve the gods of heaven and earth," a saying which with him however had a still more extensive signification. Becent researches on Buddhism have established the paradox that originally it was a religion with- out a god or gods, that its founder, in fact, was an Atheist. He does not exactly deny the existence of gods, but he simply ignores them, thrusts them aside, as in the utterance we have quoted. Jesus, on the other hand, not only imported its one God from the religion of his people into his own, but even its law. But just as his interpretation of the law was more spiritual, and as he wished to see it purified from tra- ditional appendages, so also, availing himself of iso- lated expressions in the Old Testament, he trans- formed the conception of God from that of a stern master to that of a loving father, and thus iml)ned the religious life of man with a freedom and cheer- fulness before unknown. 24. Both reformers had in common, however, an enthu- 70 The Old Faith and the New. siastic world-renouncing tendency, although its root was not the same in both. Sakhyamuni was a Nihilist, Jesus a Dualist. The first, recognizing in life and its accompanying sufiering tlie consequences of appetites and the love of existence, endeavoured by destroying this love to re-enter the Nirvana, the painless void ; the second exhorted his disciples to strive above all things after the kingdom of God, to lay up imperishable treasures in heaven rather than perishable ones on earth; he pronounced those happy who are now poor and heavy-laden, because of the great recompense which awaited them in heaven. Schopenhauer has called Christianity a pessimist religion, and finds in its avowal of the utter misery of mankind the strength which enabled it to over- come the optimist creed of Jew and Pagan. But this Pessimism, the rejection of that which it designates as "this world," is only one side of Christianity, and without its other side as a complement, that of the glory of the heavenly world to come, which it proclaimed as near at hand, it would have had but inconsiderable success. As Schopenhauer declines the latter for himself, and holds fast for his own part by the Buddhist Nirvana, he is in sympathy with only that side of Christianity which it has in Are We Still Christians? 71 common with Buddhism, which, as regards the value of this life, may also be called pessimist. In fact, as concerns the theory of human life and the regulation of its various relations. Christian Dualism produces essentially the same consequences as Buddhist Nihilism. No incentive to, nor any object of, human activity possesses any actual value ; all man's endeavour and striving in pursuit of such is not ouly mere vanity, but actually prejudicial to the attainment of his true destiny, whether this be called heaven or Nirvana. The surest means of attaining to the goal is to maintain as passive a disposition of mind as possible, saving the efforts required to soothe the sufferings of others, or to disseminate the redeemino^ doctrine, the teachinof of Buddha or of Christ. Pernicious above all is the pursuit affcer worldly goods, nay, even the possession of such, in so far as one is not willing to relinquish them. Tlie rich man in Scripture is certain to go to hell, on the sole ground, so far as appears, of his faring sump- tuously every day. Jesus has no better advice to give to the wealthy youth who would do somethinc»* more beyond the mere fulfilling of the ordinary commandments, than to sell everything he has and give it to the poor. Christianity in common with 7 2 TJie Old Faith and the New, Buddhism teaclies a thorough cult of poverty and mendicity. The mendicant monks of the middle ages, as well as the still flourishing mendicancy at Rome, are genuinely Christian institutions, which have only been restricted in Protestant countries by a culture proceeding from quite another source. ''We are perpetually reminded of the evils produced by wealth and the sinful love of money," says Buckle, " and yet assuredly no other passion, except the love of knowledge, has been productive of equal benefit to mankind; to it we owe all com- merce and industry; industrial undertakings and trade have made us acquainted with the produc- tions of many countries, have aroused our curiosity, enlarged the field of our vision, by bringing us in contact with nations of various ideas, customs, and languages, accustomed us to vast undertakings, to foresight and prudence, taught us besides many useful technical crafts, and, lastly, endowed us with invaluable means for the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering. All this we owe to the love of money. Could theology succeed in extirpating it, all these influences would cease, and we should in a measure relapse into barbarism.'' That leisure could not exist without wealth, nor art and science without leisure, has been shown Are We Still Christians'^ 73 to demonstration by Buckle in his well-known work. It does not therefore follow that the love of acquisition should not, like every other impulse, be kept within reasonable bounds, and subordinated to higher aims, but in the teaching of Jesus it is ignored from the very first, and its effectiveness in promoting culture and humanitarian tendencies is misunderstood, Christianity in this respect mani- festing itself as a principle directly antagonistic to culture. It only prolongs its existence among the enlightened and commercial nations of our time by the emendations which a cultivated but profane reason has made in it, and yet this Reason, so mag- nanimous, or perhaps so weak and hypocritical, as to impute the good effects not to itself but to Christian- it}^, to whose spirit it is nevertheless entirely opposed. In his celebrated letter addressed to me during the last war, Ernest Renan remarked with perfect justice, only unfortunately somewhat too late, how neither in the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, nor anywhere else in the Gospel, is any promise of heaven made to military valour. But neither does it contain a w^ord in favour of pacific political virtue, of patriotism and the efficient dis- 74 The Old Faith and the N'ew, charge of civic obligations. The sentence, "Give unto Csesar the things that are Csesar's/' etc., is, after all, but an evasive answer. Nay, even in regard to the virtues of private and family life, the efficacy of the example and teaching of Jesus is diminished by his own exemption from domestic ties. We possess various utterances of his on the subject, depreciating natural bonds in comparison with the spiritual, not indeed wholly devoid of justice, yet liable, by reason of their abrupt austerity, to misconstruction. We learn, besides, that while he looked upon celibacy as the higher state for per- sons destined to hio-her thino-s, he entertained rigorous notions as to the indissolubility of mar- riage, and also that he was a lover of children. It will, however, be equitable to take into account the then state of the people to which Jesus be- longed. It may be said to have resembled the pre- sent condition of Poland under Russia; the political independence of the Jewish nation had ceased to exist, the Jews were incorporated into the enor- mous empire of Rome, they could no longer make war publicly on their own account, only hatch conspiracies and raise rebellions which could but plunge the people, as had already been sufficiently proved, into ever deepening misery. Even the Are We Still Christians'^ 75 peaceful vocations of the citizen had only the very- narrowest sphere of action allowed to them under the administration of Roman pro-consuls and the system of extortion practised by Roman tax- gatherers; every higher aspiration unavoidably turned either to conspiracy or to reform, which, however, being debarred from every practical outlet, necessarily assumed a character of fanaticism. Still less, under such circumstances, was there any prospect of a higher culture, a refinement of manners, and embellishment of life, by means of science and art. The Jews, in the first place, had less natural capacity for these, not only than the Greeks and Romans, but less even than many other oriental nations ; in the second place, the nation in Jesus' time, on the verge of its political dissolution, had, especially in its native country, declined to the lowest point of prosperity and culture. It is im- possible to realize to the full the squalor and penury ■which were rife at that time in the villao-es and small towns of Galilee. How could any conception of art or science, or any impulse toward them, spring from such a source? As it was believed that the truth conld only be found in Scripture, in the sacred books of Moses and the prophets, science was entirely made to consist in a specially pitiful and arbitrary art of 76 The Old Faith and the New. interpretation, of which we possess but too many samples in the New Testament. In a word, the world and existence therein had grown to be so unbearable to the oppressed and degenerate race which then dragged on its days by the banks of the Jordan and the Sea of Tiberias, that precisely the noblest and the loftiest spirits among them v/ould have nothing more to do with it, did not con- sider it worth the pains of trying to improve it, but preferred to abandon it to the prince of this world, the devil, while, with the concentrated powers of longing and imagination, they themselves turned towards the deliverance which, accordinor to ancient prophecies and more modern glosses, was presently to come from above. 25. The only thing needful was to hasten its advent. But the people, so it seemed, must, ere it came, be worthy of it. John, therefore, preached repentance, because the kingdom of heaven was at hand, and administered the regenerating rite of baptism to those who acknowledged their sins. If reliance is to be placed on the accounts in the Gospel, he did not proclaim himself as being the bearer of this deliver- ance, the Messiah. This was first done by Jesus. Are We Still Christians? 77 But how did Jesus, propose to bring this deliver- ance ? At first, he followed in the footprints of the Baptist, and likewise preached repentance in view of the approaching kingdom of heaven. But what next? When at his passover he rode into Jerusalem he willingly suffered himself to be greeted by the people as the Son of David, the expected Messianic King. It has been hence inferred that he expected a cowp de "main on the part of his adherents, a popular insurrection which should place him at the head of the Jewish commonwealth. But then, did not he ride intentionally into Jerusalem seated on a peaceable beast ? and had he taken the slightest pains to prepare any violent uprising? When subsequently, at his imprisonment, one of his dis- ciples unsheathed his sword, he not only declared himself opposed on principle to the use of the sword, but assured him that even now he need only express the wish, and God his father would send more than twelve legions of angels to his assistance, Jesus may or may not have uttered these words at that moment; in my judgment they accurately convey the essential foundation of his ideas. The actual advent of the heavenly kingdom was to be effected not in any way by a political, or in fact natural, but by a supernatural machinery. But 78 The Old Faith a7id the New, neither was this to be of a purely moral nature — the moral part always remaining merely prepara- tory— but it was rather of a transcendent, or one might say magical, character. Jesus having given an affirmative answer to the question of the high priest as to whether he were the Messiah, had added that he would forthwith be seen sitting at the right hand of the heavenly Power, and descending in the clouds of heaven. At that time, when, a captive under heavy accusations, he foresaw his execution, this might signify that, resus- citated by God after his death, he should return in that Messianic character indicated by Daniel ; but had it pleased God to send him his legions of angels, death might have been spared him, the heavenly hosts might (as was afterwards expected in reo'ard to the Christians survivino- at the resurrec- tion) have boi-ne him up to the clouds with a sudden transfiguration of his earthly frame, and there have seated him on his Messianic throne. The Gospels, of course, represent the case entirely as if Jesus, with supernatural foresight, had always been cognizant of his violent death ; with us it can only be a question as to whether he was more or less taken by surprise at the unfortunate catastrophe of his mission, and at what period of his career he Are IVe Still Christians ? 79 applied himself to the task of reconstructing his hopes in the anticipated prodigies. 26. After he — to the surprise of his disciples, at all events — had expired on the cross as a condemned malefactor, the whole issue now hung upon these disciples' strength of soul. If they allowed their belief in him as the Messiah to be shaken by his violent death amid the wreck of his undertaking, his cause was lost ; then, al though the memory of him and of many of his pregnant sayings might possibly be preserved for awhile in Judaea, yet its impression must soon be effaced, like the circles on the surface of a pool into which some one has cast a stone. But if, in defiance of his unhappy end, they would hold fast by the belief in him as the Messiah, then it behoved them to solve the contra- diction which seemed to exist between the two ; it behoved them especially to knit together his natural existence, thus violently interrupted, with the supernatural part which, according to his repeated prediction, he would at no distant date perform, as the Son of man appearing in the clouds of heaven. According to man's common lot, he, since his death on the cross, had devolved to the 8o The Old Faith and the Nczv, realm of shades; but once identified with them the thread was snapped, his part ph\jed out ; no faith, no hope could henceforth be founded upon him. This, then, was the point which required to be made secure: he must not have died, or rather, as the whole country-side knew him to be dead, he must not ha.ve continued so; recourse was had to Scrip- ture— a great gain to begin with. For with the facility of the time in exegesis, everything that might be desirable could with certainty be found there. The author of the sixteenth Psalm, whether David or another, had, as may be imagined, not dreamt of speaking in the name of the Messiah, but merely given vent to his owm joyful trust in God ; and if he expressed this by saying that God would not leave his soul in hell, nor suffer his holy one to see corruption, he only meant that with God's help he would emerge happily from every trial and danger. " But David," argued a disciple of Jesus, seeking to prop his vacillating faith, " David is dead and mouldered to dust; consequently he cannot in this passage have spoken of himself, but rather he spoke prophetically of his great scion, the Messiah — and this of course was Jesus — who, accordingly, cannot have remained in the grave, camiot have succumbed to the nether powers." In the Acts St. Are We Still Christians? 8i Peter certainly only recites this model interpreta- tion on tlie day of Pentecost, after the resurrection of Jesus ; but we see here, on the contrary, one of the processes of thought by which the disciples gradually wrought themselves up to the production of the idea of the resuscitation of their martyred Lord. The passage in Isaiah about the lamb which is led to the shambles produced a similar effect, and Philip the Evangelist is said to have interpreted it to the Ethiopian eunuch as referring to Christ ; and if we read that at the time of the resurrection, Christ, appearing to his disciples journeying to Emmaus, had explained to them all the passages referring to himself, i.e., to his death and resurrec- tion, this, taken historically, can only mean that it was chiefly from Scripture that the disciples suc- ceeded in extracting comfort and hope in those days of sorrow. Consternation at the execution of their master had scared them far from the dangerous metropolis, to their native Galibe; here they may have held secret meetings in honour of his memory, they may have found strength in their faith in him, have searched Scripture through and through, and strained every nerve to reach unto light and certainty; these were spiritual conflicts which, in Oriental VOL. I. G 82 The Old Faith and the New. and especially female natures of an unbalanced religious and fantastical development, easily turned into ecstasies and visions. As soon as it seemed once patent that he could not have remained in the grave, being the Messiah, the step was not great to the tidings — we have seen him who hath risen from the dead, he hath met us, spoken with us ; we did not know him at first, but afterwards, when he had departed, the scales fell from our eyes, we saw that it could have been none other than he, etc. And in successive narratives the mani- festations grew even more palpable : he had eaten with the disciples, had shown them his hands and feet, and bidden them place their fingers in his wounds. Thus the disciples, by elaborating the conception of the resurrection of their slain master, had rescued his work ; and, moreover, it was their honest con- viction that they had actually beheld and conversed with the risen Lord. It was no case of pious decep- tion, but all the more of self-deception ; embellish- ment and legend, of course, although possibly still in good faith, soon became intermingled with it. But looking at it historically, as an outward event, the resurrection of Jesus had not the very slightest foundation. Rarely has an incredible fact , Are We Still Christians'^ 83 been worse attested, or one so ill-attested been more incredible in itself. In my " Life of Jesus " I have devoted a full investigation to this subject, which I will not repeat here. But the result I consider it my duty as well as my right to express here without any reserve. Taken historically, i.e.^ comparing the immense efi'ect of this belief with its absolute baselessness, the story of the resurrection of Jesus can only be called a world-wide deception. It may be humiliatiug to human pride, but never- theless the fact remains: Jesus might still have taught and embodied in his life all that is true and good, as well as what is one-sided and harsh — the latter after all always producing the strongest impression on the masses; nevertheless, his teach- ings would have been blown away and scattered like solitary leaves by the wind, had these leaves not been held together and thus preserved, as if with a stout tangible binding, by an illusory belief in his resurrection. 27. Jesus is not to be held to account for this belief in his resurrection except indirectly and for a reason very honorable to him, viz., that the very fact of its existence proves what a strong and lasting impression 84 The Old Faith and the Nezu. lie must have made on liis disciples. This impres- sion, certainly arose not only from what was rational and moral in his genius and ideas, but in at least as «rreat a des^ree from that which was irrational and fantastic. A Socrates, with his purely reasonable method of teaching, would not have fascinated the Galilean mind at that time; neither would Jesus have been able to eifect this by merely preaching purity of heart, love of God and your neighbour, and by declaring the poor and oppressed as destined to blessedness; or rather he could not have declared them blessed if he had not been able to promise them an indemnification in the kingdom of God, in which he himself expected ere long to commence his reign as Messiah. The expectation of this terrestrial heaven — which we must not imagine as representing the present idealized conception of a future world, but i-ather the sensuous descriptions in the Kevelation of St. John — had already, during Christ's lifetime, exercised the utmost influence ; and the belief produced in his resurrection was chiefly valuable as rehabilita- ting an expectation shaken by his death. But with Jesus himself this conception forms the basis upon which the general system of his ideas and precepts rests, and the point to which Are We Still Christians ? ■ 85 everything else refers. The rejection of the world and all material interests has only a meaning as implying the reverse proposition — that the true interests, the abiding satisfaction, may only be found in the approaching kingdom of heaven. Jesus himself, it was alleged, had described the prospect of his arrival or return at the head of this kingdom as so nigh, that a portion of those who listened to him should live to see it; and the Apostle Paul tells us expressly that he himself still hoped to witness it. Christianity, as we know, has during the last eighteen centuries found itself perpetually deceived in this expectation, and has therefore hit upon the expedient of putting a gloss upon Christ's words, postponing his return to some incalculable distance of time, and in compensation antedating each per- son's entrance into heaven or hell as an event to occur immediately upon the close of his earthly existence. Not only has the first expectation, however, after a gradual decay, at present become virtually extinct, but the other also — the hope of a future recompense — has been shaken to its foundations. And why? Of the cause anon ; at present, I only claim the concession of the fact. 86 ^he Old Faith and the Aew, If we open our eyes, and are honest enough to avow what they show us, we must acknowledge that the entire activity and aspiration of the civi- lized nations of our time is based on views of life which run directly counter to those entertained by Christ. The ratio of value between the here and the hereafter is exactly reversed. And this is by no means the result of the merely luxurious and so- called materialistic tendencies of our age, nor even of its marvellous progress in technical and industrial improvements ; but it is equally due to its discoveries in science, its astronomy, chemistry and physiology, as well as its political aims and national combinations, nay, even its productions in poetry and the sister arts. All that is best and happiest which has been achieved by us has been attainable only on the basis of a con- ception which regarded this present world as by no means despicable, but rather as man's proper field of labour, as the sum total of the aims to which his efibrts should be directed. If from the force of habit, a certain proportion of workers in this field still carry the belief in an hereafter along with them, it is nev- ertheless a mere shadow which attends their footsteps, without exercising any determining influence on their actions. Are We Still Christians? 87 28. Let us now bethink ourselves what it was that we really set out to discover. We had quite given up the ecclesiastical conception of Jesus as the Saviour and Son of God, and had found Schleier- macher's " God in Christ " to be a mere phrase. But we asked whether as an historical personage he might not have been one on whom our religious life still continues to be dependent on whom more than to any other great man it must look for moral per- fection. This question we are now in a position to answer. To begin with, we shall be obliged to state that our authentic information respecting Jesus is far too scanty for this purpose. The evangelists have over- laid the picture of his life with so thick a coat of supernatural colouring, have confused it by so many cross lights of contradictory doctrine, that the natural colours cannot now be restored. If one ma}?" not with impunity walk among palms, still less so among gods. He who has once been deified has irretrievably lost his manhood. It is an idle notion that by any kind of operation we could restore a natural and harmonious picture of a life and a human being from sources of information which, like the Gospels, have 88 The Old Faith and the New, been adapted to suit a supernatural being, and dis- torted, moreover, by parties whose conceptions and interests conflicted with each other's. To check these, we ought to possess information concerning the same life, compiled from a purely natural and common-sense point of view; and in this case we are not in possession of such. However grandilo- quently the most recent delineators of the life of Jesus may have come forward, and pretended to be enabled by our actual sources of information to depict a hu- man development, a natural germination and growth of insight, a gradual exj)ansion of Jesus' horizon ; their essays have been shown to be apologetic artifices, devoid of all historical value, from the absence of all proof in the record (with the exception of that vague phrase in Luke's history of the Infancy) and by the necessity of most gratuitously transposing the various accounts. But not only does the manner of Jesus' develop- ment remain enveloped in impenetrable obscurity; it is by no means very apparent into what he developed, and ultimately became. To mention only one more fact, after all we have said ; we can- not even be certain whether at the last he did not lose his faith in himself and his mission. If he Are We Still Christians'^ 8q spoke the famous words on tlie cross, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" then he did. It is possible, and I myself have pointed out the possibility, of the exclamation only being attri- buted to him in order that a psalm, considered by the earliest Christianity as the programme of the Messianic agony, might at its very commencement be applicable to him; but it certainly is equally probable that he may really have uttered the signi- ficant words. If he rose afterwards, i.e., if he was the incarnate suffering deity, then it is nowise prejudicial to him ; then it only marks the lowest degree of this agony, is the cry of anguish wrung from weak mortality, which is compensated for by the strength of his divine nature as immediately manifested in his resuscitation. If, however, he is regarded as purely a human hero, the words, if he uttered them, give rise to grave misgivings. If so, then he had not calculated upon his death, then he had to the very end nursed the iUusipn respecting the angelic hosts, and at last, as still they came not, as they suffered him to hang languishing to death on the cross and to perish, then he had died with blasted hope and broken heart. And however much, even then, we should commiserate him on account of the excellence of his heart and his aspirations, go The Old Faith and the N'ew. however much we might dejDrecate the punishment awarded him as cruel and unjust, nevertheless we could not fail to acknowledge that so enthusiastic an expectation but receives its deserts when it is mocked by miscarriage. As we have said, nothing is firmly established, save the objection that so many and such essential facts in the life of Jesus are not firmly established that we neither are clearly cognizant of his aims, nor the mode and degree in which he hoped for their realization. Perhaps these things may be ascertained ; but the necessity of first ascertaining them, and the prospect of at best only attaining probability as the result of far-reaching critical investigations, instead of the in- tuitive assurance of faith, gives a rather discouraging aspect to the matter. Above all, I must have a dis- tinct, definite conception of him in whom I am to be- liev^e, whom I am to imitate as an exemplar of moral excellence. A being of which I can only catch fitful glimpses, which remains obscure to me in essential re- spects, may, it is true, interest me as a problem for sci- entific investigation, but it must remain inefiectual as regards practical influence on my life. But a being with distinct features, capable of aflTording a definite conception, is only to be found in the Christ of faith, of legend, and there, of course, only by the votary Are We Si ill Christians^ 91 wlio is willing to take into the bargain all the im- possibilities, all the contradictions contained in the picture : the Jesus of history, of science, is only a problem; but a problem cannot be an object of wor- ship, or a pattern by which to shape our lives. 20. And among the things which, comparatively speaking, we still know most positively of Jesus, there is unfortunately something which we must mention as the second and decisive reason why, if science is to assert her rights in his case, he, as the religious leader, must come to be daily more and more estranged from mankind, as mankind has developed under the influence of the civilizing momenta of modern times. Whether he designed his kingdom for Jews, or Gentiles as well ; whether he attached much or little importance to the Mosaic law and the services of the Temple ; whether he assigned to himself and his dis- ciples a greater or less amount of actual authority; wliether he foresaw his death, or was surprised by it : either there is no historical basis to be found anywhere in the Gospels, or Jesus expected promptly to reappear enthroned on the clouds of heaven, in order to inaugurate the kingdom of the Messiah as 92 TJie Old Faith and the New. foretold by him. Xow, if he was the Son of God, or otherwise a being of supernatural dignity, all we have to say is that the event did not occur, and that therefore he who predicted it could not have been a divinity. But if he was not such — if he was a mere man, and yet nourished such an expectation — then there is no help for it : according to our conceptions he was an enthusiast. The word has long since ceased to be a term of opprobrium and obloquy, as it was in the last century. We know there have been noble enthusiasts — enthusiasts of genius; the influence of an enthusiast can rouse, exalt, and occasion prolonged historic effects; but we shall not be desirous to choose him as the guide of our life. He will be sure to mislead us, if we do not subject his influence to the control of our reason. But this latter precaution was neglected by Chris- tendom during the Middle Ages. Not only did it suffer itself to be seduced by Christ's utter disdain for the world ; it even outdid him. He at least con- tinued to abide in the world, were it only to convince men of its worthlessness ; if hermits and monks at a later period shunned all intercourse with it, they indeed outstripped him, but only on the path along which he led them himself As concerned renuncia- tion of worldly goods, indeed, they were at no loss for Are We SHU Christians ? 93 a subterfuge : tTie individual, it was true, could own nothing, but the community, the monastery, the church, and its heads, so much the more. Thus, too, the precept of turning the other cheek to the smiter has always found its corrective in the sound com- mon sense of mankind ; some personages of especial sanctity excepted, the pious Middle Ages were as contentious and bellicose as any other era in the history of the world. Its sturdy goodmen and house- wives, moreover, took good thought for the morrow, in spite of the precept of their Saviour; but the per- formance of their worldly duties weighed on the con- science of these excellent people ; at least, made them appear low and common in their own eyes. For had not Jesus told the wealthy youth, that if he would be perfect he must sell all his possessions and give the price to the poor ? and at another time he had like- wise said that all, indeed, could not receive this saying, but that there were those who had made themselves eanuchs for the sake of God's kingdom. The Reformation first went to work on a system- atic principle, in order to place this ascetic, fanatical side of Christianity under the due control of reason. Luther's dicta concerning the value of the perform- ance of duty in all the relations of life, whether matrimonial, domestic, or civil — on the useful activity 94 The Old Faith and the Ahw, of housewives, mothers, maid or man-servants, as compared with the profitless macerations, senp^less babble, and drone-like laziness of monks and nuns, are inspired by a thoroughly healthy humanity. But this was supposed to militate against the de- generacy of the Catholic Church, not against Cliris- tianity itself The earth continued a vale of tears ; man's gaze was still to remain fixed on the celestial glories to come. "If heaven is our home," asked Calvin, " what is the earth but a place of exile ? Only because God has placed us in this world, and appointed us our functions therein, must it also be our endeavour to fulfil the same ; it is solely the divine commandment which imparts a true value to our earthly vocations, which are in themselves devoid of such." This is clearly a miserable com- promise : if our earthly occupations are valueless in themselves, this value cannot be imparted to them from without ; but if they do possess such value, it can consist in nothing but the moral relations which are implied by them. Man's earthly existence bears its own law, its rule of guidance, its aims and ends included in itself. Are We Still Christians ? 95 80. But, we are told, he whom you call an enthusiast was at the same time he who, not to mention many other moral precepts of the highest value, first im- planted in mankind, both by precept and example, the principles of charity, of compassion, — nay, of the love of foes, and fraternal feelings for all men ; and even he who should only profess these principles professes thereby his belief in Christ and in Chris- tianity. They certainly remain its fairest attribute, we reply, and are the highest glory of its founder; but they neither exclusively appertain to him, nor are they annulled without him. Five centuries before the Christian era Buddhism had already inculcated gentleness and compassion, not only towards men, but towards all living creatures. Among the Jews themselves, the Rabbi Hillel had already taught, a generation before Christ, that the commandment of loving one's neigh- bour as one's self constituted the very essence of the law. To assist even our enemies was a maxim of the Stoics in Jesus' time. And but one generation later, although without doubt independently of him, and strictly in keeping with the principles of the Stoic school, Epictetus called all men brothers, inas- 96 The Old Faith and the New, much as all were the children of God. The re- cognition of this truth is so obviously involved in the development of humanity, that it must inevit- ably occur at certain stages of the process, and not to one individual alone. At that very time this perception had been brought home to the nobler minds of Greece and Rome by the abolition of barriers between nation and nation in the Roman Empire, to the Jews by their dispersal into all lands. In exile among the Gentiles, a close band of fellowship, a readiness to help and support each other, was developed and organized, and rendered still more intimate by the additional element of Christian faith in the recent manifestation and speedy return of the Messiah. The two centuries of oppression and persecution which Christianity had still to pass through — a time to which on the whole it owes all that is best in its development — were a continuous training in those very virtues. It must be admitted that compatriots and fellow- believers were the first to benefit by this active charity. Jesus himself, it is true, had proposed to his disciples the example of their heavenly Father, who caused the sun to shine equally on the evil and the good, and sent his rain upon the just and the unjust. ISTevertheless, he had pro- Are We Still Christians ? 97 hibited his disciples, on their first mission, from suffering the sunshine and fertilizing rain of his saving doctrine to fall also on Gentiles and Samari- tans; thus, at least, we are informed by Matthew the Evangelist. No wonder that the Christian Church yielded more and more to the temptation of limiting its charity to the circle of the faithful, — nay, even within the confines of this circle, to the professors of the pretended true Christianity, i.e., the members of that Church which each respectively considered orthodox. Christianity as such never rose above crusades and persecutions of heretics ; it has never even attained to tolerance, which yet is merely the negative side of universal benevolence. Their assi- duity in works of philanthropy, their zeal and ability in the organization of charitable labours and institutions, are qualities of the " unco gude " among us, the glory of which shall not be diminished, ex- cepting in so far as they diminish it themselves, by the arriere pensee of hierarchy or proselytism. Christianity indeed emphasized the idea of humanity ; but Üie task of elaborating it into a pure and com- plete form, of stating it as a principle, was reserved for the philosophico-secular civilization of the sceptical eighteenth century. The belief that Christ died for all men is not only a transcendental VOL. I. H 98 The Old Faith and the New. ground for the love of all mankind, the true reason of which lies much closer at hand ; it also runs the danger of confiningr this love to those who believe in the atonement, at least to those who do not wittingly disbelieve it. The same holds good of all the other Christian precepts; Christianity did not bring them to the world, nor will they disappear from the world along with it. We shall retain all that was really achieved by Christianity as we have retained what was accom- plished by Greece and Rome, without the form of religion in which that kernel ripened as in its husk. Thus only shall we succeed in discard- ing at the same time the narrowness and the partiality which throughout adhered to the doc- trines of Christianity, SI. But why, we shall perhaps be asked, separate what after all might be capable of union ? In its yj resent development Christianity is not likely to circumscribe our philanthropy, rather to vivify it ; and such quickening will be by no means amiss in this age of materialistic interests, of unfettered egotism. Why not, then, in this case also, try to Are We Still Christians 7 99 come up to the precept, " This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the othei^ndone ? " Because, we answer, this absolutely will not do. Why it will not do has been sufficiently elucidated in the foregoing pages ; we cannot make a prop of our action out of a faith which we no longer possess, a community from whose persuasions and temper we are estranged. We will make a trial of it, but it shall be the last. The old creed was our starting- point, and as step by step we traced its development and transformation, we found that in none of its forms was it any longer acceptable by us. Let us now, to conclude, take it in its latest, mildest, most modern and at the same time concrete form, as it reveals itself in worship ; let us assist in thought at the Christian festivals in a Protestant church, the minister of which is versed in the scientific modes of thought, and see whether we can still be sincerely and naturally edified thereby. How will this mail — or we, if we put ourselves in his place — set to work, and what must the chain of his reasoning necessarily be, even if he does not care to give formal expression to everything ? At Christmas he will tell himself, and perhaps also hint to the intellio^ent among^ his audience, that the miraculous birth and the virgin mother are lOO The Old Faith and the Nezv. utterly out of the question. Further, that the whole story as#) the journey of Jesus' parents to Bethlehem because of the tax imposed under Cyrenius, is an awkward fiction, as the tax was not imposed until Jesus had already reached boyhood. That the child presumably came quite peaceably into the world in the bosom of its Nazarene family. That the shepherds vanish with the manger, and the angels with the shepherds. That with this child not peace alone came on earth, but enough and to spare of warfare and contention. In short, that although on that day we certainly celebrate the birthday of a remarkable personage, destined to great influence on the history of mankind, we nevertheless only celebrate that of cne worker among many in the cause of human progi^ess. Such a minister would again have to make a clearance at the Epiphany, i.e., to eliminate the gospel narrative as a Messianic myth. He would remind himself, and if he were courao-eous enouo-h, his congregation also, how the errant star was none other than that star which, according to the narrative in Numbers, the heathen seer Balaam had foretold should come out of Jacob, only, how- ever, using it as an emblem of a triumphant Jewish king; how the wise men of the East had Are We Still Christians? loi only been invented to suit the star, while their gifts were modelled after a passage»^of the pseudo- Isaiah, where, of the light which had risen over Jerusalem — i.e., the light of divine favour a-min vouchsafed to the Jews at the end of their exile — it is said, that the Gentiles shall come to this lio-ht, and all they from Sheba shall bring gold and in- cense. The infant Jesus, this clergyman must admit, had undoubtedly at that time lain as un- heeded by the wide world — and moreover, not in Bethlehem, but probably in Nazareth — as children of plain citizens usually do. As at Christmas the virgin's son, so on Good Friday our clergyman would have to set aside the sacrificial death — the idea of the Redeemer altogether. The more honestly he should do this, the more would he offend the staunch believers; the more discreetly, the less satisfied would be the more advanced among his audience, who, in fact, would be justified in accusing him of equivo- cation, should he still wish to hold fast by the conception of salvation and a Saviour in any non- natural sense. His task would become more critical still as legards Easter. In this case it is hardly possible to call the thing by its correct name in a Christian T02 TJie Old Faith and the New, Church, and if this be not done, then all speech concerning it i&mere phrase. Lastly, on Ascension-day it becomes difficult to refrain from satire. To speak of this event as one of actual occurrence is simply to affront educated people at this time of day. Therefore it must be treated symbolically; as has already been done with the resurrection, and must likewise be done with the miracles, the healing of the sick, the raising from the dead, the casting out of devils — themes which repeatedly furnish texts for sermons on ordinary Sundays, and which all admit of a moral application. But why take such a roundabout way ? why beat the bush after things for which we have no use, in order at last to reach some desired point, which we might have attained in much simpler and at the same time more decided fashion by going straight at it ? On all these festivals, as well as on ordinary Sundays, our clergyman begins his discourse with prayer, not only to God but to Christ as well, after which he reads verses or sections from Holy Writ as a text. Very well ; but now, as to the first point, whence does he derive the right of praying to a mere man ? for as such he regards Christ. Habit alone makes us overlook the enormity of such a Are We Still Christians^ 103 usage, which has been imported from quite another standpoint; or is the fact to be looked at in the light of rhetorical licence, as it may be allowable to address a mountain, a river ? then it must be objected that the church, where everything is and should be seriously treated, is not the place for such a licence. But as regards the texts of Scripture — has the minister arrived at an under- standing with his audience as to what they possess in the so-called Holy Scripture ? Has he told them the men of the Keformation have conquered for us the right of free inquiry in Scripture, but modern science has conquered for itself that of free inquiry about Scripture ? And has he clearly shown them what this implies ? That reason which institutes inquiries about Scripture — i.e., not in order to comprehend its contents, but also to ascertain its origin, the measure of its credi- bility and its worth — necessarijy stands above Scripture? that Scripture has ceased, therefore, to be the highest source of religious knowledge ? We can count the theologians who have hitherto honestly spoken out on this point. Progress, it is pretended, has taken place in gradual ascent along easy ground, from the standpoint of the re- formers to the liberal theology of our time, while the 1 04 The Old Faith and the Nezü. fact of the displacement of Scripture as a supreme authority involves a step higher and more dangerous even than that other one which had to be scaled from the Catholic standpoint by the Reformers. But let us still for a moment remain in our modern Protestant church, and assist at the administration of the sacraments. Deducting all mere formalism, we here get the impression that the rite of baptism misfht not have been without a sufficient meanino^ at a time when it was necessary to gather in the new Messianic community from the world of Jew and Gentile, and to unite it by a common consecra- tion. To-day, in the midst of a Christian world, there is no longer any meaning in this ; but as the later ecclesiastical relation of baptism to original sin and the devil is even more out of the question, baptisms in the modern church, in the service of which we are mentally participating, must neces- saiily appear as a ceremony without any real signifi- cance, nay, with a meaning which is repugnant to us. We will leave it to the Jews to stamp their infant sons as something special by a permanent physical mark ; we would not have even a transient one, for we would not have our children something special, we would only have them men, and to be men we will bring them up. Are We Still Chris flans? 105 As baptism, along with its relations to the world of Jew and Gentile, and further, to original sin and the devil, has lost its real meaning, thus also has it fared with the Lord's Supper in regard to the atonement, nothing remaining now but the repulsive oriental metaphor of drinking the blood and eating of the body of a man. In the next place, the imbecile and yet fateful quarrels about it, as to whether the thing should not be taken literally — whether it were not the actual flesh and blood — are painful to remember. We might be well pleased by a fraternal feast of humanity, with a common draught from a single cup ; but blood would be the very last beve- rage we should dream of putting into the latter. On the altar of our modern Protestant church, in so far as it stands on Lutheran ground, we shall find the image of the crucified Christ, the so-called crucifix. This old chief symbol of Christianity the Catholic church, as is known, is extravagantly fond of placing up and down the country-side ; the Pro- testant church, in so far as it did not put it on one side with other images, has, at least, with a kind of shame, removed it to the interior of churches and houses, besides allowing the empty cross to stand on cemeteries, steeples, and the like. It was possibly on his Italian journey, or in some other Catholic country, io6 The Old Faith and the Ahm, that Goetlie, vexed by its obtrusiveness, took the dislike which impelled him, in the notorious verse of his Venetian epigram, to put the cross side by side with garlic and vermin. Nothing but the mere form of this sign — the stiff little piece of wood placed crosswise on another little piece of wood, as he expresses it in the "West-Eastern Divan," — was un- pleasant to him, and it would certainly have cheered him had he known that in this he agreed with that staunch Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess of the Palati- nate and Duchess of Orleans, who likewise confessed " to not at all liking to see the cross," because its form did not please her. Perhaps even half-uncon- sciously in her case, and certainly in Goethe's, there was something over and above the mere form, over and above a simple sesthetic dislike, which repelled him in the cross. It was " the image of sorrow on the tree," which, according to the passage referred to in the "Divan," ought not to be "made a god." The crucifix is, on the one hand, the visible and tangible pledge of the remission of sins to the faith- ful ; on the other, however, the deification of sorrow generally; it is humanity in its saddest plight, broken and shattered in all its limbs, so to speak, and in a certain sense rejoicing thereat; it is the most one-sided, ri of the desert, tlie pestilence which stalks through the land — if they are only conceived of as blind impersonal powers, then man, in regard to them, is a helpless cypher. Conceived of as persons, as higher beings, as daemons or divinities, although still evil, nevertheless much has been gained — a hold upon them. Are there not also wicked, cruel, and malignant men, and such, moreover, as, like those natural forces, are at the same time so power- ful as to be irresistible ? and nevertheless there are means to come to an arrangement with such — at least, to escape their clutches with but passable damage. Let submission be duly made, be not chary of flattery and gifts, and behold, they show themselves more tractable than one dared to hope. So it comes to pass with those destructive natural forces, as soon as it is settled that they are endowed with reason and will — beings, in short, resembling man. Now people go forth to meet Typhon with prayers and sacrifice; they offer up appropriate gifts to the god of the plague; they are comforted by the reflection that, from a human point of view, they may hope to have influenced these beings in their favour, to have appeased their wrath by such means. Neither, by any means, are all the forces of Nature so utterly evil as those we have adduced : 1 1 2 Tlie Old Faith and the N'ew, Kindly from heaven's cloud the rain Streams on the plain ; Blindly from ilie cloud of heaven Leaps forth the levin. Eain and lightning are only the various manifes- tations of the same power, the deity of the upper air ; the Zeus of the Hellenic conception, who, now merciful, now terrible, sometimes sends fertilizing rain to the plain, and sometimes, not so blindly, how- ever, as the modern poet imagines, his destructive thunderbolts. Such a power, in spite of the perni- cious forces at its disposal, may nevertheless be good in itself, and benevolently inclined to man, and only cause those evil effects when man has exasperated it, and kindled its wrath against him. All the easier, therefore, will it be for man to appease the excited passion of an inherently beneficent being, by proofs of his submission and devotion. But if such a manifestation of Nature, or an aggregate of natural phenomena, especially such as those on which the weal or woe of the entire popu- lation of a country is dependent in an extraordinary degree — as, for example, in Egypt, the Nile on the one hand, the blast of the desert on the other — be once personified in this fashion, the process will soon traverse the whole circumference of nature and Have We Still a Religion ? 113 human existence. To heaven as Uranos or Zeus ■we shall have confronted the earth as Gaia or Demeter, the sea as Poseidon ; the breeding of cattle, and agriculture, corn, and the vine, have each their presiding deities ; as well as music and medicine, commerce and war. The imagination of the various nations proceeds, as to this, with the utmost freedom and carelessness : the same departments are some- times distributed among different deities, sometimes, again, assigned to one and the same god, as especial aspects or manifestations of his nature. Apollo, besides being the god of music and prophecy, is also that of medicine, which yet he has transferred to his son ^sculapius as its presiding genius ; Mars is the god of war, but Minerva also is a warlike goddess : in the former, war is personified as a rude inhuman pur- suit; in the latter, so to speak, as the regular military art. And what a multitude of functions and names, — from Stator to Pistor and Stercutius, from Regina to Pronuba and Lucina, — were not heaped on Jupiter and Juno, to be taken away again in manifold changes by the inferior deities ! For the further a nation advances in civilization, the more importance will it attach to human life and its various relations, as well as to the terrors and blessings of inanimate nature. And the more VOL. I. I 1 14 The Old I-aüh and the A^ew, insecurity and hazard in mortal life, the more things dependent on circumstances which elude human calculation and are yet more beyond the control of human power, the more pressing will gTow man's need to postulate powers akin to his own nature, accessible to his wishes and prayers. At the same time, man's moral constitution now comes into play as a co-operating agent : not only against others, but against his own sensuality and capriciousness as well, would he protect himself by placing in reserve behind the dictates of his conscience, a commanding God. How helpless is the stranger in a foreign country amid a foreign people, and how easy is it to take advantage of his defenceless situation ; but there is a Zei)<; ^ivto^ who protects the guest. How unsafe is it to rely on the promises — even the oaths — of men, and how pressing the temptation under certain cir- cumstances to seek to evade them ; but there rules a Z€v<; opKLo^ who punishes perjury. Not always is bloody murder discovered by men ; but the sleepless Eumenides dog the step of the fugitive assassin. One of the most important relations of life amono* civilized nations has always been the marriage bond; but how hazardous is it not ? what manifold pos- sibilities of unhajipy results, how much temptation Have We Slill a Religion ? 115 to transgression does it not involve ? To counteract these, the pious Greek and Roman sought a security in the celestial marriage of Zeus and Hera. It cer- tainly is no model wedlock, in the ideal sense, rather an emblem of the frailty of human unions, besides being depicted by the Greeks with all the moral levity of that people; nevertheless, Jupiter and Juno make and protect matrimonial alliances; Juno especially leads- the bride to her husband, conducts her to his house, unbinds her zone, as later on she unravels the misunderstandings be- tween them, and at last, without imperilling the mother, ushers the yearned-for fruits of marriage to the light of day. 83. Hence it follows that polytheism was the original, and in some respects the natural form of religion. A multiplicity of phenomena presented themselves to man, a multiplicity of forces pressed in upon him, from which he either wished himself protected, or of whose favour he desired to be assured ; then also a variety of relations which he craved to have sanctified and securely established ; thus naturally arose, also, a multiplicity of divinities. This conclu- ßion is confirmed by the observation, that all those 1 1 6 The Old Faith and the New. tribes of the earth which are still to a certaia ex- tent in a state of nature, continue now, as formerly, to be polytheists. Monotheism appears everywhere in history, the Jewish not excepted, as something secondary, as something educed in the lapse of time out of a more primitive polytheism. How was this transition effected ? Is is said, certainly, that a more exact observation of Nature must have led man to perceive the con- nexion of all her phenomena, the unity of design in which all her laws converge. And in like manner the development of man's powers of reflec- tion must have rendered it evident tliat a plurality of deities must mutually limit each other, and in consequence deprive each other of the very attri- butes of divinity, so that the deity, in the true and complete sense of that word, could only be a unit. Insight of this kind, it is argued, came to a few highly-gifted individuals of antiquity, and these became in consequence the founders of monotheism. We know full well the highly-gifted individuals who acquired insight in this manner : they were the Greek philosophers ; but they became founders, not of a religion, but of philosophical systems and schools. Of a like nature is the oscillating mono- theism of the Indian religion : it is an esoteric, mys- Have We Still a Religion ? 117 tical doctrine, tlie presentiment of a few, developed from the popular polytheism. Monotheism first occurs among the Jews in the firm serried form of a popular religion. And here also we can clearly apprehend its origin. Hebrew monotheism was certainly not produced by a deeper observation of nature ; the Hebrews for a long while caring only for nature in its relation to their own wants. Neither did it arise from philosophical speculation; for before the impulse communicated to them by the Greeks, the Jews did not speculate, at least not in the philosophical sense. Monotheism (the fact becomes evident in that of the Jcavs, and is further confirmed by Islamism) is originally and essentially the religion of a wandering clan. The requirements of such a nomadic band are very simple, as are also its social arrangements ; and although at first (as may also here be assumed to have been the primitive idea) these may have been presided over by distinct Fetishes, Daemons, or deities, nevertheless this distinction disappeared in pro- portion as the horde concentrated itself (as did, for example, the Israelites in their invasion of Canaan) and receded more and more, as in course of warfare with hordes like themselves, or with tribes and nations of different institutions, the contrast to 1 1 8 The Old Faith and the New, these latter gained prominence. As it was but a sino-le entliusiasm which inspired the clan, which strengthened it in its conflict with others, gave it hope in victory, and even in defeat the trust in future triumph; even thus it was only one god whom it served, from whom it expected all things ; or, rather even this god was, in fact, only its deified popular spirit. True, at first the gods of other tribes and nations were conceived as antaoronistic to the one god of the clan — the gods of the Canaanites to the god of Israel ; but as the weaker, the inferior, destined to be overcome by the god of the clan — vain gods, who at last must actually vanish into nothing, leaving the one true God alone. It is only an ancient Christian- Hebrew prejudice to consider monotheism in itself, as contrasted with polytheism, the higher form of religion. There is a monotheism which is superior to polytheism ; but also one which is the reverse. He who should have expected the Greeks of the centuries between Homer and ^schylus to exchange their Olympian circle of gods for the one god of Sinai, would have demanded from them the surrender of their rich and complete existence, putting forth in all dii^ec- tions the boncj-hs and blossoms of a most beautiful humanity, for the poverty and one-sidedness of the Have We Still a Religion? 119 Jewish nature. In Schiller's " Gods of Greece," there still echoes the lament over the impoverishment of life by the triumph of monotheism; and yet the one god of his conception is already far removed from the ancient Hebrew divinity. One advantage monotheism attains, so to speak, adventitiously, which at a later period produces the most important results. The plurality of gods, agreeably to the law of their origin, how- ever they may be transferred to the domain of ethics, must ever remain bound to the individual forces and aspects of nature, and in consequence, as we observe in the case of the Grecian gods, some- thing sensuous adheres to their essence. The dis- tinction of sex inseparable from polytheism is, of itself, a sufficient proof of this. The one God, how- ever, merely because he is the one, while nature consists of a multiplicity of forces and manifesta- tions, must necessarily rise above nature. This exaltation was accomplished only gradually, and with a certain repugnance by the Jewish people, but nev- ertheless, with the greater strictness at last, as the neighbouring tribes, with whom it had to contend, declined in their worship of rude physical deities. These were detestable to the Jew, even in their very images ; therefore at last he interdicted himself any I20 The Old Faith and the New. image of his God. The worship of these deities, which diverged sometimes into the excess of the ter- rible, sometimes into that of the sensual, must have appeared unclean to the worshipper of the one God throned above nature ; the service rendered by him to his God was, indeed, far from spiritual, but nev- ertheless, such as it was, purity formed one of its principal requisites. But out of this external purity grew the inward, in consequence of a gradually deep- ening conception ; the one God developed into the severe Law-giver, monotheism into the nursery of discipline and morality. It was farther limited, however, among the Jewish people by an innate spirit of provincialism. The precepts which Jehovah gave his people were chiefly framed to isolate it from all the rest. The one God was the Maker of all, yet not the God of all nations in the same sense : properly he was the God only of the little tribe of his worshippers, in com- parison to whom he treated the other nations as step- children. From this proceeded something harsh, rigid, personally irascible in the whole character of this God. In tliis respect the Jewish conception of God awaited its completion at the hands of Hellenism. It was in Alexandria that the tribal, national god of Israel intermingled and soon became Have We Still a Re Horton ? 121 t> one with the God of the world and of mankind, who had been evolved by Greek philosophers from the multitude of Olympian, deities in their national religion. 84 Our modern monotheistic conception of God has two sides, that of the absolute, and that of the personal, which, although united in him, are so in the same manner as that in which two qualities are some- times found in one person, one of which can be traced to the father's side, the other to the mother's. The one element is the Hebrew-Christian, the other the Grseco-philosophical contribution to our concep- tion of God. AVe may say that we inherit from the Old Testament the Lord-God, from the New the God-Father, but from Greek philosophy the God- head, or the Absolute. Undoubtedly the Jew also conceived his Jehovah as absolute, in so far as he possessed the capacity of such a conception; i.e., as at least unlimited in power and duration; above all, however, his God was a being which asserted itself as a personality. Not only that in remotest times he walks in the garden and converses with Adam ; that later he in human guise allows himself to be regaled by the patriarch 122 The Old Faith and the New. under tlie tree by his hut ; that he confers with the law-giver on the mountain, and himself hands him the two tables; but his whole demeanour, as an angry and jealous God, who repents having made men, and prepares to destroy them, who regards the transgressions of his chosen people as personal injuries, and avenges them accordingly, is altogether that of a personal being. The transformation accom- plished by Christianity of the Lord-God into the God-Father, did not affect the element of personality; on the contrary, it rather intensified it. The more tender the form which intercourse of the pious with his God may assume, the more certainly will the latter appear to him as a person, for a tender rela- tion can only subsist towards a person, at the least a fictitious one. Philosophy, however, has always, in the first instance, laid the emphasis in regard to the concep- tion of God on the other side — that of the absolute. It required a Supreme Being, from whom the exist- ence and ordering of the world might be deduced. In this, however, it found several of the personal attributes which Judaism and Christianity had intermingled with their conception of God, incon- venient and offensive. Not only could it make nothing of a repenting and wrathful deity, but just Have We Still a Religion^ 123 as little of one from whom somethino^ mio^lit be obtained by human prayers. It lay not in its intention to deprive God of personality, but suc.li was practically its tendency ; for it required an illimitable deity, and personality is a limit. Copernicus is sometimes represented as the man who has, so to speak, withdrawn the seat from under the body of the ancient Hebrew and Christian Deity by means of his system of the universe. This is an error, not only from a personal point of view, inasmuch as Copernicus, like Kepler and Newton, did not cease to be a devout Christian, but also in regard to his theory. It initiated a reformation only within the limits of the solar system ; beyond this it suffered the sphere of the fixed stars, the expanded firmament of Scripture, to remain untouched, as a firm, crystalline, spherical shell, enclosing our solar and planetary worlds like a walnut- shell, so that beyond it there was room and to spare for a properly furnished heaven, with its throne of God, etc. It was not until, in consequence of continued observation and calculation, the fixed stars were recognized to be bodies similar to our sun, and surrounded presumably by analogous plane- tary systems-until the universe resolved itself into an infinity of heavenly bodies, and heaven itself 1 24 The Old Faith and the New. into an ojotical illusion, that the ancient personal God was, as it were, dispossessed of his habitation. No matter, it is said ; we know well that God is omnipresent, and not in need of any particular residence. Certainly people know this, but then they also forget it again. Reason may conceive of God as omnipresent, but imagination, nevertheless, cannot rid itself of the endeavour to represent Him as limited by space. Formerly she could do this unhindered, when she still disposed of a convenient area. N(>w she finds this more difficult, as she knows that such an area is nowhere to be found. For this knowledge must unavoidably penetrate from the reasoning faculty to the imaginative. He who has a clear cosmical conception, in harmony with the present standpoint of astronomy, can no longer represent to himself a Deity throned in heaven, and surrounded by angelic hosts. The retinue of angels is necessary, however, to the idea of a personal God. A person must needs have society — a ruler his court. But with our pre- sent cosmical conception, which knows inhabitants of the heavenly bodies, not any longer a divine court, the angels disappear likewise. With heaven, there- fore, no more his palace ; with no angels assembled round his throne; with neither thunder and light- Have We Still a Religion ? 125 Hing for Lis missiles, nor war, famine, and pestilence, for his scourges ; — with all these but effects of natural causes, how, since he has thus lost every attribute of personal existence and action, how can we still continue to conceive of a personality of God? Many a book of travels has told us what a terrifying impression the unforeseen eclipses of the sun and moon continually produce on savao-e tribes; how by screams and clamour of all sorts, they attempt to lend assistance to the luminous power, and drive far from him the huge toad, or whatever other shape they may ascribe to the ob- scuring principle. This is but natural; and it is also but natural that these phenomena, which, according to the calculations of astronomy, have been announced to us in the almanack, should no longer affect us religiously; that even the most ignorant boor should no longer say an Ave Maria or a Pater Noster to render them harmless. But what shall we say to the fact that, as late as the year 1866, English peers reproached Lord Kussell with not having ordered a general fast against the murrain which had broken out? shall we in this case 126 TJie Old 1 aiih ana UlC New. ascribe it to ecclesiastical stupidity, or miserable bypocrisy? If in a profoundly Catholic country, when rain is too long deferred, and continuous drought threatens ruin to the crops, then we can imagine the peasants expecting their priest to make a procession around the fields, and draw down rain from heaven by his entreaties. If we meet such a procession, we shall exclaim in regard to the peasants, 0 sanda simplicitas ! in regard, to the priest we shall leave it open for the present whether he has rather yielded to the urgency of pious sim- plicity, or has encouraged it in the interest of the hierarchy; but at any rate we shall be confirmed in our wish, that by an improved education even the rustic may also be brought to see that these are manifestations of nature subject to laws as stringent as the eclipses of the sun and the moon, although they have not as yet been investigated as completely as the latter. It is not quite the same thing if plague or cholera have invaded a country, or broken out in a city, claiming victims in every street, every dwelling; or if, as with us in the past year, the majority of the sons of a people have gone to the wars, and are opposed in combat to the enemy. In both instances public prayers arise spontaneously ; in the one case Have We Still a Religion f 127 from people still in healtli, in the otlier from those left behind — the masses expecting the grantino- of their petitions, i.e., an objective effect which is to be produced in favour of those in danger, while the reflecting portion is content to achieve for itself, by collective prayer, a subjective furtherance of its end, through serenity and exaltation of spirit — the only thing, in fact, which is gained by the rest. Feuerbach justly remarks, however, that a real genuine prayer is only that by means of which the suppliant hopes to effect something which could not have been effected without it. Luther was such a suppliant. He was thoroughly con- vinced that he had saved the life of the dying Melancthon by the prayers and reproaches he ad- dressed to God, in case he should just at that time snatch his indispensable colleague from his side. Schleiermachcr was no longer such a suppliant. He saw but too clearly that every assumption of a desire or a right to influence the divine decision by even the purest and most reasonable of human wishes was as foolish as it was impious. Never- theless, he still continued to pray ; only that he no longer placed the real importance of prayer in brino-- ing about an objective result, but in its subjective influence on the soul of the suppliant himself. That 128 The Old Faith and the A^ew. in individual cases this may possibly remain tte only ejffect of prayer, i.e., that God may perhaps not grant the prayer — this is a contingency which must enter into the calculation of even the sincerest believer. But nevertheless, he always looks upon the gi'anting of his prayer, i.e., its objective effectiveness, as pos- sible in general and probable in his particular case. If, on the other hand, I entreat, for example, the preservation of a life precious to me, while, never- theless, I clearly perceive that my prayer cannot produce the smallest objective result — that, sup- posing even the subject of it to recover, my suppli- cation has had no more influence on the course of the malady than the lifting of my finger on the course of the moon, — if with this conviction, and in spite of it, I still go on praying, I am playing a game with myself, excusable indeed, in view of its momentary effect, but neither consistent with dignity nor devoid of danger. In Schleiermacher s case especially, prayer was the expression of a conscious illusion, partly the result of early habit, partly in view of the congregation which surrounded him ; and he intentionally avoided lifting himself above it by his critical consciousness. Kant was no longer a suppliant, but all the more honest to himself and to others. He is shocked^ Have We Still a Religion'^ 129 quite irrespectively of the supposed efficacy of prayer by the pure position which the supplicant assumes. " Let us picture/' he says, '' a pious and well-mean- ino- man, but narrow-minded as regards a purified conception of religion, who should be taken unawares not saying his prayers, but only making the gestures appropriate to the act. I need not say that he will naturally be expected to grow embarrassed and confused, just as if he had been in a situation of which he must needs be ashamed. But why so ? A person found speaking to himself is at first sight suspected of temporary insanity ; and he is not quite unjustly judged somewhat similarly, if, beino' alone, his occupation or gesticulation is such as can only be used by him who has some other person before his eyes, which, nevertheless, is not so in the case supposed." Thus Kant in his "Reli- gion within the limits of mere Reason : " still more incisively does he express himself in an essay in his posthumous works : " To ascribe to prayer other effects than natural (subjective-psychological) ones, is foolish," he remarks here, " and requires no refutation ; we can only enquire, Should the prayer be retained on account of its natural results ? to which the answer is, that in any ease it can be recommended only according to circumstances ; for VOL. I. K 1 30 The Old Faith and the Ahw. he who can attain the vaunted advantages of prayer by other means will stand in no need of it." That Kant has here, with his wonted simplicity and precision, candidly stated the convictions of modern times in regard to pra^^er, can be as little disputed as that one of the most essential attributes of the personal God has perished with the belief in the efficacy of prayer. S6. Now at last, it seems, we must draw up the heavy, somewhat old-fashioned, scientific artillery of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, all of them seeking to demonstrate, according to the intention of those who originated them, a God in the pecuHar sense of the w^ord, wlio, after all, can only be a personal one. In the first place, then, according to the law that everything must have a sufficient cause, the so-called cosmological argument infers from the existence of the world the necessary existence of a personal God. Of all the various things which we perceive in tlie world, not one is self-existent, each owing its origin to something else, which, however is in the liko predicament of owing its origin to some other thing; thus reflection is ever sent on from one Have We Still a Religion ? 131 thing to another, and never rests till it has reached the thought of the One Being, the cause of whose existence rests not with another, but in himself, who is no longer a contingent, but a necessary existence. In the first place, however, the personality of this necessary Being would by no means have been established, for we should merely have proved a first Cause, not an intelligent Creator of the world. But in the second place, we have not even demonstrated a Cause. A cause is other than its effect ; the cause of the universe would be something else than the uni- verse; our conclusion would therefore land us beyond the limits of the Cosmos. But is this result reached by fair means ? If we invariably arrive at the conclusion, in regard to every individual existence or phenomenon in the world, examine as many as we please, that each has the ground of its existence in some other, which again stands in the same predicament as regards something else, then we justly conclude that the same law obtains with regard to all individual existences and phenomena, even those which we have not especially examined. But are we, then, justified in concluding the totality of these individual existences and phenomena to be caused by a Being not similarly conditioned which has not, like these, the source of its existence 132 The Old Failh and the New, in something else, but in itself ? This is a conclusion devoid of all coherence, all logic. By any method of logical reasoning we shall* not get beyond the universe. If everything in the universe has been caused by something else, and so on, cid infLniiwm, Avhat we finally reach is not the conception of a Cause of which the Cosmos is the effect, but of a Substance of which individual cosmical phenomena are but the accidents. We reach not a deity, but a self-centred Cosmos, unchangeable amid the eternal chancre of thinors. o o But we shall be reminded that the cosmological proof is not to be taken by itself; that it must, to gain its proper weight, be united to the teleological or physico- theological demonstration. This latter takes for a starting-point not only the bare fact of the derivative and contingent existence of all things, but also their distinctive character, their judicious adaptation as a whole and in their parts. Whichever way we look in the world — in the infinitely little or great, in the order of the solar system as well as in the structure and nutrition of the tiniest insect — we see means employed by which certain ends are attained ; we may define the world as a whole of infinitely judicious contrivance. The contemplation of ends, however, and the employ- Have We Still a Religion'^ 133 ment of means to attain them, are exclusively the functions of consciousness, of intelligence. We are therefore constrained by the physico-theological proof to define the first Cause, in the cosmologlcal argument, as an intelligent personal Creator. But how if the cosmologlcal argument, as shown above, has not furnished us a transcendental first Cause, but only a Substance immanent in the uni- verse ? Certainly in that case the Primal Substance will have received one predicate the more ; we shall conceive of it as of an entity manifesting itself in endless variety, not only causatively, but also in the adaptation and co-ordination of pheno- mena. In so doing we must, however, beware of mistaking one for the other. We being men, are only capable of producing a work the parts of which shall harmonize for the attainment of a certain result, by means of the conscious conception of an end and an equally conscious selection of means, but we must not therefore conclude that natural works of a like description can only have been produced by the cor- responding agency of an intelligent Creator. This by no means follows, and Nature herself proves the fallacy of the assumption that adaptation can only be the work of conscious intelligence. Kant already, in regard to this, pointed to the artistic instincts of 134 The Old Faith and the New. several animals, and Schopenhauer justly remarks that the instinct of animals generally is the best ex- position of the teleology of nature. Just as instinct is an activity apparently displayed in obedience to a conscious aim, and yet acting without any such aim, so is it with the operations of N'ature. The method of her procedure, however, must be reserved for another place. Of the remaining so-called proofs for the existence of God, the only one we need still advert to is the moral one. The argument is twofold : I. that the absolute stringency with which the moral law mani- fests itself in our conscience, proves its origin from an absolute Being ; and II. that the necessity under which we lie of proposing to ourselves the further- ance of the highest good in the world — of morality, with corresponding happiness — points to the existence of a Being which shall be able to realize in a future life the just balance between the two sides, which is never attained in this. But, as regards the first form of this presumptive proof, we possess nothing bat the contrivance of our reasoning instincts, to ascribe to heaven, as long as their origin is unrecognized, the moral precepts which have necessarily been educed from the nature of man, or the wants of society. "We fasten them to Have We Still a Religion? 135 Heaven, as it were, in order to place tliem out of the reacli of the violence or subtlety of our pas- sions. But in the second form, devised by Kant, this proof is, so to speak, the spare room in which God, reduced to passivity in the rest of his system, may still be decently housed and employed. The con- formity between morality and happiness, ^.6., action and feeling, which this argument takes for its start- ing-point, exists in one respect spontaneously in the inner consciousness. That these may be realized in the outward life, also, is a natural wish and righteons endeavour, but its gratification, at best imperfect, is only attainable by an accurate conception of life and happiness, not by the postulate of a deus ex macJiind. S7. Kant, we have said, after his criticism had dissi- pated the other arguments for the existence of God, as, according to the precedents of older philosophers and theologians, they had been formulated in the systems of Wolff and Leibnitz, and after he had "Worked out his own system (I allude to the later one, based upon his Critique of Pure Keason, of which the 136 The Old Faith and the New. cosmogonic essay, to be soon discussed more fully, does not form a part), without reference to the con- ception of a personal deity, was loth, nevertheless, entirely to miss the God of his youth and his nurture, and accordingly assigned him at least an auxiliary part at a vacant place in his system. Fichte set to work after a more radical fashion during the first and systematic period of his philo- sophic activity. He defined God as the moral order of the universe ; a definition partial indeed, like his whole system, in which nature is not adequately recognized ; but at the same time he repelled the conception of a personal God with arguments which will remain irrefutable for all time. " You attribute personality and consciousness to God," he said, when accused of Atheism on account of his conception of God ; " but what, then, do you call personality and consciousness ? That, no doubt, wliich you have found in ^^ourselves, be- come cognizant of in yourselves, and distinguished by that name. But if you will only give the slightest attention to the nature of your conception, 3^ou will see that you do not and cannot conceive of this v/ithout limitation and finality. By attributing that predicate to this Being, you in consequence make of it a finite one, a creature like yourselves ; Have We Still a Religion? 137 you have not, as was your wish, conceived God, but merely the multiplied representation of yourselves." In his later period of mysticism, Fichte spoke much of the Deity and the divine, but never so as to convey an intelligible conception of his doctrine of the Deity. The absolute identity of the real and the ideal, the leading conception of Schelling's original system, occupied the same standpoint, as far as we are concerned, as the Substance of Spinoza, with its two attributes of extension and thought — i.e., it afforded no possibility of conceiving a personal supernatural God. Schelling's later philosophy, again, endeavoured to demonstrate this conception, but in such fashion that no scientific value is accorded it. Lastly, Hegel, with his proposition that every- thing depended as to whether the substance were conceived as subject or spirit, has bequeatiied a riddle to his expounders and a subterfuge to his adherents. One party discerned in it simply tlie acknowledg- ment of a personal God, while another proved from the more distinct utterances of the philosopher, as well as from the whole spirit of his system, that all that was intended to be postulated by it was that Becoming and Development were the essential 138 The Old Faiih and the New. momenta of the Absolute, and further, that thought, that the consciousness of the divine in man, were the ideal existence of God, opposed to Nature as the real existence. Schleiermacher has expressed himself more clearly and frankly than the last-named philosophers in regard to this question — a fact which may surprise us — but he has only recourse to the patching-up sys- tem when he treats of Christianity. In his discour- ses on Christianity, he attached little importance to the conception of the Being on whom we are abso- lutely dependent, as personal or impersonal; and even the suggestive remarks of his work " On Beligious Doctrine" were not of a nature to dispel the pantheistic haze enveloping his thought. In his posthumous work on dialectics he has expressed himself on this question with all possible clearness. "The two ideas, God and the universe," he remarks in this work, ''are, on the one hand, not identical. For in conceiving God we postulate a unity 7)iiiius plu- rality, in conceiving the universe, a plurality minus unity ; in other words, the universe is the sum-total of all opposites, the deity, the negation of all opposites. On the other hand, however, neither of these ideas can be conceived without the other. As soon, especially, as we endeavour to conceive Have We Still a Religion'^ 13g God as existing before or without the world, we become conscious at once that all we have left is an unsubstantial phantasy. We are not war- ranted in postulating any other relation between God and the world than that of their co-existence. They are not identical, nevertheless they are ' only two values for the same thing.' At the same time, both ideas are only empty thoughts — mere formulae, and no sooner do we endeavour to fill them in and quicken them, than we necessarily draw them down into the realm of the finite ; as, for example, when we conceive of God as a conscious absolute E