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 BOOK 23g.P697 c. 1 
 
 PLATT # IS RELIGION DYING 
 
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Date Due 
 
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Is Religion Dying? ^^^^ 
 
 ■fS5 
 
 a Si?mpo6ium^ ^ 
 
 AN HOUR WITH THE PHILOSOPHERS. 
 
 W. H. PLATT, D.D., LLD, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "the PHILOSOPHY OF THE SUPERNATURAL," " AFTER DEATH, WHAT? 
 
 "unity of law," etc., etc. 
 
 Washington, D. C. ■ 
 
 W. H. MORRISON, Publisher. 
 
 1889. 
 
 1 n I /t 
 

 TO 
 
 Edward F. Searles, Esq., 
 
 Great Barrington. 
 MASSACHUSETTS. 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 WILLIAM GREEN, 
 
 324, 326 and 328 Pearl Street, 
 
 NEW YOKK CITY. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 r^ While investigating the opinions of well-known 
 
 .^^ thinkers of the day upon the present religious out- 
 
 ^ look of the world, it occurred to me to make them 
 
 ^ talk to each other out of their books ; so I brought 
 
 them all together at an imaginary breakfast in the 
 
 library of a literary gentleman, who should direct 
 
 y^ their supposed conversation upon the topics and 
 
 ^ within the scope arranged in the table of contents. 
 
 i Quotations thus take the shape of conversations. 
 
 W. H. P. 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Religion of Worship, without Morality, 
 
 DIED BY Exhaustion, 24 
 
 ^;Nrrr-C°ht'lp°'^'''--" '' 
 
 II. The Religion of Morality, without Worship, 
 
 DIED BY Exclusion, . . . . . . .27 
 
 1. Atheism, 27 
 
 {a) Positivism, 27 
 
 {b) Agnosticism, , . 27 
 
 2. Conflict between Science and Religion — Draper, . . 28 
 {a) Conflict as to the Nature of God, .... 32 
 {b) Conflict as to the Nature of the Soul, . . . -33 
 {c) Conflict as to the Nature of the World, ... 34 
 {d) Conflict as to the Criterion of Truth, .... 36 
 
 3. Bible Criticised — IngersoU, ..... 46 
 
 4. Sociological Drift, . . . . . . -57 
 
 {a) A Morality of Philosophy without Religion, . . 57 
 
 {b) A Morality of Religion without a God — Compte, . 67 
 
 III. The Religion of both Worship and Morality — 
 
 Christ, 94 
 
 I. The Survival of the Fittest, 96 
 
 {a) The Fittest by Nature, . ..... 98 
 
 {b) The Fittest by Adaptation, 99 
 
 {c) The Fittest by Resistance, 106 
 
 {d) The Fittest by the Law of Evolution, ... 122 
 
IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 [ The reader will remember that the matter under quo- 
 tation-marks is extracted verbatim et literatim from the 
 ivritings of the speakers^ respectively?^ 
 
 T^HERE were supposed to be present at this sym- 
 -'• posium, besides the host, the Dean of the Cathe- 
 dral, representative thinkers of different lines of 
 thought — Theists, Atheists, Agnostics, and Positiv- 
 ists — irrespective of age or country. The thinkers 
 are present in their thoughts, and thought keeps no 
 chronology. The talkers all talk to the question, Is 
 Religion Dying ? 
 
 The host, not intending to advocate any doctrine 
 unfriendly to religion, turned to the reverend Dean 
 and remarked, "Of late we hear it asked, Is religion 
 dying?" 
 
 Some one inquired, " What religion ? " The host 
 replied, " The question of this day is, not what relig- 
 ion, but any." 
 
 "All hope that it is dying in its errors," said the 
 Dean, " but we know that it will live in its truths. As 
 that which is divine in the Church cannot die, so that 
 which is human in it cannot live. It will gain in 
 moral influence as it loses in political power. If the 
 priest is shorn of official domination, he will gain in 
 affection as pastor and teacher. Truth is its own au- 
 thority ; and the Church will not be without authority 
 
 [2J 
 
B ■ IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 SO long as it is the ground and pillar of the truth as 
 Christ appointed. When it is other than that, or more 
 or less than that, it is nothing." 
 
 " Or worse," it was exclaimed by several. 
 
 ''Theologies may die, but not religion," rejoined 
 the Dean. " The finite must ever lean upon the in- 
 finite, and that is religion." 
 
 " It may happen again," said the host, " that the 
 people, as once in Greece and Rome, may turn for the 
 truth from the Priests and the Temples to the Forum 
 and to the Philosophers." 
 
 " And," said the Dean, " when they turned from the 
 temples of even the false gods, they had a carnival of 
 wickedness until they turned in worship to the altars 
 of the true God." 
 
 " Yes," remarked the host, " social chaos reigns 
 when men are not governed either by the reverence 
 of religion or the wisdom of philosophy. Account 
 for it as we may, all classes seem to be more and more 
 indifferent to religion. The uninformed do not long 
 believe what the well-informed doubt ; nor will the 
 uninformed long doubt what the well-informed be- 
 lieve. The authority of reason rather than that of 
 faith, or the bare corporate authority of the Church, 
 ultimately leads the world." 
 
 "■ And yet faith," observed the Dean, '' has ever 
 governed the world. It was Moses, Mahomet, Zoro- 
 aster, Confucius, Buddah, or Christ." 
 
 " What is faith ? " asked the host. 
 
 *' Faith," replied the Dean, "is the eye of religion, as 
 intuition is the eye of reason. Those who admit 
 reason cannot deny faith. The educated few may 
 lose their faith through speculative thinking, but the 
 uneducated many will retain their faith through a 
 
THEOLOGIES DIE. 7 
 
 true worship. The gulf between these two conditions 
 is wide and deep." 
 
 " But education is rapidly narrowing this gulf." 
 
 " But the gulf which is narrowed by education is 
 widened by toil. Somebody must work. Toilers 
 cannot be thinkers. Trained thinking is the work of 
 a life. He who toils by day cannot read metaphysics 
 at night. The few ever have, and ever will, think for 
 the many." 
 
 ''What, then, governs the world, if intellectual im- 
 provement does not ? " 
 
 " Organization governs the world. But what shall 
 organize organization — faith or force ? " 
 
 "Events." 
 
 "And whence come events but out of opinions, 
 credulity, faith, passion, greed, ambition, and the 
 master of masters — the inevitable." 
 
 ''What is the inevitable?" asked the Dean. 
 " Events inevitable to the power of man do not prove 
 themselves inevitable to the power above man. The 
 power to produce is the power to control." 
 
 " I can better describe than define the inevitable," 
 replied the host. " Man must meet his obligations to 
 man, irrespective of the theological dogmas of either. 
 The fields must be planted and harvested; houses must 
 be built ; in a word, no task waits upon creed. Duty 
 to all dominates opinion in each. A unit is next to 
 nothing ; but multiplied, it is next to everything." 
 
 " Human despair and human hope," it was re- 
 marked, ''will ever in the future, as in the past, group 
 mankind together in what is called the Church that 
 formulates human or superhuman answers to the in- 
 exorable enigma of eternity. No man can disbelieve 
 in everything. No creed includes all truth, and no 
 
8 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 creed excludes all error. Error is the absence of 
 truth." 
 
 '' But is it not apparent that ecclesiastical authority, 
 as authority, is losing its hold upon the mind and con- 
 duct of the world ? Neither opinions nor conduct will 
 ever be compulsory again, by Priest or Church. The 
 Inquisition is the horror of the past and the im- 
 possibility of the future. We care not what may be 
 the theology of our neighbor so long as he has no 
 power to compel us to accept it. There is religious 
 peace when there is no religious power to break it. The 
 free individual makes the free Church. Give the con- 
 science light, but not chains. There is the most power 
 where there is the most truth." 
 
 '' For all that the Church loses in one direction," 
 interposed the Dean, " it gains something infinitely 
 better in another. But has secular or domestic au- 
 thority any better hold ? Will the evolution of 
 modern thought give us morality without authority ? 
 Can we hope that, in accumulated experience, there 
 will be a minimum of human weakness and wicked- 
 ness in a maximumx of moral knowledge ? 
 
 " In the restlessness of communism, socialism, 
 agrarianism, there is the ever-recurring antagonism 
 between class and class — condition and condition- 
 status and status. The equilibrium of human social life 
 is still unaccomplished. Capital and labor are still 
 hostile, but mutually dependent. Race problems are 
 still unsolved. The dependence of the human upon 
 the superhuman is still questioned ; yet nothing is 
 changed of the eternal Order. Far above this indi- 
 vidual unrest goes on the ceaseless rhythm of good 
 and evil — of pleasure and pain — of hope and despair 
 — of life and death." 
 
IS THE CHURCH LOSING? 9 
 
 '' But, reverend Dean," interposed the host, " we 
 all see an increasing disregard of the Sabbath, less 
 and less reading of the Bible, and fewer family 
 prayers. Public affairs go on because they must ; but 
 it is said that the Church has become a mere name, 
 and has ceased to be a controlling power." 
 
 " Its human power," said the Dean, '' may be less, 
 but its superhuman power is more, as truth is seen to 
 be more." 
 
 '' Who is to certify what truth is ?" inquired the host, 
 
 " Truth certifies itself," it was replied. 
 
 " The Church is a witness of the truth." 
 
 '' But who certifies the Church ? " inquired the host. 
 
 "God," answered the Dean, ''certifies it through 
 the ages. Scientists teach the survival of the fittest. 
 Parallel all religions, and which is fittest ?" 
 
 "What, then, is the cause," inquired the host, "of 
 the present religious apathy ? " 
 
 "The principal cause," responded the Dean, "is the 
 preoccupied mind of the world, and an agnosticism as 
 to the personality of the supernatural. Human re- 
 ligion is the worship of a superhuman person. We 
 cannot worship impersonal power. Science kills re- 
 ligion only as it reduces power to an impersonal ab- 
 straction." 
 
 " How," asked the host, " do you prove either the 
 fact of the supernatural or the personality of the 
 supernatural ? " 
 
 The Dean replied, " I beg to refer you to Mr. Her- 
 bert Spencer." 
 
 Mr. Spencer said, " I can only repeat for answer what 
 I have said before — that all accountable and natural 
 facts are proved to be, in their ultimate genesis, un- 
 accountable and supernatural." * 
 
 * F. P., ch. v., i$ 30. 
 
10 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 The Dean superadded, ''That is deductively proved 
 to be above nature which nature cannot inductively 
 prove to be in nature. The supernatural is proved to 
 be personal when it acts like a person." 
 
 It was asked, ''When does the supernatural act like 
 a person ? " 
 
 The Dean answered, " When it acts with intelligence, 
 will, and consciousness." 
 
 " How do you prove the intelligence and conscious- 
 ness of the supernatural ? " 
 
 " By my own intelligence and consciousness," re- 
 plied the Dean. "As the greater cannot come from 
 the less, my intelligence could have no unintelligent 
 origin ; my consciousness no unconscious origin ; and 
 all that constitutes my personality could have no 
 impersonal origin." 
 
 " How do you prove the natural ? " 
 
 The host answered, /' By observation and experi- 
 ment." 
 
 "But how," again inquired the Dean, "do you 
 prove, and what do you know of, that power mani- 
 fested through all phenomena that you observe and 
 analyze ? You may observe and analyze that which 
 you call nature ; but that which you cannot analyze 
 must be called supernature, because above your ob- 
 servation and analysis. But when you have proved 
 nature, then, all that you do not prove or disprove is 
 supernature. If Mr. Spencer had not planted the word 
 ' supernatural ' firmly in the terminology of specula- 
 tive thought, we might dispense with both words, 
 nature and supernature, and substitute the word uni- 
 verse, as less speculative and more comprehensive. 
 We would, at least, stop discussion in that direction^ 
 The word universe would then include a superior- 
 
WHAT IS NATURE? 11 
 
 nature in intelligent personality, and an inferior-nature 
 in unintelligent impersonality. The word would be 
 changed, if the idea is not. In asking for the proof 
 of supernature, you assume that you have proved nat- 
 ure. The proof of the natural is as difficult as the 
 proof of the supernatural." 
 
 The host said, *• Let me again ask you to extend 
 your explanation of the supernatural ?" 
 
 "As the knowledge of the existence of a stone," re- 
 plied the Dean, "is not the stone itself, so, in a wider 
 sense, the knowledge of nature is not nature itself. 
 That knowledge of nature which is not nature, or the 
 thing known, is supernature-knowledge ; and, if the 
 supernature is personal, it is God. Thus, by a knowl- 
 edge of nature (which knowledge cannot be nature) 
 there is a stand-point in the sphere of knowledge out- 
 side of nature." 
 
 It was asked, "Where is the all-knowing mind to 
 know all nature ? " 
 
 " Rather," interposed the Dean, " where is the all- 
 knowing mind to create all nature ? If our minds 
 can know what they do not create, certainly the mind 
 that creates must know what it does create." 
 
 "Suppose no mind creates anything?" it was asked 
 
 "Then," said the Dean, "an unintelligent universe 
 is as glorious as an intelligent universe ; and mind is 
 not a dignity, if it is not a degradation, and a stone is 
 equal to man ?" 
 
 "Does not that teaching," inquired the host, "as- 
 sume the very point to be proved — that the knowl- 
 edge of nature is no part of nature." 
 
 "Which side," politely asked the Dean, "does the 
 most assuming — your side or mine ? Is it for me to 
 prove the negative — that the knowledge of nature is 
 
12 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 no part of nature — or is it for you to prove affirma- 
 tively, that the knowledge of nature is a part of nature, 
 as you claim ? In other words, that the knowledge of 
 an object is the object, or that the object is the knowl- 
 edge of it, or that the stone has knowledge of itself? 
 You seem to ignore the distinction between the object 
 and the subject. But this you cannot do. The uni- 
 verse cannot be an object without raising the idea of 
 a correlative subject outside of the universe. If the 
 mind of man knows a stone, are both the mind that 
 knows and the stone that is known, in the same objec- 
 tive plane ? If it take subjective mind to know objec- 
 tive matter, then there must be a difference between 
 mind and matter ; and if matter be in the lines of nat- 
 ure, mind must be in the lines of supernature. Do 
 you not, in the use of the word nature, assume that 
 the name nature proves nature to be all ? Uncon- 
 sciousness does not include consciousness — ignorance 
 does not include knowledge — impersonality does not 
 include personality. 
 
 " You cannot arbitrarily make a word cover incon- 
 sistent and contradictory ideas. The word universe 
 includes the produced and the producer. These ideas 
 cover all that is — the ro evZ, For the sake of conven- 
 ience, you may call the'objective part nature and the 
 subjective part supernature, but I protest that you 
 shall not, by the easy assumptions hid in the use of the 
 word nature, dash out the grandest side of the uni- 
 verse — the supernatural. Any way, if the knowledge 
 of a part of nature is itself nature, then one part of 
 nature knows another part of nature." 
 
 The host admitted that it would seem so. 
 
 "Moreover," continued the Dean, ''as conscious- 
 ness is superior to unconsciousness, as knowledge is 
 
WHAT IS NATURE? 13 
 
 superior to ignorance, so the knowing part of nature 
 is superior to the part known, which knows nothing." 
 
 "Yes," said the host, "but the knowing part and 
 the part unknown are one " 
 
 The Dean (interrupting), " But not the same." 
 
 The host inquired if nature as a whole did not in- 
 clude all its parts. 
 
 " This book," said the Dean, " is a part of nature ; 
 my knowledge of it, according to your argument, is 
 also a part of nature. Then, to repeat the argument, 
 as the knowledge of the existence of this book is not 
 the known book itself, so the knowledge of a part of 
 nature is itself a part of nature, but it is not the part 
 known." 
 
 The host assented, saying, " Nature is held to in- 
 clude both the part that knows and the part that is 
 known." 
 
 " Then," said the Dean, " the equation stands thus : 
 on one side is knowledge, consciousness, feeling, per- 
 sonality ; on the other is blindness, unconsciousness, 
 insensateness, impersonality. If both sides make one 
 nature, then the name nature, which has been used 
 to express only material phenomena, is now used to 
 express mental phenomena as well." 
 
 A gentleman on the right of the host remarked 
 that, " Those who use the word nature to express 
 what the two words, nature and supernature, former- 
 ly expressed, mean to deny supernature. They do not 
 use the word supernature, because they totally deny 
 the supernatural." 
 
 "Those who deny the supernatural in one sense," 
 remarked the Dean, " yet believe in it in another. 
 Supernature is that in nature which we do not under- 
 stand in that which we think we do understand. To 
 
14 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 say that nature is all does not destroy the super- 
 natural in nature. To refuse to use a name does not 
 annihilate the object. Supernature is all that which 
 nature is not, and for which nature cannot account. 
 
 " But so far as there is no belief in the supernatural, 
 the supernatural ceases to influence the life. The con- 
 science stays itself upon nature and its hidden ends. 
 The secular pressure monopolizes the soul, and man 
 stands mutely awaiting the inevitable. Man is preoc- 
 cupied, as we have said, with the pressure of earthly 
 ideas and motives. We reap that which we sow. 
 Worldly cares, trials, and necessities exclude religion 
 from the mind of the poor ; and the pleasures of 
 riches and the pride of ambition monopolize the mind 
 of the rich. 
 
 ''The religion which is first out of the mind, as with 
 the poor, whose only thought is for bread, is second 
 out of the life ; and the religion which is first out of 
 the life, as with the rich, whose general purpose is for 
 self-indulgence, is second out of the mind. 
 
 "Life with such is a present fight, not a future hope; 
 and all thoughts of a future responsibility go to sleep 
 with the fatigues of a present toil. The toilers are 
 too tired to fear death. The non-religious education 
 which all now receive is the intellectual light that 
 reveals the paradise of wealth and style which but 
 few can hope to reach. The disappointment at the 
 inequalities of life and of Providence embitters all 
 that it does not corrupt, and makes a multitude of 
 pessimists who suffer to one optimist who enjoys. The 
 doctrine of the survival of the fittest is terribly ex- 
 emplified in the increasing combinations of the many 
 poor against the few rich, accepting the doctrine that 
 might makes right. If there are no compensations 
 
LIFE A STRUGGLE, 15 
 
 fof Lazarus hereafter, they say, then every one is wise 
 to be a Dives here. Man will attempt to adjust here 
 what there is no God to adjust hereafter. Com- 
 munism is the child of Atheism. Physical force is 
 inaugurated to the vacant throne of the moral. 
 
 "Like drowning men, the struggle is for life, not for 
 immortality. The care is for the present, not the 
 future. Men turn from the ideal to the real — from 
 the possible to the actual. Aspiration is paralyzed. 
 Competition is inexorably severe and universal. The 
 fittest only survive. Civilization has so multiplied 
 the artificial wants of all classes that the struggle to 
 gratify them absorbs all other aims. The ungratified 
 poor are embittered, and the satiated rich are only 
 eager of new pleasures. 
 
 "Human life, now as ever, keeps its records on the 
 sands of the shores of Time : the past is erased, the 
 future is unguessed; the present is read, unpondered, 
 and then obliterated forever. In a word, skeptical 
 Positivism holds life to be a fact without a compre- 
 hensible past or a conceivable future. Past history — 
 its literature, its philosophies, its events — are only 
 unread epitaphs upon the multitudinous tomb of 
 humanity. Life has become exhausted — exhausted 
 of interest to the rich, except to be richer, and of 
 interest to the poor, except the fear of being poorer. 
 Hitherto, to the poor, there has been an optimism as 
 to the future lighting up the pessimism of the pres- 
 ent; but now an unintermittent and universal compe- 
 tition for daily food, raiment, and shelter in some, and 
 for new pleasures in others, makes all classes mere 
 walking encyclopedias of human and agnostic unrest. 
 
 '^The presence of the rich emphasizes the poverty of 
 the poor. The laborer feels no benignant Providence 
 
16 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 in his tasks of the present, nor of spiritual compensa- 
 tions in the uncertainties of the future. The trial of 
 human virtue is beyond human strength. Hope de- 
 ferred makes the heart sick. Human faith dies in 
 human disappointments. A dark present makes a 
 darker future ; and a dark future makes a darker 
 present. Those who hope nothing from the future 
 make the most of the present; and those who make 
 the most of the present hope nothing from the 
 future. 
 
 "For this apathy there is no one cause. The race is 
 made up of so many individual units, with such 
 various conditions, temperaments, and intellectuality, 
 that no one cause can be assigned for the character 
 of an age. It is as natural for some to doubt as for 
 others to believe. Unrelieved poverty and drudgery 
 embitters ; unchastened riches indulge and flatter 
 humanity. The prayer of Agur was : ' Give me 
 neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food con- 
 venient for me; lest I be full and deny thee, and say, 
 Who is the Lord ? or lest I be poor, and steal ' (Prov. 
 30:8). 
 
 "Multitudes of people no longer form theories of life 
 or of death. Absorbed in their pursuits, or riding 
 their hobbies, they have ceased to interrogate the 
 sphinx-universe, and live on because they do not die. 
 Out of the momentary engrossment, life is frivolous 
 and aimless. All seek to be amused. Men laugh, 
 and let the inevitable come. In a present excitement 
 they think not of a future responsibility. There is no 
 hope for any." 
 
 " Will the Church live and give hope ?" it was asked. 
 
 It was answered, " As said before, all that is divine 
 in it will live, and all that is human in it will die. 
 
MACAULATS REMARK. 17 
 
 " Religion comes out of what man thinks of the 
 infinite — the eternal — the mystery of the soul which 
 makes its own creed. Religion cannot die ; for 
 thoughts upon the infinite — the eternal — cannot die. 
 It is an age of inquiry, it is true, but the broader faith 
 of to-morrow takes the place of the narrow one of to- 
 day. It would be wiser for religion to seek to guide, 
 than to repress, this mental activity. Rules change, 
 but principles abide. If the Church is dead as an or- 
 ganic ruler, religion lives as a diffused power. 
 
 ''The Church will live if it is worth living, as a 
 teacher and witness of the truth; and, if not worth 
 living except as an exponent of human priestly power, 
 the sooner it is dead the better. But I think we can 
 trust the Church of the Living God to the care of the 
 Living God. If it is His, He will take care of it; and 
 if it is not His, no one need take care of it. The 
 Church is all right. The travesties and misrepresen- 
 tations of it only are wrong. The human mind was 
 never more earnest or sincerely eager for the truth — 
 ' the truth as it is in Jesus.' 
 
 "Lord Macaulay remarked that 'the Church had 
 been compared to the Ark of which we read in the 
 book of Genesis; but never was the comparison more 
 just than when she alone rode, amid darkness and 
 the tempest, above the deluge, beneath which lay en- 
 tombed all the great works of power and wisdom, 
 bearing within her the feeble germs from which a 
 second and more glorious civilization was to spring.'* 
 ' The Church saw the commencement of all the gov- 
 ernments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments 
 that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance 
 that she is not destined to see the end of them all. 
 
 * Hist. England, Ch. i. 
 
18 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 She was great and respected before the Saxon set foot 
 in Britain; before the Frank had passed the Rhine ; 
 when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch ; 
 when idols were still worshiped in the temple of 
 Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished 
 vigor when some lonely traveler from New Zealand 
 shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand 
 on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the 
 ruins of St. Paul's.' * 
 
 " But now it is truth, not assertion, that is de- 
 manded. It is principle, not a rule ; a conviction, not 
 a conceit, that is sought; a superhuman revelation, 
 not a human scheme. Never before was there such 
 an impatience at everything human in religion, and 
 it is indignantly rejected — human assumptions of oc- 
 cult mysteries, of exoteric powers, and of esoteric 
 acquaintance with the invisible. A human church, 
 with human ministers claiming to exercise superhu- 
 man authority over human hopes and fears, drives the 
 enlightened into a just hatred of a human church, and 
 into an unjust hatred of a true superhuman religion, 
 with a divine, superhuman head. The world will 
 turn from these falsities to Christ, and from a church 
 of this world to Christ's Church, which is not of this 
 world. If there is one hatred of this age more intense 
 than that of all others, it is of the human element yet 
 obtruding itself in our superhuman religion. There 
 is no power in the church like God's power, and He 
 will take care of His own." 
 
 The host asked, '' What is truth without author- 
 ity ? '• 
 
 ''What is authority without truth?" was replied. 
 " Just as the church loses truth, it loses authority." 
 
 *' Can it ever lose either ? " 
 
 *Essay on Ranke's Hist, of the Popes. 
 
RELIGION DICTATES MORALITY. 19 
 
 "According to Anglicanism, Roman errors destroy 
 Roman authority ; and, according to Romanism, An- 
 glican truths want the saving power of Roman au- 
 thority," 
 
 " Is science," inquired the host, " to uproot religion, 
 and with the fall of religion, if it fall, is morality to 
 fail too ? What is before us ? " 
 
 "Probably," remarked Dr. Frothingham, " we shall 
 go on in the future, as in the past, gaining purity, 
 strength, and knowledge as the future of the great or- 
 ganism Humanity perfects itself. Religion, morality, 
 science, are all ministering angels on the rounds of 
 the spiritual ladder leading upward out of sight. It 
 matters not whether morality preceded religion, or 
 religion morality, so long as both abide with man and 
 enable science more and more to disclose the founda- 
 tions upon which the pillars of the universe rest. 
 There was a time when religion had society all to it- 
 self ; because feelings, hopes, fears, anticipations 
 come first. 
 
 " Long before men think, study, reason, compare, ad- 
 just their ideas, understand themselves, they feel in- 
 tensely. Their dread of the supernatural power is fear- 
 ful ; their hope of blessedness to come to them proves a 
 source outside of their lives and takes up all feelings 
 that their heart can entertain. Thus religion gets es- 
 tablished, instituted, organized, long before morals 
 come into the field. Hence we see how it is that relig- 
 ion dictates morality.* What folly then to tell us that 
 leligion has had its day, and a very long day ; a day of 
 power amounting to sovereignty; a day of opulence, 
 command, honor, tribute to all mankind ; a day when 
 it has had human affairs, secular as well as spiritual, 
 
 " Frothingham: Visions of the Future, p. 79. 
 
20 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 at its disposal. It is said that it has lived its life and 
 now must give place to other powers — to philosophy^ 
 science, literature, politics, social reform — newly born 
 Titans who claim their opportunity to dictate to men 
 the terms of life. There is much reason in this argu- 
 ment, which yet as a teacher of religion I venture to 
 combat, still pressing its claim to respect, reverence, 
 and obedience. Religion is the oldest spirit in the 
 world — the most venerable. It has been, in its day, 
 the teacher of art and literature — yes, of philosophy 
 and science. For philosophy and science have lain 
 shivering babes in its cradle. It has been the bene- 
 factor of mankind when they had no other friend. It 
 has stood by the poor when the most abandoned. It 
 has raised the despised when they were tottering and 
 crushed to the earth. It proclaimed the brotherhood 
 of man in ages that were torn with civil and social 
 strife. It has inculcated sentiments of democracy 
 when aristocracy wore the crown and bore the sceptre 
 and flaunted its banners in the air, and imperialism, 
 held possession of the secular world. Hence I main- 
 tain that this power which has swayed human con- 
 science for thousands of years, which has had a hold 
 on human hopes and fears such as no other power 
 ever had or ever can hope to have — this power which 
 has opened the gates of the future to the contempla- 
 tion of morality, which has sheltered mankind beneath 
 convictions of divine justice, and has consoled them 
 by thoughts of a heavenly care, has its right still to 
 speak, and its title to be heard."* 
 
 " Which," inquired the host, " do you think — science, 
 religion, or morality — can meet the want of the age ? " 
 
 " The need of this age," remarked Dr. Frothingham, 
 
 * Frothingham's Vision of the Future, p. 148-9. 
 
THE NEED OF THE AGE. 21 
 
 "is for sympathy, mutual understanding, and recog- 
 nition between the high and the low, the strong and 
 weak, great and small, rich and poor, wise and simple, 
 good and bad — a practical recognition of brother- 
 hood, the acknowledgment of fellowship, the obliter- 
 ation of caste, the diminution of local and sectarian 
 prejudice, the free, open-handed, cordial admission 
 on the part of every human being of the wants, needs 
 of every other human being. This want, deeply felt, 
 passionately uttered, breaks out in socialism, in com- 
 munism, in the strikes and labor-unions that terrify 
 the community. This animates the rebellion of the 
 poor against the rich. All this turmoil of unrest, this 
 clamor of want, these agonized prayers of suffering 
 men, are cries for sympathy, recognition, human sup- 
 port and help. Nothing more than this is really 
 asked. The immediate claim is on the surface. The 
 real need is that heart-need of sympathy. It is for 
 religion to meet that want, for religion alone can. It 
 alone has the sovereignty over human nature, the 
 power to touch the depth of feeling, to stimulate pur- 
 pose, io draw men away from their selfish attractions 
 and open to them the region of disinterested en- 
 deavor and unconditional love. Its symbols are the 
 cross, which means surrender of the individual to 
 the universal, and the cup, which means the mingling 
 of the universal with the individual. It is, besides, 
 not the possession of the instructed, as science is, not 
 the prerogative of the disciplined, as philosophy is, 
 but the privilege of mankind. It appeals to the ven- 
 eration of the ages. The task is for religion. Science 
 cannot undertake it — science is engrossed by the pur- 
 suit of knowledge. Philosophy cannot attempt it — 
 philosophy is engrossed by the effort to classify knowl- 
 
 [3] 
 
22 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 edge. Religion must enter on the duty. This mighty 
 spirit, which is more than science or philosophy, of 
 which they are the servants, friends, co-workers, 
 but for which they cannot be substitutes — this mighty 
 spirit which alone now has the power to stir the hu- 
 man heart, wake up the human conscience to heroic 
 achievement, must break its bonds and spring forth 
 to meet a desire which has at length become articu- 
 late and imperious."* 
 
 Some one remarked that, '' The opinion of the rev- 
 erend Doctor seems to preclude the questions, "Is 
 morality prog^ressing or retrograding? Are morals 
 higher or lower than they were ? Are we gaining or 
 losing in ethical principle ? If religion is before mor- 
 ality, and religion is the great power now as in all the 
 past, of course it will hold up morality in the future 
 as it has held it up in the past." 
 
 " I contend with all my might," said Dr. F., with 
 distinct emphasis, "with the utmost clearness of per- 
 suasion, with the utmost earnestness of conviction, 
 that the morals of the world are improving year by 
 year ; that we are getting nearer the heart of princi- 
 ples, that we are understanding the drift of laws, 
 that we are comprehending the conditions and taking 
 advantage of the opportunities that work together to 
 make society what it ought to be. We are not called 
 upon to pronounce an encomium upon the morals of 
 modern society. They are certainly bad enough. No 
 one has painted worse than in my judgment they de- 
 serve. But this is not the question. The question is 
 whether morals are getting better or worse. Are they 
 in the way of improvement on past states, or are they, 
 as many would have us believe, declining ? We shall 
 
 * Visions of the Future, p. 144-5- 
 
DR. DRAPER'S VIEW. 28 
 
 never have perfect morality while there is room for 
 improvement, while the law of progress holds. Long 
 after we shall have passed from the scene and been 
 forgotten, nothing like a kingdom of heaven on earth 
 will be seen. Let us not boast of the excellence of 
 established morals. Our age has its peculiar dangers, 
 its characteristic vices, its special sins. Every age 
 has. In some respects we are worse than these who 
 have gone before. We have left virtues behind which 
 they possessed. Still, I hold, in spite of all that can be 
 said, in spite of all that can be imagined, that condition 
 of things is vastly and essentially better than it has 
 been.* War is less frequent and less barbarous; slavery 
 is gone ; humane societies are rising up on all sides; 
 law is more defined, and religion more universal." 
 
 " Then, of course," interrupted the host, " religion 
 cannot be dying. I think the remark is yours. Dr. 
 Draper, that no spectacle presented to the thoughtful 
 mind is more solemn, more mournful, than the dying 
 of an ancient religion, which in its day has given con- 
 solation to many generations of men."f 
 
 The Doctor bowed assent. 
 
 '' If it be supposed that the Christian religion is dy- 
 ing," remarked the preacher, ''the question is, can 
 civilization afford to let it die ? And yet our Saviour 
 asked, ' When the Son of Man cometh shall he find 
 faith on the earth ? ' " 
 
 "It would seem," remarked the host, "that no one 
 is better prepared to answer Dr. Draper's remark 
 than yourself." 
 
 "Then I should say," replied the parish rector, 
 " that so far as the Christian religion is concerned, it 
 
 * A Vision of the Future, p. 67. 
 
 f Draper: Conflict Between Science and Religion. 
 
24 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 is not dying, but only increasing its life. I know that 
 some think that the enlightened world is more and 
 more dropping the worship of the supernatural, and 
 resting more and more upon the conclusions of mere 
 science and experience as a guide to conduct. Ob- 
 serve the distinction between an exhausted religion and 
 an excluded religion. It was exhausted at Caesar and 
 needed to be substituted ; it was only excluded at 
 Napoleon, and awaited its recall. The expectation of 
 some now is to exclude religion from morality, and 
 by exclusion to extinguish it ; but as there is no per- 
 sistent life of faith without works, so there is none of 
 works without faith. To have either truly, is to have 
 both really. Together they live ; apart they die. 
 The worship was first of many gods, then of one God, 
 and now the tendency is of no God — polytheism, 
 monotheism, atheism." 
 
 I. The Religion of Worship, without Morality, 
 DIED BY Exhaustion. 
 
 '' Polytheism is the religion of a worship without a 
 morality ; and it died by exhaustion. It had faith 
 without works, or rather superstition without con- 
 duct. 
 
 '' The religion of Greece and Rome regarded what 
 the gods were, and what they could do for man, not 
 what man should be to the gods. The idea was the 
 providence of the gods, not the morality of man. 
 These gods were either the spirits of dead ancestors 
 or the personified elements or forces of Nature. These 
 religions did not look to conduct, and they became 
 extinct. They were false, theistic, and not truly hu- 
 manistic. Credulity became exhausted, and died be- 
 cause there was nothing in it to believe. 
 
 " These Pagan mythologies may have had a mis- 
 
ANCIENT religions: 25 
 
 sion to the imagination, but none to the moral feel- 
 ings. Their gods were not worshipped for guidance 
 in conduct, but were worshipped only as fear knelt 
 before power. Family morality came out of the wor- 
 ship of family ancestors. These two contemporary 
 religions — the worship of ancestors and the worship 
 of the personified elements — both expired between the 
 ridicule of the philosophers, after they came, and the 
 rise of the Plebeian power in the State. As the plebe- 
 ians had no family gods to worship, out of which came 
 family morality, and as the gods of Olympus were 
 powers to be propitiated, not teachers of righteous- 
 ness, we can easily see how, with the decline of the- 
 ology, such as it was, worship and morality declined. 
 When these ancient beliefs expired, Caesar came to as- 
 sume that control over the conduct of men which the 
 failure of these beliefs had relinquished ; and for a 
 time there was what some Agnostics now hope to 
 set up again. 
 
 "The future governs the present, and so man has al- 
 ways had a religion of some sort. In the earliest ages 
 of the world the Greek and Roman Aryans had two : 
 one for the family constitution and morality, called 
 ancestral worship, and a mythological one for the in- 
 dividual imagination and the spectacular ritual of the 
 State. But while the philosophers ridiculed the an- 
 cestral superstition out of the credulity of men, the 
 State offered no other basis of morality than its own 
 laws, and all religion expired. The gods of Olympus 
 were the personifications of the elements, but no teach- 
 ers of morality. Indeed, they were generally horrid 
 monsters of cruelty and lust." 
 
 " Our gods reflect ourselves," said Dr. Frothing- 
 ham. 
 
26 ■ IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 *'As gods, if we may speak of them as more than 
 one, were they not infinitely above the people ? Did 
 the God of the Hebrews," asked the host, '' or Christ 
 of the Christians reflect those who worshipped them ? 
 Would it not be more strictly according to the light 
 of history to say that the worship of the true God 
 lifts up the people, and that of the false gods de- 
 grades them ? The Pagan gods were either dead 
 ancestors carrying human passions up into the sup- 
 posed power of gods, or the deified elements low- 
 ering the power of gods down to the standard of hu- 
 man passions. They were powers, but not virtues. 
 They were worshipped to propitiate their evil pas- 
 sions." 
 
 " Yes," said Mr. Ingersoll, with a tone of sarcasm, 
 " these gods were manufactured after numberless 
 fashions. Some have a thousand arms, some a hundred 
 heads ; some were adorned with necklaces of living 
 snakes ; some were armed with clubs, some with 
 sword and shield, and some with bucklers ; some were 
 jealous ; some were foolish ; some turned themselves 
 into men, and some into swans." * 
 
 " They were poor indeed," replie i the preacher, " but 
 they were the best the people knew of. Paul describes 
 them in worse terms than you do. He says that the 
 people of those times, 'professing themselves to be 
 wise, they became fools ; and changed the glory of the 
 incorruptible God into an image made like to cor- 
 ruptible man, and to birds and four-footed beasts, 
 and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them 
 up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own 
 hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between them- 
 selves ; who changed the truth of God into a lie, and 
 
 * Ingersoll : Gods. 
 
FALSE GODS DESCRIBED BY PAUL. 27 
 
 worshipped and served the creature more than the 
 Creator. As they did not like to retain God in their 
 knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, 
 to do those things which are not convenient, being 
 filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wicked- 
 ness, covetousness, maliciousness ; full of envy, mur- 
 der, deceit, malignity ; whisperers, backbiters, haters 
 of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil 
 things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, 
 covenant-breakers, without natural affection, impla- 
 cable, unmerciful. We are sure that the judgment 
 of God is according to truth against them which com- 
 mit such things.' 
 
 II. The Religion of Morality, without Worship, 
 DIED BY Exclusion. 
 
 I. Atheis7n. 
 
 (a) Positivism. 
 
 "Yet," says M. Comte (the teacher of Positivism, 
 or the philosophy of ignorance towards God, and 
 faith in man — Comte and his followers teach that no 
 religious faith is a delusion), '' from a religious point 
 of view, it is evident that no belief, especially no sys- 
 tem of worship, could ever have grown up which did 
 not at the sam.e time serve some useful purpose in the 
 intellectual and moral development of humanity. 
 Hence, every religious faith is treated by Positivism 
 with reverence within the sphere of its own social mis- 
 sion. Every one has such a mission, and remains pro- 
 gressive until it is accomplished."* 
 
 {h) Agnosticism^ or a morality without a worship. 
 
 In this, religion is excluded, but neither exhausted 
 nor extinguished. It is works without faith. It is 
 
 * Edger: Positivism, p. 20. 
 
28 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 first, a morality without religion, and second, it is a re- 
 ligion without a God. But the full discussion of Ag- 
 nosticism must be deferred until we come to it as a 
 form of Positivism. 
 
 In seeking to establish the independent dominion 
 of morality without worship — ethics without rites — 
 conduct without faith — faith, rites, and worship must 
 be displaced. To do this there must be considered 
 the alleged conflict between science and dogma, the 
 renewed criticisms upon Bible statements, and socio- 
 logical phenomena. It is here necessary to show, not 
 only that morality can stand alone, but that it must so 
 stand, in consequence of the decay of religion brought 
 about by 
 
 2. The conflict between Religioii and Sciejice. 
 
 '' No religion will die," said the host, ''which is fit 
 to live." 
 
 ''Judging the future by the past," remarked some 
 one, "can we resist the conclusion that a general and 
 sure decay is going on both in Judaism and Christian- 
 ity ? In their conflicts with science, they must perish, 
 or at least be so greatly weakened as to cease to be 
 factors in civilization." 
 
 Dr. Draper here remarked that, " There is an in- 
 fancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death to religion 
 as well as to philosophy. The latter was born under 
 the shadow of the Pyramids ; after many wanderings 
 for a thousand years around the shores of the Medi- 
 terranean, it came back to its native place, and under 
 the shadow of the Pyramids it died. 
 
 "I am relieved to hear you say," interrupted the 
 Dean, "that philosophy was not killed by religion, 
 but died a natural death." 
 
 "Religion," continued Dr. Draper, not noticing the 
 
THE OL YMPIAN GODS. 29 
 
 interruption, ''seems to be nearing the end of its 
 ancient circuits, to enter its crypt of universal death. 
 For centuries before the birth of Christ, Greece was 
 fast outgrowing her ancient faith. Her philosophers, 
 in their studies of the world, had been profoundly im- 
 pressed with the contrast between the majesty of the 
 operations of Nature and the worthlessness of the di- 
 vinities of Olympus."* 
 
 "And yet," said the Dean, "the Olympian Gods 
 known to the philosophers were the elements of nat- 
 ure personified and deified by the fathers of the phi- 
 losophers. The 7'eligion- of the ancients came from 
 ancestral worship of the Penates and Lares, and not 
 from the mythological gods of the elements. It was 
 the nature-worshippers of a later age reforming the 
 ancestral and nature-worship of a former age." 
 
 "The philosophers," replied the Doctor, "took 
 the place of the priests. But this did not happen 
 without resistance. At first the public, and particu- 
 larly its religious portion, denounced the rising 
 doubts as atheism. They despoiled some of their 
 ^oods and exiled others ; some they put to death. 
 They asserted that what had been believed by pious 
 men in old times, and had stood the test of ages, 
 must necessarily be true." 
 
 "Is it not wise," asked the Dean, "to adhere to 
 that which has stood the test of ages ? New things are 
 not always better than the old. The ancients, as all 
 must do, for ages, stood by the tried rather than ex- 
 periment with the untried." 
 
 " But their efforts," continued the Doctor, " were in 
 vain, for there are predestined phases through which 
 
 * Draper : Intellectual Development, and Con. Sci. and Re., 
 p. T. 
 
30 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 on such occasions public opinion must pass. What it 
 has received with veneration it begins to doubt, then 
 it offers new interpretations, then subsides into dis- 
 sent, and ends with the rejection of the whole as a 
 fable.* In their secession, the philosophers and histo- 
 rians were followed by poets, and finally by the com- 
 mon people." 
 
 ''What then?" ejaculated the Dean. "Are we too 
 to witness a religious decay, and all the social chaos 
 that have hitherto followed such moral conversions ? 
 I think you yourself said in your ' Intellectual Devel- 
 opment of Europe,' ' Nations plunged in the abyss of 
 irreligion must necessarily be nations in anarchy.'" 
 
 " Whatever was the result," answered the Doctor, 
 " the modern Jew already repudiates the supernatural 
 element of Judaism, and the Christian pulpit has 
 changed its themes and tone." 
 
 " To what do you attribute this change ?" asked the 
 host. 
 
 '' To the long and irrepressible conflict," replied the 
 Doctor, "between science and religion." 
 
 " I am surprised to learn," remarked the Dean^ 
 " that there has been or is such a conflict. All truths 
 are consistent. Religion has had its great universal 
 contest with the evil passions of men, but not with 
 learning." 
 
 " There have been four of these conflicts," remarked 
 the Doctor.f " The first was the conflict respecting 
 the unity of God ; the second respected the nature of 
 the soul ; the third the nature of the world ; and the 
 fourth the criterion of truth." 
 
 " To be certain," was the reply, " to escape what 
 
 * Draper, Id. 
 
 f Draper: Conflict between Science and Religion. 
 
RELIGION DEFINED. 31 
 
 Herbert Spencer calls being unscientific as science 
 and unreligious as religion in considering these 
 alleged conflicts, I beg you will say what you mean 
 by science and what you mean by religion." 
 
 " Science," said the Doctor, " is a knowledge of 
 material nature, attained and verified by observation 
 and experiment. By religion, as engaged in this con- 
 flict, I do not mean Judaism, for the Jews founded 
 many schools and colleges. They particularly studied 
 the science of medicine. Of all men, they saw the 
 course of human affairs from the most exalted point 
 of view. Among the special sciences they became 
 proficient in mathematics and astronomy.* I do not 
 mean Mohammedanism, for the Mohammedan culti- 
 vation of science dates from their capture of Alexan- 
 dria, f I do not refer to the Oriental religions, nor to 
 the Greek Church. This church has never since the 
 restoration of science arrayed itself in opposition to 
 the advancement of knowledge. On the contrary, it 
 has always met it with welcome. It has observed a 
 reverential attitude to truth, from whatever quarter it 
 may come. Recognizing the apparent discrepancies 
 between its interpretations of revealed truth and the 
 discoveries of science, it has always expected that 
 satisfactory explanations and reconciliations would 
 ensue, and in this it has not been disappointed. I 
 refer generally in the remark made to the Roman 
 Church, partly because its adherents compose the 
 majority of Christendom, partly because its demands 
 are the most pretentious, and partly because it has 
 commonly sought to enforce those demands by the 
 civil power. None of the Protestant churches have 
 
 * Draper's Con. Sci. and Re., p. 145. 
 fA. D. 638. 
 
S2 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 accepted a position so imperious — none have ever had 
 such wide-spread political influence. In the most 
 part they have been averse to constraint, and, except 
 in a very few instances, their opposition has not passed 
 beyond the exciting of theological odium.* It is also 
 to be said that the Roman Church is far more a political 
 than a religious combination. "f 
 
 {a) Conflict as to the Nature of God. 
 
 " The conflicts of science, then, it seems," remarked 
 the Dean, *' have not been with religion at all, but only 
 with a political institution known as the Roman 
 Church. For the sake of the young, who may be 
 seriously miseducated in this matter, would it not be 
 better to adhere to historical accuracy, and not speak 
 of a conflict between science and religion, when con- 
 fessedly there is none, but call these conflicts, conflicts 
 between Science and Political Power — the Roman 
 Church. That would be, at least, according to your 
 own enlightened admission." 
 
 ''We shall see how best to describe them," replied 
 he Doctor, " when we have stated them more fully." 
 
 " The first conflict, you say," remarked the Dean, 
 encouraging the Doctor to go on, " was as to the 
 nature of God." 
 
 "Yes," answered the Doctor, "and it involved the 
 rise of Mohammedanism. Its result was, that much 
 of Asia and Africa, with the historic cities of 
 Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage, were wrenched 
 from Christendom, and the doctrine of the Unity of 
 God established in the larger part of what had been 
 the Roman Empire. This political event was followed 
 by the restoration of science, the establishment of 
 
 * Draper's Con. Sci. and Re. ..Preface, 
 f Draper: Conflict Sci. and Re., p. 329. 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS. 3S 
 
 colleges, schools, libraries throughout the dominions 
 of the Arabians. Those conquerors, pressing forward 
 rapidly in their intellectual development, rejected the 
 anthropomorphic ideas of the nature of God remain- 
 ing in their popular beliefs and accepted other more 
 philosophical ones, akin to those that had long pre- 
 viously been attained to in India."* 
 
 "But," interrupted the Dean, "this was a conflict 
 between religion and religion, not between science and 
 religion. The nature of God is a question of theology 
 and not one of science. The word science, in its true 
 sense, comprehends all positive and definite knowl- 
 edge of the order existing among surrounding phenom- 
 ena.f If questions as to the nature of God be 
 embraced in all positive knowledge, then all theo- 
 logical questions become scientific questions, and the 
 conflict is not between science and religion, but be- 
 tween science of people in the Church and science of 
 people not in the Church; and I think, as I understood 
 from statement of your second conflict, that it is of 
 the same kind. Will you please state it again ? " 
 
 {b) Conflict respecting the Nature of the Soul. 
 
 " Ideas respecting the nature of God," replied the 
 Doctor, " necessarily influence ideas respecting the 
 nature of the soul. The Eastern Asiatics had adopted 
 the conception of an impersonal God, and, as regards 
 the soul, its necessary consequence, the doctrine of the 
 emanation and absorption of the soul. The Vedic 
 theology developed itself into Buddhism, which has 
 become the faith of a majority of the human race. 
 This system acknowledges that there is a Supreme 
 Power, but denies that there is a Supreme Being."J 
 
 * Draper: Science and Religion, 
 f Herbert Spencer: First Principles. 
 :}: Draper: Con. Sci. and Rel., 122. 
 
34 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 " Is this Supreme Power blind ? If there can be a 
 Supreme Power," interposed the Dean, " why not a 
 Supreme Person ? " 
 
 "It contemplates," continued the Doctor, "the ex- 
 istence of Force, giving rise in its manifestations to 
 matter. It adopts the theory of emanation and ab- 
 sorption. In a burning taper it sees an effigy of man — 
 an embodiment of matter and an evolution of force. If 
 we interrogate it respecting the destiny of the soul, it 
 demands of us what has become- of the flame when it 
 is blown out ; and in what condition it was before the 
 taper was lighted. Was it a nonentity ? Has it been 
 annihilated ? It admits that the idea of personality 
 which has deluded us through life may not be instan- 
 taneously extinguished at death, but may be lost by 
 slow degrees. On this is founded the doctrine of 
 transmigration. But at length reunion with the uni- 
 versal intellect takes place ; Nirvana is reached; 
 oblivion is attained, a state that has no relation to 
 matter, space, or time; the state in which the deportep 
 flame of the taper has gone; the state in which we were 
 before we were born. This was the doctrine of Aris- 
 totle first, and afterwards of Averroes." 
 
 "■ But," said the Rector, " how is all this a matter of 
 science ? The nature of the soul, like the nature of 
 God, is not material, and therefore not the subject of 
 scientific investigation. We know them by reason 
 and consciousness and not by experiment. Two out 
 of the four conflicts you have mentioned, therefore, are 
 not between science and religion." 
 
 (c) Conflict as to the Nature of the World. 
 
 " However that may be," replied the Doctor, " as 
 to the first and second conflicts, there can be none as 
 to the third, respecting the nature of the world. The 
 Scriptural view was that the earth is a flat surface. 
 
THE BIBLE AND NA TURE. 35 
 
 whereas the scientific and true view is that the earth 
 is a globe."* 
 
 " Are you not mistaken in the view you ascribe to 
 
 Scripture ? " inquired the Dean. " The seventh verse 
 
 of the ninety-eighth Psalm, as found in the Evening 
 
 Service of the Prayer Book, speaks of the earth as 
 
 the round world.' '' 
 
 "How long," inquired the host, '' was that trans- 
 lation after Copernicus had proved the centrality of 
 the sun and the rotundity of the earth ? " 
 
 " It was not after it at all," replied the Rector. 
 " The translation of the Psalms in the Episcopal 
 Psalter is taken from Miles Coverdale's translation, 
 made by order of Henry VHI., and published in 1537, 
 six years before the death of Copernicus and before the 
 publication of his system of the universe. The fables 
 of the Pagan religion and the ignorance of science 
 no doubt regarded the earth as a flat surface ; but for 
 nearly three thousand years the Psalms of David have 
 taught otherwise. The Bible was all right, whether 
 the Church was or not." 
 
 "Anyhow," remarked the Doctor, "on the basis of 
 this view of the flat structure of the world great re- 
 ligious systems have been founded." 
 
 "But in all this," replied the Rector, "systems of 
 religion have not been based on the form of the 
 world at all. Science misinformed religion. Claudius 
 Ptolemy, a scientist and not a priest, held religion to 
 an astronomical error for thirteen hundred years, 
 until Copernicus, a monk of the Church, informed re- 
 ligion correctly upon the subject."f 
 
 *See head-notes to Chap, vi., Draper's Conflict between Science 
 and Religion. 
 
 f Draper: Conflict between Science and Religion, p. 157. 
 
36 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 " Yes," said the Doctor, " but religion resisted, 
 sometimes by bloodshed, attempts that have been 
 made to correct its incontestable errors — a resistance 
 grounded on the suspicion that the localization of 
 heaven and hell, and the supreme value of man in the 
 universe, might be affected."* 
 
 "It is a virtue" of religion," replied the Dean, "to 
 be loyal to truth, or what it has been taught to be 
 truth. Scientific convictions are no more tolerant 
 than religious. The world and the cause of truth is 
 better for the courage of convictions, whether right 
 or wrong, than without it. Religion is greedy for 
 truth. The greater creation, the greater is the Creator. 
 Religion rejoices in the true interpretation of nature, 
 but is impatient at what she has been taught to regard 
 as misinterpretation. Prompted by religion, science 
 has perfected knowledge." 
 
 "As some think exactly the reverse to be true,'' re- 
 marked the host, " please state any help religion has 
 been to science, directly or indirectly.' 
 
 " How was it," said the preacher, " about architec- 
 ture ? Have not the religions of the past inspired 
 and supported all its development ? The great tem- 
 ples were votive to gods. Without the religion of 
 the past the world would not have had the temples 
 of the past. Nearly, if not all, of the great astron- 
 omers were professors of the Christian religion." 
 
 Francis Galton here remarked that " seven out of 
 every ten scientists of the present day were members 
 of some one of the Christian churches, and they ad- 
 mit help from religion. "f 
 
 (<-?) The fourth conflict ivas as to the Criterion of Truth. 
 
 * Id., p. 155. 
 
 f See Galton's Men of Science. 
 
PROFESSOR BLACKIE. 37 
 
 "All literary confusion and darkness," said the 
 Doctor, " only make the criterion of truth the more 
 uncertain. 'What is truth ?' was the passionate de- 
 mand of a Roman procurator on one of the most mo- 
 mentous occasions in history ; and the Divine Per- 
 son who stood before him, to whom the interrogation 
 was addressed, made no reply — unless, indeed, silence 
 contained the reply.* It might be supposed that a 
 revelation from God to man would make all certain, 
 yet even as to revelation how uncertain all is." 
 
 " But," replied the preacher, "it is difficult for men 
 to come to the same conclusion as regards even ma- 
 terial and visible things, unless they stand at the same 
 point of view. God's revealed communication to 
 man is ever one and the same, but human minds differ 
 in thought, and so differ in its interpretation." 
 
 " It is this very difference of thought and interpre- 
 tation," said the Doctor, " that makes doubtful the 
 probability of such a revelation at all. Besides, what 
 God is said to have revealed in Scripture and what 
 He has actually revealed in nature is absolute oppo- 
 sition. The Pentateuch is affirmed to have been writ- 
 ten by Moses, under the influence of a divine inspira- 
 tion ; but no man may dare to impute them to the 
 inspiration of Almighty God."f 
 
 " Bacon was quite right," interposed Professor 
 Blackie,}; "when he tells us not to mix theology with 
 science ; but he would be altogether wrong if he 
 were to tell us not to mix up theology with philos- 
 ophy. Science works in a narrow range, and has no 
 function to meddle with philosophical and theologi- 
 
 * Draper: Conflict between Science and Religion, ch. viii. 
 
 fib. 
 
 X Natural History of Atheism, p. 237. 
 
38 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 cal questions at all. The question of design or the 
 cause of things is a philosophical question, and the 
 moment a scientific man either asserts or denies it, 
 he walks out of his proper sphere, and is, or attempts 
 to be, a philosopher. Science investigates only facts, 
 religion or theology both causes and ends, and there 
 cannot possibly be, in the nature of things, any con- 
 flict between them. To suppose one, is to force it." 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer remarked : " Doubtless science 
 is the enemy of the superstitions that cloak them- 
 selves with the name of religion, but it is not the 
 enemy of the essential religion which the superstitions 
 darken. Doubtless in the science of to day there 
 reigns an irreligious spirit, but not in the true science, 
 which, not stopping at the surface, penetrates to the 
 depths of nature. With regard to human traditions, 
 and the authority that consecrates them, true science 
 maintains a lofty attitude ; but before the impene- 
 trable veil that hides the absolute it humbles itself: 
 it is at once truly proud and truly humble. The sin- 
 cere philosopher alone (and by these words we mean 
 not the astronomer, who computes distances, not the 
 naturalist, who defines species, but he who through 
 the lower seeks the higher, to stop only at the highest), 
 the sincere philosopher at once can know how high — 
 we say not above human knowledge, but above hu- 
 man conception — is the universal power, whereof nat- 
 ure, like thought, is a manifestation." 
 
 Professor Tyndall said : * 
 
 " If asked to deduce from the physical interaction 
 of the brain-molecules the least of the phenomena of 
 sensation or thought, we must acknowledge our help- 
 lessness. 
 
 * Fortnightly Review. 
 
DR. VIRCHOW. 39 
 
 "The mechanical philosopher, as such, will never 
 place a state of consciousness and a group of mole- 
 cules in the relation of mover and moved. In passing 
 from the one to the other we meet a blank which the 
 logic of deduction is unable to fill. 
 
 " Physical considerations do not lead to the final 
 explanation of all that we feel and know. We meet a 
 problem which transcends any conceivable expansion 
 of the powers which we now possess. 
 
 " We may think over the subject again and again, 
 but it eludes all intellectual presentation. 
 
 " Having thus exhausted physics and reached its 
 very rim, a mighty mystery still looms beyond us. 
 We have, in fact, made no step toward its solution. 
 We try to soar in a vacuum when we endeavor to pass 
 by logical deduction from one to the other. 
 
 " Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other 
 part of human consciousness ; and against it, on its 
 subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. 
 
 " Carlyle's contention at bottom always was that the 
 human soul has claims and yearnings which physical 
 science cannot satisfy." 
 
 " It seems high time to me," said Dr. Virchow, " to 
 enter an energetic protest against the attempts that 
 are made to proclaim the problems of research as 
 actual facts, and the opinions of scientists as estab- 
 lished science. 
 
 " We ought not to represent our conjecture as a 
 certainty, nor our hypothesis as a doctrine : this is in- 
 admissible." 
 
 " The burden of my writing in this connection," 
 said Prof. T , "is as much a recognition of the weak- 
 ness of science as an assertion of its strength. 
 
 "If asked whether science has solved, or is likely in 
 
40 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 our day to solve, the problem of the universe, I must 
 shake my head in doubt. Behind and above and 
 around us the real mystery of the universe lies un- 
 solved, and, as far as we are concerned, is incapable 
 of solution. The problem of the connection of body 
 and soul is as insoluble in its modern form as it was 
 in the pre-scientific ages. 
 
 " There ought to be a clear distinction made be- 
 tween science in the state of hypothesis and science in 
 the state of fact. 
 
 '■^ And inasmuch as it is still in its hypothetical 
 stage, the ban of exclusion ought to fall upon the 
 theory of evolution. 
 
 " After speaking of the theory of evolution applied 
 to the primitive condition of matter as belonging to 
 the dim twilight of conjecture, the certainty of experi- 
 mental inquiry is here shut out. 
 
 '' Those who hold the doctrine of evolution are by 
 no means ignorant of the uncertainty of their data, 
 and they only yield to it a provisional assent. 
 
 "In reply to your question, they will frankly admit 
 their inability to point to any satisfactory experi- 
 mental proof that life can be developed save from 
 demonstrable antecedent life. 
 
 " I share Dr. Virchow's opinion, that the theory of 
 evolution in its complete form involves the assump- 
 tion that at some period or other of the earth's his- 
 tory there occurred what would now be called spon- 
 taneous generation. I agree with him that the proofs 
 of it are still wanting." 
 
 " Religion and the Church are a part of their sur- 
 roundings/' remarked the Dean, as if changing the 
 subject. 
 
 "And why," interrupted the Doctor, "do they not 
 
HYP ATI A. 41 
 
 harmonize their surroundings ? They had all 
 power." 
 
 "■ Of all the wars, sufferings, and failures in the past 
 — if God in Heaven, consistent with their free will, 
 could not harmonize men, the Church could not be 
 expected to do it. The Church does all the world will 
 let it do." 
 
 "The world," said the Doctor, ''would have let the 
 Church honor, instead of destroying, Hypatia." 
 
 " The Church did not destroy Hypatia," firmly re- 
 marked the Dean. 
 
 " You astonish me ! " ejaculated the Doctor. 
 
 "So far from it," replied the Dean, " Synesius, 
 Bishop of Ptolemais, was Hypatia's best friend and 
 correspondent." 
 
 " Did not the monks kill her ? " inquired the Doctor. 
 
 "Yes, but not because she was learned," returned 
 the Dean, " The monks belonged to a political party 
 at Alexandria, led by Cyril, the Bishop ; and Hypatia 
 was supposed to belong to and control the action of 
 the other political party, led by Orestes, the Roman 
 Prefect. The passions of the hour made both sides of 
 these political parties demoniac." 
 
 "But monks ought to be good men," remarked the 
 Doctor, with a quiet smile. 
 
 "A monk is a man as well as a monk," replied the 
 Dean, " and when human passion is aroused we see 
 the man and not the monk. The murder of Hypatia 
 was for her politics and not for her learning." 
 
 "I am sure," said the Doctor, "you have conjec- 
 tured no such excuse for the persecution of Galileo 
 for saying that the sun was the centre of the universe 
 instead of the earth." 
 
 Sir David Brewster remarked, " It is a curious fact 
 
42 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 in the annals of heresy and sedition that opinions 
 maintained with impunity by one individual have in 
 the same age brought others to the stake or to the 
 scaffold. The results of deep research or extravagant 
 speculation seldom provoke hostility when meekly an- 
 nounced as the deductions of reason or the convictions 
 of conscience. As the dreams of a recluse or an en- 
 thusiast, they may excite pity or call forth contempt ; 
 but like seed quietly cast into the earth, they will 
 rot and germinate according to the vitality with 
 which they are endowed. But if new and startling 
 opinions are thrown in the face of the community — if 
 they are uttered in triumph or insolence, in contempt 
 of public opinion, or in derision of cherished errors — 
 they lose the comeliness of truth in the rancor of their 
 propagation ; and they are like seed scattered in the 
 hurricane, which only irritate and blind the husband- 
 man. Had Galileo concluded his system of the world 
 with the quiet peroration of his apologist, Campanella, 
 and dedicated it to the Pope, it might have stood in 
 the library of the Vatican beside the cherished, though 
 equally heretical, volume of Copernicus. One of the 
 most prominent trials in the character of Galileo was 
 his invincible love of truth and his abhorrence of that 
 spiritual despotism which had so long lorded over 
 Europe. His views, however, were liberal, and too 
 far in advance of his age, which he adorned ; and 
 however much we may admire the noble spirit which 
 he evinced, and the personal sacrifices which he made in 
 his struggle for truth, we must yet lament that in his 
 contest with the Church of Rome, in the hotness of 
 his zeal and the tenacity of his onset, he fell under 
 her victorious banner ; and though his cause was that 
 of truth against superstition, yet the sympathy of Eu- 
 
GALILEO. 43 
 
 rope was not aroused by his misfortune. Under the 
 sagacious and peaceful sway of Copernicus, astronomy 
 had effected a glorious triumph over the dogmas of the 
 Church, but under the bold and uncompromising scep- 
 tre of Galileo, all her conquests were irretrievably lost." 
 
 '' The persecution of Galileo by the Church," said 
 the Doctor, ^' was the more criminal, whatever his im- 
 petuosity, because Christianity had been in existence 
 for fifteen hundred years and had not produced a 
 single astronomer." 
 
 "Had science produced one?" asked the Dean. 
 ''The business of religion is to produce moral and 
 spiritual teachers, not scientists. But out of the mon- 
 asteries of those monks so offending in the eyes of 
 some came, in the tenth century, Gobert, afterwards 
 Pope Sylvester II., and Herman Contractus, a monk 
 of St. Gall, Switzerland, celebrated for astronomical 
 learning. Robert of Lorraine was made Bishop of 
 Hereford by William the Conqueror for his knowl- 
 edge of astronomy, and Robert Grostete, Bishop of 
 Lincoln, published a treatise on the sphere. Coper- 
 nicus, a monk, after fourteen centuries of scientific 
 error, gave the truth to the world for all after-time." 
 
 " It is singular if, as you say," replied the Doctor, 
 " the Church produced astronomers and established 
 schools and libraries, that for a thousand years it did 
 so little to improve the material condition of man- 
 kind. The surface of the continent of Europe was, 
 for the most part, all this time covered with pathless 
 forests ; here and there it was dotted with monas- 
 teries and towns. In the lowlands and all along the 
 river-courses were fens, sometimes hundreds of miles 
 in extent, exhaling their pestiferous miasms, and 
 spreading agues far and wide. In Paris and London 
 
44 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 the houses were of wood daubed with clay, and 
 thatched with straws or reeds. They had no windows, 
 and until the invention of the saw-mill very few had 
 wooden floors. The luxury of a carpet was unknown; 
 some straw scattered in the room supplied its place. 
 There were no chimneys ; the smoke of the ill-fed, 
 cheerless fire escaped through a hole in the roof. No 
 attempt was made at drainage. Men, women, and 
 children slept in the same apartment ; not infre- 
 quently domestic animals were their companions. In 
 such confusion of the fam.ily it was impossible that 
 modesty or morality could be maintained. The bed 
 was usually a bag of straw ; a wooden log served as 
 a pillow. Personal cleanliness was utterly unknown. 
 To conceal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and 
 profusely used. The streets were without lamps or 
 pavement.* Why did not religion improve human 
 condition ? " 
 
 '' Why," replied the Dean, "did not science do 
 it ? Mankind, whether in science or religion, does 
 but one thing at a time. The dominant activity of 
 the five hundred years before Christ and the thousand 
 years after, was war. There were the two hundred 
 and fifty years' war out of the five hundred of the 
 Roman republic B. C; there were the wars of the Em- 
 pire ; there were the ten or more persecutions of the 
 Christians ; the wars of Charlemagne, and the Cru- 
 sades. Nations would fight in spite of religion. The 
 present arts of civilization were impossible. Their 
 era had not come." 
 
 *' But," insisted the Doctor, " however powerless re- 
 ligion was in the practical arts, certainly no such plea 
 could be offered for its inefficiency in letters. The 
 
 * Draper: Conflict between Science and Religion, p. 264. 
 
HALL AM. 45 
 
 priests were not warriors, nor laborers ; their lives, 
 after the rise of monasteries, were cloistered, and if 
 they were not learned they ought to have been, and 
 ought to have educated the people ; but the Church 
 was as unproductive in letters as in arts." 
 
 "You know," said the Dean, in reply, "that Latin 
 ceased to be a spoken language some time in the 
 fifth century. In that language and in the Greek was 
 all the learning of the past. The northern nations, 
 out of which were formed the modern, knew neither. 
 The new modern languages had to be formed out of 
 the old before the literature of the old could be made 
 known in the new. This was a thing of the centuries. 
 There was no papyrus imported into Europe, and pa- 
 per was not manufactured. There were but few 
 books in manuscript accessible even to the clergy ; no 
 printing press and no circulating libraries as now." 
 
 Mr. Henry Hallam * here said, that, " If it be de- 
 manded by what cause it happened that a few sparks 
 of ancient learning survived throughout this long 
 winter, we can only abscribe their preservation to the 
 establishment of Christianity. Religion alone made 
 a bridge, as it were, across the chaos, and has linked 
 the two periods of ancient and modern civilization. 
 It is not, however, from religion simply that we have 
 derived this advantage, but from religion as it was 
 modified in the dark ages. Such is the complex re- 
 ciprocation of good and evil in the dispensations of 
 Providence, that we may assert, with only an appar- 
 ent paradox, that had religion been more pure it 
 would have been less permanent, and that Christian- 
 ity has been preserved by means of its corruptions. 
 The sole hope of literature depended on the Latin 
 
 * Middle Age, ch. ix. 
 
46 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 language ; and I do not see why that should not 
 have been lost if three circumstances in the prevailing 
 religious systems, all of which we are justly accus- 
 tomed to disapprove, had not conspired to maintain 
 it : the papal supremacy, the monastic institutions, 
 and the use of a Latin liturgy.* The first kept up 
 communication between the nations of the world, 
 and carried the Latin tongue, in which were locked 
 up the learning of the past, to all lands ; her laws 
 were received by the bishops, her legates presided in 
 councils, so that a common language was necessary 
 in the Church as in diplomacy. The monasteries, 
 amid wars and the transformation of nations, were 
 the only cabinets of study, and the worship of the lit- 
 urgy made the Latin sacred, and preserved the lan- 
 guage and its precious literature." 
 
 3. Bible Criticised. — Ingersoll. 
 
 The host here turned to Col. Ingersoll and said to 
 him, " I dissent from what the papers make you say 
 about the Bible and the domestic relations, especially 
 about woman." 
 
 "There is not one word," said Col. Ingersoll, 
 ^^ about woman in the Old Testament, except the 
 word of shame and humiliation. The God of the 
 Bible does not think woman is as good as man. She 
 was never worth mentioning. If there is any God in 
 the universe who thinks more of me than he does of 
 my wife, he is not well acquainted with both of us." 
 
 " I quite agree with you," remarked an English 
 gentleman present. " I have never had the pleasure 
 of meeting with your wife, but there must be, as you 
 say, a difference between you. You see that it is not 
 
 *Hallam, lb. 
 
DR. RICHARDSON. 47 
 
 every n:an that God thinks better or stronger than 
 woman." 
 
 ''The gentleman assails," said Rev. Dr. N. S. 
 Richardson, '' the Bible as encouraging concubin- 
 age and polygamy. His charges are misleading. The 
 patriarchs had no Bible. The Bible only records 
 what they did. Concubinage and polygamy amid 
 the sparse population of those times were universal. 
 The Mosaical laws were based on this established 
 usage. To prevent greater social wrongs, it per- 
 mitted under very severe restrictions that which it 
 could not prevent. The motives leading to these 
 evils were then of a lofty nature. There were reasons 
 for both that do not exist to-day. The concubine 
 was not a mistress, but a betrothed and secondary 
 wife, with well-protected legal rights. But the New 
 Testament dispensation, overshadowing the Old in 
 its claims on our faith and practice, classes these 
 social evils as fornication and adultery. John the 
 Baptist lost his life for assailing them in a royal 
 palace. Amid surrounding polygamy Paul says of 
 the marital relations of a minister: 'Let a Bishop be 
 the husband of one wife' Wherever the Bible has be- 
 come the standard of morals these evils have gradu- 
 all}^ disappeared. Christianity has been the pioneer 
 of monogamy throughout the world. To find legal- 
 ized concubinage and polygamy to-day, the gentle- 
 man must pass out of Bible-reading provinces and 
 enter the harems of Mohammedanism, the zananas of 
 Hindooism, or the law-protected bagnios of Utah. 
 The gentleman speaks of the Bible as grossly un- 
 friendly to the rights of childhood and womanhood. 
 Surely he cannot be sincere. What protection has 
 childhood beyond the pale of Bible civilization ? The 
 
48 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 Greeks murdered maimed infants. Plato defended 
 the custom, clamoring for ' the survival of the fittest.' 
 The Carthaginians laid their youngest-born on the 
 outstretched hands of their idol god, who dropped 
 the wondering innocent into the fires below. Spartan 
 legislation compelled parents to cast their sickly in- 
 fants into the cavern that yawned at the base of Mount 
 Taygetus. Roman law permitted fathers to murder 
 their offspring at pleasure. The Norsemen gave un- 
 promising nurslings to the wild beasts of the forests. 
 China for ages has legalized the assassination of one- 
 third of its infant population. In Fiji and the South 
 Sea Islands, infanticide is incorporated into religious 
 worship. In India, millions of children have been 
 fed to the crocodiles of the Ganges. The Marquis of 
 Wellesley, representing a great Christian government, 
 with difficulty checked the alarming child-murder 
 prevailing throughout Hindostan. The Bible the 
 foe of childhood ! Tell it to millions of Sunday- 
 school scholars, whose faces beam with joy as they 
 study its contents' or carol its doctrines in song. 
 Was it Moses, or was it Zoroaster, Plato, or Zeno who 
 provided in their religious systems for the rights of 
 children ? Was it Christ, or was it Confucius, Aris- 
 totle, or Pythagoras who said, ' Suffer little children 
 to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is 
 the kingdom of heaven ?' Where but in the courts of 
 Christian governments is the slaughter of bastards 
 ranked with murder ? Where but on their soil are 
 found asylums for foundlings, orphans, and homeless 
 little ones ? 
 
 '' The Bible the adversary of woman ! What is the 
 condition of woman in every nation where this book 
 has not been scattered ? In everv Oriental and un- 
 
MR. INGERSOLL. 49 
 
 christian province woman has ever been, and is to- 
 day, either the beast of burden or the incarcerated 
 slave of passion. What honor does the Zend Avesta, 
 the Koran, the Vedas, the Shasters, or the sacred 
 books of any heathen nation bestow on woman ? Tell 
 it to the intellectual princesses who are crowding 
 into all the higher professions and bearing off the 
 honors of colleges and universities. Tell it to the 
 female leaders of the temperance crusades, before 
 whose tears and prayers iron-hearted venders of 
 strong drink trembled and surrendered. Tell it to 
 the queenly authors of modern literature, and the 
 graceful orators of the fair sex whose silvery voices 
 are captivating cities. What the women of Christian 
 lands are to-day, they owe to the influence of the 
 Bible." * 
 
 Mr. Ingersoll remarked, with some asperity, that 
 '' God believed in the infamy of slavery." 
 
 The Dean asked, " Then why did God deliver the 
 Israelites from slavery ? " 
 
 Dr. Richardson replied further, " Col. Ingersoll 
 charges the Bible with supporting slavery, concubin- 
 age, and polygamy. Such accusations are deceptive, 
 and calculated to mislead. In patriarchal, prophet- 
 ical, and apostolical times slavery was universal. Cap- 
 tives in war and purchased human beings were in 
 involuntary servitude in all Oriental and civilized 
 lands. Grecian and Roman history tell us of the 
 rigor of slavery at Athens, Corinth, and Rome. The 
 horrors of pagan slavery stirred early the heart of 
 Justinian, and he struggled for its niodification. The 
 parents of Oriental lands even sold their children to 
 the citizens along the Mediterranean. The primitive 
 
 * The Guardian, Dec. 13, 1879 (edited by Dr. Richardson). 
 
50 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 slave trade was frightful in extent. The master held 
 the life of the servant both absolutely and in per- 
 petuity. Chained slaves opened the doors of Roman 
 mansions in the days of Augustus. Countless were 
 those who fell under the knife of the gladiator and 
 the teeth of wild beasts in the games of the Coliseum. 
 Roman laws knew no recognized relation between 
 the bondman and his wife or children. Vedius Pollio 
 fed the lampreys of his fish-ponds on gray-haired 
 servants. It was a common usage to send old slaves 
 to an island in the Tiber to perish. 
 
 " But the slavery of the Hebrews was of a different 
 type. While abolition was then impracticable, and 
 perhaps impossible, the Mosaical laws, divinely in- 
 spired, modified amazingly the evils of the S3^stem. 
 Moses, that illustrious seer against whom Mr. Inger- 
 soll levels in his various satires the artillery of his 
 wit, provided for the regulation of involuntary servi- 
 tude according to the ethics of religion and human- 
 ity. . . . The least objectionable type of slavery 
 on which the sun has shone was that of the Jews. It 
 was never perpetual. Periods of emancipation were 
 frequent. The slave always had the right of appeal 
 to the tribunals. His religious privileges suffered no 
 restrictions. He could at any time, on the payment 
 of ransom money, demand release. Human laws 
 gave him protection. Mutilation insured his instant 
 freedom. 
 
 ''The spirit of the Bible is against oppression. It 
 steadily presents mankind as a universal brotherhood. 
 It swings back on their golden hinges the great doors 
 of the temple of Freedom, and welcomes all alike to 
 * life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' 
 
 " While the Greek philosophers defended slavery 
 
QUEEN VICTORIA. 51 
 
 the men who have reverenced the Bible have been 
 gradually and long marshaling agencies for its uni- 
 versal extinction. The Christian Church early 
 pioneered the way for general emancipation. It ex- 
 communicated cruel masters in its periods of greatest 
 peril. It placed Wilberforce, Dellwyn, Pitt, Clarkson, 
 and Sharp at the front of the host who have struck 
 perseveringly and successfully for human freedom. It 
 influenced Alexander II. of Russia, but fifteen years 
 ago, to abolish serfdom throughout his vast empire."* 
 
 "Recently, Her Majesty Queen Victoria," re- 
 marked the Englishman, " said to an African prince 
 investigating the foundations of England's glory, 
 ' The Bible is the secret of my country's greatness ! ' '' 
 
 '^ Allow me to say," continued Dr. Richardson, 
 " Christianity has given the world its schools, col- 
 leges, and universities. With but few exceptions, the 
 men whose names are immortal in authorship have 
 reverenced the Bible. The libraries of the world 
 groan under the literary work of Christian men. The 
 antagonists of the Bible who have been moderately 
 conspicuous for knowledge are comparatively few in 
 number. Their works would hardly fill a cabinet 
 bookcase. Their volumes lie as untouched on the 
 shelves of the world's literary museums as the bones 
 of the dead in the niches of the catacombs. To count 
 the men of learning the plume of whose glory has 
 been their faith in Christ and the Bible would tax an 
 angel's patience. It is in those countries where the 
 Bible is studied that art, science, and learning make 
 recognized progress. A long line of poets, philoso- 
 phers, historians, linguists, statesmen, scientists, and 
 other distinguished men have bequeathed to us their 
 
 * The Guardian, lb. 
 
52 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 exalted estimates of the Bible. Even Napoleon has 
 written: 'The loftiest intellects since the advent of 
 Christianity have had a practical faith in the mys- 
 teries and doctrines of the Gospel.' The innumer- 
 able and eloquent tributes of hundreds of finely 
 educated ministers as to the worth of the Bible we 
 can afford to lay aside amid the wealth of eulogiums 
 given by men of learning who have never stood in 
 the pulpit." 
 
 Sir William Jones, bowing toward the host, re- 
 marked, '' I am of opinion that the Bible contains 
 more true sensibility, more exquisite beauty, more 
 pure morality, more important history, and finer 
 strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected 
 from all other books, in whatever age or language 
 they may be written." 
 
 John Locke also added the opinion that, " In mo- 
 rality there are books enough written, both by ancient 
 and modern philosophers, but the morality of the 
 Gospel doth so exceed them all that to give a man a 
 full knowledge of true morality I shall send him to 
 no other book than the New Testament." 
 
 Dr. Richardson went on, saying, " Dr. Samuel John- 
 son, Sir Walter Scott, John Milton, Lord Bacon, Sir 
 Isaac Newton, Guizot, Judge Story, Daniel Webster 
 and an innumerable company of great men have laid 
 on the lids of this book tributes as comprehensive 
 and passionate as those quoted. Scientists like Prof. 
 Guyot, Hugh Miller, Sir John Herschel, Prof. Henry, 
 J. Pye Smith, Sir David Brewster, Prof. Mason, Dr. 
 Pritchard and others eminent in the department of 
 astronomy, geology and other sciences have honored 
 the contents of this peerless book. Poets such as 
 Scott, Pollok, Young, Dryden, Cowper and many of 
 
THE BIBLE. 53 
 
 their compeers in song have poured out in verse their 
 affection for the Bible. Even avowed skeptics, such 
 as Diderot, of France, Edward Gibbon and Theodore 
 Parker, have written paragraphs that are preserved 
 as encomiums of the Scriptures." 
 
 The host said that Rousseau paid to God's Word 
 this panegyric : '' Peruse the works of philosophers, 
 with all their pomp and diction — how contemptible 
 are they compared with the Scriptures ! The majesty 
 of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration." 
 
 ''And yet," said Dr. Richardson, "on this book the 
 oracles of science, the sages of philosophy, the crowned 
 kings in varied erudition, and the vast congress of the 
 world's litei^ati have piled their eulogies until they 
 have seemed to kiss the clouds. This is the volume 
 that has been represented as encircling the portrait 
 of a bloodthirsty God, as requiring human faith in a 
 multitude of absurdities, as unworthy, because of its 
 immorality, to have a place in the public schools, and 
 as the chief enemy of progress in culture, civilization 
 and liberty. But reason and history assert that the 
 world needed an inspired and written revelation 
 from God. What did reason and nature teach con- 
 cerning God's attributes, human duty, the way of sal- 
 vation and human destiny ? Go back to the golden 
 age of civilization. What did Pericles and Augustus, 
 Cicero and Homer, Thucydides and Tacitus know 
 concerning such subjects as the resurrection of the 
 dead, the immortality of the soul and eternal rewards 
 and punishments ?" 
 
 Some one answered, "Their systems abounded with 
 abominations. Their altars smoked amid debauchery 
 and licentiousness. Rome and Greece in their high- 
 est refinement were the theatres of nameless and 
 
 [5] 
 
54 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 unrestricted iniquities. Only occasionally some splen- 
 did man, like Socrates, would stand out morally supe- 
 rior to his surroundings, as some truant star beaming 
 in solitude from a sky of otherwise unbroken black- 
 ness. Egypt, claiming to be the intellectual teacher 
 of the world, worshipped oxen, reptiles and birds. 
 Phoenicia, Persia and Syria constantly offered human 
 sacrifices to inanimate deities. The Druid priests of 
 Great Britain bathed their knives in human hearts in 
 worship. Even in a recent century the monarchs of 
 Mexico offered annually twenty thousand stalwart 
 men to the sun, under the dripping knife. The world, 
 outside of Palestine, was sunk in crime and environed 
 with moral gloom. No pagan system could free men 
 from sensualism." 
 
 "Then," replied Dr. Richardson, "God inspired 
 holy men to communicate His will and to write ' as 
 they were moved by the Holy Ghost.' The Divine 
 Spirit overshadowed the thought and guided the 
 pens of the authors of the sacred books from Moses 
 to John. They held the trumpets through which God 
 has spoken to the nations. For eighteen centuries 
 the best-educated men have accepted this volume as 
 containing the ' Oracles of God.' The substantial 
 agreement of fourteen hundred manuscript copies of 
 the New Testament assures us that the mistakes of 
 transcribers have not materially impaired the sense 
 of the original writers. The fifty-four learned men 
 who gave us our version of the Bible were masters 
 in Hebrew learning and Greek literature. Because 
 Greece claimed to have a sentence received from 
 heaven, she gilded it in gratitude on the front of her 
 finest temple. From Genesis to Revelation we have 
 an infallible, inspired Book. ' The grass withereth and 
 
PROF. HUXLEY. 55 
 
 the flower thereof falleth away, but the Word of our 
 God shall stand forever.' But some gentlemen can 
 discern no reason why the lost and mapless mariners 
 on the sea of Time needed this chart ; why mankind 
 wanted this sun on their benighted sky ; why the im- 
 poverished race desired this inexhaustible mine of 
 wealth."* 
 
 During these remarks of Dr. Richardson our host 
 kept his eye on Col. I., who sat near the speaker. He 
 was all ready, when the Doctor stopped, to enter 
 warmly into the lists. Bowing toward the host, he 
 said, '' I regret to differ in opinion from our distin- 
 guished visitor ; but to me no book of all books is 
 more objectionable for school or any other use. The 
 advance of civilization requires that the Church shall 
 stand aside forever, and let reason finally rule the 
 world. Secularize education and it will advance, but 
 not without." 
 
 " I have always," mildly replied Professor Huxley, 
 ''been strongly in favor of secular education, in the 
 sense of education without theology. But I must 
 confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to 
 know by what practical measures the religious feel- 
 ing, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be 
 kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion 
 on these matters, without the use of the Bible. The 
 Pagan moralists lack life and color, and even the 
 noble stoic Marcus Antoninus is too high and refined 
 for an ordinary child." f 
 
 "And could you reject the refined words of that 
 great stoic," said Mr. Ingersoll, "and put in the hands 
 of a child the horrible, indecent stories of the Bible?" 
 
 fib. 51. 
 
56 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 "Still," replied the Professor, "take the Bible as a 
 whole, make the severest deductions which fair criti- 
 cism can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors, 
 eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do if left to 
 himself, all that is not desirable for children to occupy 
 themselves with, and there still remains in this old 
 literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and 
 grandeur. And then consider the great historical 
 fact that for three centuries this book has been 
 w^oven into the life of all that is best and noblest in 
 English history ; that it has become the national epic 
 of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from 
 John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and 
 Tasso once were to the Italians ; that it is written in 
 the noblest and purest English, and abounds in ex- 
 quisite beauties of mere literary form ; and finally, 
 that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his vil- 
 lage to be ignorant of the existence of other countries 
 and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching 
 back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the 
 world. By the study of what other book could chil- 
 dren be so much humanized and made to feel that 
 each figure in the vast historical procession fills, like 
 themselves, but a momentary space in the interval of 
 two extremities, and earns the blessings or the curses 
 of all time according to its efforts to do good or hate 
 evil, even as they also are earning their payment for 
 their work ? " * 
 
 For a moment there was silence up and down the 
 table after such emphatic and eloquent words for the 
 Bible. But Colonel Ingersoll was not done. It was 
 not exactly the company for his peculiar style of talk 
 and choice of words, and especially as they were 
 
 * Critiques and Address, p. 51. 
 
SIR J. STEPHEN. 57 
 
 mindful of what three thousand years had held in rev- 
 erence. But he was irrepressible, and said : 
 
 " Still, where this Bible has been, man has hated his 
 brother — there have been dungeons, racks, thumb- 
 screws and the sword." * 
 
 " Yes," said the Dean, " and there have been 
 floods and famines, and droughts and conflagrations, 
 and profanities and frauds ; but did the Bible cause 
 all that happened after it was given to the world ? 
 Can any one say that the injustice and cruelties and 
 impurities of the world are taught and commanded 
 in the Bible ? Can the teachings of a book be so hor- 
 rible that says, ' Love your enemies ; be merciful, as 
 your Father in heaven is merciful ; be pitiful ; be 
 courteous ; honor all men ; blessed are the poor?' " 
 
 4. Sociological Drift. 
 
 {a) A Morality of Philosophy without Religion. 
 
 " What do you think. Sir James Stephen," asked the 
 host, " of the assumed antagonism between theology 
 and morality ? Many persons, you know, regard 
 everything which tends to discredit theology with 
 disapprobation, because they think that all such 
 speculations must endanger morality as well. Others 
 assert that morality has a basis of its own in human 
 nature, and that even if all theological belief were 
 exploded morality would remain unaffected." 
 
 '' My own view," answered Sir James Stephen, '' is 
 that each part is to a considerable extent right, but 
 that the true practical inference is often neglected. 
 Understanding by the theology of an age or country 
 the theory of the universe generally accepted then 
 and there, and by its morality the rules of life then 
 and there commonly regarded as binding, it seems to 
 
 * Ingersoll : Mistakes of Moses, p. 15. 
 
'"58 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 me extravagant to say that the one does not influence 
 the other. A vast majority of people believe that the 
 course of the world is ordered by a good God, that 
 right and wrong are in the nature of a divine law, and 
 that this world is a place of trial, and part only of a 
 wider existence ; and we may call this belief theol- 
 ogy. On the other hand, it seems at least equally 
 evident that morality has a basis of its own quite in- 
 dependent of all theology whatever. It is difficult to 
 imagine any doctrine about theology which has not 
 prevailed at some time or place ; but no one ever 
 heard of men living together without some rules of 
 life — that is, without some sort of morality." 
 
 ''But," said the Dean, "was not that morality 
 the practical side of the prevailing theology ? Mo- 
 rality is life among men. Religion (theology) is life 
 toward God, and both are as much one as is the inside 
 and outside of any kind of seed, or the concavity and 
 convexity of a curved line, and to destroy either is to 
 destroy both." 
 
 " I admit," said Sir James, " that the destruction of 
 religion would involve a moral revolution ; but it 
 would no more destroy morality than apolitical revo- 
 lution would destroy law. It would substitute one 
 set of moral rules and sentiments for another, just as 
 the establishment of Christianity and Mohammedan- 
 ism did when they superseded various forms of Pagan- 
 ism." 
 
 " Your admission," remarked the Dean, " seems 
 to refute your theory. Substitution is, practically, 
 the destruction of the thing substituted. If, by a de- 
 struction of religion, you bring in a set of moral rules 
 not based on religion, do you not destroy those moral 
 rules that were so based ? " 
 
PROF. CLIFFORD. 59 
 
 "I do not think," interposed Mr. Martineau, ''that 
 the form and contents of a moral system would be es- 
 sentially modified by the decline of religious belief. 
 It may, no doubt, happen that particular problems of 
 conduct, as in the case of suicide and marriage, have 
 become the subject of ecclesiastical legislation, and 
 so have passed into preoccupation of religious feeling, 
 and on the disappearance of that feeling may be 
 flung back into an indeterminate condition. But to 
 the real solution of such problems it would be difficult 
 to show that religion contributes any new elements, 
 so as to twine that into duty that was not duty before." 
 
 " Is not that 'a.petitio principii ? " respectfully inquired 
 the Dean. "The question to be proved is. What is 
 the basis of morality ? If religion, then with the decay 
 of religion the duties it supports would decay. If 
 wrongs are mala in se, why are they so ? The nature of 
 things, Mr. Spencer has said in his ' Data of Ethics.^ 
 But whence the nature of things ? How are we to 
 know it ? Is it the will of God revealed to us in the 
 Bible, or in our moral sense, or in experience, or 
 by all these ? Is its origin natural or supernatural ? " 
 
 " The moral sense, adjudicating and proclaiming 
 moral rules," remarked Professor Clifford, " is the ac- 
 cumulated instinct of the race, poured into and over- 
 flowing us as if the ocean were poured into a cup. 
 The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, 
 which is set to work by the practice of comradeship. 
 Virtue is a habit, not a sentiment or an ism. I 
 neither admit the moral influence of theism in the 
 past nor look forward to the moral influence of hu- 
 manism in the future," 
 
 "What is your opinion. Professor Robertson ?" in- 
 quired the host. 
 
60 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 "As to morality, you seem to hold to Mr. Locke's 
 tabula rasa theory," was the response ; " but is there 
 not an element or factor in the individual's knowledge 
 that is there before, or, at all events, apart from that 
 which happens to come to him by way of ordinary 
 experience ? This other element or factor is now most 
 commonly represented as an inheritance that each 
 human being brings into life with him. We are to 
 understand that a human child being what he is — the 
 offspring of particular parents, of a particular nation, 
 of a particular race, born at a particular stage in the 
 race's development — does know and feel and will 
 otherwise than he would if all or any of these circum- 
 stances were different. I cannot doubt that human 
 beings are determined by inherited constitutions, 
 mental or nervous, or mental and nervous, to inter- 
 pret and order their incidental experience in a certain 
 common fashion ; in other words, that the way of 
 men's knowing is prescribed for them by ancestral 
 conditions. Original endowment is everything, and 
 man's life-experience little or nothing, toward the sum 
 of his knowledge. The latest phase of modern phil- 
 osophic thought, then, becomes hardly distinguishable 
 from the high speculative doctrine of Leibitz — that in 
 knowledge there is, properly speaking, no acquisition 
 at all, but every mind (or monad) simply develops 
 into activity all the potency within it : not really af- 
 fected by or affecting any other mind or thing. It 
 is no exaggeration to say that the tendency of recent 
 evolutionism in psychology is to reduce to a mini- 
 mum, or even crush out, the influence of incidental 
 experience as a factor in the development of the 
 individual knowledge. What can happen to the in- 
 dividual in his little life seems to be so mere a trifle 
 
LORD SELBORNE. 61 
 
 by the side of all that has happened /<?r him through 
 the ages. The race is a solidarity from which the in- 
 dividual man is never separable. Humanity is an or- 
 ganism, and heredity continues the past into the pres- 
 ent and future."* 
 
 •'Heredity recognizes individuality," said the 
 Dean, " but this organic humanism of which you 
 speak never emancipates the individual, any more 
 than the tree emancipates the limb. Humanity be- 
 comes one ever-growing personality, with an ever-ac- 
 cumulating experience and intelligence, with an ever- 
 continuous history, each identical with the whole, and 
 the whole as incomplete without each as the arch 
 without each voussoir. Thus, evolution compels 
 humanity ever to be more humanity, and immortal 
 humanity. But in dropping individuality, you drop 
 responsibility, and so all morality. But Paul said to 
 the Romans, f ' Every one of us shall give account of 
 himself to God.' So that the question of moral ac- 
 countability brings us again face to face with 
 theology." 
 
 " False theology," remarked Sir James Stephen, 
 ''cannot give a good morality." 
 
 "That is an admission," replied the Dean, "that 
 theology affects morality, and a true theology would 
 affect morality." 
 
 "I do not see how that can be denied," interrupted 
 Lord Selborne. " Morality has not flourished among 
 either civilized or uncivilized men when religious 
 belief has been generally lost or utterly debased. 
 Nothing worse can be conceived than the morality of 
 
 * See Prof. Croom Robertson's essay, How We Come by Our 
 Knowledge. C, May, 1873. The Nineteenth Century. 
 f(Ch. xiv. 12.) 
 
62 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 the Greeks and Romans at the height of their civiliza- 
 tion, when religion was dead." 
 
 " To assert," remarked Mr. Frederic Harrison, with 
 due deference to the opinion just expressed, " that 
 there is no morality but what is based on theology, is 
 to assert what experience, history and philosophy 
 flatly contradict. History teaches us that some of the 
 best types of morality, in men and in races, have been 
 found apart from anything that Christians can call 
 theology at all. Morality has been advancing for 
 centuries in modern Europe, while theology, at least 
 in authority, has been visibly declining," 
 
 " This would seem to show," said Lord Selborne, 
 '' the morality that advanced with the impetus given 
 to it by religion must recede when religion declines 
 and that impetus is no longer felt. It was so in Rome. 
 The morality of the Romans in the old republican 
 times when they knew nothing of Greek philosophy 
 was praised by Polybius, who connected it directly 
 and emphatically with the influence among them of 
 religious belief. After their intellectual cultivation 
 had taken its tone from the irreligious or agnostic 
 materialism of Epicurus, then morality became what 
 is described in the first chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Romans and in the satires of Juvenal." 
 
 " But the morality of Confucius and of Sakya 
 Mouni," responded Mr. Harrison, " of Socrates and 
 Marcus Aurelius, of Turgot, Condorcet and Hume, 
 was entirely independent of theology. The moral 
 system of Aristotle was framed without any view to 
 theology, as completely as that of Comte or of our 
 recent moralists." 
 
 Mr. Froude interposed, " The difliculty of conduct 
 does not lie in knowing what it is right to do, but in 
 
MR. FROUDE. 63 
 
 doing it when known. Intellectual culture does not 
 touch the conscience. It provides no motives to over- 
 come the weakness of the will, and with wider knowl- 
 edge it brings also new temptations. The sense of 
 duty is present in each detail of life ; the obligatory 
 ' must ' which binds the will to the course which 
 right principle has marked out for it produces a fibre 
 like the fibre of the oak. The educated Greeks knew 
 little of it. They had courage and genius and enthu- 
 siasm, but they had no horror of immorality as such. 
 The Stoics saw what was wanting, and tried to supply 
 it; but though they could provide a theory of action, 
 they could not make the theory into a reality." * 
 
 '' It is not moral knowledge man so much needs as 
 he needs moral power," remarked the Dean. 
 
 "How far," inquired the Dean, "is one age in- 
 dependent of preceding ages? Faith is older than 
 philosophy. The religions of the world have 
 pioneered the way for moral systems." 
 
 " I cannot admit that," said Mr. Frothingham,f 
 " morals, in the order of time and the order of 
 thought, preceded religion. Religion reflected the 
 moral sentiment of man, whatever that might happen 
 to be, and changed as the moral sentiment improved, 
 or the reverse. As the standard of morality has in- 
 cessantly improved as the principles of morality 
 gradually became understood and established, re- 
 ligion took on new forms and assumed a more beauti- 
 ful expression." 
 
 " And yet," said the Dean, " excuse me for quot- 
 ing your own word, so well expressed when you say,;^ 
 
 * Froude's Caesar, p. 12. 
 
 f Visions of the Future, p. 78. 
 
64 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 ' There was a time when religion had society all to 
 itself ; because feelings, hopes, fears, anticipations, 
 come first. Long before men think, study, ■ reason, 
 compare, adjust their ideas, understand themselves^ 
 they feel intensely. Their dread of supernatural 
 power is fearful ; their hope of blessedness to come 
 to them from a source outside of their lives takes up 
 all the feelings that their hearts can entertain. Thus, 
 religion gets established, organized, recognized, long 
 before morals can come into the field. Hence we see 
 how it is that religion dictates morality.' I admit that 
 you also said that, ' Although in the first instance it 
 may have reflected the moral condition such as it 
 was, yet, having possession of the ground, it dictates 
 what the moral principles and feelings of men shall be, 
 and so prevents them from becoming what they would 
 naturally be.' I quote this," continued the preacher, 
 ''to show how thoroughly religion inspires, molds 
 and originates moral feeling and action." 
 
 '' The influence of religion upon the present 
 morality of the world," said Mr. Frothingham, " can- 
 not be overstated. Imagine religion instituted, and 
 by religion instituted I mean accepted, recognized, 
 built with form, organized, administered by priest. 
 Imagine this thing going on for thousands of years, as 
 Christianity, for instance, has done, so as to become 
 a religion, an accepted practical system, with its 
 priesthood, its churches, its altars, its sacraments, its 
 creeds, its sacred books, its holy customs, covering 
 the surface of Europe. For ages it has presided over 
 the whole of life. Generations have been born into 
 it, have been reared by it. It has held control of the 
 great universities, the centres of light in Italy, France,, 
 England, Germany. It has presided over the acad- 
 
DR. FROTHINGHAM. 
 
 65 
 
 emies of higher education. It has had its minis- 
 ters in the bosom of every family. It has controlled 
 the nursery, the primary school. It has written the 
 school book. Wherever young people met for m- 
 struction, religion has been on the spot to say what 
 the instruction should be. This is what I meant by 
 instituted religion. It is religion made a part of ex- 
 istence. Nobody questions it. Nobody disregards it. 
 So completely a matter of course is it that nobody 
 asks a reason for its existence, or credentials for its 
 authority. Nobody doubts its doctrines, disputes the 
 efficacy of its sacraments, neglects its observances. 
 Generation after generation is born, matured and 
 buried without raising a surmise in regard to its abso- 
 lute right to rule. Such is instituted religion. It is 
 not your creed or my creed, or the creed of any com- 
 pany, clique or set— it is the creed of everybody, man, 
 woman and child. 
 
 '^For a thousand years Roman Catholicism was 
 thus the faith of the Western world, as the Greek 
 Church was the faith of the Eastern world, husband- 
 ing the sacred sentiments of. the people. All the 
 great philosophers were Romanists. The scientific 
 men were believers in the Church. Everybody, high 
 and low, strong and weak, rich and poor, wise and 
 foolish— everybody without exception, without hesita- 
 tion, without compulsion, recognized the binding 
 authority of religion over the whole of life. 
 
 " Of course, a system of morals followed more com- 
 plete, more exact, more rigid, than had been known 
 before. I say ' of course.' The object of religion 
 has, we must bear in mind, been to make people 
 happy hereafter. How was it to do this ? In order 
 to guarantee happiness hereafter, it was necessary 
 
66 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 that people who professed the religion should be 
 members of the Church, should be constant at the 
 sacraments, should avail themselves of the ministra- 
 tions of the priest ; for saving power came from 
 above, from outside, from supernatural sources. 
 Hence, certain moral precepts must be accepted, cer- 
 tain books must be read, certain books must be 
 avoided, a certain routine of conduct must be gone 
 over. Religion, therefore, had its prescribed formu- 
 laries for every act and experience of life. The min- 
 isters of religion were in every house, telling the par- 
 ent how to rear the child, telling the teacher what the 
 child should study, telling the thinker what to think, 
 the student what to learn, the critic what to blame or 
 praise. 
 
 " We see the system working.its way in until it occu- 
 pies every field of human life — the departments of 
 sentiment, emotion, conscience; regulating the emo- 
 tions of hope and fear; standing guard at all the ave- 
 nues of the intellectual, sentimental and moral world. 
 Here is a system of m.orals." * 
 
 "I think it evident," said Sir James Stephen, " that 
 the destruction of religion would involve a moral rev- 
 olution ; but it would no more destroy morality 
 than a political revolution destroys law. It would 
 substitute one set of moral rules and sentiments for 
 another, just as the establishment of Christianity and 
 Mohammedanism did when they superseded various 
 forms of Paganism." 
 
 " But such a revolution," remarked the Dean, 
 " is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. It would give 
 us 
 
 * Frothingham: Visions of the Future, pp. S-12. 
 
MR. MILL. 67 
 
 " (b) The Morality of what Comte calls a Religion 
 without a God.'" 
 
 Mr. Mill said : " Comte called this the Religion 
 of Humanity. So far as it is a religion, is it to 
 die with all other religions? As it looks to a 
 morality without religion, it is, as to conduct, 
 practical Atheism.* If this could be called a 
 religion at all, the question is not whether it will 
 end, but can it ever begin ? Can a right con- 
 duct ever begin without a right power ? and the 
 power of action is not logic, but feeling. Power is 
 derived, not inherent. Matter acquires gravitation 
 directly as to mass and inversely as to distance. 
 Mora] ends are reached by acquired power, operating 
 on our natural faculties, involution energizing evolu- 
 tion. Positivism, ignoring the courses of things and 
 their destiny, and, of course, the being of God, 
 simply studies the laws of the universe. But what is 
 the cause or who is the giver of law ? This question 
 Positivism does not discuss. Its rules of moral con- 
 duct are sought in the light of experience only, and not 
 in the will of any Supreme Being." 
 
 " The word LaivT said Professor Blackie,f " is the 
 last term with those who disdain to use the name of 
 God as the underlying reasonable cause of the grand 
 order of the Universe. But this word, however fash- 
 ionable, is utterly void of philosophical significance. 
 A law is simply a regular method of operation, and 
 implies either an internal or external causal Force, 
 whose constant and consistent action produces that 
 method of operation. The motion of a piston in a 
 steam-engine proceeds according to a law ; but no sane 
 
 * Mill's Comte, pp. 121-133. 
 f Nat. Hist. Atheism, p. 244. 
 
68 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 man could dream of substituting that expression of 
 regularity in the movement for the true cause of the 
 movement. The cause of the law in this case is the nat- 
 ure of steam and the designing mind of James Watt. 
 So with everything else : the men on a chess-board, the 
 balls on a billiard-table, the soldiers in an ordered 
 battle, move according to a law ; but to substitute that 
 law for the cause of these motions would not be 
 claimed. The cause of the motion is a motive force ; 
 and the cause of all reasonable motion, or motion ac- 
 cording to law, is a reasonable motive force. And 
 in this way the cause of the laws of Nature, which 
 we are called upon to substitute for God, is the Su- 
 preme designing Reason or reasonable Force which 
 we call God. The self-existent divine reason con- 
 trolling the physical world we call the laws of Nat- 
 ure, and the same Reason controlling the moral world 
 we call the principles of right conduct. Fundament- 
 ally, both are one: deny the radical unity of the laws 
 of Nature in the Divine Being and you can have no 
 reason to admit a controlling unity of reasonable plan 
 in a well-ordered life or a well-governed state." * 
 
 " It is the aim of Positivism," said one of the party, 
 *' and of the moral education which it designs, to 
 bring the doctrine of the social organism, and of 
 the organic relations of human beings, more and 
 more vividly into the consciousness of mankind. 
 Well aware of the feebleness of the sympathetic 
 instincts, it attributes to their lack of devel- 
 opment or to their systematic perversion, a large 
 part of the miseries and inadequacies and dis- 
 appointments which at present darken human life. 
 It .proposes, therefore, to develop such sentiments 
 
 * lb. 44. 
 
DR. FROTHINGHAM. 69 
 
 by every practicable means. It addresses those who 
 are capable of speculation with the true philosophy 
 of the doctrine, and confides to them the task 
 of continually expounding and exploring it ; of en- 
 forcing it by exhortation and illustration, by prin- 
 ciple and precept. Thus, to the priests of Catholi- 
 cism, Positivism opposes the philosophers. Over 
 those unable to really understand ideas, it extends the 
 influence of feelings, emotions, sentiments generated 
 by ideas."* 
 
 "Remembering this," interposed Dr. F., "re- 
 ligion, in all ages, has preached compassion, sympathy, 
 fellow-feeling, piety, tenderness. It has told the 
 great that they were great in order that they might 
 help the small. It has bidden the rich to bear in mind 
 their stewardship, to remember that they were rich 
 in order to bless the poor. It has urged on the wise 
 the lesson of service to the simple, reminding them 
 that as the poor and toiling labor that they may 
 have bread, they should in return give light, life and 
 immortality, f 
 
 " And yet the spheres of morality and religion are 
 quite distinct," continued Dr. Frothingham. "Moral- 
 ity aims to produce a perfect society ; religion aims 
 at building up the family in heaven. Morality aims 
 at making men happy, sympathetic, just, kind ; re- 
 ligion aims at makmg men safe in the hereafter. 
 The object of religion— taking the interpretation of 
 it by Christianity, Bhuddism, Brahmanism, or any of 
 the old-world faiths, is to reconcile men with God, 
 not with each other." \ 
 
 * The Value of Life, a reply to Is Life Worth Living ? p. 206. 
 f Frothingham : Visions of the Future, p. 156. 
 I Frothingham : Visions of the Future, p. 54. 
 [6] 
 
70 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 The Dean replied, *'The Master said, 'Ye have 
 heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou 
 shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill shall be in 
 danger of the judgment, But I say unto you, that 
 whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause, 
 shall be in danger of the judgment ; and whosoever 
 shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of 
 the council ; but whosoever shall say thou fool, shall be 
 in danger of hell fire. Therefore, if thou bring thy 
 gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy 
 brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy 
 gift before the altar, and go thy way : first be rec- 
 onciled to thy brother, and then come and offer 
 thy gift.' * In brief, my dear Dr. Frothingham, does 
 morality teach a single rule of conduct that it did 
 not get, either in principle or form, from religion ? " 
 
 "That," interposed Rev. Dr. Martineau, " is only an 
 inverse method of saying that Christian ethics are 
 true to human life and the expression of right reason.f 
 I admit that though the decay of religion may 
 leave the institutes of morality intact, it draws off 
 their inward power. The devout faith of men ex- 
 presses and measures the intensity of their moral nat- 
 ure, and it cannot be lost without a remission of en- 
 thusiasm, and under this low pressure, the successful 
 re-entrance of importunate desires and clamorous 
 passions which had been driven back. To believe in 
 an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over the 
 universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immen- 
 sity and eternity, and lift them from the provincial 
 stage of human society to the imperishable theatre of 
 all being. When planted thus in the very substance 
 
 * Matthew x. 21-24. 
 
 f April number Nineteenth Century, 1S77. 
 
DR. MARTINEAU. 71 
 
 of things, they justify and support the ideal estimate 
 of the conscience ; they deepen every guilty shame ; 
 they guarantee every righteous hope ; and they help 
 the will with a divine casting vote in every balance of 
 temptation. The sanctity thus given to the claims of 
 duty, and the interest that gathers around the play 
 of character, appear to me more important elements 
 in the power of religion than its direct sanctions of 
 hope and fear. Yet to these, also, it is hardly possible 
 to deny great weight, not only as extending the range 
 of personal interests, but as the answer of reality to the 
 retributor's verdict of the moral sense. Cancel these 
 beliefs, and morality will be left reasonable, but para- 
 lyzed ; possible to temperaments comparatively pas- 
 sionless, but with no grasp on vehement and poetic 
 natures ; and gravitating toward the simply pruden- 
 tial wherever it maintains its ground. Historical ex- 
 perience appears to confirm this estimate. In no race 
 (notwithstanding conspicuous individual exceptions) 
 have the excesses of sensual passion been so kept in 
 check as among the Jews. There is no more striking 
 feature in their literature during the moral declension of 
 Greek and Roman society (e. g., in the Sibyline Oracle) 
 than the horror which it expresses of the pervading 
 dissoluteness of the Pagan world. It certainly can- 
 not be said that the problem was rendered easy by 
 the-; .coolness of the Jewish temperament. The phe- 
 nomena of Christendom presents a more complicated 
 tissue. But a just analysis yields, I believe, the same 
 result, and attests the force of religious conviction 
 as the only successful antagonist, on any large scale, 
 of the animal impulses. True it is, that in the very 
 presence of the Church, and even among its represen- 
 tatives, gross vices have ^at times prevailed. But 
 
72 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 these have been hollow times, in which, w4th large 
 classes of persons, the outer shell of religion shel- 
 tered insincere life, and the private habits be- 
 trayed the inward disintegration which policy or in- 
 difference concealed." * 
 
 "Are we to understand," inquired the host, "that 
 civilization may go down in the very presence of re- 
 ligion ? " 
 
 " Not in its presence, but in its absence. To test 
 the power of religion," continued Rev. Dr. M, "we 
 must limit ourselves to cases where that power is 
 not effete. In the Puritan families of the seventeenth 
 century, among the present Catholic peasantry of Ire- 
 land, throughout the Society of Friends^ and in the 
 Wesleyan classes, it can hardly be denied that the 
 control of irregular desires has been attained with an 
 exceptional ease and completeness." 
 
 "Man wants," said Mr. Harrison, "a morality dis- 
 coverable alone by observation and experience, unin- 
 fluenced by faith in the supernatural." 
 
 " Christians," replied the Dean, " teach a moral- 
 ity with both sanctions. Their revealed morality is 
 practical, and their practical morality is revealed. 
 Where the mere moralist has much, the Christian 
 moralist has more. His religion is moral, and his 
 morality is religion. But the effort to divorce moral- 
 ity from religion is nothing new. In every age and 
 community there are moral individuals who ignore re- 
 ligion while they are instructed by it. The rational- 
 istic skeptic forgets that he was once a believing 
 child. The teachings of a religious mother live on in 
 the unbelieving man. The great religious pressure 
 
 of the world without controls the life that thinks itself 
 ___ _ 
 
DR FROTHINGHAM. 73 
 
 governed exclusively by its own force of reason from 
 within. Morality apart from religion has ever disas- 
 trously failed. But two instances are remembered 
 where the separation was complete. In the one, at the 
 fall of the Roman Republic, religion being entirely 
 exhausted, expired, and Caesar came ; in the other, as 
 at the rise of the French Republic, religion was only 
 excluded to be restored by Napoleon. In either case, 
 the moral chaos was horrible. Thus, morality is ever 
 the child of religion." 
 
 "Much of this is certainly true," said Dr. Frothing- 
 ham. '' Consider the practical effect of the great doc- 
 trine of all instituted religion, upon the moral dispo- 
 sition of men ; for instance, the doctrine of a pei'sonal 
 God. And by a personal God I do not mean an infi- 
 nite intelligence, will, force, ' a stream of tendency,' 
 a ' Power outside of ourselves working for righteous- 
 ness.' I mean an individual being watching over the 
 world, in whole and in part, overlooking and ordering 
 every individual life, appointing each particular lot, 
 adjusting every detail of fortune, counting the tears, 
 numbering the disappointments of every one, balanc- 
 ing evil against good, harm against benefit, joy against 
 sorrow, educating men, training them with patient 
 providence and assigning every incident in a varied 
 experience by his discerning will and for his supreme 
 purpose. Think of such an idea as this holding pos- 
 session of the intellectual and spiritual world, say for 
 a thousand years, nobody doubting it, nobody repel- 
 ling it, everybody, old and young, giving to it an im- 
 plicit, explicit and familiar faith, growing up and 
 working themselves into it ! 
 
 '* What is, what must be, the consequence ? Cer- 
 tainly a state of mind, feeling, will, altogether pecul- 
 
74 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 iar. Suppose that each one of us firmly and abso- 
 lutely believed, without the least misgiving or qualifi- 
 cation, that a being such as I have described, infinitely 
 wiser, better, more far-seeing, more forecasting than 
 he, had the charge of his particular destiny — some 
 guardian angel, some eternal spirit, accompanying 
 him in every point of his career, doing everything 
 that happened to him, undoing everything that was 
 in the nature of mishap to him, sending calamity, 
 loss, disaster, bereavement: if he were stretched upon 
 the bed of sickness, stretching him there with definite 
 intention; if he were raised up, raising him up for a 
 purpose; in all respects administering every part and 
 particle of private experience — think, I say, of the 
 power of such a belief as that! Believing this, one 
 would accept his faith without a question, without a 
 murmur. Is he poor, he must bless his poverty. Is 
 he ignorant, simple, he must be glad that he is not 
 in the company of the wise. Is he cast down, trod- 
 den under the foot of men, persecuted, oppressed, 
 this is his privilege. It is a sin to find fault that this 
 being takes the pains to chasten, to educate, to dis- 
 cipline, to lead him on. Blessed be poverty! Blessed 
 be pain, sickness, suffering, toil ! Blessed be a lonely 
 and miserable lot ! Blessed are the poor. Blessed 
 are the meek. Blessed are the hungry and thirsty. 
 Blessed are they that are persecuted. Blessed are they 
 of whom all men speak ill, for whom the Lord loveth 
 he chasteneth. Through suffering men are made per- 
 fect. Submit and acquiesce. Be grateful for the 
 cross ; bow to the rod ; take your lot. No matter 
 whether it seems in the eyes of men desirable or not, 
 you know nothing about that. How can you, short- 
 sighted, undertake to pronounce upon it ? Accept it 
 
F. HARRISON. 75 
 
 as the appointment of a being perfectly wise and just 
 and good. If life is rich, be grateful that it is so. 
 But be careful not to be overweening in your vanity 
 or puffed up in your self-esteem. Do not think too 
 highly of yourself, for if you do it will be all taken 
 away. Such is the moral inference from a belief like 
 this. The ministers of religion repress murmurs and 
 skepticism. The Church thunders its denunciation 
 against those who would change the established situa- 
 tion, pervert the order of things. A type of moral 
 sentiment is fostered the characteristic of which is 
 the abnegation of self, the complete resignation of 
 the person in favor of the Supreme Will." 
 
 " Disputes about a name are idle," interposed Mr. 
 Harrison. " If we can be debarred the use of the 
 name of Religion, no one can disinherit us of the 
 thing. We mean by religion a scheme which shall 
 explain to us the relations of the faculties of the hu- 
 man soul within, of man to his fellow-man beside him, 
 to the world and its order around him ; next, that 
 which brings him face to face with a power to which 
 he must bow, with a Providence which he must love 
 and serve, with a Being which he must adore — that 
 which, in fine, gives a doctrine to believe, a discipline 
 to live by, and an object to worship. This is the an- 
 cient meaning of religion, and the fact of religion all 
 over the world in every age. What is new in our 
 scheme, who follow the teaching of Comte, is merely 
 that we avoid such terms as Infinite, Absolute, Im- 
 material, and vague negatives altogether, resolutely 
 confining ourselves to the sphere of what can be 
 shown by experience, of what is relative and not ab- 
 solute, and wholly and frankly human."* 
 
 * Symposium, the Nineteenth Century, April, 1879. 
 
76 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 "Whether religion will die or not," said the Dean, 
 "depends altogether upon the probability of the cul- 
 tivated mind becoming only atheistic." 
 
 "As to that," remarked Mr. Frothingham, "we 
 need not fear ; for about a century ago, in France 
 and elsewhere in Europe, the belief in God seemed 
 passing away. The very name of God was spoken in 
 derision, as a word that was no longer powerful to 
 conjure by. A philosopher declined an article on 
 God for his encyclopaedia, saying the question of God 
 had no significance. He who professed belief in 
 God was blackballed at the clubs. A distinguished 
 philosopher — I think it was Hume — remarking in a 
 philosophical company in Paris that he never saw an 
 atheist, and did not believe that there was one^ a 
 gentleman replied, ' Well, you may have that pleasure 
 now. Every man here is an atheist.' In fact, for a 
 brief period the belief in God had lost its hold in cul- 
 tivated minds ; Materialism had the argument. But 
 since then the ancient conviction has been taking 
 heart, and has steadily pushed its antagonist to the 
 wall. And this in the face of physical science, which 
 has in these latter days attained prodigious growth, 
 and has been sweeping gods and demi-gods out of the 
 world as the house-maid sweeps chips and cobwebs 
 from a parlor. Definitions of God have been vanish- 
 ing, idols have been trembling, symbols have been 
 fading away, trinities have been dissolving, person- 
 alities have been waning and losing themselves ip 
 light or in shadow ; but the Being has been steadily 
 coming forward from the background, looming up 
 from the abysses, and occupying the vacant spaces, 
 flowing into dry channels, and taking possession of 
 
DR. FROTHINGHAM. 77 
 
 every inch of matter and mind. The mystery of it 
 deepens, but the conviction of it deepens also."* 
 
 '' From the polytheistic religion of the worship of 
 ancestors," said the Dean, ''with morality, and the 
 polytheistic religion of the worship of the elements 
 as deities, without morality, the next logical step is 
 to an atheistical religion of morality without worship. 
 This religion, if such it can be called, is either per- 
 sonal or what man should be in himself, as taught by 
 Socrates : or impersonal, as in the Fatalism taught 
 by Zeno, or the humanistic morality of law, or what 
 each man should be to all others, as taught in the 
 Positivism of Comte. I do not say that these men 
 were atheists, but only that they taught a morality as 
 divorced from theology." 
 
 " The avowed atheist," rejoined Dr. F., '' for there 
 are such, finds it harder to put his creed into words 
 and to adjust it to the human mind than ever Atha- 
 nasius did to define his doctrine of Trinity. You can- 
 not push him into a corner ; you cannot make him 
 avow his unbelief in unqualified terms ; you cannot 
 compel him to back out of the region of confessed 
 divinity. He retires beyond the reach of definition, 
 but not beyond the reach of thought. Comte says, 
 ' The principle of theology is to explain everything by 
 supernatural wills. That principle can never be set 
 aside until we acknowledge the search for causes to be 
 beyond our reach, and limit ourselves to the knowl- 
 edge of laws. The universal religion adopts as its 
 fundamental dogma the fact of the existence of an 
 order which admits of no variation, and to which all 
 events of every kind are subject. That there is such 
 
 * Frothingham: Religion of Humanity, p. 
 
 37- 
 
78 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 an order can be shown as a fact, but it cannot be ex- 
 plained.' " * 
 
 " No one will dispute the statement of M. Comte/' 
 said Dr. Bushnell, "as to the laws of matter. But 
 what is law ? ' The laws of nature cannot account for 
 their own origin.' f The word is used with many 
 varieties of meaning, but always, and in all its 
 varieties, having one element that is constant, viz., 
 the opinion had of its uniformity ; as that, in exactly 
 the same circumstances, it will always and forever 
 do, bring to pass, direct or command precisely the 
 same thing. Without this, no law, so called, is 
 regarded as law. Observing this fundamental fact, 
 w^e notice the distinction between natural and moral 
 law. Natural law is the law by which any being 
 or thing is made to act invariably thus or thus, 
 in virtue of terms inherent in itself; as when any 
 body of matter gravitates by reason of its matter, and 
 according to the quantity of its matter. Moral law 
 pertains never to a thing, nor to any substance in the 
 choice of cause and effect, but only to a free intelli- 
 gence, or self-active power. Its rule is authority, not 
 force. It commands, but does not actuate or deter- 
 mine. It speaks to assent or choice, inviting action, 
 but operating nothing apart from choice. It imposes 
 obligation, leaving the subject to obey or not, clear 
 of any enforcement, save that of conviction before- 
 hand and penalty afterward. There is a third kind 
 of law, viz., the law of one's end, or the law which 
 one's reason imposes in the way of obtaining this end. 
 Thus, if a man undertake to be honest, having that 
 for an end, then it will be seen that his end so far be- 
 
 * Frothingham: Religion of Humanity, p. 39. 
 f Mill's Comte, p. 15. 
 
DR. BUSHNELL. 79 
 
 comes a law to all his actions ; that is a law self-im- 
 posed, one which his reason prescribes, and which, in 
 accepting his end, he freely accepts. So, if a man's 
 end is to be rich, we shall see that his end is a law to 
 his whole life-plan.* But who is to fix the end of 
 life-work ? If there be no future, then the end is a 
 present one. If a present one only, is it self-fixed, or 
 fixed by others ? Is every man exclusively a law unto 
 himself ? If not, is society ? And if society, what is 
 over society ? If nothing, then society is irresponsi- 
 ble for its life. But we see that it is responsible ; for 
 it fails with vice and succeeds with virtue, so far as 
 its own work is concerned. If it is destroyed, it is 
 not self-destroyed. But if nothing is law but like re- 
 sults from like conditions, then there is no such thing 
 as law; for conditions are always unlike ; and from 
 unlike conditions there can be no law. 
 
 " As worship without conduct expires," continued 
 Dr. Bushnell, ''as seen in the ancient religion, so the 
 attempt at conduct without worship will, now as then, 
 lead to social and political revolution. 
 
 " Each successive skeptical system claims to have 
 discovered, and be inspired by, some new principle 
 needed to reform and direct the moral movements of 
 the world ; is there a single valuable truth found in 
 any one of these schemes opposed to Christianity 
 which Christianity itself does not include in a form 
 better far ? The authors of these systems, either 
 ignorant of the forms of Christianity, and, consciously 
 or unconsciously, borrowing some one of its many and 
 divine principles, separate it from its place in Christ's 
 great system of truth, and present it as of exclusive 
 
 * Bushnell on Nature and Supernature, p. 263. 
 
80 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 importance, and as a principle new with skepticism, 
 and therefore opposed to Christianity. 
 
 " The adherents of this religion of Humanity are 
 sometimes practical men, monopolized by their busi- 
 ness, honest from commercial principle or policy, pru- 
 dent in speech and circumspect in action. They claim 
 to be moral rather than religious. They stake their 
 chances for eternity upon their respectability in time. 
 But while they themselves rely upon their morality, 
 many, if not most, of them would prefer that their 
 families take their chances upon religion. They feel 
 that their sons, especially, are safer, certainly for this 
 world, in the Church than out of it. 
 
 " But there is another class of mind, bewildered by 
 speculation as to efficient and final causes of things, 
 who turn from a faith in God to what they call a 
 knowledge of man, and rest their all on that. They 
 mainly adhere to the Positive philosophy originated 
 by Hume but emphasized by Comte. It is called 
 positive because it rests on the positive discoveries of 
 science and negatives the speculations of all other 
 systems. 
 
 " In the positive state of science, the human mind, 
 acknowledging the impossibility of obtaining abso- 
 lute knowledge, abandons the search after the origin 
 and destination of the universe and the knowledge of 
 the secret causes of phenomena. All in this scheme 
 is temporal and human, and nothing divine and eter- 
 nal. Instead of looking for humanity to aspire god- 
 ward, it is silent as to the very being of God, and 
 turns its worship to Humanity. As we have said, its 
 religion is called the Religion of Humanity. But 
 what sort of religion is that ? " 
 
 '' The order of the sciences," said the host, '* as 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 81 
 
 Stated to us by these Positivists, builds a philosophy 
 that binds the Cosmos into one intelligible whole, 
 lying around its great perceptive centre, Man. Its 
 religious and moral base is this organic Humanity, 
 whose good, welfare and glory become the mainspring 
 of life and duty. The Religion of Humanity, in a 
 word, is that religion which counts Man as the centre 
 of the world, and solves all relations by reference to 
 that centre. It is, therefore, the true and scientific, 
 because the only verifiable, religion of the human race. 
 Its fundamental maxim is ' to know the true in order 
 to do the good.' 
 
 " It is indeed horrible to think of entirely breaking 
 up old ideas, customs, laws, feelings, hopes and wor- 
 ships in order utterly to recast society upon new and 
 untried theories of right and wrong. Think of the 
 human race without worship ! praiseless, prayerless, 
 altarless, without hope and ivithout God in the world!' 
 
 "Let the consequences be what they may," said 
 Mr. Frothingham, '' if we are to have a religion that 
 helps morality instead of hindering it, we must have 
 a new conception of religion — a new religion^ with new 
 creeds, a new order of sentiments, new institutions — 
 a religion that is fully sympathetic with man." 
 
 ''What more sympathetic with man than the Chris- 
 tian religion ?" said the Dean. " God so loved the 
 world that He gave His only begotten Son, that he 
 who believeth on Him should not perish, but have 
 everlasting life." 
 
 "That is it," replied Mr. Frothingham. " We want 
 a religion that plants itself upon the conditions of 
 success in this life, that bids men study their human 
 relations — a human religion, in which the conception 
 of man is substituted for the conception of God ; in 
 
 /4^3^5 
 
83 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 which duty, responsibility, obligation, shall consist 
 not in the performance of works pleasing to an invisi- 
 ble being outside the world, but in the sincere effort to 
 secure the happiness, comfort, satisfaction, elevation, 
 enlightenment of human beings in the world where 
 duty is actually to be done ; a reliction which shall 
 lay the foundations of piety in obedience to the facul- 
 ties of human nature as they are unfolded, and to 
 social relations as they are understood, and which 
 for new light resorts not to prophet, saint or priest, 
 not to sacred Scripture, Old Testament or New, but to 
 the revelations that come in the form of practical 
 knowledge, through careful and conscientious study 
 of the requirements and conveniences of existence in 
 this year of the world's history. The religion of 
 humanity, the church of humanity, this is what we 
 are coming to ; the conservative faith based on ob- 
 servance of the moral law, the religion of intelligence.'* 
 
 "Is not the Christian religion," inquired the 
 Dean, '' one of intelligence ? Has it not, as you 
 said, built up the schools, inspired literature, made 
 the laws that have elevated woman, and preached 
 the gospel of love to the poor ? What is the creed 
 of this new religion of humanity? " 
 
 "Its creed," replied Mr. Frothingham, "is not yet 
 written, but it is a-making. Its sentiments are scarcely 
 more than indicated and suggested. Its duties are 
 slowly defining themselves. Its future is shadowy, 
 but how immense, how glorious in vision, as it rises 
 veiled before the eyes of those who think, feel, aspire. 
 Give us a rational religion to meet a rational moral- 
 ity." * 
 
 "And after all the creeds and deeds of the past," 
 
 * Visions of the Future,, pp. 98—9. 
 
A. COMTE. 83 
 
 said the Dean, "after all the hymns and prayers, 
 after all that science knows and conjectures, have we 
 to renounce all religious beliefs, revolutionize all the 
 morality which they have inspired, and go back to 
 the infancy of civilization and start afresh? Has all 
 the progress of the past brought us to moral chaos? 
 By the light of this religion of humanity are we to 
 see in the past nothing but universal error? If so, is 
 it worth lifting the veil ? Upon the Nothingness of 
 the past we can build only nothingness in the future. 
 Can Comte and his agnostic disciples teach the world 
 a new and better religion of Humanity than Christ 
 and his Apostle ? " 
 
 "The phrase 'Religion of Humanity,'" remarked 
 Mr. Frothingham, "has, unfortunately, been associ- 
 ated with the name and philosophy of Auguste 
 Comte, who does not deserve credit for the main 
 ideas it stands for. If the name was of his invention 
 the thing was not. His leading conceptions of the 
 solidarity of mankind, of the grand man, and immor- 
 tality of the race, were thrown out several years in 
 advance of him. Comte elaborated them, but, as we 
 believe, corrupted and perverted them ; for his elab- 
 oration was artificial, consisting much less in a de- 
 velopment of spiritual capacities than in a mechanical 
 arrangement of outward apparatus. It was with him a 
 manufactured system done with malice-aforethought. 
 He found no soul in it, and put no soul into it. His 
 spasm of sentimentality gratified itself by construct- 
 ing this ambitious Mausoleum which was to take the 
 place of the Church of Rome, but it was chu7'ch 
 against chui'ch. It was the Roman Church without 
 its theology ; St. Peter's without a saint. It is the 
 mechanism of the old faith without the soul of tha 
 
84 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 new. The despotic character of mediaeval religion 
 was retained ; the distinction between the priesthood 
 and the laity ; the distinction between the various 
 secular orders ; the subjection of woman to man ; in 
 a word, Comte's Church of Humanity was in every 
 respect European. But this is not the time to give a 
 critical account of Comte's scientific chimera. I have 
 said this much of its character to show why we re- 
 pudiate it, as we do, and disavow all purpose of 
 recommending a system which seems so full of per- 
 nicious elements, and wholly at variance with the in- 
 tellectual, social and spiritual tendencies of the age." 
 
 " I cannot admit," remarked Mr. Frederic Harri- 
 son, '^ that I fully agree with Mr. Frothingham in all 
 that he has said. We who follow the teaching of 
 Comte, humbly look forward to an ultimate solution 
 of all the moral and theological difficulties by the force 
 of one common principle. I admit with Sir James 
 Stephen, that morality has a basis of its own, quite 
 independent of theology, yet deeply affected by it and 
 destroyed by it if the theology be not true. I admit 
 also with Lord Selborne that if the religious founda- 
 tions and sanctions of morality be given up, human life 
 runs the risk of sinking in depravity, since morality 
 without religion is insufficient for general civilization. 
 I agree also with Mr. Martineau that theology cannot 
 supply a base for morality which has lost its own; and I 
 agree with what he further says, that morals, though 
 they have a base of their own, and are second to noth- 
 ing, are not adequate to direct human life until 
 they are transfused into that sense of resignation, 
 adoration and communion with an overruling Provi- 
 dence which is the mark of true religion." 
 
 ''We speak of Providence," said Mr. Frothingham. 
 
THE DEAN. 85 
 
 *'We say life is a school; experience is an educator; 
 existence is a discipline. Yes; but it is a school where 
 lessons are taught in an unknown tongue, where the 
 books are written in a tongue that nobody can read, 
 and the teachers use signs instead of speech. It is a 
 gymnasium -where the institution does not seem to 
 understand the pupils, and the pupils do not under- 
 stand the implements. If we could only be sure that 
 a superintending power, wisdom, love, looked after 
 the individual interest — the individual interest: that is 
 the thing; not the interest of the ages, not the welfare 
 of man, but your happiness and mine — then we could 
 look with tranquil eye upon the world. But can this 
 be proved ? '** 
 
 "The being of God implies providence," replied 
 the Dean. " Through providence we feel our way 
 back to being ; the indications of care point to the 
 care-taker. The notion of providence is as universal 
 as the notion of Deity. 'AH things are providence,' 
 said Marcus Aurelius. The poets, ancient and mod- 
 ern, prose writers, too, bear witness to the general, 
 we may say, the instinctive belief in a great care over 
 the world of things and men. It may be doubted 
 whether the belief is ever absent from the human 
 mind, or can be ever eradicated. f But logic and ob- 
 servation beat the personal and special providence off 
 the ground. The philosopher gives up the theory of 
 final causes as inapplicable to a system regulated by 
 universal and impartial laws." \ 
 
 " But," asked the Dean, " when you use such awful 
 words as Maw,' and 'order,' how can you hesitate to 
 
 * Visions of the Future, p. io6. 
 
 f Frothingham: Religion of Humanity, p. i8o. 
 
 tib. 
 
 m 
 
86 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 use the other tremendous words, ' cause ' and ' God ? ' 
 What is law but steady, continuous, persistent, con- 
 sistent power ; cumulative, urgent, regulated power ; 
 power moving along even tracks and pushing to- 
 ward distinct aims ; power with a past behind it, 
 and a future before ; power that is harmonious, ryth- 
 mical, as Comte calls it, orderly ? Can Comte con- 
 ceive of such power as unintelligent ? Can he con- 
 ceive of it as intelligent and purposeless ? Can he 
 conceive of it as purposeful and yet as uncausing ? 
 Does not the very word ' force,' as science uses it, 
 compel the association with mind and will ? And can 
 we think of mind and will without thinking with the 
 same brain-throb of wisdom and goodness ? It seems 
 as if one must have completely suppressed in his 
 memory the constitution of the human mind, to help 
 being dragged by such overpowering words as ' law,' 
 'will' and 'order' upward out of all the meshes of 
 materialism towards the Infinite and Perfect One. It 
 is logical precision itself that lends wings. The very 
 stones of fact become ethereal, and float us upon the 
 eternal sea." * 
 
 "So far," said Professor Huxley, ''as the laws of 
 conduct are determined by the intellect, I apprehend 
 that they belong to science, and to that part of science 
 which is called morality. But the engagement of the 
 affections in favor of that particular kind of conduct 
 which we all call good, seems to me to be something 
 beyond mere science. And I cannot but think that 
 it, together with the awe and reverence, which have 
 no kinship with base fear, but arise whenever one 
 tries to pierce below the surface of things, whether 
 they be material or spiritual, constitutes all that has 
 
 * Frothingham: Religion of Humanity, p. 40. 
 
PROF. HUXLEY. 87 
 
 any unchangeable reality in religion. And just as I 
 think it would be a mistake to confound the science, 
 the morality, with the affection, religion ; so do I con- 
 ceive it to be a most lamentable and mischievous error, 
 that the science, theology, is so confounded in the 
 minds of many — indeed, I might say, of the majority 
 of men. 
 
 ' I do not express any opinion as to whether the- 
 ology is a true science, or whether it does not come 
 under the apostolic definition of ' science falsely so 
 called ; ' though I may be permitted to express the 
 belief that if the Apostle to whom that much misap- 
 plied phrase is due could make the acquaintance of 
 much of modern theology, he would not hesitate a 
 moment in declaring that it is exactly what he meant 
 the words to denote. But it is at any rate conceiv- 
 able, that the nature of the Deity, and His relations 
 to the universe, and more especially to mankind, are 
 capable of being ascertained, either inductively or de- 
 ductively, or by both processes. And, if they have 
 been ascertained, then a body of science has been 
 formed which is very properly called theology. Fur- 
 ther, there can be no doubt that affection for the 
 Being thus defined and described by theologic 
 science would be properly termed religion ; but it 
 would not be the whole of religion. The affection 
 for the ethical ideal defined by moral science would 
 claim equal if not superior rights. For suppose the- 
 ology established the existence of an evil deity — and 
 some theologies, even Christian ones, have come very 
 near this — is the religious affection to be transferred 
 from the ethical idea to any such omnipotent demon ? 
 Better a thousand times that the human race should 
 perish under his thunderbolts than it should say, 
 
88 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 ^ Evil, be thou my good.' There is nothing new, that 
 I know of, in this statement of the relations of religion 
 with the science of morality on the one hand and that 
 of theology on the other. But I believe it to be alto- 
 gether true, and very needful, at this time, to be 
 clearly and emphatically recognized as such by those 
 who have to deal with the education question. 
 
 ''We are divided into two parties — the advocates of 
 so-called 'religious' teaching on the one hand, and 
 those of so-called ' secular ' teaching on the other. 
 And both parties seem to me to be not only hopelessly 
 wrong, but in such a position that if either succeeded 
 completely, it would discover, before many years were 
 over, that it had made a great mistake and done seri- 
 ous evil to the cause of education. For, leaving aside 
 the more far-seeing minority on each side, what the 
 ' religious ' party is crying for is mere theology, under 
 the name of religion ; while the ' secularists ' have un- 
 wisely and wrongfully admitted the assumption of 
 their opponents, and demand the abolition of all ' re- 
 ligious ' teaching, when they want to be free of theol- 
 ogy — burning your ships to get rid of the cock- 
 roaches ! But my belief is, that no human beings 
 ever did, or ever will, come to much, unless their con- 
 duct was governed and guided by the love of some 
 ethical ideal. Undoubtedly, your gutter child may 
 be converted by mere intellectual drill into the ' sub- 
 tlest of all the beast of the field ; ' but we know what 
 has become of the original of that description, and 
 there is no need to increase the number of those who 
 imitate him successfully without being aided by the 
 rates. And if I were compelled to choose for one of 
 my own children, between a school in which real re- 
 ligious instruction is given, and one without it, I 
 
HERBERT SPENCER. 89 
 
 should prefer the former, even though the child 
 might have to take a good deal of theology with it. 
 Nine-tenths of a dose of bark is mere half-rotten 
 wood ; but one swallows it for the sake of the par- 
 ticles of quinine, the beneficial effect of which may be 
 weakened, but it is not destroyed, by the wooden di- 
 lution, unless in a few cases of exceptionally tender 
 stomachs. Hence, when the great mass of the Eng- 
 lish people declared that they want to have the chil- 
 dren in the elementary schools taught the Bible, and 
 when it is plain from terms of the Act, the debaters 
 in and out of Parliament, and especially the emphatic 
 declarations of the Vice-President of the Council, 
 that it was intended that such Bible-reading should 
 be permitted, unless good cause for prohibiting it 
 could be shown, I do not see what reason there is for 
 opposing their wish. Certainly, I, individually, could 
 with no shadow of consistency oppose the teaching of 
 the children of other people to do that which my own 
 children are taught to do. And even if the reading 
 of the Bible were not, as I think it is, consonant with 
 political reason and justice, and with the desire to act 
 in the spirit of the education measure, I am disposed 
 to think it might still be well to read that book in the 
 elementary schools."* 
 
 Here the host said, " perhaps, gentlemen, it may aid 
 us in coming to some conclusion upon this important 
 subject by getting Herbert Spencer's views upon it." 
 
 "^The influence of intellectual culture upon moi-ality,'^ 
 Mr. Spencer said, " as to rational legislation, based as 
 it can only be on a true theory of conduct, which is 
 derivable from a true theory of mind, must recognize 
 as a datum the direct connection of action with feel- 
 
 * Huxley * Critiques and Addresses, pp. 49, 50. 
 
90 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 ing. ,. . It is never the knowledge which is the 
 moving agent in conduct ; but it is always the feeling 
 which goes along with that knowledge or is excited 
 by it. Though the drunkard knows that after to- 
 day's debauch will come to-morrow's headache, yet 
 he is not deterred by consciousness of this truth, un- 
 less there is excited in him an adequate amount of 
 feeling antagonistic to his desire for drink. Similarly 
 with improvidence in general. Much of our legisla- 
 tion must be fruitless or injurious. We are at pres- 
 ent, legislature and nation together, eagerly pushing 
 forward schemes which proceed on the postulate that 
 conduct is determined not by feelings, but by cogni- 
 tions. For what else is the assumption underlying 
 this anxious urging-on of organizations for teaching? 
 What is the root-notion common to Secularists and 
 Denominationalists, but the notion that spread of 
 knowledge is the one thing needful for bettering be- 
 havior? This belief in the moralizing effects of intel- 
 lectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd 
 ap7'ion. What imaginable connection is there be- 
 tween the learning that certain clusters of marks on 
 paper stand for certain words, and the getting a 
 higher sense of duty ? What possible effect can ac- 
 quirement of facility in making written signs of 
 sounds, have in strengthening the desire to do right? 
 How does a knowledge of the multiplication table, a 
 quickness in adding and dividing, so increase the 
 sympathies as to restrain the tendency to trespass 
 against fellow creatures ? In what way can the at- 
 tainment of accuracy in parsing and spelling make 
 the sentiment of justice more powerful than it was ; 
 or why, from stores of geographical information, per- 
 severingly gained, is there likely to come increased 
 
HERBERT SPENCER. 91 
 
 regard for truth ? Not by precept, though heard 
 daily ; not by example, unless it be followed ; but 
 only by action, often caused by the related feeling 
 can a moral habit be formed. And yet this truth, 
 which mental science clearly teaches, and which is in 
 harmony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ig- 
 nored in current educational fanaticisms. ' Good 
 character is more important than much knowledge.' 
 " The influe7ice of moral teaching is supposed by 
 others to improve conduct and diminish crime. They 
 hold general knowledge to be inadequate, and con- 
 tend that rules of right conduct must be taught. Al- 
 ready, however, reasons have been given why the ex- 
 pectations even of these are illusory; proceeding as 
 they do, on the assumption that the intellectual 
 acceptance of moral precepts will produce conform- 
 ity to them. I will not dwell on the contradictions 
 to this assumption furnished by the Chinese, to all of 
 whom the high ethical maxims of Confucius are 
 taught, and who yet fail to show us a conduct propor- 
 tionately exemplary. It will suffice if I limit myself 
 to evidence supplied by our own society, past and 
 present, which negatives very decisively these san- 
 guine expectations. What have we been doing all 
 these many centuries by our religious agencies, but 
 preaching right principles to old and young ? Teach- 
 ing by clergymen not having the desired effect, and 
 now it is held that something more must be done — if, 
 notwithstanding perpetual explanations and denunci- 
 ation and exhortations, the misconduct is so great that 
 society is endangered only after all this insistance has 
 failed, is it expected that more insistance will succeed — 
 commands and interdicts uttered by a surpliced 
 priest to minds prepared by chant and organ-peal, 
 
92 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 not having been obeyed when mechanically repeated 
 in school-boy sing-song to a threadbare usher, amid 
 the buzz of lesson-learning and clatter of slates ? 
 Certainly such influences as may be gained by ad- 
 dressing moral truths to the intellect, is made greater 
 if the accompaniments arouse an appropriate emo- 
 tional excitement, as a religious service does ; while, 
 conversely, there can be no more effectual way of 
 divesting such moral truths of their impressiveness, 
 than associating them with the prosaic and vulgariz- 
 ing sounds and sights and smells coming from 
 crowded childreuv" * 
 
 ''And no less certain," said Mr. Ingersoll, " is it that 
 precepts often heard and little regarded, lose by repe- 
 tition the small influence they had." 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer: "What do public schools 
 show us? Are the boys rendered merciful to one 
 another by listening to religious injunctions every 
 morning? What do universities show us ? Have per- 
 petual chapels habitually made under-graduates be- 
 have better than the average young men ? What do 
 cathedral towns show us ? Is there in them a moral 
 tone above that of other towns ? Nowhere do we find 
 that repetition of rules of right, already known but 
 disregarded, produces regard for them ; but we find 
 that contrariwise, it makes the regard for them less 
 than before." 
 
 " It is evident," said the Dean, '' upon the whole, 
 the feeling which produces action is more likely to 
 arise when moral truth is taught surrounded by im- 
 posing accessories of architecture, painted windows, 
 tombs and dim religious light, than under other cir- 
 cumstances not calculated to excite emotions* While 
 religious services in schools may not do all hoped 
 
 * Sociology, p. 58. 
 
IMK, MILL, 93 
 
 from them, yet the scholars would be worse without 
 those services. That great religious influences go out 
 from such universities as Oxford and Cambridge is 
 undeniable. They are felt upon the lives and char- 
 acters of the graduates in all after years. Look at 
 the religious literature — the poems, the fictions, the 
 essays, the theistic philosophies— that go from them. 
 They feed the pulpit. With all the shortcomings in- 
 evitably incident to life anywhere, it may be confi- 
 dently asserted that religious schools do more good as 
 such than they would do as mere secular or non- 
 religious schools. It is certain that we see more of 
 this feeling leading to moral action in connection 
 with religious services — with worship — than we find 
 in culture without religious worship. The centre and 
 lines of religion and morality coincide. But is it 
 necessary to separate intellectual and moral and 
 religious culture ? Each should promote the other; 
 and neither would seem to be sufficient by itself. All 
 seem to agree with Mr. Spencer that moral truth needs 
 the moral feelings of religion to make it effective. 
 And now: Is religion, the inspirer of this feeling, 
 dying? If so, morality is dying." 
 
 ''The religious Positivism of Comte," said the 
 host, " as interpreted by Mr. Mill, is religion without 
 a God." 
 
 Mr. Mill said in reply: "We venture to think that 
 a religion may exist without belief in a God, and that 
 a religion without a God may be, even to Christians, 
 an introduction and profitable object of contempla- 
 tion. It has been said that whoever believes in 'the 
 Infinite nature of Duty ' is religious. Comte refers 
 the obligations of duty, as well as all sentiments of 
 devotion, to a concrete object, at once ideal and real : 
 the Human Race, conceived as a continuous whole, 
 
94 IS /RELIGION DYING? 
 
 including the past, the present and the future. This 
 he calls the Grand Etre, the great Being." 
 
 " Can we not, and for eighteen hundred years have 
 we not," said the Dean, '' had in Christianity, all the 
 moral teachings that the philosophers, including 
 Comte, propose, and vastly more ? The morality they 
 offer is already a part of and taken from Christianity. 
 There is nothing new in Positivism except its meta- 
 physical conceit of what they call ^ the organism of 
 Humanity.' There is absolutely no such thing as the 
 Grand Etre of Humanity, as fancied by Comte, any 
 more than there is anything in Positive morality new 
 to Christianity." 
 
 III. The Religion of both Worship and Morality — 
 Christ. 
 
 "The Master condemned the tree that bore nothing 
 but leaves," remarked the Dean, " and the religious 
 theories die that do not result in religious practice. 
 But if there be no good practice with religion, is 
 it likely that practice will be better without it ? 
 Religion without conduct will die now as it did in the 
 past. This is the inexhaustible religion of faith and 
 works — of creed and deed — of theology and morality. 
 We have seen that Polytheism or the ancient religions 
 of worship without morality became exhausted, and 
 expired in Greece and Rome ; and that Atheism, 
 under the sham of Positivism, which claims to know 
 by positive experience and observation the laws but 
 not the causes, did not suffice in France ; and that 
 Agnosticism which denies all knowledge of either laws 
 or causes — we have seen that these intellectual 
 schemes excluding religion or not, by a vast majority 
 of thinkers, regarded as sufficient for modern civiliz- 
 ation; yet, both these elements of worship and moral- 
 ity, of faith and conduct, are found united in the 
 
POSITIVISM. 95 
 
 Christian religion. Has experience of the ages led us 
 to any satisfactory philosophy of life ? Is religion 
 religion, without a morality, or can there be a true 
 morality without a true religion ? Christianity is not 
 only a creed but a deed. As Polytheism looked only 
 to duty to the gods, ignoring those to man, so 
 Positivistic Atheism looks only to duty to man, ignor- 
 ing both God and duty to God. Each has a truth 
 belonging to the other, and each needed a truth the 
 other had. To each the other was a half. That 
 which Positivism discusses as the essential unity of 
 Humanity, Christianity reveals as the spiritual unity 
 of Humanity. Positivism is no new phase of thought. 
 It is the milk of speculative opinion with the cream 
 of Christianity skimmed off. It is ' the opposition of 
 science falsely so-called.' It is science without a 
 philosophy, and a religion without a God.* Its central 
 thought is the continuous unity of the race, with its 
 bond or nexiLS in society, as opposed to the unity of 
 the race with its bond or unity in its Creator. That 
 which is true in Positivisai is a plagiarism from 
 Christianity, and that in it which is not a plagiarism 
 from Christianity, is worthless. Christianity without 
 its morality, is a vain worship; without its worship, 
 Christianity proposes an impossible morality. Faith 
 inspires works, and works measure faith. There is no 
 creature Christianity does not love; no right it does 
 not recognize; no duty it does not enjoin; no social 
 need it does not help; no social hindrance it does not 
 oppose; no hope it does not cherish; no sorrow it does 
 not soothe; and no grave it does not seal with a resur- 
 rection promise. We shall show the superiority of 
 Christian worship and morality by contrasting them 
 with the atheistical morality which seeks to supplant 
 
 * Mill's Comte, p. 120. 
 
96 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 them. Something must govern conduct, and in the 
 end, that will govern it which can govern it the best. 
 The fittest wins. Is Christianity that ? If not, what 
 is better ? 
 
 '^ Christiaiiity will su7'vive as the fittest of all social 
 forces ; that is, a Christianity uniting both faith and 
 works, which only is true Christianity. It will live as 
 long as it helps humanity. This law of the survival 
 of the fittest, if it be a law, includes every principle of 
 self-preserving superiority both in what a thing is in 
 itself, and in its power to adapt itself to what it is 
 not." 
 
 Dr. Frothingham said, '' As to the creeds of to-day 
 I believe the next hundred years will see great 
 changes in them, but I do not think them destined to 
 disappear." 
 
 The Dean said, '' Nothing dies that is able to live. 
 That is the best force that does the best work. In 
 other words, that survives as the fittest — continues its 
 existence — which helps everything, and which every- 
 thing helps. Everybody preserves that which is 
 necessary to everybody. People may destroy each 
 other, but not the bread and the water, the light and 
 the air which all need, and upon which all live. And 
 why should religion die ? Its superstitions will cease, 
 but what part of Christian faith is wrong ? Are its 
 hopes of a better world — its comforts, its morals, its. 
 rites wrong? If all these and more are not good, 
 what is better? Helping everything, it cannot perish, 
 for the law of self-preservation compels everything 
 in the end to help it. If morality with religion has 
 not sufficed for the moral order of the world, is it 
 likely that morality without religion will do any bet- 
 ter ? If the existence of a personal God and the im- 
 
POSITIVISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 97 
 
 mortality of the soul be denied, is it likely that men will 
 observe higher moral conduct with lower spiritual 
 motives ? If men will not be moral from a sense 
 of obligation to God, however incomprehensible he 
 may be, is it probable that they will be more moral 
 by speculations about a fetish called Humanity, no 
 less incomprehensible ? We have seen man as an in- 
 dividual, but not Humanity as a whole. If men can 
 bring themselves to believe in the existence of Hu- 
 manity, how can they deny the existence of a Divinity ? 
 Humanity is but a name, and not a reality. The 
 struggle of this hour is between the ancient theistis- 
 tic moralities of Christianity with theistic sanctions, 
 and modern atheistic moralities of Positivism without 
 sanctions of any kind. It is a struggle between a 
 system with power and a system without power. Re- 
 ligion teaches a personal Power, and science, an im- 
 personal Power in the universe, and that is all the 
 difference between them. 
 
 '' Christianity includes both theory and practice, 
 both a rule and a life, both faith and works. ' Faith 
 without works is dead.' Christianity with living 
 power in it, is a conformity of the life to the rule. 
 Religion is a sense of dependence and of responsibil- 
 ity. Pagan mythology was the first ; Christianity 
 is both ; Atheism is neither. Dependence looks to 
 a providence, and gives worship ; responsibility 
 looks to divine authority and gives ^ conduct. 
 Without a sense of responsibility, moral conduct is 
 impossible, and worship is a superstition. There is no 
 moral truth new to Positivism that is not old to Christi- 
 anity. Let us put Christianity and Positivism side 
 by side and see how far this is so. [ What the Dean 
 stated in a general way may here be shown in a more 
 
IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 particular way.] Christianity as a social force, is 
 
 " (a) Fittest in its nature. 
 
 Christiatiity, over eighteen 
 hundred years ago, taught 
 The Unity of Humanity in 
 God. 
 
 " In Him we live and move, 
 and have our being. Hegiveth 
 to all life, and health, and all 
 things." Acts xvii, 32-32. 
 
 * The invisible things of 
 Him from the creation of the 
 world are clearly seen, being 
 understood by the things that 
 are made, even his eternal 
 power and Godhead, so that 
 they are without excuse." 
 Rev. i, 20. 
 
 Christianity also teaches a 
 unity of Humanity in man. 
 
 Christ's Last Prayer. 
 
 " Holy Father, keep through 
 thine own name those whom 
 thou hast given me, that they 
 all may be one, as thou, Father, 
 art in me, and I in Thee, that 
 they all may be one in us, that 
 they may be made perfect in 
 one." John xvii, 2. 
 
 " All ye are brethren." Matt, 
 xxiii, 8. 
 
 "We are members one of 
 another." Eph. iv, 25. 
 
 God , "hath made of one 
 blood all nations of men, for 
 to dwell on all the face of the 
 earth." Acts xvii, 26. "For 
 in Him we live and move, and 
 have our being." lb. 28. 
 
 " With God there is no re- 
 spect of person, Christ came 
 to call not the righteous, but 
 sinners to repentance." 
 
 " But ye have not so learned 
 Christ; if so be that ye have 
 heard Him, and have been 
 
 Positivism, not more than 
 fifty years ago, taught The 
 Unity of Humanity in Man. 
 
 " Humanity is the great Col- 
 lective Life of which human 
 beings are individuals; it must 
 be conceived of as an organism 
 — as having an existence apart 
 from human beings, just as we 
 conceive each human being to 
 have an existence apart from, 
 though dependent on, the in- 
 dividual cells of which his 
 organism is composed. This 
 Collective Life is in Comte's 
 system the Eire Supreme, the 
 only one we can know, there- 
 fore, the only one we can wor- 
 ship." (Lewes on Comte, p. 
 342, Bohn, Ed.) 
 
 " The power which may be 
 acquired over the mind by the 
 idea of the general interest of 
 the human race, both as a 
 source of emotion and as a 
 motive to conduct, many have 
 perceived; but we know not if 
 any one before M. Comte real- 
 ized so fully as he has done all 
 the majesty of which that idea 
 is susceptible. It ascends into 
 the unknown recesses of the 
 past, embraces the manifold 
 present, and descends into the 
 indefinite and unforeseeable fu- 
 ture. Forming a collective ex- 
 istence w'ithout assignable be- 
 ginning or end. it appeals to 
 that feeling of the Infinite, 
 which is deeply rooted in hu- 
 man nature, and which seems 
 necessary to the imposingness 
 of all our highest concep- 
 tions." 
 
 " That the ennobling power 
 of this grand conception may 
 
CHRIS TIA N ALTR UISM. 
 
 taught by Him, as the truth is 
 in Jesus, that ye put off 
 concerning the former conver- 
 sation the old man, which is 
 corrupt according to the de- 
 ceitful lusts; and be renewed 
 in the spirit of your mind; and 
 that ye put on the new man, 
 which after God is created in 
 righteousness and true holi- 
 ness." Eph. iv, 20. 
 
 "Ye ought to support the 
 weak, and to remember the 
 words of the Lord Jesus, how 
 He said, It is more blessed to 
 give than to receive." Acts 
 XX, 35. 
 
 Is there anything new there- 
 fore, in Positivism ? Has not 
 Christianity from first to last 
 sought to repress all forms of 
 selfishness? The Master said, 
 " Love thy neighbor as thyself. 
 Love your enemies; bless them 
 that curse you; do good to 
 them that hate you, and pray 
 for them which despitefully 
 use you and persecute you." 
 
 have its full efficacy, we should,, 
 with M. Comte, regard the 
 Grand Eire, Humanity, or 
 Mankind, as composed in the 
 past solely of those who, in 
 every age and position, have 
 played their part worthily in 
 life. It is only as thus re- 
 stricted that the aggregate of 
 our species becomes an object 
 deserving our veneration. The 
 unworthy members of it are 
 best dismissed from our habit- 
 ual thoughts." (Mill's Comte,. 
 p. I23-) 
 
 " (b) Fittest by itspowej^ of adaptation, to the individual 
 man, to society and to nations, or the living for others, 
 called Altruism. 
 
 Altruism of Chrlst: 
 
 " For scarcely for a right- 
 eous man will one die; yet per- 
 adventure for a good man 
 some would even darie to die. 
 But God commendeth His love 
 toward us, in that, while we 
 were yet sinners, Christ died 
 for us." Romans v, 7, 8. " I 
 live by the faith of the Son of 
 God, who loved me, and gave 
 himself for me." Gal. ii, 20. 
 
 " Seeing ye have purified 
 your souls in obeying the truth 
 through the Spirit, unto un- 
 
 Altruism of Comte: 
 
 Men must live not so spec- 
 ially for the good of each other 
 as for the good of Humanity. 
 
 As to the moral affections, 
 the Positivists say " that the 
 Real Life is dominated by the 
 affections. The heart is the 
 necessary centre of our Unity. 
 The social unity would be im- 
 possible without the discipline 
 of the individual; but for such 
 a task merely mental action is 
 too weak. Considerations ad- 
 dressed only to the reasoning 
 
100 
 
 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 feigned love of the brethren, 
 see that ye love one another 
 with a pure heart fervently." 
 I Peter i, 22. 
 
 " Be ye all of one mind, 
 having compassion one of an- 
 other: love as brethren; be 
 pitiful, be courteous; not ren- 
 dering evil for evil, or railing 
 for railing; but contrariwise, 
 blessing." I Peter iii, 8-9. 
 
 " Herein is love, not that 
 we loved God, but that He 
 loved us, and sent His Son to 
 be a propitiation for our sins. 
 Beloved, if God so loved us, 
 we ought also to love one an- 
 other. No man hath seen God 
 at any time. If we love one 
 another God dwelleth in us, 
 and His love is perfected in 
 us. And this commandment 
 have we from Him, That he 
 who loveth God, loves his 
 brother also." I John iv, 10-24. 
 
 " Bear ye one another's bur 
 dens, and so fulfil the law of 
 Christ." Gal. vi, 2. 
 
 "Give to him that asketh 
 thee. Love your enemies, bless 
 them that curse you, do good 
 to them that hate you, and 
 pray for them that despitefully 
 use you and persecute you." 
 Matt, v, 44. 
 
 " We ought to lay down our 
 lives for the brethren." I John 
 iii, 16. 
 
 faculties amount to nothing at 
 all in the presence of passion. 
 The only discipline of which 
 the individual is susceptible 
 consists in the repression of 
 personality by the develop- 
 ment of sociality. Disinter- 
 ested love must be awaked 
 and stimulated and cherished 
 as the only power capable of 
 really quelling our great ene- 
 my — the true Satan — the nat- 
 urally preponderating selfish- 
 ness." (Edgar on the Positive 
 Religion of Humanity.) 
 
 '* We do not doubt that child- 
 ren and young persons will one 
 day be again systematically 
 disciplined in self-mortifica- 
 tion; that they will be taught, 
 as in antiquity, to control their 
 appetites, to brave dangers, 
 and submit voluntarily to pain, 
 as simple exercises in educa- 
 tion. Nor can any pains taken 
 be too great to form the habit, 
 and develop the desire, of 
 being useful to others and to 
 the world, by the practice, in- 
 dependently of reward and of 
 every personal consideration, 
 of positive virtue beyond the 
 bound of prescribed duty." 
 (Mill's Comte, p. 134.) 
 
 "The Golden Rule of Moral- 
 ity, in M. Comte's religion, is 
 to live for others, znvre pouj 
 'autrie. To do as we would 
 be done by, and to love our 
 neighbor as ourselves, are not 
 sufficient for him. They par- 
 take, he thinks, of the nature 
 of personal calculations. We 
 should endeavor not to love 
 ourselves at all. We shall not 
 succeed in it, but we should 
 make the nearest approach to 
 it possible. Nothing less will 
 satisfy him, as towards human- 
 ity, than the sentiment which 
 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 
 
 101 
 
 THE DUTIES TAUGHT 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 The Catechism taught each 
 Christian child for centuries: 
 
 Q. What is thy duty toward 
 God? 
 
 A. My duty toward God is, 
 to believe in him; to fear him; 
 and to love him with all my 
 heart, with all my mind, with 
 all my soul, and with all my 
 strength; to worship him; to 
 give him thanks; to put my 
 whole trust in him; to honor 
 his holy Name and His Word; 
 and to serve him truly all the 
 days of my life. 
 
 Q. What is thy duty toward 
 thy neighbor ? 
 
 A. My duty toward my 
 neighbor is, to love him as 
 myself, and to do to all men as I 
 would they should do unto me. 
 To love, honor, and succor my 
 father and mother; to honor 
 and obey the civil authority; to 
 submit myself to all my gov- 
 ernors, teachers, spiritual pas- 
 tors, and masters; to order my- 
 self lowly and reverently to all 
 my betters; to hurt nobody by 
 word or deed; to be true and 
 just in all my dealings. To 
 bear no malice nor hatred in 
 my heart; to keep my hands 
 from picking and stealing, and 
 my tongue from, evil speaking, 
 lying and slandering; to keep 
 my body in temperance, sober- 
 ness and chastity; not to covet 
 nor desire other men's goods; 
 l)ut to learn and labor truly to 
 get mine own living, and do 
 my duty in that state of life 
 which it shall please God to 
 call me. 
 [8] 
 
 one of his favorite writers, 
 Thomas a Kempis, addresses 
 to God. A mem te plus quam 
 me, nee me nisi propter te^ 
 (Mill's Comte, p. 125.) 
 
 THE DUTIES TAUGHT ^Y 
 POSITIVISM. 
 
 Positivism acknowledges no 
 God, and therefore acknowl- 
 edges no duties, reverence or 
 responsibility to any. Human- 
 ity is in place of God. 
 
 A man's duties are rather to 
 society than to himself. " So- 
 ciety," says Dr. Frothing- 
 ham (Religion of Humanity), 
 "preaches contentment, dis- 
 interestedness, peacefulness, 
 faith, self-control, joy." 
 
 In Positive Philosophy, hu- 
 man nature is sufficient for 
 human nature. If it needed 
 supernatural help, there is 
 none to supply it. 
 
 ''Prayer," says Mill, "ac- 
 cording to M. Comte, does 
 not mean asking; it is a mere 
 outpouring of feeling, . . but 
 must be in all cases to women." 
 (Mill's Comte, p. 136.) 
 
102 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 " But," said another Positivist present, "though we 
 may not propose a morality new to Christianity, yet 
 Christian morality is so mixed up with supernatural- 
 ism that we can subject it to no scientific test as we 
 can the Religion of Humanity, taught by our great 
 philosophy." 
 
 '^ Right here," remarked the Dean, " be it well 
 noted, that Christianity was the first to appoint the 
 test of experience. ' Whoso doeth my will,' says 
 Christ, ' shall know of the doctrine.' ' By their fruits 
 ye shall know them.' Dare any merely human philos- 
 ophy challenge such a test ? If Christianity has not 
 and cannot bear more, better and other fruit than the 
 so-called Religion of Humanity, then renounce it. If 
 there is anything more humane than the religion of 
 Christ, what is it ? What, as to man and before the 
 laws of civilized countries, has done more for woman 
 to sanctify her relations to man as wife; what has 
 done more for her than the equity laws devised by 
 Christian clergymen, as to her dower as distributee 
 of her husband's estate ? What has more protected 
 children, lunatics and idiots ? Who more than Stephen 
 Langton, a Popish Cardinal, ever wrote such laws for 
 human freedom as the Magna Charta ? They are the 
 bulwark of our liberties to-day. They entered, once 
 for all, into the civil or juristic life of the world. Men 
 are most free when possessed of that liberty over pas- 
 sions of selfishness and spiritual fear, wherewith Christ 
 hath made them free. The Positivist cannot announce 
 a desired dignity of humanity in its organic unity or 
 ultimate exaltation, that Christianity has not an- 
 nounced for ages before, and yet announces as its 
 peculiar and previous teaching. But there is this all- 
 important distinction between this religion of human 
 
MR. LEWES. 103 
 
 conduct without religion and that religion of human 
 conduct with religion, and that is one oi power'' 
 
 "The religion of unqualified altruism," remarked 
 Mr. Spencer, " arose to correct by an opposite excess 
 the religion of unqualified egoism."* 
 
 "I cannot forbear," f said Mr. Lewes, "from point- 
 ing out one immense omission in Comte's Religion of 
 Humanity. It makes religion purely and simply what 
 has hitherto been designated morals. In thus limit- 
 ing religion to the relations in which we stand toward 
 one another, and toward humanity, Comte leaves an 
 important element aside ; for even upon his own show- 
 ing, humanity can only be the Supreme Being of oicr 
 world — it cannot be the Supreme Being of the universe. 
 To limit the universe to our planet is to take'a rustic, 
 untravelled view of this great subject. If, in this our 
 terrestrial sojourn, all we can distinctly know must be 
 limited to the sphere of our planet, nevertheless even 
 here, we, standing on this ball of earth and looking 
 into the infinite of which we know it to be but an 
 atom, must irresistibly feel and know that the human- 
 ity worshipped here cannot extend its dominion, there. 
 I say, therefore, that supposing our relations toward 
 humanity may one day be systematized into a distinct 
 cultus^ and made a religion, and supposing further our 
 whole practical priesthood to be limited to it, there 
 must still remain for us, outlying this terrestrial sphere, 
 the other sphere named Infinite, into which our eager 
 and aspiring thoughts TtV// wander, carrying with them, 
 as ever, the obedient emotions of love and awe. So 
 that beside the Religion of Humanity, there must be 
 Religion of the Universe; beside the conception of hu- 
 
 * See p. 182-186 of Spencer on Sociology. 
 
 f Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences, Bohn's edition, p. 342. 
 
104 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 manity, we need the conception of a God as the infinite 
 life, from whom the universe proceeds, not in alien in- 
 difference — not in estranged subjection — but in the ful- 
 ness of abounding power, as the incarnation of resistless 
 activity. In plainer language, there must ever remain 
 the old distinction between religion and morality — 
 between our relations to God and our relations to 
 man; the only difference between the old and the new 
 being that in the old theology moral precepts were 
 inculcated with a view to a celestial habitat; in the 
 new they will be inculcated with a view to the general 
 progress and happiness of the race." 
 
 Mr. Mill replied : '' M. Comte says, that assuming 
 the existence of a Supreme Being (which he is as 
 far from' denying as affirming), the best, and even the 
 only, way in which we can rightly worship Him, is by 
 doing our utmost to love and serve that other great 
 being (humanity) whose inferior Providence has be- 
 stowed on us all the benefits that we owe to the labors 
 and virtues of a former generation. It may not be 
 consonant to usage to call this a religion; but the 
 term, so applied, has a meaning, and one which is not 
 adequately expressed by any other word. Candid 
 persons of all creeds may be willing to admit, that if 
 a person has an ideal object, his attachment and sense 
 of duty toward which are able to control and discip- 
 line all his other sentiments and propensities, and 
 prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a reli- 
 gion; and though every one naturally prefers his own 
 religion to any other, all must admit that if the object 
 of this attachment, and of this feeling of duty, is the 
 aggregate of our fellow creatures, this religion of the 
 infidel cannot in honesty and conscience, be called in- 
 trinsically a bad one."* 
 
 * Mill's Comte, p. 121. 
 
HUXLEY AND COMTE. 105 
 
 "That part of M. Comte's writings," said Professor 
 Huxley, "which deals with the philosophy of physical 
 science, appeared to me to possess singularly very 
 little value. Great, however, was my perplexity, not 
 to say disappointment; as I followed the progress of 
 this ^ mighty son of earth ' in his work of reconstruc- 
 tion. Undoubtedly ' Dieu ' disappeared, but the Nou- 
 veaic Grand-Etre Supi'eme, a gigantic fetish, turned 
 out brand-new by M. Comte's own hands, reigned in his 
 stead. ' Roi,' also was not heard of; but in his place 
 I found a minutely defined organization, which, if it 
 ever came into practice, would exert a despotic au- 
 thority such as no Sultan has rivalled, and no Puritan 
 Presbytery in its palmiest days could hope to excel. 
 While as for the ' Culte systematique de L'Humanite,' 
 I, in my blindness, could not distinguish it from sheer 
 Popery, with M. Comte in the chair of St. Peter, and 
 the names of most of the saints changed.* In fact, 
 M. M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be com- 
 pendiously described as Catholicism minus Christian- 
 
 ity."t 
 
 "That is no religion," remarked the Dean, "for one 
 which is not a religion for all. All may be saved by 
 Christ, but Altruism or the sacrifice of one's self is an 
 impossibility to the totality of human nature, except 
 as a Christian grace. The invincible law of self-pres- 
 ervation absolutely forbids it. Under cases most like 
 it, the apparent Altruist has some compensating and 
 selfish motive. His own pleasure, in some way, is 
 paramount. It is useless to ignore the real weakness 
 of human nature for a romantic theory. All lines of 
 interest centre at the grave. If the grave be dark, all 
 
 * Huxley : Lay Sermons, p. 148. 
 f lb., p. 140. 
 
106 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 else is dark. If life be all, its brevity and troubles 
 make it pessimistic to most. The weak man cannot 
 reach the ideal virtues of the strong few. Virtue 
 may be its own reward, not its own inspiration, and 
 weak human nature must be driven to seek it by fear 
 or drawn to embrace it by hope." 
 
 (c) Fittest in its power of resistance. 
 
 The Dean continued, " It has struggled with the 
 poverty of its disciples and survived ; it has struggled 
 with the enervating and corrupting wealth of its 
 disciples, and survived ; it has struggled with the 
 power of Emperors, and survived ; it has struggled 
 with the captious cavils of philosophy, falsely so- 
 called, and survived ; it has struggled with unscien- 
 tific opposition of science, and survived ; and for over 
 eighteen hundred years, while all else changed, em- 
 pires rising and crumbling, conquerors re-mapping 
 the nations, schools of philosophy blazing and expir- 
 ing in darkness, in spite of faggots, beasts and 
 dungeons, this religion has survived. 
 
 '' It is now confronted by Positivism — the boldest 
 and the weakest inherently of all opposers. One class 
 say they know nothing of anything ; and another 
 claims to know nothing but laws. But they cannot 
 tell what these laws are, and the laws will not talk 
 about themselves — or, in the language of you, Mr. 
 Mill, ' the laws of nature cannot account for their own 
 origin.' This positive agnosticism and this agnostic 
 positivism are the giants to overthrow Christianity ! 
 But in the eternal fitness of things this cannot pos- 
 sibly be — they attempt too much. Other skepticisms 
 of more strength have failed before them. As often 
 as humanity relies merely upon itself, it fails. It 
 failed in Greece in the verv face of all the Philoso- 
 
UNIVERSAL DEPENDENCE. 107 
 
 phers. It failed in Rome in the face of the Republic 
 and in the face of the Empire. It failed in France, 
 when the goddess of Reason was enthroned and 
 legalized assassins cut the throats of her worshippers. 
 It fails even within the pale of the Church, just so 
 far as professing Christians fall under a worldly 
 spirit, and aim at worldly ends. It fails in every in- 
 dividual, as in Peter, who trusts in his own strength. 
 Withhold the sun from the seed, and gravitation trom 
 the atom, the molecule, or the mass and they are 
 dead. Nothing has power in itself. Power is a gift, 
 and the greater the power the more distant its source 
 and the profounder the mystery. Humanity, ifi itself^ 
 has power of neither mind, motive nor deed. 'We 
 know but in part.' ' We fade away suddenly like the 
 grass.' The mistake of many is in shutting their 
 eyes to the omnipresence of the dependence. Indeed, 
 they admit it when they attempt to set up the organ- 
 ism of Humanity, but they strangely deny it when 
 they state the religious conditions of that Humanity. 
 Environment is a momentous fact in human character 
 and conduct. Every relation helps or hinders us. 
 Superior minds help inferior minds, and just how 
 high this help is to go, no one can tell. So weak is 
 man in himself that he could not be left alone. 
 Christianity more emphatically than Positivism, 
 reaches the unity of the race, in saying, that as ' we 
 are members one of another, so we are to bear one 
 another's burdens.' As each belongs to all, all are 
 to help each. Conduct is most deficient even in 
 the best. The good we would do, we do not, and 
 the evil we would avoid, that we do. With all the 
 help of the glorious progressions of civilization of 
 the past — all its speculations —sciences, poesies, ora- 
 
108 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 tions, maxims of truth ; with all its Psalms, and pray- 
 ers and sacrifices, with the best that man alone could 
 do, and the divinest help that he sought and ob- 
 tained from God, how has execution faltered upon 
 promise and intention, and how far short has conduct 
 come from the dignity of Humanity and the glory of 
 God? 
 
 " Let it be once admitted that there must be some re- 
 ligion as distinguished from a non-religious morality, 
 and the Christian religion will submit its divine claims 
 to the judgment of mankind. No such faith has ever 
 been so tried and so triumphant. It has proved the 
 fittest moral factor in all the past and can be well 
 trusted in the future. Religion is man's instinc- 
 tive dependence on some power, conceived of as 
 many or as one, supreme of all ; and it is expressed 
 either by ritualistic worship or by moral conduct 
 or by both. Mr. Mill alludes to religion as 'that feel- 
 ing of the Infinite, which is deeply rooted in human 
 nature.' Polytheism, embracing the worship of an- 
 cestors and of the Olympian gods, is worship without 
 conduct ; Monotheism, including Judaism and Chris- 
 tianity is the worship of the One God with conduct ; 
 and Atheism, including Positivism and Agnosticism 
 is the effort to attain a morality announced by the 
 intellect, without worship, and independent of any 
 and all supernatural considerations. Most men think 
 this impracticable. The evolution of religion, like all 
 evolution, dropping nothing and unifying all things, 
 may rise from the idea of many gods to the idea of 
 one God, but not expire in the idea of no God. Evo- 
 lution extends, not restricts, and looks to perfection 
 of its object, not its extinction. So far from the un- 
 derlying idea of religion — theism — fading out in 
 
TRUE RELIGION. 109 
 
 Atheism, it rather rises higher to a more perfect ideal 
 of Power. As religion is a fact, it will be certain to 
 go on by the law of continuity, unless the hindrances 
 to it be overwhelming. But are they of that nature 
 and strength ? The cause of whatever religious in- 
 difference there may be, is not in any recently dis- 
 covered weakness or invalidity in its truth, but in 
 the environment of indifference occasioned by the in- 
 tense absorption of the minds of men by other sub- 
 jects. The people do not stop to consider religion. 
 The cares and pleasures and riches of this world 
 come in and drive out the awe and love of the soul, 
 which is religion. If religion be not inherently 
 perishable, it will continue to live, though an un- 
 friendl)^ parallel may live by its side. The question 
 is not whether other things may live for awhile, but, 
 'Is Religion Dying?' We say not, because its hin- 
 drances are not internal but external and transient. 
 No competing influence has anything like its moral 
 power. Trouble will bring us back, so that the 
 world will see and acknowledge religion again. 
 
 '* Whatever freedom of will men may have, tends 
 to prevent a coercion of faith. Religion must be 
 favored by religious conditions. Environment affects 
 religion as it does all else. Shakespeare says that 
 one fire drives out another fire : in other words, as 
 the mind has but ' a single eye,' it is always pre-oc- 
 cupied by a single object. Much of one thing is less 
 of something else. Inverse cor-relatives are not both 
 present at the same time in the same place. The 
 more thought the less is the feeling, and the more 
 feeling the less is the thought. The excess of either 
 unbalances the soul ; and true religion and true phil- 
 osophy is the equilibrium of both. The mind may 
 
110 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 be pre-occupied by the curious researches of learning, 
 the pampering pleasures of wealth, or the embittering 
 privations of poverty. Men think not of the pleasures 
 of heaven when their minds are full of the things of 
 •earth. Their hearts are lifted up. ' The ox knoweth 
 his owner and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth 
 not know, my people do not consider.' For this reason 
 as a feeling and worship, religion has ever had an un- 
 equal influence upon conduct, whether as to times or 
 number of persons. ' Know this, also,' wrote Paul to 
 Timothy, ' that in the last days perilous times shall 
 come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, 
 covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient 
 to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affec- 
 tion, truce-breakers, false-accusers, incontinent, fierce, 
 despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, 
 high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than the lovers 
 of God ; having a form of godliness, but denying the 
 power thereof. From such turn away. For of this 
 sort are they which are ever learning, and never 
 able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Evil 
 men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiv- 
 ing and being deceived.' 
 
 " Thus we see that the Church has been warned to 
 expect indifference, lukewarmness, denial of the truth. 
 Though for eighteen hundred years, the Church has 
 endured the external pressure at times of adverse poli- 
 tical events and internal agitations as to doctrine or 
 authority, it has steadily extended its religious and 
 moral influence to every institution of civilization. 
 At intervals, even from the first, these skeptical 
 spasms have come and gone." 
 
 " The army of liberal thought," said Professor 
 Huxley, '' is, at present, in very loose order ; and 
 
PROF. HUXLEY. Ill 
 
 many a spirited free-thinker makes use of his freedom 
 mainly to vent nonsense. We should be the better 
 for a vigorous and watchful enemy to hammer us in- 
 to cohesion and discipline ; and I, for one, lament 
 that the bench of Bishops cannot show a man of the 
 calibre of Butler of the 'Analogy,' who, if he were 
 alive, would make short work of much of the cur- 
 rent a priori infidelity/' * 
 
 "There is now a straining," remarked the Dean, 
 ''after new theories of nature." f 
 
 " To what do you attribute this ? " inquired the 
 host. 
 
 "In my opinion," replied the Dean, '^ First, i)ie7is 
 minds are possessed with ambition for original thinking. 
 
 " We hear a good deal of the joylessness of the 
 present generation, and no doubt there is a greater 
 unrest and a greater impatience among those who 
 lead the forward movement of thought than in any 
 former time, and partly, no doubt, this is true to 
 want of trust, want of power to lean on any invis- 
 ible hand ; partly, too, to a habit closely connected 
 with this want of trust — a habit contracted by men 
 of the greatest intellect^ of straining to see or say 
 something new. Even now we are sure that the 
 tendency to grasp at new ideas is often fatal, not 
 merely to the utilization of old truths, but to the 
 mere holding of the ground which had been gained 
 by our ancestors. All this razing to the earth of 
 the moral and religious beliefs of former days is 
 far more loss to man than the best of the new 
 glimpses of truth are gain. And, indeed, the tend- 
 
 * Huxley : Lay Sermons, p. 62. 
 
 f See an article in Popular Science Monthly, from the Specta- 
 tor for Nov., 1879, on Intellectual Straining in Authorship. 
 
112 IS RELIGION D YING?- 
 
 ency is to eradicate the temper of repose, the heart 
 of confidence in what has been gained, and to sub- 
 stitute for it a constant reliance on the stimulus of 
 an intellectual excitement, the very essence of which 
 depends on change. This state of things existed 
 among the philosophers at Athens. Paul says : ' The 
 Athenians and strangers which were there spent their 
 time in nothing else but either to tell or hear some 
 new thing.' Such mental fickleness of the few can- 
 not long affect the religious faith of the many. It is 
 the few that think more than they feel ; but the many 
 feel more than they think, and feeling is religion." 
 
 " We know very little," said Mr. Froude,* '' of the 
 conditions of intellectual energy. In the past history 
 of mankind it has been intermittent. Periods of ac- 
 tivity and progress have alternated with periods of 
 rest, as if the mind was like the soil, which requires a 
 respite of stagnation to recover from an exhausting 
 crop. It is possible, it is even likely, that the appe- 
 tite for change which has characterized the last cen- 
 tury may be followed by a wave of spiritual and pol- 
 itical conservatism, that science will pause for awhile 
 in its discoveries, and that our new knowledge may 
 be allowed time to shape itself into a form with some 
 humanity in it." 
 
 "The psychical history of our race," remarked Pro- 
 fessor Winchell, '' presents a succession of religious 
 and intellectual phases alternating with each other. 
 Faith and intellect move in two equal intersecting or- 
 bits, having a common centre. When the crisis 
 comes and faith and intellect change places, both 
 are found to have gained by all preceding alterna- 
 tions. Sometimes, faith and intellect have been united 
 
 * North American Review, December, 1879. 
 
PROFESSOR WINCHELL. 113 
 
 and sometimes disunited, but always, by the law of 
 antagonism or of co-operation, they have left the 
 moral life of man upon a higher plane. These revolu- 
 tions need not surprise us. They come and they go, 
 not in fixed periods, but by the fixed law of exhaus- 
 tion and repair. 
 
 " Second — The 7?iinds of men are preoccupied with the 
 materialism of science, as another cause of Atheistic or, 
 at least, Agnostic doubt. 
 
 " Scientific investigations have always, in the end, 
 strengthened religion. Religion fears that science 
 will discover too little rather than too much. Igno- 
 rance is more destructive than knowledge, whether in 
 secular or sacred directions. But it is knowledge, not 
 theories, all need." Said the Dean : 
 
 " Materialists discovering some of the potencies 
 manifested in matter, assume them to be self-existent 
 or eternal, and so, deifying force, deny that there is 
 any creating Being behind the potencies. To this im- 
 personal force, the mind of man soon brings itself into 
 utter denial of all accountability. Matter never cate- 
 chises. Then the sense of moral obligation ceases ; 
 the moral man goes down, and, to the extent of the 
 individuals thus morally collapsed, society goes down. 
 The sense of right and wrong is immediately' con- 
 nected with a belief in some Supreme Being to whom 
 man is responsible. If there be no such being, there 
 is no right and no wrong ; for before the march of 
 Fate, things are inevitably what they are, and there- 
 fore neither right nor wrong. Right and wrong be- 
 long to free, not necessary action. Duress takes all 
 responsibility out of conduct. But it is said that these 
 materialists separate morality from religion, and live 
 innocent and moral lives without belief in a personal 
 
114 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 God. It must be remembered that these men have 
 been reared by religious parents, in religious homes, 
 and pass their lives associated with those who believe 
 in and worship a personal God. From such influence 
 they cannot escape. Besides, they do not draw the 
 social consequences of their material theories. They 
 hold on more or less consciously to old conclusions as 
 to moral accountability, while they indulge new theo- 
 ries of material manifestations. No man is an out and 
 out Atheist; but so far as he is an Atheist, just so far he 
 morally breaks down, except as held up by the moral 
 influences of those around him who are not Atheists. 
 There is no ultimate triumph in Atheism. 
 
 " Third — The conceit of science or a mindpre-occiipied with 
 one line of thought sees no importance, no interest, in other 
 thoughts. Special minds give undue importance to special 
 ideas. Religion craves all possible light — light is the 
 mantle of God. The Church has been the great 
 school teacher in the past. In 836 the Council at 
 Rome established schools for the poor. So did the 
 Council at Lateran, 11 79, and the Council at Lyons, 
 1256. The Church established nearly all the great 
 schools and colleges of Europe. Most men of great 
 learning, such as Copernicus and Newton, have been 
 great churchmen ; so that it is not culture that in- 
 jures religion and so civilization, but a culture that is 
 narrow and exclusive of the moral. A little learning 
 is, and ever will be, a dangerous thing. The world 
 daily sees those who are educated just enough to 
 make fools of them. The crazy conceits of the half 
 educated Atheists are more destructive of personal 
 happiness and social order than the credulous super- 
 stition of the Middle Age peasant. That is best for 
 man which leads to the best conduct. In the religion 
 
THE DEAN. 115 
 
 of a godless nature, man is compelled to do as he does, 
 and one act is as right as another. This evident er- 
 ror will work its own correction. 
 
 " Fourth — The Two Philosophies. 
 
 " But this belief in a nature without a God, leads to 
 two different philosophies of life. The cultivated few 
 hope to find social order in philosophy without re- 
 ligion, but the uncultivated many care for neither 
 philosophy nor religion, and disorder society by their 
 brutal wills. To the fortunate all is for the best ; to 
 the unfortunate all is for the worst ; both are indiffer- 
 ent to God, whom they deny. The rich are optimists; 
 the poor are pessimists. One enjoys his wealth with 
 indifference to the poor ; and the poor groans under 
 his dark fortunes with a despairing hatred of the rich. 
 The rich thanks no God for his wealth, and the poor 
 fears no God when in anarchy he seeks to revenge 
 himself on the rich. The one says : ' Soul, take thine 
 ease, eat, drink and be merry, for thou hast much 
 goods laid up in store.' The other says : ' There is 
 no God, no hell, no heaven, no hereafter, no right, no 
 wrong, and I will be most of the fiend now, as there 
 can be nothing of the saint in the blank hereafter.' 
 
 " Now to what extent is this disorganizing philos- 
 ophy to prevail ? The skeptical scientists are few as 
 compared with the whole population ; and they are 
 few as compared with the religious scientists. Galton, 
 in his work on ' Men of Science,' shows that seven out 
 of every ten men of science in England belong to 
 some branch of the Christian church. Even the other 
 three-tenths, who may ignore religion, are not agreed 
 among themselves. All that skeptics of any age have 
 done is to tear down. Nihilism is the result. They 
 claim to know nothing of matter in the past or 
 
116 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 of matter in the future, and admit that inexorable 
 fate dominates them in the present. 
 
 " This is the end many learned of both sexes have 
 reached in Russia, and some of all classes in Germany, 
 France and in this country. What can be expected 
 from such a philosophy of despair? The worst might 
 be expected, if it were not the fact that these disor- 
 ganizing elements are opposed one to the other, and 
 no one overwhelmingly numerous. The great mass 
 and average of people have no time to confuse them- 
 selves with disturbing speculations ; the richt, with 
 their easy apathy, are necessarily few in number, and 
 the multitude of the despairing poor are powerless to 
 destroy for any long period of time. Revolutions are 
 exceptions. There must be in the nature of things 
 more order than disorder in the world. Wrong con- 
 ditions soon right themselves. 
 
 " Fifth — A Moral Iiiterregmim is Moral Chaos. A 
 change of religion is a change of morality, and any 
 possible interregnum would, of course, be so far de- 
 structive of civilization. It is equally certain that any 
 possible religious interregnum would be destructive 
 of all moral order. What is morality ? It is the 
 doing of that which ought to be done. But if the 
 materialists be right, and there is no God, no future, 
 and so no responsibility, who can say that one thing 
 ought to be done more than another ? Actions would 
 not then be because they ought to be, but because 
 they must be. According to materialists, men steal 
 because they must, and burn, kill and outrage the 
 innocent and helpless, not because they are wicked, 
 but because they were created so to act, and must so act. 
 Such a philosophy would authorize every crime, and is 
 so understood by the Socialists and Revolutionists who 
 
THE DEAN. 117 
 
 preach it. The deeds of men are responsible as con- 
 duct either to a personal finite man or to a personal 
 infinite God, or they are irresponsible, as mere auto- 
 matic, inevitable actions to an impersonal, compulsory 
 nature or matter. But if actions are irresponsible to 
 an impersonal, compulsory nature, then they are ne- 
 cessary actions and not moral conduct at all, being 
 neither right nor wrong. But if what we do be either 
 right or wrong, as conduct, there must be responsi- 
 bility for wrong. If responsibility, it must be to man 
 or to God. If matter be all, and there be no God, a 
 fortiori there can be no man, except as a form of mat- 
 ter. If man be only a form of matter, then, as matter 
 cannot be responsible to matter — m.an cannot be re- 
 sponsible to man ; so that, if there be no God, there 
 can be no responsibility, and, if responsibility, no con- 
 sequences for wrong and no safety to the right. Edu- 
 cated by this philosophy, the Communist soon learns 
 to hold treason and patriotism, honesty and dishon- 
 esty, peace and violence, truth and falsehood to be 
 equally right. This is the practical result of divorc- 
 ing morality from religion, or human conduct from 
 responsibility to some power above man. Men must 
 choose between some kind of religion and the sword. 
 Something must govern. In an age of selfishness, 
 when the struggle for existence is universal and desper- 
 ate ; when class is angry with class, men must become 
 either soldiers or Christians, and for awhile perhaps 
 both. And as anticipation of the future governs the 
 present, and as religion has its power in the problems 
 of the future, so religion ever has and will govern 
 mankind. There are rhythms or inequalities of the 
 religious force as of every other ; but as the soul of 
 man ever confronts the eternal mystery, it will have 
 its altars and its upward vision. 
 
 [9] 
 
118 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 "It is a great mistake to suppose that Christianity is 
 dying. So far from it, it is ever under the law of 
 evolution, taking on new life. A limited few who 
 entertain themselves with the material speculations of 
 the ancient schools, reproduced in the modern, may 
 become confused amidst a multitude of theories, but 
 the average class have neither time nor inclination to 
 study metaph)rsical infidelity. They are practical, and 
 look to practical results. The danger of this class in 
 this country is from irreligious customs introduced 
 by atheistical foreigners, not from doubts suggested 
 by investigations as to the validity of Christianity it- 
 self. Science seems receding from its atheistical 
 materialism. Its knowledge is far more limited than 
 it, at one time, confidently expected it to be. It has 
 not discovered the principle of life. Herbert Spencer, 
 with equal force and solemnity, writes, ' In all direc- 
 tions our investigations bring us face to face with an 
 insoluble enigma.' We learn at once the greatness 
 and the littleness of the human intellect — its power in 
 dealing with all that comes within the range of ex- 
 perience, its impotence in dealing with all that trans- 
 cends experience. We realize with special vividness 
 the utter incomprehensibleness of the simplest fact 
 considered in itself. The scientific man, more truly 
 than any other, knoivs that in its essence nothing can 
 be known. Even those rich, who, in the independence 
 incident to wealth, are indifferent to religion, are even 
 fewer in number than the scientific skeptics. It is 
 true that the wealth of the ungodly rich is not sancti- 
 fied, and is of no moral or religious use to the world, 
 and i'n some respects may be against religion ; yet 
 death and the vicissitudes of life, especially in 
 America, soon redistribute the fortunes of the few, 
 
THE DEAN. 119 
 
 and so this class cannot long injure the influence of 
 religion. The danger to society is in the irreligion of 
 that class who, having neither learning, wealth, nor 
 religious hopes, have nothing. They include those 
 godlessly and partially educated — educated in 
 thoughts and not in conscience — and these, uniting 
 with the army of the unfortunate, the incapable, the 
 unsuccessful, the idle, having nothing to lose and 
 everything to be hoped for from social changes and 
 political convulsions — this class, now, as with the 
 Greeks and Romans, is an element of danger ; and it 
 is possible that they may disturb the social order but 
 never destroy religion. Indeed, faith follows revolu- 
 tions. The successor to Caesar was Christ. The less 
 religion, the more the despotism! Except a very few, 
 the great champions of religion, of liberty and of 
 humanity have been Christian men — such as the 
 Priests of the Church against the feudal tyrants — the 
 Hamdens and Sydneys — the Chathams and the 
 Washingtons of the world." 
 
 " In point of fact," inquired some one of the com- 
 pany, " Is not religion declining in our Churches and 
 seminaries of learning ? " 
 
 " By no means," replied > the Dean. "Christianity 
 is increasing in the world. The Methodist Church 
 this year appropriates |6oo,ooo for missions against 
 1550,000 last year. The following statistics of all the 
 churches for thirty years show a gain in America: 
 
 Per cent Value of Per cent 
 
 Population, increase. Churches, property. increase. Schools. 
 
 1850 23,191,896 38,062 $87,328,800 87,257 
 
 i860 31,443,321 36 54,009 171,397,932 42 115,224 
 
 1870 38,558,371 22 72,450 354,483,581 33 141,429 
 
 " Religious college statistics also show a great in- 
 crease in the Christian religion: 
 
120 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 1853- 1878 
 
 Harvard i in 10 i in 5 
 
 Brown .... i in 5 3 in 5 
 
 Yale I in 4 2 in 5 
 
 Dartmouth i in 4 i in 3 
 
 Bodowin i in 4 i in,3 
 
 Williams i in 2 4 in 5 
 
 Amherst 5 in 8 4 in 5 
 
 "With the founding of every new town or city, there 
 is the cemetery, the school-house and the church. To 
 say that religion is dying, is to say that the whole 
 supposed precedure of evolution is a mistake, and that 
 the world is going backward and not forward. No 
 doubt many believers become cold, and the church 
 may be somewhat powerless in the midst of a genera- 
 tion perverted by changeable science, corrupted and 
 enervated, as of old, by plethoric wealth, and made 
 bitter and despairing by the disappointed struggles 
 of toil, but the doctrine of evolution is that every- 
 thing progresses forever. We may be sure this is so 
 of ' the truth that makes for righteousness.' The good 
 that is in the Christian faith will be preserved, and 
 the errors, if any, which have been added by man, will 
 be dropped; but as a great faith, in its old and 
 general doctrines, it will not only continue, but in- 
 crease. The hopes of this are, among other reasons, 
 in: [a) The recession of materialistic skepticism be- 
 fore the power of Christian thought which it has 
 awakened. At first, the confident assertions of skep- 
 tical science captured the minds of many reading 
 people, and threatened, as some thought, all the hopes 
 of faith. But Christian thought soon rallied from its 
 surprise. Strong, painstaking minds began to ex- 
 amine the new theories of science and the field was 
 soon better understood. It was then discovered that 
 old materialistic theories had come back under new 
 
THE DEAN. 121 
 
 names — that words had been substituted for argu- 
 ments — that theories had been accepted as science — 
 that conclusions had not been warranted b)^ premises; 
 and then religion became the attacking party, the 
 Nihilism of materialism began to appear in its social 
 consequences, and scientists not only became more 
 cautious in statements and inference, but their distin- 
 guished Virchow admitted that the great doctrine of 
 evolution, which had assumed to dethrone theology, 
 could not claim to be proved as a science. And now 
 what ? Religion will gladly welcome all light, whether 
 from friends or enemies; and the more the better. 
 Let religion know the worst that can be said against 
 it, and then reply patiently, honestly and fully. If, 
 after so many ages, Christianity, and the Jewish 
 religion out of which it grew, can be shown to be false, 
 let it be shown. Fortunately for Christianity, its un- 
 friendly critics now show it no quarters. Let them 
 strike to their hearts' content. Let the old fight go 
 on and be over once more. Religion fears indiffer- 
 ence more than enmity. The factors of the problem 
 are unchanged, and so will the result be. Right and 
 wrong, moral responsibility, social order, death, are 
 the same as ever. Science will help theology to wider 
 and stronger knowledge of God, His works and His 
 economy. The more we know, the more we shall be- 
 lieve. The more we know of nature, the more we 
 magnify supernature. ' The invisible things of Him 
 from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being 
 understood by the things that are made, even His 
 eternal power and godhead.' 
 
 "" {b) One, but not the least significant indication of 
 the times, is the encyclical of his holiness the present 
 Pope of Rome. He urges the Roman Priesthood to 
 
122 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 resume the study of the philosophy of St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, and assault the ranks of skepticism. This, 
 surely, is no sign of weakening on the part of that 
 Church. The replies to skepticism now to be made 
 by both Catholic and Protestant will display a theo- 
 logic thought more glorious than any ever before it. 
 The Greek Church shows no signs of decay. With 
 an awakened interest in all branches of the Church, 
 and less confident positions by the enemy; with a 
 social revolution or two thrown in to prove the state- 
 ment that righteousness alone exalteth nations, it may 
 be confidently claimed that religion will not only not 
 die, but will confirm its former confident command of 
 the situation. In the outcome of things, change must 
 result in improvement; but under all circumstances, 
 religion is indestructible. The Master has promised 
 that the gates of hell shall not prevail against His 
 Kingdom. Those who tear down can never stand 
 against those who build up. Over the gate of despair 
 there will ever arise the bow of hope. The absence 
 of the sun is not its extinction; and it is the nearest 
 in the winter, when its beams are the coldest. Science, 
 criticism, and political unfriendliness are to force 
 religion to see its unanticipated and diviner strength. 
 Religion has more to fear from, ignorance than from 
 enlightenment. It should urge the world to study, to 
 take scales, retorts, and crucibles, and get at atoms, 
 and find what lies below, behind, above and around 
 them, and ' seek after God, if haply they may find 
 Him, though He be not far from every one of us, for 
 in Him we live, and move, and have our being.' 
 
 " 2. Christianity will survive by the laws of Evolution. 
 
 " In the struggle for existence by the inherent nature 
 of a thing, by its power of adaptation, or its power of 
 
HERBERT SPENCER. 123 
 
 resistance, life is seen in a struggle with environment 
 from without, but we are now to look at it as unroll- 
 ing by the laws of its life within." 
 
 Mr, Herbert Spencer remarked, "■ No one need ex- 
 pect that the religious consciousness will die away or 
 will change the lines of its evolution. Its specialities 
 of form, once strongly marked and becoming less dis- 
 tinct during past mental progress, will continue to 
 fade; but the substance of the consciousness will per- 
 sist. That the object-matter can be replaced by an- 
 other object-matter, as supposed by those who think 
 the '- Religion of Humanity ' will be the religion of 
 the future, is a belief countenanced neither by induc- 
 tion nor by deduction. However dominant may be- 
 come the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of 
 Humanity, it can never exclude the sentiment, alone 
 properly called religion, awakened by that which is 
 behind Humanity and behind all other things. The 
 child by wrapping its head in the bed-clothes, may, 
 for a moment, suppress the consciousness of surround- 
 ing darkness; but the consciousness, though rendered 
 less visible, survives, and the imagination persists in 
 occupying itself with that which lies beyond percep- 
 tion.* 
 
 '' Nor will man escape this religious sentiment, even 
 if he open his eyes, and see uniformities where the un- 
 enlightened intellect saw only mystery, and the awful- 
 ness of mystery. There ever arises the question, How 
 came these uniformities? As fast as science transfers 
 more and more things from the category of irregular- 
 ities to the category of regularities, the mysteries that 
 once attached to superstitious explanations of them 
 become a mystery attaching to the scientific explana- 
 
 * H. Spencer: The Study of Sociology, p. 311. 
 
124 IS RELIGION D YING ? 
 
 tions of them ; there is a merging of many special 
 mysteries in one general mystery. The astronomer 
 having shown that the motions of the solar system 
 imply a uniform and invariably acting force he calls 
 gravitation, finds himself utterly incapable of conceiv- 
 ing this force. Though he helps himself to think of 
 the sun's action on the earth by assuming an interven- 
 ing medium, and finds he vmst do this if he thinks 
 about it at all ; yet the mystery reappears when he 
 asks what is the constitution of this medium. While 
 compelled to use units of ether as symxbols, he sees 
 that they can be but symbols. Similarly with the 
 physicist and the chemist. The hypothesis of atoms 
 and the molecules enables them to work out multi- 
 tudinous interpretations that are verified by experi- 
 ment ; but the ultimate unit of matter admits of no 
 consistent conception. Instead of the particular mys- 
 teries presented by those actions of matter they have 
 explained, there rises into prominence the mystery 
 which matter universally presents, and which proves 
 to be absolute. So that beginning with the germinal 
 idea of mystery which the savage gets from a display 
 of power in another transcending his own, and the 
 germinal sentiment of awe accompanying it, the pro- 
 gress is toward an ultimate recognition of a mystery 
 behind every act and appearance, and a transfer of 
 the awe from something special and occasional to 
 something universal and unceasing.* 
 
 '' No such thing, therefore, as a ' Religion of Hu- 
 manity ' can ever do more than temporarily shut out 
 the thought of a power of which humanity is but a 
 small and fugitive product — a power which was in 
 
 *Ib. 
 
HERBERT SPENCER. 135 
 
 course of ever-changing manifestations when human- 
 ity has ceased to be.* 
 
 " The anti-theological bias, ignoring the truth for 
 which religion stands, undervalues religious institu- 
 tions in the past, thinks they are needless in the pres- 
 ent, and expects they will leave no representative in 
 the future. ... It generates an unwillingness to 
 see that a religious system is a normal and essential 
 factor in every evolving society ; that the specialties 
 of it have certain fitness to the social conditions ; and 
 that while its form is temporary its substance is perma- 
 nent. In so far as the anti-theological bias causes an 
 ignoring of these truths, or an inadequate appreciation 
 of them, it causes misinterpretations. To maintain 
 the required equilibrium amid the conflicting sym- 
 pathies and antipathies which contemplation of relig- 
 ious beliefs inevitably generates, is difficult. In pres- 
 ence of the theological thaw going on so fast on all 
 sides, there is on the part of many a fear, and on the 
 part of some a hope, that nothing will remain. But 
 the hopes and the fears are alike groundless ; and 
 must be dissipated before balanced judgments in so- 
 cial science can be formed. Like the transformations 
 that have succeeded one another hitherto, the trans- 
 formation now in progress is but an advance from a 
 lower form, no longer fit, to a higher and fitter form ; 
 and neither will this transformation, nor kindred 
 transformations to come hereafter, destroy that which 
 is transformed, any more than past transformations 
 have destroyed it."f 
 
 " Then," said the host, " if religion could die, must 
 
 *Ib. 
 
 f The Study of Sociology, ch. xii, p. 313. 
 
126 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 not morality die with it ? It would seem that it 
 must." 
 
 '''' Morality without Religion is unsupported^''* said Mr. 
 Spencer. 
 
 "Without seeming so, the development of religious 
 sentiment has been continuous from the beginning ; 
 and its nature when a germ was the same as its nature 
 when fully developed, f 
 
 " Clearly, a visionary hope misleads those who 
 think that in an imagined age of reason which might 
 forthwith replace an age of beliefs but partly rational, 
 conduct would be correctly guided by a code directly 
 based on considerations of utility. A utilitarian sys- 
 tem of ethics cannot at present be rightly thought 
 out even by the select few, and is quite beyond the 
 mental reach of the many. The value of the inher- 
 ited and theologically-enforced code is that it formu- 
 lates, with some approach to truth, the accumulated 
 results of past human experience. It has not risen 
 rationally but empirically. During past times man- 
 kind have eventually gone right after trying all pos- 
 sible ways of going wrong. The wrong-goings have 
 been eventually checked by disaster, and pain and 
 death ; and the right-goings have been continued 
 because not thus checked. There has been a growth 
 of beliefs corresponding to those good and evil re- 
 sults. Hence the code of conduct, embodying dis- 
 coveries slowly and almost unconsciously made 
 through a long series of generations has transcendant 
 authority on its side. 
 
 " Nor is this all. Were it possible forthwith to re- 
 place a tradition-established system of rules, sup- 
 
 * lb. 359. 
 f lb. 310. 
 
HERBERT SPENCER. 137 
 
 posed to be supernaturally warranted, by a system 
 of rules rationally elaborated, no such rationally 
 elaborated system of rules would be adequately oper- 
 ative. To think that it would implies the thought 
 that men's beliefs and actions are throughout deter- 
 mined by intellect ; whereas they are, in much 
 larger degree, determined by feeling. 
 
 ''There is a wide difference between the formal 
 assent given to a proposition that cannot be denied 
 and the efficient belief which produces active con- 
 formity to it. Often the most conclusive argument 
 fails to produce a conviction capable of swaying con- 
 duct ; and often mere assertion, with great emphasis 
 and signs of confidence on the part of the utterer, will 
 produce a fixed conviction where there is no evidence, 
 and even in spite of adverse evidence. Especially is 
 this so among those of little culture. Not only may we 
 see that strength of affirmation and authoritative man- 
 ner create faith in them ; but we may see that their 
 faith sometimes actually decreases if explanation is 
 given. The natural language of the belief displayed 
 by another is that which generates their belief — not 
 the logically-conclusive evidence. Nay, it is even 
 true that the most cultivated intelligences, capable of 
 criticizing evidence and solving arguments to a 
 nicety, are not thereby made rational to the extent 
 that they are guided by intellect apart from emotion. 
 Continually men of the widest knowledge deliber- 
 ately do things they know to be injurious ; suffer 
 the evils that transgression brings ; are deterred 
 awhile by the vivid remembrance of them ; and when 
 the remembrance of them has become faint, trans- 
 gress again. Often the emotional consciousness over- 
 rides the intellectual consciousness absolutely as hyo- 
 
128 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 chondriacal patients show us. All which, and many- 
 kindred facts, make it certain that the operativeness 
 of a moral code depends much more on the emo- 
 tions called forth by its injunctions, than the con- 
 sciousness of the utility of obeying such injunctions. 
 The feelings drawn out during early life toward 
 moral principles, by witnessing the social sanction 
 they possess, influence conduct far more than the per- 
 ception that the conformity lo such principles con- 
 duces to welfare. And in the absence of the feelings 
 which manifestation of these sanctions arouse the 
 utilitarian belief is commonly inadequate to produce 
 conformity. 
 
 ''It is true that the sentiments in the higher 
 races are now in considerable degrees adjusted to 
 these principles ; the sympathies that have become 
 organic in the most developed men, produce spontan- 
 eous conformity to altruistic precepts. Even for such, 
 however, the social sanction, which is in part derived 
 from the religious sanction, is important as strength- 
 ening the influence of these precepts. And for per- 
 sons endowed with less of moral sentiment the social 
 and religious sanctions are still more important aids 
 to guidance. 
 
 " Thus the anti-theological bias leads to serious 
 errors both when it ignores the essential share 
 hitherto taken by religious systems in giving force 
 to certain principles of action, in part abolutely 
 good and in part good relatively to the needs of the 
 time, and again, when it prompts the notion that these 
 principles might now be so established on rational 
 bases as to rule men effectually through their enlight- 
 ened intellects." * 
 
 *H. Spencer: The Study of Sociology, pp. 307-S-9. 
 
THE DEAN. 129 
 
 Some moments of silence followed these remarks, 
 each one pondering them from the standpoint of his 
 own philosophy. 
 
 ''Still," said some one, " that the intellectual world 
 of to-day is drifting away from the religious in be- 
 lief and dogmatic theology of the past, is a fact which 
 is more evident to the student, the wider his acquaint- 
 ance with the current of contemporary thought in 
 Christendom." * 
 
 " Most depends," replied the Dean, "upon your 
 view as to what religion is." 
 
 "The class to which a man shall belong," remarked 
 some one, "is not determined so much by his moral 
 purity or the elevation of his motives as by his belief 
 in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and the miracu- 
 lous birth and resurrection of Christ and his perform- 
 ance of certain mental acts of acceptance toward his 
 Saviour. If he complies with these conditions his 
 moral constitution may be such that he has daily to 
 repent of a propensity to enjoy the pleasures of sin, 
 lets his notes go to protest, and finds it very hard to 
 recall his cattle when he sees them grazing on his 
 neighbors' fields ; yet, if he fights manfully against 
 his wicked propensities and repents of each bad 
 deed, he may remain among the elect. But if one 
 finds himself an atheist, or even a disbeliever in the 
 divine mission of Christ, his righteousness and moral 
 elevation are but as filthy rags. He may labor for 
 humanity with the most disinterested devotion, be 
 animated throughout his life by the highest and pur- 
 est of motives, without doing anything to remove 
 from him the curse of Adam." f 
 
 * North American Review, December, 1879. 
 f North American Review, December, 1879. 
 
130 IS RELIGION DYING? 
 
 " You assume," rejoined the Dean, " two things: First, 
 that the Christian will be the weaker member of society, 
 with his Christianity, believing, sinning and repent- 
 ing all his life ; and, second, that the infidel will be 
 the stronger one without it, being righteous and mor- 
 ally elevated, and a man laboring for humanity and 
 of disinterested devotion, without sins and equally 
 without faith. This, you assume, whereas the truth 
 is, that the Christian will be morally stronger with his 
 religion than he would be without it, and the infidel 
 will be morally weaker without any religion than he 
 would be with it. You compare a Christian of a weak 
 character with an infidel of strong character, but re- 
 verse it and compare a morally weak infidel with a 
 morally strong Christian and note the result. In the 
 outcome of things religion will be placed according to 
 its value. It has been oftentimes before, is now, and 
 ever will be, challenged to show that it is necessary for 
 the control of human conduct. Men are not governed 
 by their intellects, as Mr. Spencer shows, but either by 
 persuasion of feeling, or by force, or by both. In 
 this alternative religion is sure of its supremacy. 
 
 " There is but one simple religion — the natural and 
 the universal — whose manifestions are modified ac- 
 cording to outward circumstances, but whose essence 
 is always the same.* 
 
 " Dependence," continued the Dean, " is the one fact 
 of the universe, and man in his weakness below ever 
 reaches up to super-human power above. Man turns 
 to the Infinite, and this is religion." 
 
 "The religious feeling," said Mr. Tyndall, '' is as 
 much a verity as any other part of human conscious- 
 ness, and the immoval basis of the religious sentiment 
 is in the emotional nature of man. There are such 
 
 * Dr. Pressence : Religions before Christ. 
 
DR. MARTINEAU. 131 
 
 things woven into the texture of man as the feelings 
 of awe, reverence and wonder." * 
 
 " If religion could die," continued the Dean, 
 " all faith in the unseen Father, all hope of an here- 
 after, all anticipated reunions, all worship, all sacred- 
 ness, all things that lift man above the brute — if all 
 that cheers life and glorifies the openings of destiny 
 were to expire, would life be worth living ? 
 
 " Man without a future is an animal in the present. 
 We keep our bodies under now for joys above the 
 body hereafter ; but if there be no hereafter the pres- 
 ent appetite is man's strongest power. Human nature 
 is too weak for present sacrifices without the hope of 
 future compensations. Religion is a life of motives 
 Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The sacri- 
 fice of one's self for another is only possible under 
 hopes of a future reward or intense passions that 
 obliterate the future. The grandest heroism is in acts 
 which, for others, sacrifice the present for a future." 
 
 Dr. Martineau said that '' ReJigion is reproached 
 with not \>€\x\^ pf'ogressive ; it makes amends by being 
 imperishable. The enduring element in our humanity 
 is not in the doctrines which we consciously elaborate, 
 but in the faiths, which unconsciously dispose of us, 
 and never slumber but to wake again. What treatise 
 on sin, what philosophy of retribution is as fresh as 
 the fifty-first Psalm ? What scientific theory has 
 lasted like the Lord's Prayer ? It is an evidence of 
 movement that in a library no books become sooner 
 obsolete than books of science. It is no less a mark 
 of stability that poetry and religious literature survive, 
 and even ultimate philosophies seldom die but to rise 
 again. These, and with them the kindred services of 
 devotion, are the expression of aspirations and faiths 
 * Belfast Address. 
 
132 IS RELIGION D YING? 
 
 which forever cry out for interpreters and guides. 
 And in proportion as you carry your appeal to those 
 deepest seats of our nature you not only reach the 
 firmest ground, but touch accordant notes in every 
 heart, so that the response turns out a harmony." 
 
 Dr. Frothingham remarked : " As to the fact that 
 revealed religion, as we call it, is stronger to-day than 
 it was twenty years ago, I have no doubt. It is 
 stronger here and in Europe, notwithstanding the 
 much talked-of German materialism, and the religion 
 of to-day is all the stronger than that of twenty 
 years ago, in that it is throwing off the secretions 
 of ignorance and presents fewer features incompat- 
 ible with good sense and charity. I am no more a 
 believer in revealed religion to-day than I was a 
 year ago, but, as I said before, I have doubts which I 
 had not then. The creeds of to-day do not seem in 
 my eyes to be so wholly groundless as they were 
 then, and while I believe the next hundred years will 
 see great changes in them, I do not think they are 
 destined to disappear. To sum up the whole matter, 
 the work which I have been doing appears to lead 
 to nothing, and may have been grounded upon mis- 
 taken premises. Therefore it is better to stop ; but 
 I do not want to give the impresssion that I recant 
 anything ; I simply stop denying and wait for more 
 light." 
 
 " ^nd Jesus came and spake unto them, saying: All power is 
 given Unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and 
 teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and 
 of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all 
 things whatsoever I have commanded you ; and, lo, I am with you 
 always, even unto the end of the world. Amen." 
 
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