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IN QUEST OF LIGHT

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IN QUEST OF LIGHT

BY
GOLDWIN SMITH
• t *

X; I,

l

. 1 V ;
I'M-1; ' 1 ; '

\

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
I906
All rights reserved

COPYEIGHT, 1906,
Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1906.

Norraooti 3Prr»3
J. S. disking & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE
A secular journal in England received, in
the course of three months, nine thousand
communications from people seeking for light
on the religious question. The question, then,
is evidently practical.
Never before has there been such a crisis in
the history of belief. Never before has man,
enlightened as he now is by Science, faced
with a free mind the problem of his origin and
destiny. The following papers were penned with the
same desire of light as those of the nine thou
sand. They appeared in different forms, chiefly
as letters, in the New York Sun, to the cour
tesy and courage of whose editor the best
thanks of the writer are due.
It seems that some of those who read them
have wished to refer to them again. They are
printed as they appeared, without attempt,
which would have been vain, to give the series
a literary form.

VI PREFACE
No theory is here propounded. The writer's
aim is to help, if he can, in clearing the posi
tion, pointing to the right line of inquiry,
and guarding against false lures. To this end
inquiry and thought must be free. Reason
must rule. It is, as Bishop Butler frankly
says, " the only faculty we have wherewith to
judge concerning anything, even revelation
itself." Its voice, therefore, is that of our
Maker. Faith, which is an emotion, cannot
supersede or contradict reason, though it may
soar above sense. To know what remains to
us of our traditional belief we must frankly
resign that which, however cherished, the
progress of science and learning has taken
away. But destruction will not be found to
be the object of the writer. Nor, it is to be
hoped, will there be found in him any appear
ance of irreverence. Nothing can be farther
from his heart. G. S.
Toronto, March 20, 1906.

CONTENTS

Preface

LETTER I. Church-going Scepticism
II. The Immortality of the Soul
III. The Immortality of the Soul
IV. Haeckel 
V. Between two Fires
VI. A New Theory of Immortality
VII. The Bee versus Man .
VIII. The Immortality of the Soul
IX. The Immortality of the Soul
X. Easter 
XI. Easter 
XII. Is Religion Worthless?
XIII. The Crimes of Christendom .
XIV. Does Christianity fall with Dogma?
XV. Sabatier on Religions of Authority .
XVI. The Tendencies of Religious Thought
XVII. The Bible: its Critics and its Defenders
XVIII. Is Christianity Dead or Dying? .
vii

PAGE V

II 16
19
273742 48 545962 68 73
83 88
94

viii CONTENTS
LETTER XIX. The Two Theories of Life

XX. Telepathy 
XXI. Spiritual versus Supernatural
XXII. A Problem greater than Telepathy
XXIII. Dr. Osler on Science and Immortality
XXIV. Dispensing with the Soul .
XXV. The Religious Situation .
XXVI. Is Materialism Advancing?
XXVII. Doubt and its Fruits.
XXVIII. The Anglican Petition for Freedom
XXIX. The Remedy for Religious Doubt .
XXX. The Origin of Life ....
XXXI. Rational Christianity
XXXII. Free Thought and Churchmanship .
XXXIII. Religion and Morality
XXXIV. The Conference of the Churches .
XXXV. What do We Owe to the Old Testament
XXXVI. Justice Hereafter ....
XXXVII. Our Present Position

103
107no114118121
126 131
I36141145I48
151155 159
164 170
173

IN QUEST OF LIGHT

IN QUEST OF LIGHT

CHURCH-GOING SCEPTICISM
One clergyman, it seems, denies the infallibility
of the Bible, and treats the Church as an asso
ciation for general improvement. A second finds
in the Bible inaccuracy and worse. A third pro
fesses to believe only so much of the Bible as com
mends itself to his judgment. A correspondent
of the New York Sun rebukes one of them
for indiscretion in the publication of truth. At the
same time he says himself that the truth may be
rightly told in private conversation. For his own
part he regards church-going as a "moral tonic,
and a mental bath," adding that "it is often not
comfortable to get up and take a sponge bath
with cold water, in a cold room, but lacking better
facilities you must do it if you would be de
cent among your friends and agreeable to your
self." The eminent clergyman might perhaps be

2 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
justified in retorting on his critic the charge of
indiscreet disclosure.
How many church-goers are there to whom
church-going is merely a moral and mental sponge
bath, which they take without any definite belief
in the doctrine, that they may be decent among
their friends, and agreeable to themselves? How
many are there who, dissembling in public, tell
the truth in private conversation? If the num
ber is large, the end cannot be far off, and this
hollow crust of outward conformity may presently
fall in with a crash all the greater for delay.
A layman has only to sit and listen to the
sermon. But a clergyman has actively to pro
fess and preach the doctrines. If he has ceased
to believe them, what is he to do? I never
could regard without entire aversion the notion
of certain illuminists that truth was the privilege
of the enlightened few while tradition was the
lot of the crowd. But the most fatal part of
the arrangement was that it dedicated the clergy
to falsehood.
Caution and tenderness are most necessary in
dealing with religious questions, seeing to how
great an extent religion has formed the basis of

CHURCH-GOING SCEPTICISM 3
morality. But scepticism has now spread so far,
not only among the learned, but among mechanics,
that the policy of silence or dissimulation, sup
posing it were sound, is no longer possible. There
is nothing for it now but perfectly free inquiry
and frank acceptance of results. Caution and
tenderness will always be in order, but they are
not incompatible with sincerity.
What is the consequence of silence or dissimu
lation on the part of earnest and reverent in
quirers? It is the abandonment of free inquiry
to reckless and profane hands, with such results
as the "Comic Life of Christ," which I picked up
in an anti-clerical bookstore at Paris. I heard
Mr. Ingersoll lecture on Genesis. He was very
brilliant, and highly effective, but he destroyed
reverence as well as superstition.
"Do not pull down, but build up," is the cry.
How can we build upon a site incumbered with
false tradition? All truth, negative as well as
positive, is constructive; no falsehood is. I see
Henry Newman preferred to his brother Francis
on the ground that Henry was organic, and
Francis was not. What did Henry organize?
A house of mediaeval dreams, in which he could

4 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
not force himself to believe without the help of
such an apparatus of self-obscuration as the
"Grammar of Assent." The "Grammar of As
sent" can only enhance scepticism by its inevitable
fall. Francis Newman, if he did nothing else,
cleared the ground for construction, and he helped
to lay firmly the foundation of all genuine faith,
thorough-going confidence in Truth.
The three eminent clergymen, it is to be feared,
are sliding down a slippery incline, on which no
permanent foothold is to be found.
January, 1896.

II
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
The theological discussion carried on in the
Sun, apparently by practical men anxious to
arrive at truth, has been in that respect more
interesting than the discussions of professional
theologians. One of the subjects was the validity
of the evidence for a future life, which Johnson,
orthodox as he was, could not help feeling to be
defective. It is a question not only profoundly
interesting, but intensely practical, as well in its
social as in its religious bearing. Without a
belief in consequences of conduct beyond the
present life, moral responsibility in the full sense
of the term can hardly exist. Apart from indi
vidual interest there can only be social respon
sibility, which would hardly control the unsocial
and selfish natures, whereof there are not a few.
The cultivation of character, independently of
present social requirements, would lose its object,
since the best of characters formed by lifelong
5

6 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
effort and self-denial would, equally with that
formed by lifelong crime or sensuality, come to
dust. Interest in the future of our race would
lose its force; reason would bid each man aim
simply at a comfortable passage through this life.
It is not on the old ground that the doctrine
of a future life can be sustained. Theologians
in former days imagined that the soul was an
entity apart from our physical frame, inserted
into the body by a special act of divine power,
pent in it during life, and set free from it by death,
though still remaining its filmy counterpart.
Bishop Butler, who has said in the most effective
way all that there was to be said from his point
of view, argues that the soul, or as he calls it the
"conscious being," is indivisible, indiscerptible,
and, therefore, presumably unaffected by the dis
solution of the body. But we have now learned
to believe that there is nothing in us which is not
the outcome of our general frame, and presumably
liable, with our general frame, to dissolution at
death. Yet there is a voice within us which tells us
that in the sum of things it will be well with
virtue, and that the effort and self-denial expended

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 7
in the promotion of a good and beautiful character
will not have been expended in vain. No man,
I suppose, at the end of life, whatever his course
and whatever his success had been, would not
wish that his life had been righteous. If you ask
me how this can be without the existence of the
soul as an entity separate from the body, the body
being liable to dissolution, my answer is that I
cannot tell. But I do not on that account refuse
to listen to a genuine prompting of my nature,
if this be one, merely because it is not confirmed
by the evidence of sense. Our whole being is a
mystery. Try to realize in thought eternity and
infinity, and you become conscious of that fact.
Our sense probably tells us little more of the uni
verse in which we are than sense tells the pur
blind mole, which no doubt thinks it sees all that
there is to be seen. We are happily casting off
superstition, but there may be still some scope
for faith. Not for the faith which would reject
or supplant reason, but for the faith which is
the evidence of things unseen.
September, 1899.

Ill
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
In using such a phrase as "the immortality
of the soul" we put the question on a wrong
footing; for the phrase seems to imply that the
soul is an entity separate from our general frame,
and this can no longer be maintained.
But admitting that the soul is not a separate
entity, does it follow that any intimation in our
nature of accountability or hope extending beyond
our present life must be an illusion and ought to
be disregarded? I do not wish to dogmatize or
even to affirm, but simply to submit the question.
One of your correspondents holds that the
question is settled by physical science, which pro
nounces that personal decease is final. All physi
cal science rests upon the evidence of our bodily
senses, however systematized by our reason.
Have we ground for assuming that the evidence
of our bodily senses is exhaustive?
We recognize the immense revelations of science
8

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 9
in all their bearings, and especially in their bear
ing on the origin and nature of man. But is
there not some danger of our being swept away
by a tidal wave? The doctrine of evolution has
been carried to the length of imagining an evolu
tion of Revelation.
I am not aware that science has yet explained
conscious personality, or attempted to explain it,
otherwise than as a collection of memories. On
such collection there must surely be something
to reflect and operate.
Huxley at one time confidently maintained
that man was an automaton. But I believe he
afterward receded from that position.
Tyndall, with whom I was so happy as to be
very intimate, always avowed himself a materialist.
His was the formula that matter contained the
potentiality of all life. Yet he would have found
it difficult to account on merely material grounds
for some of his own sentiments and aspirations.
If all ends here, considering what an amount
of unmerited and uncompensated misery and
suffering there has been and still is, it would be
difficult to confute Schopenhauer, who tells us
that this is the worst, not of all conceivable, but

10 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
of all possible, worlds. It would be difficult also
to show that the individual has any inducement to
exert himself for the general and future good of
mankind, or that there is anything to restrain
him from doing whatever may tend to his own
profit or enjoyment without regard to the inter
ests of humanity, provided he can keep clear of
the law. Moral responsibility in the true sense
of the term, as I said before, would apparently
cease. Belief in an all-powerful, all-wise, and
benevolent ruler of the universe, it would seem,
could no longer be maintained.
September, 1899.

IV
HAECKEL
It is not wonderful that the masterly account
of Haeckel's philosophy given by a well-known
writer in the Sun should have been read with
interest and set other pens at work. It may
confirm belief in Haeckel's creed, perhaps make
some converts to it. Physical science has been
achieving dazzling victories while theology and
philosophy are for the time at a discount. Ultra-
physicism is the ruling influence of the hour.
We heartily and gratefully accept the revela
tions of physical science, casting away all tradi
tions, cosmogonical, anthropological, or of any
other kind, which its discoveries have disproved.
But before we resign ourselves to its exclusive
dominion we may take time at least to look round.
One or two grounds for hesitation may be men
tioned. It is not pretended here to do more.
The knowledge of the universe, or of the particle
of it which we inhabit, is that received through

12 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
our bodily senses. Is it certain that these are our
only trustworthy sources of knowledge? If our
moral perceptions are natural, ought they to be
put out of court? In approaching these ques
tions we cannot help being filled with a sense of
our immense ignorance and of the possibilities
beyond our physical ken. This universe, as we
call it, which physical science observes, including
the remotest telescopic stars, is but an atom in in
finity. It is less than an atom ; for an atom bears
some proportion to the mass, while our universe
can bear no proportion to infinity. What physi
cal science calls laws and bids us venerate as
supreme, however they may bound and control
our lives, are not laws, but only phenomenal
uniformities, unless there is a Lawgiver; and if
there is a Lawgiver, who can say that his action
generally or in relation to us does not transcend
his physical laws? No one can be more strictly
scientific than Mr. Herbert Spencer ; yet he recog
nizes the Unknown as an object of reverence,
and it is not through any physical organ that he
can perceive the existence of the Unknown.
The freedom of the human will in any degree and
however qualified by the influence of character

HAECKEL 13
and circumstance, would seem fatal to the mate
rialist hypothesis as establishing the existence
of a force independent of physical causation.
It is, accordingly, altogether and peremptorily
denied. The powers of physical causation we
can inspect; we can see that there is nothing
between the impact and the shock, between the
composition of the ingredients and the compound.
The process of moral causation we cannot inspect.
Between the ascertainable determinants and the
result there is room for another factor. The
only appeal is to our consciousness; and our
consciousness tells us plainly that we are free.
Responsibility would otherwise be an illusion.
If we are really automata, how came we to fancy
ourselves free?
Against the belief in the immortality of the soul
it is said that eternity transcends thought, and
that the attempt to conceive it and identify our
conscious existence with it only produces mental
pain. This is true; but it is a merely psycho
logical difficulty. Let us discard the word "im
mortality," which connotes eternity, and ask only
whether we are sure that all ends here. If all
does end here, what a scene is human history!

14 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
What a scene is human life ! What can the
Power be under whose dominion we are? Hux
ley wished, if nothing better was to come, that
the globe might be shattered by a comet. Can
we readily believe that when a man comes to die
it makes no difference to him whether his life has
been that of a benefactor of his kind or of a devil?
Evolution is an immense discovery, the most
momentous probably ever made, though perhaps
it has hardly yet settled down into its final form
and limits. Yet mav it not weigh on us too much ?
That we have been evolved from anthropoid apes
is the conclusion of science, and we accept it,
as once we believed that man had been made out
of the dust of the earth, it might be radium.
Still, we are what we are, not apes, but men.
Evolution itself seems to preclude finality.
Where physical selection ends, moral selection
may begin. Perfection and beauty of character,
which, we seem to feel, have a value apart from
their mere social usefulness, may also have ends
unseen. These remarks, however, are merely a plea for
circumspection and against giving up ourselves
blindly to ultra-physicism while we fly from

HAECKEL 1 5
tradition and superstition. Such caution is spe
cially to be desired, as ultra-physicism is evidently
beginning to affect morality, particularly in rela
tion to the duty of strong nations and races
towards the weak.
April, 1901.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES
I find myself between two fires : the Darwinian
and the Dominican. But I fancy that my posi
tion is that of a good many thoughtful men who
have renounced superstition but are not ready
to go the whole length of materialism without
further light. Even on social grounds the pros
pect of a reign of commercialism without con
science is enough to make us pause.
I have not asserted that the phenomena of
moral responsibility are incapable of physical
explanation. I have only said that they exist,
and that it is incumbent upon the materialist to
explain them. They are not explained by mere
reiteration, however vehement and positive, of
the necessarian hypothesis.
We are ready to accept heartily and gratefully,
if not always joyfully, whatever is proved by
physical science. It may be that the evidence
16

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 1 7
of our consciousness is an illusion. Prove this,
and we will accept the fact.
Tyndall maintained that in matter was the
potentiality of all life. Of the existence, however,
of something beyond physical life his own charac
ter and aspirations always seemed to me to be
a very striking indication.
To turn to my critics from the other side. I
do not entertain, and therefore I cannot have
shown, any bad feeling toward Roman Catholics,
among whom I have numbered some of my most
valued friends. I have admitted that truth
may conceivably be found with those whose faith
is based on Church authority and miracle. But
it would be absurd to number among rational
ists any who believe in infallibility, ecclesiastical
miracles, and transubstantiation. If I were pressed
on the subject of the evidence for miracles, I
would direct the attention of "Catholic Student"
to the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius,
which takes place annually almost under the eyes
of the Pope.
It could not be supposed that I intended to
accuse Cardinal Newman of unveracity or deceit.
His conduct as a convert to Catholicism at heart,

1 8 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
carrying on his movement in a Protestant church,
was perhaps not always perfectly ingenuous.
But all that I meant was that his aim as a specu
lative theologian was rather religious system than
truth. He used his powers of persuasion to bend
your reason to that which he had made up his
mind was good for your soul. In the opening
of "Tracts for the Times" he lets you see that
in reviving the doctrines of apostolic succession
and the eucharistic real presence he was seeking
to furnish a fresh ground for clerical authority
when the support of the State was being with
drawn. Nobody doubts the excellence of his
character or the purity of his spiritual aspirations
any more than his genius as a writer. Sophis
tical reasoning has often been found compatible
with honesty of purpose and sincerity of belief.
It was so in the case of Cardinal Newman.
April, 1901.

VI
A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY
The last attempt to make evolution, like the
fabled spear of Achilles, cure the wounds which
it has made in our religious faith is Dr. S. D.
McConnell's remarkable essay on "The Evolution
of Immortality."
The faith in which most men now over middle
age grew up, and which churches still preach,
is that man is distinguished from all other animals
by the possession of a soul separate from his body
and generally antagonistic to the body and its
lusts; that at death the souls of all men alike are
parted from their bodies, but will be united to
them at the Day of Judgment, when there will
be a final division of the wicked from the good,
the good going to everlasting bliss, the wicked to
everlasting woe. To this rationalism now objects
at once on scientific and on moral grounds.
On scientific grounds, it denies that man is
essentially distinguished from the higher races
19

20 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
t
of animals; affirming that the soul, instead of
being separate from the body and introduced
into it by a special act of the Creator, is the out
come of our general frame. On moral grounds
it objects to the utter disproportion of infinite
rewards and penalties to finite merits or demerits,
and to the assumption of a sharp distinction be
tween the good and the wicked characters passing
by infinite gradations into each other.
The result is a growing tendency to disregard
anything beyond the present life, or at least to
agree with Horace Greeley in thinking that "those
who discharge promptly and faithfully all their
duties to those who still live in the flesh, can have
but little time left for prying into the life beyond
the grave ; and that it is better to deal with each
in its proper order." On the other hand, though
in the whirl of business or pleasure we may be
willing, like Macbeth, to "jump the world to
come," in the hour of reflection we cannot help
shrinking from annihilation. To the Greek poet
it was a sad thought that while the lowliest herb
might have a second spring, man, the mighty and
the wise, must sleep forever in his cold, dark
grave. The strain might have been more melan-

A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY 21
choly still if the poet had thought not only of the
extinction of the individual, but of the severance
of affection. The sight and the retrospect of
human pain and misery, if there is to be no com
pensation, are heartrending. They are a heavy
set-off against release from the fear of eternal
fire, the belief in which has probably always been
faint, since, had it been vivid, society would have
been dissolved with terror. Immortality, in the
strict sense of the term, as it connotes eternity, is,
like eternity and infinity, inconceivable. But the
social effect of a belief in a future state has most
likely been greater than is by Dr. McConnell, or
generally, believed. It has in some degree balanced
the absorbing pursuit of wealth. It has in some
degree taken the sting from social injustice, and
reconciled the masses to the unequal distribution
of this world's goods. If it has not made men in
general prefer the next world to the present, it has
helped to prevent them from seeking their ad
vancement in the present world by cutting throats
or purses. So at least thought Voltaire, whose
evidence on this point may be deemed impartial.
In fact, the authority of conscience depends on
the belief that whatever may happen to us in the

22 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
present dispensation, in the sum of things it will
certainly be well for him who has done good, and
ill for him who has done evil. Lay aside that
belief, and conscience will apparently lose its
authority; there will be no moral influence but
that of enlarged expediency, with its social embodi
ments in custom or the law. Of the social con
sequences of this change, we seem, as has already
been said, to be having some premonitory symp
toms. Dr. McConnell takes the bull by the horns.
True it is, he says, that the common view of im
mortality is totally untenable; true it is that, as
science tells us, the soul is not an entity separate
from the body and enclosed in it by a special
fiat of the Almighty, but simply the outcome
of our general frame ; true it is that man as a race
is not essentially distinguished from other animals,
which show in a rudimentary form mental faculties
and perhaps sentiment identical with those of man.
But the Doctor's theory is that the common herd
of men are not capable of immortality. The
common herd of men have no right or claim to it.
As animals they have had their life, and this is
their whole due. Those only are capable of

A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY 23
immortality who by a process of evolution have
risen to a higher kind of life, not racial, but individ
ual and spiritual, which qualifies them for the
transition. In the Doctor's newly minted phrase
ology, man is not "immortal," but only "immor-
table"; that is, capable of immortality. The
distinguished few will mount from the present state
of being to another, not reunited to their terres
trial bodies, but, as dwellings of some kind souls
must have, invested with bodies of that luminif-
erous or interstellar ether, the existence of which
Newton divined and recent science has established.
The common herd will mingle with the sod, as
beseems their meagre speech, their shallow lives,
their brutality and mischievousness, their low
desires and ideals of life, and their blank insen
sibility to any moral appeal. Calvin could hardly
exceed the ruthlessness of the demarcation. What
sets on foot the evolution of the chosen few Dr.
McConnell has not clearly explained to us; nor
can his theory be said to be entirely free from the
arbitrariness of the common belief in regard to
the distribution of final bliss and woe, though it
has the advantage of not consigning the rejected
to everlasting fire. He admits that he is puzzled

24 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
by the case of those who are not adults. He
must be equally puzzled by the case of those who
die in an early and imperfect stage of their evolu
tion. Dr. McConnell has the satisfaction of think
ing that his theory is in perfect harmony with
Christianity, and even that the true meaning of
the teaching of Christ and his Apostles on the
subject of a future state is now for the first time
made to appear. Marvellous, he says, is the agree
ment between his views and the words of Jesus.
The words of Jesus and those of St. Paul and
other apostolic writers on this subject especially
are so little precise, they are so much more homi-
letic than dogmatic, that very different meanings
may without much difficulty be read into them.
But in this case, as with regard to the theory
of an evolutionary Revelation, it must surely strike
us as strange that, Revelation having been given
for the enlightenment and salvation of mankind,
the real key to it should have been withheld from
so many generations of men and brought to light
at last by the voyage of the Beagle.
Dr. McConnell, as well as the believer in the
common doctrine, is confronted by the fact that,

A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY 25
no one having ever appeared or been heard from
after death, his theory lacks the one perfectly
satisfactory verification. In meeting this objec
tion he dallies a little with telepathy, evidently
feeling, however, that he is here upon slippery
ground. More decidedly, though not with an
assurance entirely orthodox, he professes his be
lief in the resurrection of Christ. The evidence
of that event has been thoroughly sifted by criti
cism, and the conclusion to which free inquiries
have come is sufficiently well known. But it is
certain that if Jesus appeared after death to his
disciples, it was not in a body of illuminated and
interstellar ether, but in the body which had been
laid in the grave. So all the Gospels tell us and
all the Churches have believed.
Without any special reference to the work of
Dr. McConnell, it may be said that evolution
is in danger, like other great* discoveries, of be
coming a craze. For every problem, physical,
moral, or theological, it is now made to furnish
a solution. The theory is physical, and its illus
trious author neither presumed to extend it to
anything not physical nor denied the possible
existence in the universe or in man of things

26 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
beyond the cognizance of our bodily senses. The
very fact that our thoughts and aspirations range
beyond earth and our present state, is a phe
nomenon challenging observation apart from the
truth or falsehood of our ideas. Apes, beavers,
ants, and bees undoubtedly do things which are
curiously like the actions of men, and seem to
bespeak an intelligence identical with ours; but
we have no reason for believing that they look
before and after, that they pine for what is not,
or that they try to peer behind the veil.
July, 1901.

VII
THE BEE VERSUS MAN
"The Life of the Bee," by Maurice Maeter
linck, translated by Alfred Sutro, is a very beauti
ful book, though, in its dealing with a scientific
subject, somewhat poetical, and occasionally bor
dering on rhapsody. The writer throughout
manifestly glances from the bee to man, and
seeks in the name of the bee to dispute man's
exclusive claim to reason, forecast, and self-
sacrifice in pursuit of an ideal, with whatever
of still higher moment may hang thereby. That
this is the main purport of the book it would per
haps be unsafe to say. One aspect of the book
it certainly is, and it furnishes a distinct point
for consideration.
We are perhaps paying the penalty of having
so long assumed that man was a being in his origin
and nature distinct from all other creatures;
that his reason was a prerogative entirely above
their instinct; and that while they were nothing
27

28 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
but perishable clay, he had a soul separate from
his body, destined to survive the body and to be
reunited with its Maker. Evolution has over
turned this belief. It has told us that the mate
rial origin of man and beast, probably of the
vegetable world also, is the same. It has told
us that there is no generic distinction between
instinct and reason, instinct being reason in a
rudimentary stage. It has told us that what we
took for a distinct entity and called the soul is
in reality a development. We now seem inclined
to pass to the opposite extreme, and at once to
assume that where there is no corporeal distinc
tion, there can be no essential difference, and
that if the soul is not a separate entity, spiritual
life must be a dream.
The embryo of a man and that of a dog, sci
ence tells us, are alike. From this scientific fact
either of two inferences may apparently be drawn.
It may be concluded either that there is no essen
tial difference between the man and the dog, or
that the structure of the embryo is not decisive.
If we were to go back to the nebula, whatever
slight difference there might be would totally
disappear. Let the origin and process of develop-

THE BEE VERSUS MAN 29
ment in the two cases have been what they may,
we still are what we are. There can surely be
no such thing as essential difference if it does
not exist between a man and a dog.
The habits of bees, as described by M. Maeter
linck, are marvellous in the highest degree; and
not less marvellous are the scientific industry
and acumen by which they have been explored.
They are more wonderful, perhaps, than those of
ants, beavers, or apes. Yet I fail to see in them
anything which puts the bee at all on a level
with civilized man. They all seem to me to be
such as, without discursive intelligence or delib
erate effort, the drilling of environment and cir
cumstance, prolonged through aeons, may con
ceivably have produced. jEons must certainly
be assumed for the purpose of evolution, if evo
lution is the creation of species by the improve
ment, through environment and circumstance,
of accidental variations. We can hardly recog
nize as spontaneous effort for improvement the
action of a bee in availing itself of a piece of ready-
made wax which had been put in its way. Of
course we cannot credit the insects with anything
that has been done for them by man; with

30 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
anything at least beyond the acceptance of new
conditions. A general estimate of what has been
done for the hive by man would make our view
of the subject more complete.
The actions and productions characteristic of
man, his political and social experiments, his
scientific investigations, his mathematics, his lit
erature, his poetry, his art, cannot be ascribed
to mere drilling by environment and circumstance ;
they are the work of conscious effort and discur
sive intelligence.
The "spirit of the hive" is a term habitually
employed by M. Maeterlinck. But can it be
said to be warranted? Routine necessary to
subsistence, though unvarying, can hardly be
called "spirit" or compared with a consciousness
of duty to the nation and humanity such as exists,
however imperfectly or fitfully, in communities
of civilized men and rising to its highest level in
the great benefactors of the race. "The god
of the bees is the future." Making due allow
ance for the metaphor, we cannot help asking
on what this assumption rests. What idea of
the future or of anything but the interests and
operations of their own time and hive can the

THE BEE VERSUS MAN 3 1
insects be said ever to have displayed? We are
asked if we have often "encountered an ideal more
conformable to the desires of the universe, more
widely manifest, more disinterested or sublime,
or an abnegation more complete and heroic."
But the question surely is whether, in the his
tory of the bees, we have encountered an ideal
at all, as we certainly have in the history of man.
A general ideal of the progress and destiny of
their race they can hardly have if their sympathy
and cooperation are entirely confined, as M.
Maeterlinck tells us, to the bees of their own hives ;
if between the different hives, even those of the
same origin, there is no sympathy or connection
whatever. Nor does it seem that there can be
any pervading sense of a community of race like
our sense of a common humanity, when, as M.
Maeterlinck tells us, you may crush, a few steps
from their dwelling, twenty or thirty bees that
have all issued from the same hive, and you will
find that those which are left untouched will not
even turn their heads.
The vegetable world, too, has its wonders.
"We are struck," says M. Maeterlinck, "by the
genius that some of our humblest flowers display

32 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
in contriving that the visit of the bee shall infallibly
procure them the cross-fertilization they need."
He bids us see "the marvellous fashion in which
the orchis Moris combines the flag of its rostellum
and retinacula; observe the mathematical and
automatic inclination and adhesion of its polynia;
the unerring double see-saw of the anthers of
the wild sage, which touch the body of the visiting
insect at a particular spot in order that the insect
may in its turn touch the stigma of the neighbor
ing flower at another particular spot; and, in
the case of the Pedicularis sylvatica, the succes
sive calculated movements of its stigma." Do
not these contrivances almost rival the bee's
hexagon? Might not such phrases as guiding
"spirit" and devotion to the "future" as "god"
be applied to these plants as reasonably as to the
bee? That the hive bees have been developed out
of lower, less gregarious, and less communistic
races, seems certain; to that extent a claim of
progress must be allowed. On the other hand,
Egyptian monuments appear to demonstrate that
there has been no material change in the structure
of the comb for many thousands of years. And

THE BEE VERSUS MAN 33
now perfect monotony appears to reign ; one hive
is the counterpart of another. In human common
wealths meanwhile there have been immense
changes; and there is now a great variety, the
result of struggle more or less pronounced for the
attainment of a higher state.
It is hardly safe to assume that when animals
do anything conducive to the advantage of the
tribe they do it with understanding. Stags fight
in the rutting season. Their fighting conduces
to the selection of the best sire for the herd. But
can they be said to fight with that intention?
Is reason in the human sense of the term pos
sible without language? Is sustained progress
possible without writing? Bees evidently do
communicate as well as cooperate with each other,
but it seems to be only in the most rudimentary
way and about a most limited range of subjects.
They certainly do not write or in any way record
their thoughts and experiences so as to store
them for posterity.
Defects, such as the massacre of the males,
the author admits. But a superior being, looking
down upon the ways of men, would, M. Maeter
linck says, see great defects there also. He would

34 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
see idle wealth lodged in luxurious palaces, indus
trious poverty lodged in hovels. However, lookmg
close, he would see that not all wealth is idle,
and that its attainment was the incentive to labor.
But he would see, moreover, that man was always
struggling against the defects of society, that in
the higher communities philanthropy was at work,
that plans of reform were on foot, that dreams
of social perfection were being dreamed. Is
there anything analogous to this in the common
wealth of the bees? Is there the slightest reason
for supposing that they take thought for the im
provement and elevation of their race?
It is in the "nuptial flight" that the writer's
poetry rises to its highest pitch. Exact observa
tion of the union of the queen bee with the male
chosen for the purpose of impregnation there
can hardly have been, as it takes place in the sky.
But accepting the description as it is given us,
how can this momentary and coarse embrace,
in which the entrails of the male are torn out
and he perishes, bear comparison with romantic
love and pure conjugal affection? It is true
that romantic love and conjugal affection of the
highest kind are found only in civilized man;

the bee versus man 35
but in civilized man they are found, and men as
a race are capable of civilization.
"Sad let it be," says M. Maeterlinck, dismiss
ing a melancholy portion of his subject, "as all
things in nature are sad when our eyes rest too
closely upon them. And thus it ever shall be
so long as we know not her secret, know not even
whether secret truly there be. And should we
discover some day that there is no secret or that
the secret is monstrous, other duties will then
arise that as yet perhaps have no name." There
is no use in attempting to veil the fact, which
is already easting its shadow over our life.
Toward the belief that there is no secret or that
the secret is monstrous, toward the belief, in
other words, that the world is ruled by force with
out design, of which man and his history are a
play, science and thought are at present tending.
If this is the truth, we must bow, though the
materialist can hardly expect us to rejoice, and
make each of us the best we can of our brief lease
of existence. Two things, however, may still
be whispered on the other side. One is that the
phenomena of what we have hitherto called man's
spiritual nature, his sense of moral responsibility,

36 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
his appreciation of moral beauty, his moral
aspirations, his conception of a state beyond
the present, the refinement of his affections,
his poetry and art, his conscious and forecasting
efforts for the improvement, moral as well as
material, of himself and his race, in themselves
claim consideration like other phenomena sub
mitted to science, whatever may be the physical
genesis of man or the soundness of his particular
conceptions. Another is that we have appar
ently no sufficient reason at present to conclude
that there is nothing in the universe, or nothing
cognizable by us, beyond that which is perceived
by our bodily senses and is the subject of physical
science. There is nothing, I hope, in what has now
been said at variance with thorough loyalty to
scientific truth or with just appreciation of a
very interesting and charming book.
August, 1901.

VIII
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
The battle with Tammany did not suspend the
discussion in the Sun's columns of the immor
tality of the soul and its relation to morality.
Nothing can be more intensely practical than
this question. Since the decline of religious
belief, morality has been dragging its anchor,
and our state of transitional perplexity may be
one source at least of much of the practical
disturbance of the world.
One bold thinker says that morality without
immortality is a sentimental humbug. As an
agnostic or an atheist, he claims the right of making
his own moral law. Subjectively, no doubt, he
has that right. Objectively he will find the
limit of the right in the club of the nearest police
man. Whatever turn may ultimately be taken
by our convictions about a hereafter, society will
uphold by law or social influence rules necessary
to its own security and convenience here. It may
37

38 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
even uphold them more rigorously than ever
when it is convinced that the present life is
all. The natural affections, parental, conjugal,
and social, will also retain their force.
So far, however, as conscience is concerned
this dauntless agnostic is logical. Immortality is
an idea which my mind fails to grasp, as it fails
to grasp the ideas of eternity, infinity, omnipo
tence, or first cause. But if this life ends all,
I do not see how conscience can retain its
authority. The authority of conscience, it seems
to me, is religious. The sanction of its awards
appears to be something beyond and above
temporal interest, utility, or the dictates of society
and law. In the absence of such a sanction what
can there be to prevent a man from following his '
own inclinations, good or bad, beneficent or mur
derous, so long as he keeps within the pale of law
or manages to escape the police? One man is a
lamb by nature, another is a tiger. Why is not
the tiger as well as the lamb to follow his nature
so far as the law will let him or as he has power?
Eccelino, for instance, was by nature a devil
incarnate, a sort of Satanic enthusiast of evil.
What had merely utilitarian morality to say against

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 39
his gratification of his propensities as long as he
had power on his side?
The age of Machiavel was something like ours,
in being one of religious eclipse attended by fail
ure of the traditional foundation of morality.
A domination of self-interest without regard for
moral restrictions was the result.
I do not presume to put forward any hypothe
sis. I merely call attention to certain phenomena
of humanity which seem at first sight to militate
against the purely materialist view. Our power
of choice in action, which, without belying our
consciousness, cannot be denied; our consequent
sense of responsibility; our moral aspirations and
endeavors; our conceptions of a higher state of
being and desire to press onward towards it ; all
the phenomena, in a word, of what has hitherto
been called our spiritual nature — by what pro
cess of physical evolution can we suppose these
to have been produced?
Heartily accepting evolution, I demur to the
assumption that physical development is the
end, as well as to the assumption that nothing
of which our bodily senses are not cognizant can
be true.

40 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Perfection may be produced by the fiat of
Omnipotence. This clearly is not the constitu
tion of the universe, since the universe is full of
imperfection. Physical progress may be made
by evolution, which out of the worm has evolved
the frame of man. But there is another mode
of progress of which we are conscious in ourselves,
and of which man's history, so far as it is progres
sive, is the outcome. This is intelligent effort.
In fact, we can hardly understand any moral per
fection or excellence of character except as the
product of effort. A seraph is insipidity with
unanatomic wings.
It constitutes for us a special interest in an
cient masters of ethics, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus
Aurelius, and Epictetus, that, while they
looked at human nature with eyes as clear
as ours, they were without our special prepos
sessions. From the State polytheism they had
broken away. Yet in all of them you find recog
nition of the character produced by moral effort
and transcending mere utility. This is especially
striking in Plato, who is so far from utilitarianism
that he even looks on martyrdom as the natural
meed of the righteous. It is less striking in

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 41
Aristotle, whose ideal is an animated Greek
statue, but still it is there. In Plato there is a
distinct connection of virtue with a personal
though unseen power of good. In Marcus Aure
lius and Epictetus the power is not personal, but
there is a power.
I have assumed that as agents we have liberty
of choice. I eschew the term "free will," leaving
it to the metaphysical angels in Milton's Hell.
The necessarian hypothesis, seeing that the chain
of causation stretches back indefinitely, must
imply that all our actions were irrevocably set
tled in the very beginning of things. Not having
seen the beginning of things, I cannot say; but
unless my whole moral being is a delusion, I have
liberty of choice.
Frank acceptance of all proved truth, such as
the general theory of evolution; caution in sur
rendering ourselves to the last great discovery;
recognition and examination of all phenomena,
not physical only, but of every kind, together
form the compass to which we must look for
guidance over a dark and perilous sea.
December, 1901.

IX
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
The correspondents of the Sun still keep up
the philosophic debate about the nature and
destiny of man. No question can be more
truly practical than that which concerns the
authority of conscience and the basis of moral
ity, personal, social, and international. We are
everywhere met by the effects of the present
mpral doubts and distractions.
, _/ One of the correspondents, apparently a
thorough-going necessarian, quotes in support of
his theory a passage of Oliver Wendell Holmes : —
" The more I have observed and reflected the more
limited seems to me the field of action of the human will.
Every act of choice involves a special relation between
the ego and the conditions before it. But no man knows
what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
The bias which decides his choice between two or more
motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source,
of which he knows nothing at all. He is automatic in
virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time
42

the immortality of the soul 43
having the feeling that he is self-determining. The story
of Elsie Venner illustrates the direction in which my
thought was moving. The imaginary subject of the story
obeyed her will, but her will obeyed the mysterious ante
natal poisoning influence."
This passage seems to me rather literary than
philosophic. However, it says only that the
human will or whatever it is that constitutes our
moral responsibility is "limited." Nobody sup
poses that our liberty of choice is unlimited or
that the will operates in a vacuum. Necessarian-
ism, I suspect, is at bottom merely a mental
puzzle, which may perplex our conceptions, but
does not affect our actions. No man practically
applies it either to his own actions or to those of his
fellows. The belief upon which we all act and by
which we always judge actions is that of moral
responsibility, which implies a freedom of choice,
however limited. Achilles does overtake the
tortoise in spite of a demonstration, apparently
logical, that he will not ; and though we may have
a logical difficulty in rebutting absolute causation
we do deliberate and decide. For my part I
must say that I do not expect to see the exact
relation of will to preexisting character and

44 IN quest of light
circumstance stated in a precise and scientific form.
Huxley had at one time got himself entangled
in the notion that man was an automaton which
had become automatically conscious of its own
automatism; but I believe he shook it off in the
end. Necessarianism, or a denial of the freedom of
the will, appears to assume that there is only one
element in action, the predisposing motive. Ap
peal to our consciousness seems to tell us that
there are two: the antecedent motive and voli
tion. In ordinary action the duality is not per
ceived; in doubtful and hesitating action it is.
Another of the correspondents seems to me,
with all deference be it said, to exemplify the
tendency of great discoveries, when victorious
in their inevitable combat with prejudice, to pur
sue their victory too far. The discoverer of
evolution, however, is not responsible for the
present tendency to regard the nature of man
as merely physical and to treat the community
on that principle. Why should we not weed out
the human herd as we do the herd of kine or the
flock of sheep, killing off the unpromising and
allowing only the more promising organizations

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 45
to live? A sufficient reason, setting aside
all mere traditional reverence for humanity, is
that while in the case of the kine or the sheep we
can see everything that is necessary to determine
our selection, we cannot see that which is most
necessary to determine our selection in the in
tellectual and moral being, man. The cor
respondent, if I rightly understand him, would
have "society" put to death the "socially unfit"
or disable them from propagation. What is
"society" but the government? and what gov
ernment, even with the aid of the best experts,
could see so far into the inner man as fitly to
undertake the process of elimination? Where
would the line between social fitness and unfitness
be drawn ? What would be the outward signs of
unfitness ? Those who are convicted of crime you
might hang or subject to the alternative treatment
suggested. But in the case of the unconvicted,
what is your test ? How can you foresee develop
ment? Socrates confessed that it was through a
hard struggle that he attained virtue. An ultra-
evolutionist would have eliminated him in his
first stage. Nero, on the other hand, set out
well.

46 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
A metaphysical book, it seems, has reached its
eighth edition. This shows that a number of
inquirers are still upon that track. Is there any
hope in that direction ? Is it possible that mental
introspection should lead us to objective truth?
Might we not as well look for scientific fact in
the structure of a scientific instrument, as for
objective truth in the structure of the mind?
Intellects of the highest order have been devoted
to metaphysic; and with what result? From
the Greek philosophers to the schoolmen, from
the schoolmen to the Germans, system succeeds
to system, without progress or practical outcome.
Even the reputed discoveries of Berkeley have
borne no practical fruit, and Hegel is already as
dead as Pythagoras. Meantime genuine science
wins a series of practical triumphs and is ad
vanced even by partial errors. The datum
assumed by metaphysic throughout is that
reality must correspond to conception. No such
assumption is involved in our belief in moral
responsibility or other spiritual phenomena of
human nature, which are facts of mental ex
perience and observation though not of bodily
sense.

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 47
We have specially to be on our guard against
the attempts of some writers of the metaphysical
school to shake the foundation of all scientific or
rational belief, by reducing everything to philo
sophic doubt, and thus to place us at the mercy
of orthodox tradition. Dean Mansel was sup
posed in his Oxford sermons, by demonstrating
our inability to grasp the Unconditional or com
prehend divine morality, to have made scepticism
slay itself with its own sword. Loud was the
applause of orthodoxy. But one shrewd head of
a college as he came away from the University
Church, said, "I never expected to hear atheism
preached from the pulpit of the university."
January, 1902.

X
EASTER
Easter revives the discussion of the immor
tality of the soul, of which the Resurrection of
Jesus is regarded by Christendom as the pledge,
though the fact that Deity could not be holden
of death would hardly in itself be a pledge that
death shall not hold mere humanity.
At Easter a year or two ago I heard a preacher
speak of the Resurrection of Jesus as the best
attested of all historical events. So far a fond
adherence to tradition could carry him ! If the
event really happened and is of such unspeakable
importance as has been supposed, it would be
reasonable, and more than reasonable, to expect
not only that the evidence of it should be better
than that of any other historical event, but almost
that there should be a standing miracle of some
sort to place it forever beyond the possibility of
doubt. The fact, however, is that the narratives
are anonymous ; that their authorship is unknown ;

EASTER 49
that they are of uncertain date ; that they are hope
lessly at variance with each other. The attempts
to harmonize them, such as that of Dr. Greswell,
serve only to make the inconsistencies more
glaring. Is it conceivable that the records of an
event on which the salvation of mankind depends
should be left to be cleared from doubt and con
fusion by the hermeneutic ingenuity of a divine
in the nineteenth century?
A personal impression, however strong, however
deepened by Church art as well as by theology, is
no evidence. It is inconceivable that the power
which ordained such an event and for such a
purpose should have left its authenticity to rest
upon impressions. There can be no use in
fondly clinging for support to that which itself
cannot stand. Still the exclamation with which
the Eastern Church hails Easter morning is true.
As the Founder of Christendom, Christ is risen
indeed. These questions, as has been said before,
speculative as they may seem to those who deem
themselves practical men, are really practical and
urgent in the highest degree. The conscience
which we have hitherto obeyed, or endeavored

SO IN QUEST OF LIGHT
approximately to obey, and which has more or
less kept the world in order, seems in its nature
religious. It has claimed, and to some extent
practically asserted, an authority beyond that of
any earthly tribunal. It has proclaimed that it
shall be well with those who do good and ill with
those who do evil, not only in this transitory
life. It has bidden the righteous, suffering from
injustice here, appeal to a higher tribunal, and
threatened the unrighteous on whom fortune in
the present world smiles with a reversal of their
lot hereafter. The most comprehensive view of
our temporal interest, even though it may embrace
the whole compass of our social affections, is not
what we mean by conscience.
Every day brings fresh proof of the fact that by
the collapse of the traditional beliefs on which
morality has hitherto largely rested morality itself
is being shaken, so that there is a danger of a
moral interregnum like that which there was
between the fall of mediaeval Catholicism and the
rise of Protestantism, aggravated, moreover, by
the struggle for gain. The rule of conduct for
nations toward each other threatens to be not
antiquated righteousness, but conformity to the

EASTER 51
indications of the stars in their courses; in
other words, seizure of all opportunities of ag
grandizement without regard to the rights of
others. One cannot help respecting the memory
of the Barbary corsair, who did not talk about the
stars in their courses, or about duty taking the
hand of destiny, or about a providential mission,
but said frankly that he wanted his neighbors'
goods, and if the owner tried to keep them he
would knock him on the head.
So eminent a thinker as Dr. Felix Adler regards
personal immortality as a thing not to be desired,
but as a thing to be dreaded. It involves, he
says, endless suffering and interminable strug
gling toward some higher plane of existence
which still always rises above you. His senti
ment appears to be somewhat like that of the
Buddhist, who strives by intense self-effacement
to escape from the burden of conscious personality
and the interminable series of transformations.
But if Dr. Felix Adler recoils from the prospect of
personal immortality, does not he, or do not men
in general, recoil from the prospect of personal
annihilation ? Apart from our individual destiny,
is it not sad to think of all the uncompensated

52 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
suffering which, on the hypothesis that existence
ends here, fills the pages of human history? Does
death level not only the king with the beggar,
but the best of men and the greatest benefactor
of his kind with the worst of tyrants or assassins ?
If it does, can we believe in the moral govern
ment of the world? If we cannot believe in the
moral government of the world, where is the
sanction of morality?
Nor, again, can we contemplate without sor
row the prospect of final separation from those
we love?
Immortality, ag has been said before, like
infinity or eternity, transcends our power of con
ception. The attempt to realize it only produces
a sort of dizziness in the mind. It seems better
to set that term aside, and simply to consider
whether it is certain or probable that all ends for
us with death. There are phenomena in our
nature which, apparently, are not physical, but
seem to point to something beyond our physical
existence. They constitute in the aggregate what
we have called our spiritual life, including our
sense of moral responsibility, our moral aspira
tions, our feeling for moral beauty, our power of

EASTER 53
idealization, our higher and more perfect human
affections. Is there anything to which these
point ? May there not still be something behind
the veil?
Clinging to tradition, however entwined the
tradition may be with all our associations, is, in
the face of the revelations of science and criticism,
no longer possible. We are in danger of falling
from that state into a blind and even fanatical
materialism, which, if we could see behind the
veil, might be found to be no more identical than
tradition itself with the progressive purpose of
the universe.
April, 1902.

^

XI
EASTER
No one whose life has not been devoted to the
study can pretend to have read everything that
has been written on either side about the author
ship, dates, and historical character of the Gos
pels. But I have read enough on both sides to
convince me that the authorship and dates are
doubtful; that the Gospels contain much unhis-
toric matter ; and that they are often and seriously
at variance with each other. The variations are
especially marked and irreconcilable in the narra
tives of the Resurrection. Moreover, these nar
ratives are connected with such prodigies as the
miraculous darkness, the rending of the veil of
the Temple, and the apparitions of the dead in the
streets of Jerusalem, which could not have oc
curred without making a tremendous impression or
without leaving their trace in history. It may be
true, as one of your correspondents says, that we
cannot set limits to the action of Providence. But
54

EASTER 55
»
we are surely justified in assuming that Providence
would not, in communicating vital truths to men,
contravene its own purpose by simulating the
defects of human evidence.
Besides, we have to meet the general objection
to the whole supernatural system of which the
Resurrection is an integral part. Science has
indisputably proved that instead of being created
perfect and falling from perfection, man rose by
evolution from a lower organization to a higher;
and if there was no Fall, how can there be room
for the belief in the Incarnation and the Redemp
tion? It is a subject on which it may be painful to
piety to dwell, but is it possible to follow in imagi
nation the details of the Incarnation, with the
relations of the two natures to each other, both
here on earth and after the Ascension, without
feeling the impossibility of conception, and there
fore of belief? Newman desired his disciples
specially to mark that it was Almighty God that
endured the scourging; and Frederick Faber,
one of Newman's circle, described the babe as
sleeping in the mother's arms, when she had
slaked its thirst and stilled its cry, yet with its

56 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
sleeping eye seeing the universe, and all that was
therein. We may repeat, but we cannot realize
the creeds. Probably their theosophic authors
did not, though their cosmogony was much
narrower than ours.
The sublimities of the Mosaic story of creation,
in spite of some strongly anthropomorphic pas
sages, have wonderfully prolonged its hold. But
its mythical character can no longer be denied
by any one whose mind is open to scientific truth.
In fact, of the orthodox clergy, not a few are ready
to embrace the expedient of allegorical interpre
tation, which, it is needless to say, amounts to
surrender of the case.
This is said in no spirit of general scepticism
or destructiveness, but very much the reverse.
It surely is worse than vain to cling to dead beliefs.
Our only hope of salvation lies in the full and
hearty, though reverent and discriminating, ac
ceptance of that which is now the revealed truth,
though reason is the organ of the revelation. In
trying to save the creeds we may make jettison
of spiritual life.
It is said truly that the revision of antiquated
creeds, such as the Westminster Confession, is a

EASTER 57
desperate undertaking. Those who attempt it
are trying to revise the sixteenth century. Surely
the wiser course would be to let the old creeds
remain as they are, for whatever they may still be
worth; but to cease to impose them, or any
human manifesto, as ordination tests. Let the
engagement at ordination be one simply binding
the minister to preach what in his conscience he
believes to be the truth. An enlightened laity
asks for no better credentials on the part of its
teacher. The Sun speaks of the remarkable spread of
ritualism, even in churches which are not sacer
dotal and do not pretend to apostolical succession.
Ritualism has had two epochs and two phases. In
England, when the advance of liberalism after the
passing of the Reform act threatened to withdraw
from the clergy the support of the State, they
looked about for another support, and thought
that they found it in a revival of the doctrines
of Apostolical Succession and Real Presence.
This is very distinctly avowed by Newman in
the opening of the "Tracts for the Times." That
movement, however, was ecclesiastical and theo
logical; the aesthetic element, though distinctly

58 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
present, was not predominant; on Newman him
self and his companions of the Oratory it had
comparatively little hold. The present move
ment, which pervades not only the Anglican and
medisevalizing Church, but the churches gener
ally, owes its existence, not to theological specula
tion or to ecclesiastical policy, but to the growth
of a vacuum in the region of religious belief,
which music, art, flowers, and ceremony are re
quired to fill. That the beliefs and the religious
system of the Middle Ages can be restored is an
idea with which Ritualists, those of the Anglican
Church at least, may play for a time, but it can
hardly be seriously entertained. It is too likely
that when the aesthetic enchantment has lost its
power blank materialism will be the end.
April, 1902.

XII
IS RELIGION WORTHLESS?
" Verus " has said that no religion ever
taught us anything worth knowing. What he
said was true, if by "worth knowing" he means
beneficial in a material sense. Yet it cannot be
denied that religion has practically played a most
important part in the development of humanity.
Religious ordinance was the form originally
assumed by social morality. A memorable
instance of this is the religious legislation
ascribed to Moses, especially the Decalogue.
But the moral and social philosophy of Socrates
and his disciples Plato and Xenophon certainly
rested on religious belief; not in the Greek
pantheon, but in a supreme power that made
for righteousness. So did the moral philosophy
of the great stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus,
impersonal as their deity is.
Egyptian morality appears to have been in
form religious. More questionable, of course,
59

60 IN QUEST of light
is the influence of the Greek pantheon, with its
amorous Zeus and its sensual Olympus. Yet
the Greek gods were upholders of justice. The
Delphic Oracle in its best day seems to have been
an organ of morality. We have the story of a man
who, wishing to repudiate a deposit, consulted the
Oracle and received an encouraging reply. When,
having paid the penalty of his crime, he reproached
the Oracle with having misled him, he was told
that this was his reward for the insult which he
had offered to the moral majesty of the god.
In the aesthetic development of man religion has
unquestionably played a great part. The Par
thenon and the cathedrals, the great painters,
the composers of sacred music, are religious.
So are Dante and Milton. So fundamentally is
Shakespeare, though he was probably a free
thinker. There have been aberrations very many and
horrible, such as Moloch-worship and the Inqui
sition. But religion is not to be charged with
the crimes of worldly powers which have enslaved
it and abused its name.
Christendom, whatever may become of its
claims as a Revelation, retains its claims as a

is religion worthless ? 6 1
historical fact and an element in the progress of
moral civilization.
What is the origin of religion? The tendency
appears to be almost universal, showing itself inde
pendently in every member of the human race,
saving perhaps the very lowest savages. There
must be some rational account of it, and it is
difficult to see how that account could be found
in evolution or in anything disclosed by physical
science. Such an explanation of the origin of
religion as the apparition of dead chieftains in
dreams seems to be totally inadequate. Let us
be thoroughly loyal to science and embrace all
its real discoveries, however subversive of our
traditions. But let us ask for recognition of all
the phenomena of human nature, not only those
which are demonstrably physical, but also those
which appear to belong to another class.
May not a man be doing what is at present
premature in absolutely rejecting all religious
belief and cutting himself off from the religious
life of the world? May not the impetus of our
parting from belief in the supernatural and the
dogmatic carry us at first too far?
• August, 1903.

XIII
THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM
Commenting on an arraignment of the Christian
churches, the Sun said the other day : —
If our correspondent will follow the history of Chris
tianity in Europe from the time it first gathered strength
to assert itself with physical force he will read a record of
war, persecution, atrocity and fierce human passions in
flamed by religious enthusiasm which is not exceeded if it
is equalled in its darkness in the history of any previous
religious propaganda of which we have the record.
Of the crimes committed in the name of Chris
tianity it is impossible to speak with too much
sorrow and abhorrence. But the guilt, I submit,
attaches not to Christianity itself, but to malig
nant influences under which it has fallen. The
vital doctrines of Christianity as preached by its
Founder are the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man. Our faith in these doc
trines may be failing; our faith in the brother
hood of man would certainly appear to be under
going eclipse. But there is nothing in them which
62

THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM 6^
could possibly lend itself to atrocity or persecution.
When the Inquisitor sought a warrant in the
Gospel for his religious murders, he could find
nothing more to his purpose than the words in
the parable of the Great Feast, "Compel them
[the guests] to come in," or St. Paul's saying, "I
would that they were cut off which trouble you,"
which only the blindest bigotry could construe
as a longing for an auto-da-fe.
Islam propagated itself by the sword. Chris
tianity in its native character propagated itself
by the Word preached by peaceful missionaries,
who, taking their lives in their hands, converted
the barbarians and founded the Christian nations.
The Founder of Christianity said that His
Kingdom was not of this world. Had that saying
been kept, there could have been no persecutions.
By keeping it in after days the Baptist Church
has won a distinction unhappily almost unique.
When the Empire, after struggling long to ex
tinguish Christianity, bowed to it and made it
the imperial religion, it extended its political
despotism over the Church. Orthodoxy, the
doctrine patronized by the court, became law,
heresy was treason; and there followed the

64 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
inevitable results. Ecclesiastics denied their
founder by appealing to the secular arm. Chris
tianity, however, humanized the Roman law,
notably with regard to slavery.
Special influence and authority could not fail
to attach to the bishops of the two imperial cities,
Rome and Constantinople; especially to the
Bishop of Rome, who was not overshadowed by
the presence of the Emperor. In the dissolution
of the Empire, the Roman See became a rallying
point for the Western Church. But there was
really no Pope in the present sense of the term,
no spiritual dictator claiming theocratic and
universal authority over the Church, before
Hildebrand. Gregory the Great denounced the
title of universal Bishop as blasphemous. Hilde
brand it was who created the theocratic despot
ism, using such instruments as Norman conquest
and German rebellion, as well as a clerical militia
detached from humanity and bound to the Papacy
by the enforcement of celibacy. There is not in
history a greater mockery than the pretence
of this autocrat and his successors, including
Innocent III., Alexander VI., and Julius II., to
represent the preacher of the Sermon on the

THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM. 65
Mount. Here we have the main source of per
secution and its atrocities; hence flowed the
extermination of the Albigenses, the Inquisition,
Alva's reign of blood in the Netherlands, the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the Dragon-
ades. The Crusades, with any atrocities which
they may have involved, were more the work of
Christendom at large, but they can hardly be set
down as persecution; they were rather a war
for the defence of Christian civilization against
the on-rolling tide of Mohammedan conquest,
that irruption of moral barbarism, as it is now
seen to be. Genuine Christianity was not left
without witnesses. It showed itself in such
characters as that of Anselm, in such writings as
the "Imitatio Christi."
Protestant Christianity could not at once get clear
of the mediaeval tradition. But presently it did.
It has repented of its crimes and renounced perse
cution. The Syllabus, which is the latest mani
festo of the theocratic Papacy, reaffirms the prin
ciple of intolerance, throwing down the gaunt
let to modern civilization and to the liberty of
opinion which has been won by the struggle of
ages for humanity. Infallibility cannot repent.

66 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
The religious character would in any case,
no doubt, have shown its weak side. There
would have been extravagance, bigotry, con
troversial heat, and rancor; perhaps fanatical
and sectarian affray; but without the influence of
the Empire and the Theocracy there could hardly
have been these enormous crimes.
Catholicism, as its name imports, is univer
sal. Papalism is Italian. Only Italians, native
or naturalized, can be Popes. The few his
torical exceptions are exceptions which prove
the rule. Catholicism, with all its charac
teristics and graces, was fully developed before
Hildebrand. There is nothing polemically
Papal in the writings of Anselm, Thomas a
Kempis, or Pascal. Lacordaire and Montalem-
bert were thoroughly Catholic, but as friends of
liberty, thinking that it could be reconciled with
Catholicism, they were disavowed by the Papacy.
By Acton, who died Catholic, the Papacy is
sternly arraigned.
I plead once more for fair consideration of all
real phenomena, physical or moral. Christianity,
apart from its entanglements with imperial des
potisms and theocratic usurpation, seems, by the

THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM 67
principles which it has propagated and the char
acters which it has produced, to have been up to
the present time a great power, to say the least,
of moral progress, and one which is not easily
explained by physical evolution.
October, 1902.

XIV
DOES CHRISTIANITY FALL WITH DOGMA?
It seems to be assumed in some quarters that
if ecclesiastical dogma departs, nothing of Chris
tianity will be left us. The edifice of ecclesias
tical dogma is built on belief in the Incarnation
and Atonement, which again depends on belief
in the Fall of Man. Science has apparently dis
proved the Fall of Man, and proved that man,
instead of falling, rose, by evolution, from lower
organizations. The inference seems irresistible
and fatal to dogmatic Christianity. But does
this reduce Christianity to an ethical speculation,
one of a number of the same kind?
The essence of Christianity as it came from the
lips of the Author seems to be belief in the father
hood of God and the brotherhood of man. Trace
the practical effect of this belief through the cen
turies, disengaging it as' well as you can from
ecclesiastical superfetations, from the effects of
fellowship with evil powers of the world, from
68

DOES CHRISTIANITY FALL WITH DOGMA ? 69
the crimes of theocracy, and from the fanaticism
of sects. Does it not appear wherever it has
prevailed, under whatever form and in whatever
circumstances, in all nations and in all states of
life, to have produced in those who strove to live
up to its excellence and beneficence of character,
spiritual happiness, with an inward assurance
that it would be well for them in the end? In
that case may not Christianity fairly present itself
as something more than an ethical speculation?
May it not claim to rank in some degree as a right
solution of the problem of humanity and a prac
tical experiment which has not failed?
It is said that in the struggle of righteous
ness and mercy against might, those who have
borne themselves best upon the side of that which
Christians claim as Christian principle, have in
many cases not been Christians. This is true,
as it is true also that some Christian churches
have taken that which seems to be ethically the
anti-Christian side. But have these men, in
discarding Christian profession, discarded belief
in that which is the essence of Christianity ? Have
they renounced belief in the brotherhood of man ?
May it not be said that Comte's Great Being of

70 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Humanity is Christ's brotherhood of man under
another name? Belief in God may have been
renounced, yet to warrant belief in a brother
hood of man there must surely be some paternal
and consecrating power.
To demonstrate that Christianity cannot stand
as a philosophy of the conduct of life without
the support of dogma, are cited extreme pas
sages" in the Gospel against carefulness for riches
and the things of this world, with the remark
that "so far from there being practical unanimity
in accepting this philosophy of the conduct of
life, there is practically unanimity in repudiating
it." Beyond doubt the passages are in expression
hyperbolical. They are the language, as those
who have rejected supernaturalism believe, of
a carpenter's son who spoke to the heart rather
than to the philosophic mind, who had been bred
in no school of philosophy and was untrained to
the strict use of language. Beyond doubt their
hyperbolical form has told against their prac
tical effect. But, after all, the gist of them is
"keep your heart above wealth and devotion to
its increase." Has not this been practised, with
out detriment to industry, by men even in the

DOES CHRISTIANITY FALL WITH DOGMA? 7 1
mart or on the Stock Exchange, and have they
not found that self-approval and moral happiness
were the result?
It was rather surprising to hear a doubt ex
pressed, as it was the other day, by a scientific
man as to the effect of the progress of science
on human happiness. As to the effect of scien
tific discovery on our material well-being and
everything that directly depends on it there can
be no doubt whatever, though querulous old age
may sometimes be found looking back wistfully
to the restfulness of the days before the electric
telegraph, the ocean greyhound, and the automo
bile. Nor, if it is the effect of scientific discovery
on our religious faith that is meant, can there be
any doubt that knowledge of our nature and
destiny, however unwelcome and lowering in
itself, is better than ignorance and infinitely
better than falsehood. Let science prove that
man is merely a physical development of the
ape or earthworm, and that with his present
life all ends; we will accept the proof, though
there may be little comfort in the materialist's
exhortation to make the best of this life and look
forward with complacency to our eternal sleep,

72 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
the life perhaps being that of a galley-slave,
while eternal sleep is a pleasant name for anni
hilation. But the conviction cannot be said to
enhance the dignity or conduce to the happiness
of man; apparently it will hardly conduce to
morality, personal or social. Before accepting
it we once more crave a full exammation of all
real phenomena. Physical science itself is still
advancing, and there may be Darwins after
Darwin. January, 1904.

XV
SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY
Momentous is this crisis in the history of
man if all authoritative religion, all consecrated
tradition, fails him, and he is left to work out by
his own reason the problem of his origin, state,
and destiny. With the religions of authority
would pass away the whole order of spiritual
guides, leaving, as the departure of the clergy
certainly would, an incalculable void, not only
in our theological, but in our moral and social
system. To such a crisis, however, according
to M. Sabatier's work on "Religions of Author
ity," we have come.
The days of all the religions of authority,
in M. Sabatier's opinion, are numbered. He
appears to think that the Papacy is likely to last
the longest. It has a wonderfully strong organi
zation, an imposing and fascinating ritual, a
legendary antiquity founded on a mythical list
of early Popes. It still commands the allegiance
73

74 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
of masses like the Italian peasantry, who can
believe in the miracle of St. Januarius and the
Holy House of Loretto, or the crowds of pilgrims
to Lourdes. Of highly educated adherents it
retains comparatively few, of scientific adherents
almost none. It offers in these times of religious
confusion and perplexity a tempting haven to
the weak and doubting mind. It has in its own
despite gained in spiritual character and re
spectability by severance from the temporal
power. As an anti-revolutionary influence it is
rather regarded with complacency by the conser
vative statesmen of Europe. Guizot seemed to
have this feeling about it. But now, loaded
with jts burden of historical memories, it is
going into its last struggle against reason and
progress. In its Syllabus it bids defiance to liberty
of conscience and of opinion, to the right of the
State, to the cardinal principles of modern civili
zation. Civilization takes up the glove.
That the Papacy is not the whole of the Catho
lic Church we have a reminder in another religion
of authority, with which M. Sabatier does not deal.
The Eastern Church, now mainly represented
by the State Church of Russia, has all along

SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 75
remained separate from that which is represented
by the Papacy, in spite of an enforced, transitory,
and nugatory act of submission. In this case the
authority is largely national, the union of Church
and State in Russia being complete, so that the
Procurator of the Holy Synod is a very important
Minister of State. The Church is Holy Russia,
and Holy Russia is the Church. The immobility
of the system verges on torpor. Naturally those
who break away from it break away with a ven
geance. The orthodoxy of Pobyedonostseff gives
birth to heterodoxy in Tolstoi. Here also the
incipient forces of dissolution may be seen.
Yet another religion of authority unnoticed by
M. Sabatier is Anglicanism, the religion of the
State Church of England. A State Church that
of England is, in the fullest sense of the term.
Its doctrines and ritual are an amalgam of the
personal bias of Henry VIII. , who died half a
Catholic though in revolt against the Papacy,
with the policy of his executors, a new aristoc
racy looking for support to the party of progress
against the ancient nobility, and with the
policy of the opportunist statesmen of Elizabeth,
one of theological compromise. In the history

76 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
of the Church of England the several elements
of its composition predominate in turn: first the
Genevan, which gives birth to the Lambeth
Articles and the delegation to the Calvinistic
Synod of Dort; then, under Laud, the Catholic;
again, after a long period almost of torpor, the
Evangelical; and now once more, in a large
section of the clergy, the Catholic, though a small
section is rationalist. The authority in this case
is the Parliament, which originally settled the
system without any real regard to Convocation,
but in those times was itself Anglican, whereas
it is now made up of men of all religions and of
none. Such a state of things, if the Church of
England is a spiritual body, cannot last long.
She may be forced to break her political bonds,
and dogmatic dissolution could hardly fail to
ensue. Practically the most important of the subjects
with which M. Sabatier deals is the Protestant
authority, that of the Bible. He seems fully to
embrace the judgments of criticism, literary and
historical : —
"In what condition do we actually find the text of the
Old Testament Scriptures ? Instead of the homogeneity

SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY yy
formerly attributed to them, we find in the historic books
a fabric woven of documents yet more ancient, whose vari
colored threads are easily distinguishable, making clear
that the Pentateuch and the books of Joshua, Judges,
Samuel, and Kings assumed their present form at a very
late date. Furthermore, what a medley of disarrange
ment do we find in the prophecies of Isaiah, Zechariah,
and Jeremiah, to speak only of those whose want of con
nection is visible to the unaided eye ! What is the book
of Psalms, if not the Psalter of the Jewish synagogue,
made up of hymns of very different periods, already gath
ered into earlier collections? What shall we say under
this head of Proverbs and the entire Solomonic literature,
offshoots of which are found down to the second century
before our era?" (p. 236.)
M. Sabatier abandons in plain terms the super
natural notion of the Bible and confesses that it
is no longer the infallible rule of religious thought,
the oracle of absolute and eternal truth. Yet
he treats it still as the great aliment and support
of spiritual life. He says that it "continues
to discharge a double and essential function in
the life of churches, families, and individuals;
that it is no longer a code, but remains a testimony;
is no longer a law, but is a means of grace ; does
not prescribe the scientific formulas of faith,
but does remain the historic fountain of Christian

78 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
knowledge." Luther, he says, and Calvin, used
the Bible freely as spiritual food without bibli-
olatry ; Luther disparaging the Epistle of James,
Calvin looking askance on the Apocalypse. To
which it might be replied, in the first place,
that Luther and Calvin brought with them con
firmed convictions from their previous religious
state; in the second place, that they were not
common men. Simple souls can hardly be ex
pected to make use of a great course of literature
as food for spiritual appetite developed within
themselves, injecting into it their personal thoughts
and emotion. They crave for authority, or at
least a positive rule such as they thought they
had in the Bible, believing it to be throughout the
inspired Word of God.
How, after the admissions which M. Sabatier
has made, can he continue to speak of "the Bible"
at all? How can he persevere in treating as a
book that which is in fact a collection of books,
independent of each other, and varying greatly
in character, spirit, and value? The Old Testa
ment is the whole of ancient Hebrew literature
bound up together. The idea of God differs
materially in different parts of it. The God of

SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 79
Genesis is anthropomorphic, and the special deity
of a patriarchal family. The God of Exodus,
Joshua, and Judges is intensely tribal, sanctioning
in the interest of the tribe wholesale massacre,
as in the case of the Canaanites; treason, as in
the case of Rahab ; assassination, as in the case of
Sisera; inflicting plagues upon all the Egyptians
to make Pharaoh let the favored tribe go. This
deity and the deity who makes Balaam's ass
speak, who sends a lying spirit to Ahab, who
makes bears kill a party of boys for mocking
Elisha, is a conception surely lower than that
of Deity in the second Isaiah, in Amos, in the
more spiritual Psalms. The Psalms are mani
festly by different hands. The spirit of some
of them is gentle and beautiful. That of others
is the reverse.
An attempt has been made to impart unity to
the collection and at the same time to explain
away its moral difficulties and give it as a whole
the character of a progressive revelation by the
help of that universal key, the principle of evolu
tion. But no process of evolution can really be
discerned. In the latest books of the series,
those of Ezra and Nehemiah, there reigns the

80 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
narrowest tribalism, a tribalism which commands
the Hebrew to put away his Gentile wife. Of
the book of Esther it is only necessary to say that
it is the source of the feast of Purim.
If the Hebrew literature is divested of the
character of revelation, is it so immeasur
ably higher, morally and spiritually, than the
Greek? The Greek pantheon, of course, is
morally low, though sunny and inspiring to art.
But the deity of Socrates, though indistinct and
hardly personal, is sublimely moral. In the
Hebrew literature there is, on the whole, not
much of tenderness or affection. We have Ruth,
it is true, we have the friendship of David and
Jonathan, and some other touches of humanity.
But there is no parting of Hector and Andromache.
There is no Antigone or Alcestis. There is nothing
like the sentiment of the Greek epitaph in which
the dead wife says that of the two babes which
she bore her husband, one she keeps with her as
the pledge of his love, and the other she has left
to be the prop of his old age. Sternness, amount
ing often to grimness, seems to be the general tone
of the Old Testament.
Then, upon what principle would M. Sabatier

SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 8 1
say, if belief in a supernatural revelation is to be
discarded, are we to bind up the New Testament
with the Old? The Deity and the religion of
the Old Testament are tribal, and tribal they re
main to the last. The God of the Chosen People
might be destined to extend his sway over all the
nations of the earth; but he would still be the
God of the Chosen People. The God of the New
Testament is the equal Father of all. The son
of the carpenter at Nazareth would, of course,
accept uncritically the sacred books of his nation
with their traditional interpretations. But it
was not from the narrative of the plagues of Egypt
or of the slaughter of the Canaanites that he
drew his ideas of the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man. If the religion of the New
Testament owed its birth to that of the Old
Testament, it was by repulsion as well as by pro
duction. Of the prophecies of Jesus in the Old
Testament, criticism has entirely disposed. The
bigots of the Old Testament crucified the Teacher
of the New. Nothing is more dear or familiar
to us than the Bible as it is. Great indeed would
be the wrench of parting with it. Yet nothing
surely can be less rational than a volume in which

82 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
certain portions of Hebrew history and literature
are bound up as identical in source and spirit
with' the Sermon on the Mount.
For my own part, I should prefer to rest the
claims of Christianity to serious and unimpassioned
consideration no more on anything mystical or
esoteric than on anything supernatural, but rather
on the evidence of the character, moral and social,
which Christianity has produced, and the relation
of that character to the progress of humanity.
These are facts not less certain in their way
than any that can be submitted to the investiga
tion of science.
March, 1904.

XVI
THE TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
Slnce Sabatier's work foreshadowing the de
cline of religious authority was noticed in the
Sun, a movement has been on foot in Canada
tending in the direction which it was then suggested
that religious progress would be likely to take.
It had its origin in Toronto, but its most congenial
scene appears to be our Canadian Northwest,
where everything is] new, a population, being
immigrant, is less bound by old ties, secular or
religious, and the futility of dogmatic division
is most apparent; where, moreover, the incon
venience of maintaining three churches for one
congregation must be specially felt. It is proposed,
and the proposal seems strongly supported, to
unite the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congrega
tional churches. The union is not to be one merely
of pulpits and good works, but organic. As
between the Methodists and Congregationalists,
there would be little to sacrifice on either side
83

84 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
in the way of doctrine; there would be more
between the Presbyterians and the other two
classes, unless the Presbyterians have radically
modified the Westminster Confession. The Con-
gregationalists would have to sacrifice their theory
of church government. Fusion of organizations,
with their vested interests, might be more difficult
than the fusion of doctrines. Perhaps the fusion
of names might be most difficult of all. A fear
has suggested itself that the result, instead of being
an advance in liberalism, might be a consolidation
of dogma on a large scale. But this seems unlikely.
Sectarian bulwarks having once given way, the
result probably would be an approach to a church
of ethical, spiritual, and social brotherhood on
Christian lines such as the Protestant churches
are apparently tending to be.
I was sure to receive proofs of the impatience
with which thorough-going materialists, elated
by the grand discovery of evolution, regard those
who hesitate to embrace at once the full mate
rialist creed and say with its chief living exposi
tor that the three great obstacles to our well-
being are the beliefs in God, Free Will, and a
Future Life. For my part, I have unfeignedly

THE TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 85
professed my loyalty to Science. I heartily accept
evolution, only pausing to see whether a discovery
so recent as well as momentous has yet found its
final level. I only ask that certain phenomena
of human nature, its liberty of choice in action,
its moral aspirations, its power of idealization, its
finer affections, its sense of spiritual beauty, its
conception of the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man, all in fact that constitutes
what we have regarded as spiritual life, should
receive fair consideration, and that we should be
told whether these phenomena can be explained
by evolution or by any process of material de
velopment. I hesitate also to admit the assump
tion that the evidence of our five senses, even
with all our scientific aids, is a complete account
of the universe, so as to shut out any indication
that there may be in our nature of something be
yond. Truth, welcome or unwelcome, we must
embrace. In embracing it is our only salvation.
But it is too much to say that proof of the mate
rialist theory would be welcome. The theory
means annihilation after a life as transitory as
that of an insect; less jocund, it is to be feared,
than that of an insect in the case of a very large

86 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
proportion of our race. Positivism seeks to con
sole us with an attractive formulary setting forth
the cooperation of successive generations in the
furtherance of human progress. What interest
can any generation have in a progress of which
it will not personally partake or even be conscious ?
Besides, in what is the progress to end? Science
says, in a physical catastrophe.
Not less fully do I accept the judgments of
criticism on the authenticity of the Gospel narra
tives and the mythical element which they unques
tionably contain. With the supernatural and
miraculous, with what has hitherto been called
revelation, we must evidently part. But the
Character which has formed the Christian Ideal
still remains. It is not only pictured in the Gos
pels, but reflected in the genuine writings of Paul.
There remains also the doctrine to which Paul
was a convert and which was preached with signal
success by him. There remains the effect of
that doctrine on the history of the civilized world.
Loaded and sullied though Christianity has been
by alliances with secular powers, theocratic usurpa
tion, dogmatic bigotry, and sectarian strife, what
moral influence can be traced in the progress

THE TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 87
of humanity comparable to that of the belief
in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man? There is surely nothing superstitious
or reactionary in the recognition of experience
embodied in the great facts of history.
April, 1904.

XVII
THE BIBLE: ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS
We learn from the Sun that orthodoxy under
the very eminent leadership of Dr. Patton is
confronting heterodoxy on a decisive field in
defence of the "full inspiration and supreme
authority of the Bible as the word of God." It
will be a momentous encounter. What are all
our political questions compared with the question
whether we have or have not the divinely inspired
word of life?
Those whose opinions I share will be inclined
to demur to the use in a critical discussion of
the term "Bible," dear and familiar as that term
may be. The founder of Christianity, a humble
Galilean, naturally received with uncritical sim
plicity the sacred books and traditions of his
nation. He accepted as historical the story of
Jonah, and saw in the appellation of Jehovah as
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob a proof
that those patriarchs still lived. But Pharisaism
88

THE BIBLE: ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS 89
obeyed its instincts in crucifying the Founder
of Christianity. The Anglican Articles say "the
Old Testament is not contrary to the New."
In some parts it is anticipative ; but what can be
more contrary to the brotherhood of man than
the order to smite the Canaanites and utterly
destroy them? What can be more contrary to
the Christian rule of marriage than is the in
junction of Ezra to the Jews to put away their
Gentile wives? The God of the Old Testament
to the last is tribal, though he is supreme over
the gods of all the other nations and will some
day make his tribe and worship supreme. The
God of the New Testament is universal.
It is time that we should frankly treat as primi
tive the Old Testament stories of the Creation
and the Deluge, which distinctly clash with the
true revelation of science. They ought no longer
to be taught to children. I recollect the ignomini
ous struggles of a great geologist, whose lectures
I attended in my youth, to reconcile scientific fact
with established and consecrated belief.
The Old Testament has its sublimities, its
beauties, its passages of advanced morality, both
personal and social. In virtue of these it must

90 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
always hold its ground. The Mosaic law,
whatever may be the date of its redaction,
belongs in its character to a primitive era, and
for that era is a notable advance in civiliza
tion. Recognizing primitive customs, it improves
on them. It distinguishes wilful murder from
accidental homicide, and confines to wilful mur
der the function of the avenger of blood. It
forbids the taking of money as a satisfaction for
blood, which was the general custom of primitive
mankind. It condemns the hereditary blood
feud. By providing judges and calling on the
congregation to judge between the slayer and
the avenger of blood, it puts private revenge under
the control of public law. It limits the evil
privilege of asylum. It limits paternal despotism,
which among the Romans was unlimited, requir
ing a public process and the concurrence of the
mother in the execution of the rebellious child.
Recognizing polygamy, as in those days was
inevitable, it guards against the evil jealousies
and partialities of the harem. It even mitigates
in some measure the barbarous laws of war, re
quiring that a garrison shall be regularly summoned,
and forbidding the cutting down of the fruit trees,

THE BIBLE: ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS 91
the permanent wealth of the country, which was
regularly practised by the Greeks. It extends
a measure of protection to the feelings of captive
women. It is singularly free from militarism,
making no provision for a standing army, even
foregoing forced service in war, and treating
"peace in all your borders" as the highest bless
ing. It recognizes slavery, then universal, but
mercifully interposes to some extent between the
master and the slave. It however betrays its
human origin in ordaining death for witchcraft.
Nor can mere improvements on the tribal system,
though remarkable and even wonderful, be said
clearly to bespeak the intervention of God.
The Decalogue is very high morality for its
day, as the continuance of its authority has proved,
though its allusion to the Creation shows that it
was not inspired by the Maker of the world.
The Sabbath, while in its Jewish form it belongs
to the past, has glided with rational modification
into our inestimable Day of Rest.
If the grandeurs and beauties of the Old Testa
ment are apparent, its weaknesses cannot well
be concealed. Who can pretend to admire all
the ecstatic utterances of Jeremiah and Ezekiel ?

92 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
The book of Job has been lauded beyond measure.
It has striking passages, and its theme is one of
the deepest interest. But it signally fails to solve
its problem, the compatibility of the sufferings of
good men with the providence of God. Socrates,
as reflected in Plato, is here clearly above Job.
Some passages in the Old Testament which
are instinct with tribal cruelty and pander to the
war spirit have borne very bitter fruit. A plea
has been entered for the retention of these as
congenial to a particular class of converts. It
was for that very reason that Ulfilas, the apostle
of the Goths, left the book of Kings out of his
translation of the Scriptures.
Inspiration must be universal or none. We
are not warranted in picking out certain passages
and pronouncing them divine while the rest are
human. A single error or immorality is fatal
to the divine origin of the whole. That a divine
Being should err or mislead is inconceivable.
Not less inconceivable is it that he should have
subjected himself in his operations to such a
law as evolution, and then waited for Darwin to
explain the dispensation to mankind.
Inspiration has not been defined, nor does it

THE BIBLE: ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS 93
seem that any distinct idea has ever been formed
of the process. How was the divine mind com
municated to the writer? By what signs or con
sciousness was the writer assured that he had
become the penman of the Almighty and was
authorized in that character to claim the trust and
obedience of the world ?
It seems to follow that the Old Testament
ought not to be bound up with the New as the
record of a continuous revelation, hard as it will
be to dissolve the union between the two parts
of our family Bible.
The value of the New Testament, to a rational
ist, does not depend on the proof of apostolic or
contemporary authorship, on the credibility of the
miraculous parts of the narrative, or on anything
that the higher criticism has swept or is sweeping
away. It rests on the Character unmistakably
portrayed, and on the doctrines which unques
tionably gave birth to Christendom.
May, 1904.

XVIII
IS CHRISTIANITY DEAD OR DYING ?
When it is said that Christianity since the
middle of the eighteenth century has been dead
or dying, we must ask what is meant by Chris
tianity. If what is meant is belief in the super
natural inspiration of the Bible, in miracles, in
the creeds, Christianity unquestionably is dead
or dying in critical minds. The miracles, we see,
were a halo which gathered round the head of
the Founder, superior to other such halos in that
they are miracles of mercy, not of power. But
the doctrine which is the vital essence of Chris
tianity, belief in the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man, seems not yet to be dead
or certainly dying.
During the first half of the eighteenth century
spiritual life was at a low ebb, the main cause be
ing the tyranny or torpor of established Churches.
That was the day of Voltaire. But towards the
end of the century there was a great revival. In
94

IS CHRISTIANITY DEAD OR DYING? 95
England there was outside the Establishment
the Methodist movement under Wesley; inside
the Establishment there was the evangelical
movement, which had Christians of eminence at
its head. From the religious zeal thus awakened,
besides a moral and social reform, sprang great
religious enterprises, missionary and philanthropic.
The movement for the abolition of slavery and
those for the redemption of suffering classes in
England were Christian in spirit and were led by
Lord Shaftesbury and other religious men.
The Reformation itself was a revival, and a
revival not only from torpor and seeming death,
but from depravation apparently the most fatal,
from the Papacy of the Borgias and the reign of
the Inquisition. Has polytheism, Buddhism, or
Islam ever shown its inherent vitality by a similar
revival ?
The preaching of the Founder of Christendom,
who taught the fatherhood of God and the brother
hood of man, undeniably was the great awakening
of spiritual life in the world. A world without
spiritual life, or religion as the embodiment of
that life, and regulated by social science solely
in temporal interests, is perfectly conceivable.

96 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
But the religion which should take the place of
vital Christianity is not. Renan says of the
words addressed to the woman of Samaria that
they are the essence of religion, and that if there
are intelligent beings in other planets and they are
religious, this and none other their religion must be.
The revelations of the physical world come to
us through the action of high scientific intellects.
Was it not possible that a revelation of the moral
world should come to us through a character of
unique excellence, benevolence, and beauty, pre
served in its simplicity and purity by the pastoral
isolation of Galilee?
The Positivist points triumphantly to the self-
devotion of the Japanese sacrificing themselves
for their country though they have, as he assumes,
no religion. Is the diagnosis quite correct?
When the Japanese rips himself up rather than
surrender, what is his motive? Is it self-sacrifice
like that of the Christian martyr, or an intense
manifestation of the tribal instinct which passes
from the animal to the human herd? In self-
sacrifice for the good of humanity such as that
of the Christian martyr there would seem to be
an element of another kind.

IS CHRISTIANITY DEAD OR DYING ? 97
An article published in the North American
Review on "The Immortality of the Soul" has,
it seems, saddened some of its readers. The
admissions made in it saddened its writer.
But it would sadden him and all of us still more
to rest in untruth. He has shown that he so far
refuses to believe that all ends here.
July, 1904.

xrx
THE TWO THEORIES OF LIFE
"You need not expect that people will stand
aside because you have come. They are going
to crowd you, and you will have to crowd them.
They will leave you behind unless you leave
them behind." Such, it seems, is the view of
human society and life which can now be pre
sented by educational authority. A generation
ago this doctrine would have startled us.
But we seem verging on an age of survival of
the fittest, fitness being measured by force; of
progress by destruction, of imperialism, of strenu
ous life. Against the prevailing tendencies vital
Christianity, the belief in the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man, continues to strug
gle, though with a force impaired by its entangle
ment with beliefs which science and criticism
have disproved, but which it is hard for an or
dained clergy and ecclesiastical organizations to
cast off. The world is again divided between
98

THE TWO THEORIES OF LIFE 99
these tendencies and the parties to which they
give birth, somewhat in the same way as at the
time of the Reformation it was divided between
Catholicism and Protestantism, when the lines of
nationality were crossed and superseded by those
of religious belief. Not that orthodox and titular
Christianity by any means coincides with faith
in human brotherhood and righteousness. Some
churches have floated with the political tide.
But of the essence of Christianity, as it is embodied
in the Sermon on the Mount, not a little is now
to be found outside the churches.
Christian ethic has suffered by a belief in the
inspiration of the Gospels which has led to the
acceptance of Oriental hyperbole as literal pre
cept. The injunctions of forgiveness of injuries,
taken literally, would be fatuous. But plac
ability is not fatuous, or undignified. In a fa
mous passage of Corneille's " Cinna," Augustus,
after overwhelming the offender with a rehearsal
of his misdeeds, changes his tone and says, "Let
us be friends." Is Augustus lowered? Is there
more dignity in the opposite sentiment, so frankly
avowed in the columns of the Sun by a repre
sentative of the old Dispensation ?

100 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
The Christian doctrine of fraternity is, at all
events for many of us, more comfortable than
that of mutual jostling and the survival of the
strongest. We cannot all be foremost in the race
of competition, we cannot all thrust each other
aside, we cannot all climb over each other's
heads. But we can all do our duty in our place ;
and if duty is the pledge of happiness, we can all
in a measure be happy.
Is competition or cooperation the fundamental
law of humanity? Take any product of human
industry, a manufactured article, for instance;
trace it back in thought to the multifarious agencies
which in countries and ages widely apart have
contributed to its production, and say whether it
does not speak of a relation very different from
that of herds of animals jostling each other.
What is the mainspring of progress but cooper
ation ?
Nobody could be more free from orthodox
superstition of any kind than Carlyle, who in one
of his Essays, after speaking of other agencies of
progress, says : —
Or, to take an infinitely higher instance, that of the
Christian religion, which, under every theory of it, in the

THE TWO THEORIES OF LIFE IOI
believing or unbeheving mind, must ever be regarded as
the crowning glory, or rather the life and soul, of our whole
modern culture: How did Christianity arise and spread
abroad among men ? Was it by institutions, and establish
ments and well-arranged systems of mechanism ? Not so ;
on the contrary, in all past and existing institutions for
those ends its divine spirit has invariably been found to
languish and decay. It arose in the mystic deeps of man's
soul; and was spread abroad by the " preaching of the
word," by simple, altogether natural and individual efforts ;
and flew, like hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all
were purified and illuminated by it ; and its heavenly light
shone, as it still shines, and (as sun or star) will ever shine,
through the whole dark destinies of man.
It happened that when I laid down Carlyle
there met my eyes a gilt cross on the spire of
a Catholic church illumined by the sun. The
cross was the emblem of all that was materially
weakest, of slavery and the shameful death of the
slave. The eagle was the emblem of the Roman
Empire, the greatest embodiment of force which
the world has ever seen. The eagle and the
cross encountered each other. Which prevailed?
It may be said, of course, that the cross repre
sented a force. It did, but the force was not that
of strenuous life and the big stick.

102 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Once more I have not pretended, nor do I
pretend, to advance any theory of the universe
or of man. I only ask that before we embrace
ultra-materialism, with its apparent corollaries,
moral and social, all the real phenomena of
humanity, not only those with which physical
science deals and which Darwin's grand discovery
covers, shall receive fair consideration, and among
the rest the phenomena of history.
August, 1904.

XX
TELEPATHY
There appeared the other day in the London
Times an account by Mr. Rider Haggard of a
telepathic communication between him and his
favorite dog which he evidently considered of
great importance. It seems he had a nightmare
in which he dreamed that his dog was being
killed and cried to him for help. It turned out
that the dog had been killed about that hour. It
does not seem that the coincidence of time was
exact, while as to the manner of the dog's death
the dream gave no sign, or none that could be
deemed a coincidence. The narrative, I confess,
seemed to me less important as a proof of mys
terious agency than as a proof of the extent to
which fancy can operate on very slight materials,
even in a strong mind. Mr. Haggard designates
his dream as a nightmare; the cause of night
mare is indigestion; and it is difficult to believe
that indigestion is a factor in the operations of the
spirit world. 103

104 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
All the cases of telepathy of which I have read
have seemed to me to resolve themselves either
into fulfilments of natural expectations, as in the
case of warnings that a person known to be sick
is dead, or into accidental coincidences, of which
in the chapter of accidents there are sure to be
many, some of them curious and striking; the
occurrence being afterwards dressed up by the
retroactive imagination of which we are all apt to
be the unconscious dupes. It has been remarked
that there has often been a letter in the case and
that the letters have not been produced.
I may mention an instance of accidental coinci
dence which fell within my own knowledge. A
person living at Oxford was staying in a house
at some distance from that city. Crossing a
heath, he was attacked by faintness and lay for
some time prostrate on the heath. When he got
back to the house in which he was staying he
found that at the very moment when he was lying
on the heath a telegram had been received from
his servant at Oxford asking whether it was true
that he had died suddenly. Another person of
the same name had died suddenly. This was the
explanation. Had the fainting fit ended differ-

TELEPATHY 105
ently, here would have been a telepathic warn
ing, and if not with a letter, with a telegram as
its proof.
As to spiritualism, one can only wonder that
the imposture should have survived such a series
of exposures. It in fact exposes itself, since the
spirits must materialize before we can be made
sensible of their presence. The planchette has
produced nothing but absurdities. Such a mode
of communication adopted by spirits is in itself
absurd. The delusion is probably kept alive by
the craving for intercourse with the lost objects
of affection. The premier medium of the day,
illumined by a spirit which had entered him,
recounted to me the misfortunes of my nephew,
when a nephew I never had. In this case I
rather suspected that the spirit was trading on
a hint given by a friend who was himself mis
informed. When I asked whether I was married,
the answer was that I seemed to be alone in the
material world and yet not alone.
It is needless to say that there has always been
a craving for the supernatural, which has shown
itself in the eclipses of religion. With the collapse
of Roman religion came the mysteries of Isis;

106 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
with the collapse of mediaeval Catholicism came
the prevalence of astrology, which captured
minds so powerful in different ways as those of
Wallenstein and Kepler. Such fancies as spiritual
ism, telepathy, planchette, seem to be the offspring
of a similar void in the soul, created by the depar
ture of traditional religion. They will not help us
to save or revive our spiritual life. They will act
in the opposite way. They will seduce us into
grovelling superstition. There are mental mys
teries, no doubt, still to be solved by physiology.
The creative action of the imagination in dreams
is one of them. So is the general mystery, still
profound, of memory. But there is no place
for the supernatural. Let us put that away for
ever. August, 1904.

XXI
spiritual versus supernatural
I find that an expression used by me has
been misconstrued. Referring to telepathy and
other miracles, I said that there was no place for
the supernatural. I did not mean to say that there
was no place for the spiritual. Spiritual life, with
its intimations, presents itself to me, not as super
natural, but as the natural though the highest
development of humanity.
Another word on the subject of that paper.
Some of us remember that the original form of
these pretended manifestations was table-turning.
Table-turning for a time was the rage. In the
circle of my own acquaintance there was a man
of considerable intellect and attainments who
was carried away by this absurdity. I took part
in an experiment, and plainly saw one of the party,
unconsciously of course, pressing the table and
making it turn.
"M. M." is apparently inclined to believe in
107

108 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
spiritualism because a female medium guessed
his malady and the names of two of his relatives.
Could inspiration do no better than this? These
pretenders are of course adepts in the trade. They
know how to fish out information and how to feel
their way with an inquirer by observation of face
and voice. My own experience has proved that
the most famous of them, when craftily led on,
can go utterly astray.
A story was told about Alexis, the great clair
voyant of his day, which, though no doubt a joke,
probably pointed to the secret. A sceptic, it was
said, made an appointment with Alexis for a
seance and bade his wife at that time put the
coal-scuttle on the drawing-room table. He re
turned converted, and reported to his wife that
Alexis had told him that the coal-scuttle was on
the table. "Bless me!" replied the wife, "I
quite forgot to put it there."
For any strange manifestations of nervous
sensibility, and for any thaumaturgic performances
for which they may afford scope, we are of course
prepared. A school-fellow of mine, a nervous
boy, was thrown by mock-mesmeric passes into a
trance to get him out of which medical assistance

SPIRITUAL VERSUS SUPERNATURAL 109
was required. There are no doubt still mysteries
in the physical nature of man. But they have
nothing to do with spiritual life. There is no
place for the supernatural, and in following that
lure the spiritual may be lost.
The case of wireless telegraphy is cited. But
can there be transmission without a medium ? In
the case of wireless telegraphy there is a known
medium. In the case of telepathy no medium is
known, nor does the existence of a medium seem
possible. September, 1904.

XXII
A PROBLEM GREATER THAN TELEPATHY
The last-cited case of telepathy is that of a
loving wife filled with sudden anxiety by the silence
of her absent husband, whom she afterwards finds
to have been sick. Incidents such as this, dressed
up by our retroactive fancy, become mysterious
and the materials of a new faith. Our minds are
thereby turned from questions really momentous
in the solution of which we are called upon to
help each other.
One writer in the telepathic discussion glances
at the question of a future state in a way which
seems to imply that he hardly deems it pressing.
Yet surely no question can be more pressing, if
we have any means of solving . it, than that of
existence after death. I avoid the phrase "im
mortality of the soul," because I cannot form an
idea of immortality any more than I can of infinity
or eternity, both of which elude conception.
Conscience tells us that according as we do well
or ill in this life it will be well or ill for us here-
IIO

A PROBLEM GREATER THAN TELEPATHY III
after. Is the evidence of conscience less trust
worthy than that of our bodily senses? If the
evidence of our bodily senses and the science built
upon them alone is trustworthy, on what does
their prerogative rest? May we not be in a uni
verse unseen by Newton or Darwin?
That death wipes out the score of life and levels
the best with the worst of men, the man who has
been the benefactor with the one who has been the
curse of his kind, is a belief from which our
moral nature would seem to recoil as strongly as
our physical nature recoils from anything con
tradictory of sense.
Positivism, in place of the hope of personal
existence hereafter, presents to us impersonal
existence as a factor in the progress of humanity.
But that which is not personal is not ours.
What would be the consequence to society of
the belief, if we should be driven to it, that death
is the end ? Would there be any rational induce
ment to self-sacrifice or effort for the common
good? Would not struggle for the means of
present enjoyment be in fact the true wisdom?
Is not a tendency of this kind making itself felt
as religious belief grows weak?

112 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Old arguments of the natural kind no doubt are
failing us. We can no longer hold with the good
Bishop Butler that the soul is a being distinct
from the body, indiscerptible, and therefore prob
ably indissoluble. We know that what we call
the soul is the consummate outcome of the general
frame. Nor can we, with Socrates, found our
faith on a preexistence attested by the presence
in us of innate ideas. When Socrates points to
the distinction between the lyre and the melody
as analogous to that between the body and the
soul, a hearer replies at once that when the lyre
is broken the melody dies. Of ghosts or spiritual
ist apparitions there is no need to speak.
We are met with the cases of idiots, lunatics,
children dying in infancy, savages, and others,
who have not seen moral light. That argu
ment seems valid against universal resurrection,
but not against the survival of responsibility
where responsibility has been.
Conscience implies the existence of a deity, to
whose tribunal it appeals, as to that of a power
which upholds righteousness and directs all in
the end to good. It implies, not the freedom of
the will, if by that is meant independence of ante-

A PROBLEM GREATER THAN TELEPATHY 113
cedents, but volition, the reality of which extreme
materialism seems to deny. The exact relation
between the antecedents and the volition we may
not be able to define. The impelling motive, as
was said before, seems not to be the only factor in
action of which we ,are conscious. We are con
scious also of the exertion of the will, though not
distinctly in actions where there is no conflict of
motive, in actions where there is. The existence
of volition, as well as of the antecedents, is as
sumed in all our judgments on our own actions
and those of our fellows.
October, 1904.

XXIII
DR. OSLER ON SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY
Dr. Osler's erudite and elegant lecture on
"Science and Immortality" has just come into
my hands.
Dr. Osier plays gracefully with the subject.
His own attitude towards the doctrine of a future
life appears, to use his own phrase, to be "Gallio-
nian." He seems to regard the doctrine as a
beautiful but perfectly unpractical hypothesis.
He winds up, indeed, with a faint affirmative and
a mallem errare cum Platone. To me, I confess,
the question seems one on which at the present
time we can no more afford to err with Plato than
we can to err with Eddy or Dowie.
Philosophic dalliance with the problem of a
future state may be more congenial to Dives than
to Lazarus. If there is nothing beyond this life,
what a spectacle is the state of Lazarus in the slums
of New York ! What a spectacle is the life of the
unfortunate generally! What a spectacle is His-
114

DR. OSLER ON SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 115
tory! Schopenhauer said, not that this was the
worst of all conceivable, but that it was the worst
of all possible worlds, and could not bear another
grain of evil. There has been and is a terribly
large proportion of the human race which might
think that the pessimist told the truth. The
crown of all things, Dr. Osier says, is man. If
happiness is the criterion, what a crown !
"Immortality" is inconceivable. We must dis
card the term. The question is whether our hopes
and responsibilities extend beyond this world and
life. Conscience says that they do. Conscience
tells us that this world, its awards and its judg
ments, are not all, but that as we do well or ill in
this life, it will be well or ill for us in the sum of
things. What question can be more practical?
Even taking it on the lowest ground, what would
our social state be if vice and wickedness had only
to bilk human law? Would not self-sacrifice be
folly and martyrdom insanity?
That physical science has nothing to say to
this matter is true. But is physical science our
only sure source of knowledge? Are our moral
instincts less trustworthy than our physical sense ?
As I have already said, I affirm nothing; but I

Il6 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
call attention to the apparent fact that there is in
man something of which the materialist still owes
us an account. All may be, and in a sense no
doubt is, the outcome of physical evolution. That
does not seem to me to close the inquiry. What
ever the process of development, Dr. Osier is not
a germ, but a man, well read in the noble literature
of the seventeenth century.
That men go about their daily work thinking
little of a future state, as Dr. Osier says, is per
fectly true. But is not the influence of conscience,
with what it implies, always there, unless it has
been absolutely stifled, as in the case of consum
mate wickedness it probably is? Does not every
man, when he obeys his conscience against his
passions or his interest, virtually express a belief
in something beyond this world?
"Teresianism," as Dr. Osier calls the fervent
belief, such as was that of St. Teresa, in the life
to come, has, as he admits, produced the salt of
the earth, which a mere falsehood could hardly
have done. On the other hand, what followed
when French Jacobinism and Terrorism had
written over the gate of the cemetery: "Here is
eternal sleep"?

DR. OSLER ON SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 117
The dull submission of the dying to the inevi
table, when, as in most cases, emotion is weakened,
while death is often a release from pain, does not
seem to me to go far toward proving that death
is not a turning-point, but the end. From the old
ecclesiastical terrors most men are now free.
The conclusions of extreme materialism would
be welcome to few. But if the materialist proves
his case, we acquiesce. There is no hope for us
in our present perplexities but in the frank accept
ance of all demonstrated truth.
'October, 1904.

XXIV
DISPENSING WITH THE SOUL
One more word. On re-perusing Dr. Osier's
very charming treatise, I find him saying that
"modern psychological science dispenses altogether
with the soul." With the soul as a separate entity
breathed into the body at birth and parted from
it at death all free thinkers now dispense. But
has reason yet dispensed with spiritual life and
its attendant hopes? Are we, as Dr. Osier ap
parently thinks, bound to admit the absolute
prepotency of the "germ-plasm" and to assume
that the limit of its physical development is the
limit of ethical possibility? Is it not still con
ceivable that something different in kind from
the germ-plasm may be the ultimate issue of the
process? In fact, can one thing differ more in
kind from another thing than Dr. Osier with his
science and his culture differs in kind from the
germ-plasm? If development goes so far, are
118

DISPENSING WITH THE SOUL 119
we warranted in assuming that it cannot go farther
and culminate in spiritual life? Does the germ-
plasm contain the whole productive power and
all the promise in itself? Left to itself, would
it come to anythmg? Is it not mdebted for its
development to the vivifying and moulding influ
ences in which it is steeped? If it is, nothing in
the germ-plasm itself can apparently be an abso
lute limitation. The germ is a starting-point, as
was the particle in the nebula. The goal may be
spiritual life; by which of course is meant
not "spiritualism" or anything of that kind,
but the life of moral aspiration and effort,
with any promise or assurance which it may
contain. The authority of conscience is a dream; there
is no moral tribunal higher than that of human
opinion and law; death levels the good with the
wicked, the sensualist with the pure of heart, the
man who has been a blessing with the man who
has been a curse to his kind. Such is the con
clusion to which thorough-going materialism leads.
We may have to face it. I have not said and do
not say that we may not. But we want the ques
tion to be thoroughly discussed, and we maintain

120 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
that it is not fanciful or dilettantist, but practical
in the highest degree. Apart from spiritual hopes,
would not social morality feel the change ? Is not
social morality feeling the change already?
December, 1904.

XXV
THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION
The acceptance of my letters by the Sun has
brought me many tokens of interest in the sub
ject to which they relate. Some of my corre
spondents have asked me for my theory. But I
have no theory. All I pretend to do is to state
the case and invite opinion.
The subject is one of interest, practical as well
as deep, were it only from its bearmg on the future
position of the clergy. What are clergymen on
whose minds the light of criticism has dawned
hereafter to do? Renan and others like him
seem in effect to wish that the clergy should con
tinue to preach a religion suited to the multitude,
while they, the sons of light, sit aloft in light by
themselves. But will learned and conscientious
men, as your clergy must be, be found to preach
wholesome falsehood for a State purpose, and,
like Roman augurs, to laugh each other in the
face when they meet?

122 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
If ultra-materialism is true, man is a mere
development of the germ-plasm. There is no
ground for belief in a moral government of the
universe. Conscience, if it speaks of a tribunal
higher than the human, lies. Death ends all for
us, and levels us all. When we die, it signifies
nothing whether our life has been good or evil.
Materialists say that the evildoer will be punished
by remorse for a wasted life. But how can his
life be said to have been wasted if he has supped
full of pleasure, gratified every passion, and bilked
human justice? Positivism tells us that we shall
live for good or evil in the future of the race.
What interest, when we have personally ceased
to be, shall we have in the future of the race?
After all, in what will the race end ?
Dogmatic and miraculous Christianity we resign.
But the vital principles of Christianity, the father
hood of God and the brotherhood of man, still
rest on their historical and moral evidences as a
key to the moral problem of our being. At the
same time Christianity, by throwing off dogma
and miracle, is rid of one of its heaviest burdens.
There is no longer a barrier between Christendom
and the rest of humanity. The term "heathen"

THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION 123
becomes unmeaning. Socrates, Epictetus, Marcus
Aurelius, are no longer consigned to the uncove-
nanted mercies of God. We live henceforth
under an ampler sky.
There is no use in guessing at the nature of the
Power which fills and moves the universe. We
cannot hope to delineate or define the inconceiv
able. The world visible to us presents to our
senses a perplexing mixture of that which to us
is good with that which to us is evil, of order with
disorder, of beneficence with cruelty, of beauty
with the unbeautiful. We cannot solve the
mystery. Bridgewater Treatises, picking out in
stances of order and beneficence and saying
nothing about the opposites, no longer afford us
help. Human excellence is attainable only through
effort, which implies a struggle with evil. This,
apart from revelation, is apparently the only hint
of a solution that we have. Yet it is difficult to
believe that rational being is confined to this
planet or that nothing speaks to us through the
majesty and glory of the universe.
Conscience, says Bishop Butler, a keen anato
mist of human nature, if it had power as it has
authority, would rule the world. Conscience tells

124 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
us that as we do well or ill it will be well or ill
for us in the end. Is this delusion? Is con
science or is it not really a part of our nature?
If it is, have we any special ground for refusing
its evidence more than for refusing that of our
physical senses on which all science, moral or
physical, rests? After all, what is truth but that
which, by the constitution of our nature, we can
not help believing? Is any man without a con
science? There are men who crush it, perhaps
silence it in themselves; but is any man without
it? That notions of duty vary considerably from
age to age may be admitted. But conscience
always declares for duty as we see it at the time
against the forces of passion or self-love.
It may be true that conscience, like other parts
of our nature, including the scientific faculties, is
developed by an evolutionary process. This does
not affect its authority. When developed, it is
here. We must, however, be allowed to challenge
the claim of the germ-plasm to prepotency and
finality. The germ-plasm is the starting-point of
a development which, carried forward and moulded
by a variety of influences, culminates in Socrates.

THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION 1 25
But Socrates is not a germ-plasm any more than he
is a particle in the nebula from which the germ-
plasm itself is an emanation. That man had his
foundation in the dust we have long believed.
For dust put radium, if you will; but con
science, moral aspiration, spiritual affection, the
sense of spiritual beauty, idealization, are, if our
inner sense does not utterly mislead us, higher in
their nature than dust.
February, 1905.

XXVI
IS MATERIALISM ADVANCING?
It would seem that the answer to the question
whether materialism has been making way must
partly depend on the meaning attached to the
word. My friend Professor Tyndall, as I think I
have said before, called himself, and insisted upon
being called, a materialist, because, as a man of
science, he believed that in matter was the poten
tiality of all things. Yet in sentiment, character,
and aspirations no human being could be less
material. In this I believe he was the type of
many who, though they have embraced the mate
rialist hypothesis, remain spiritual in character
and aim.
It can scarcely be denied that between the higher
criticism on one side and Darwin's momentous
discovery on the other, materialism, in the scien
tific and philosophic sense, positive or negative,
is gaining ground. We are called upon at all
events to find a new warrant for spiritual life, for
126

IS MATERIALISM ADVANCING ? 12;
reliance on the dictates of conscience, for any
hopes that we may have cherished of existence
beyond the grave, for confidence in a divine order
of the universe. We can no longer believe that
the miscellany of Hebrew writings, many of them
of doubtful authorship and date, some of them
plainly mythical, are a divine revelation. Nor
is anything to be hoped from an attempt to evade
the difficulty by suggesting that Deity, in its deal
ings with man, had to accommodate itself to the
Darwinian law of evolution. Of the Gospels,
criticism has spared only the character and teach
ings of Jesus, which, on any hypothesis, have
given birth to Christendom. In the authenticity,
contemporaneity, harmony of the documents, we
can confide no more. We can no longer sincerely
accept the evidence for the Incarnation, the
Immaculate Conception, the miracles, the Resur
rection; or deem it such as would certainly have
been given in proof of a revelation which was to
be the light of the world. Moreover, the Fall
being a myth, as it is now allowed almost on all
hands to be, there is no ground for the Incarnation
and the Atonement, a disclosure which in itself
is fatal to the dogmatic and traditional creed of

128 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Christendom. Nor, we must sorrowfully confess,
is the collapse of our evidences limited to the case
of, revelation. It extends to that of natural
religion. Bishop Butler's proof of immortality,
resting on the separate existence of the soul as
an entity breathed into the body at birth and
released from it at death, has been swept away by
evolution. Theism itself has been seriously called
in question, and arguments founded on the proofs
of universal beneficence, such as the writers of the
Bridgewater Treatises deemed conclusive, will un
happily no longer avail. The wrench is great;
but through frank abandonment of that which
cannot be sustained lies our only road to truth.
For the first time perhaps in history, man stands
with his unassisted reason, independent of any
revelation or tradition, in face of the mystery of
his existence and of the order of the universe. If
there is any historical precedent, it is probably the
position of the Greek philosophers. But the Greek
philosophers were children in science. Their cos
mic speculations were ingenious guesses. Besides,
they had not absolutely renounced the State religion.
Socrates worshipped the gods of the State, and
bequeathed an offering to ^Esculapius. Little will

IS MATERIALISM ADVANCING ? 129
be found in the Greek philosophy at all helpful to
present investigation. The thought of the Roman
stoics was given to the formation of personal char
acter. Nor is there much to aid us in the phi
losophy of the Voltairean era. It had no Darwin.
It is extremely controversial, and therefore want
ing in breadth and in calmness of vision. Besides,
neither Voltaire nor Rousseau is independent
of theistic tradition. Voltaire, as we remember,
avowed his belief that the fear of God was neces
sary to save our throats from being cut; and he
built a church with the inscription, "Deo Erexit
Voltaire," which, if he had said what he felt,
would perhaps have been " Voltairio Erexit Deus."
No one surely can treat these questions lightly.
No one can think that even in a social point of
view it matters nothing whether death ends and
cancels all or whether conscience is a delusion.
Dr. Osier may be right in saying that most people
think little about a future life. This may be
partly because the future life has been presented
to them in a guise which no mind can grasp, and
which is at variance with their practical sense of
justice and mercy. Still, the belief has been there ;
and so has the authority of conscience. The

130 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
churches are a momentous part of our social
organization, and on these beliefs they rest.
Habit and opinion will sustain them, probably
are now sustaining many of them, after the de
parture of positive belief. They may glide, as
not a few of them are now gliding, into social
congregations, spiritual in their tone, with moral
objects, and under highly cultivated leadership.
There are already inklings of such a change.
Inquiry has happily become earnest, calm, and
tolerant. It may yet end in inducing the germ-
plasm to limit its unbounded pretensions and leave
room for the continued existence of spiritual life,
and of such hopes as may reasonably be attached
thereto. A new religion independent of tradition
may yet be born.
In the meantime there is a natural tendency to
take refuge in fantastic speculations of the spiritu
alist kind against which we have to be on our
guard. April, 1905.

XXVLt
DOUBT AND ITS FRUITS
"B. D., Oxon.," I can conscientiously assure
him, mistakes my position if he thinks that
my object is destructive. That which cannot
be maintained, it seems to me, we ought frankly
to resign, that we may hold fast that which can.
What is really injurious to the clergy is the sugges
tion that they should continue to preach for pur
poses of expediency that which has ceased to be
believed. To what extent the doubts manifestly
prevalent among the laity may have spread to
the clergy, I do not pretend to say. That they
have spread to some extent surely cannot be
gainsaid. The volume of letters about religion entitled
"Do We Believe?", a selection from nine
thousand sent to the London Daily Telegraph
in three months, is a proof that the subject
has living and general interest. This book is a
fair mirror of opinion, and in two respects is
131

132 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
welcome. It proves at once the triumph of
toleration and the earnestness of quest for truth.
Of dogmatic narrowness or bitterness there is
hardly a trace. We are in a far better and more
hopeful state than Christendom was a hundred
years ago.
The collection is divided into three parts:
"Faith," "Unfaith," and "Doubt." Doubt is
hardly distinguishable from Unfaith. Nor does
Faith make any serious stand for the evidences.
The stand it makes is for Christian character and
the consolations of religion. Even Archbishop
Temple, when interrogated about the miracles,
can only say that omnipotence had always power
to perform them, and that the absence of them
in our day is no proof of their absence in past
times; two propositions which a sceptic might
subscribe. Unfaith and Doubt are left in pos
session of the critical field, and they are able to
cite startling admissions on the clerical side, such
as that of an ecclesiastic of eminence who gives
up as mythical the virgin birth of the Redeemer.
On the other hand, Unfaith and Doubt generally
accept the Christian view of character and the
Christian rule of life. They place happiness in

DOUBT AND ITS FRUITS 1 33
benevolence, which is taken to be its own reward.
On what is that assumption founded if there is
no God or Hereafter ? If conscience is a delusion,
and death clears all scores, what have we to say
to the man who indulges his lust and escapes the
law? He may be a social nuisance, but how can
you show that, from his own point of view, he is
unwise? "Man," says one bold doubter, "lives
in a world which gets its living by lying and deceit.
You must fight that world with its own weapons.
And if you are sharp enough, you will become
a respected member of society." What have we
to say to the man if he wins his game ?
If this life is all, what a spectacle is history!
What is there to redeem the picture of the bar
barism or pain and misery in which myriads
have lived and died, in which millions are still
living and dying ? Is it easy to confute the pessi
mist who wishes that such a world had never been ?
A bishop is cited as averring that the doctrine
of the Sermon on the Mount would never do for
foreign policy or for the management of States.
The precepts of the Sermon on the Mount are in
the language of Oriental hyperbole. However,
they are not meant for foreign policy or for the

134 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
management of States, which Jesus never had
before his mind, but put aside with the precept,
"Render unto Caesar the thingswhich are Caesar's."
Jesus recognized the calling of the soldier and the
authority of public law. St. Louis of France
acted even in his foreign relations on the Christian
principle, with results not altogether disastrous.
If, as the result of this discussion, theism loses reve
lation, it ceases to be perplexed by attempts to grasp
eternity and infinity, to excogitate a primum mobile,
to reconcile almighty goodness with the existence of
evil. Is conscience the voice of the Power which
rules our world ? Are moral effort and struggle to
wards perfection the dispensation under which we
live ? If so, our life is not without a guiding light.
Immortality passes our conceptions. We now
know, too, that the soul is not a being separate
from the body, enclosed in it at birth and severed
from it at death. Still, spiritual life may be a reality
and may be instinct with further hopes. The imper
sonal immortality in the progress of the race which
Positivism offers us is little consoling. If a man con
tributes to the progress of the race, and in that
sense lives in it, so it may be said does anything
that helps progress, a beast of burden or a machine.

DOUBT AND ITS FRUITS 1 35
Christianity, ceasing to be a revelation, does
not cease to be moral light. It has produced
Christendom, and Christendom has been nearly
conterminous with moral civilization. This is
matter of history. Nor has the moral influence
of Christianity been confined to the doctrinal
pale. What is to be the moral code of materialism
we have yet to learn. The moral code of ag
nosticism is still Christian.
Let me repeat that I do not presume to broach
a theory. My aim is only to keep in the right
path, frankly to resign whatever has been dis
proved, to be cautious in accepting the extreme
conclusions of a new-born materialism riding on
the wings of a grand discovery, and to avoid
the misleading fancies which swarm in the eclipse
of religion, such as spiritualism, clairvoyance,
planchette, and telepathic revelation. Especially
do I wish to challenge proof of the assumption,
fatal to spiritual life and its hopes, that the germ-
plasm, as it is the beginning of our being, must
be the limit of its development and its end. In
this at all events I may hope to have " B. D., Oxon.,"
on my side.
May, 1905.

XXVIII
THE ANGLICAN PETITION FOR FREEDOM
I thank the Sun for putting me in a right
light and pointing out that my object is not to
aid in destruction, but rather to ascertain the real
limits of the destructive process, and especially
to challenge what appeared to me to be the extreme
assumptions of the materialist school. We seek,
amid these troubled waters, to find, if possible,
some anchorage for a reasonable faith.
The inquiry is partly historical, and as such
comes within the province of a student of history.
The part which is strictly theological would more
properly belong to our theological guides if only
their thought and utterance were free.
A number of Anglican divines, including some
of rank and reputation, plead for liberty to deal
honestly with the New Testament in the light of
critical investigation. By the heads of the Cana
dian Church at Montreal they are pointed to the
door and told that in that way they may save their
136

THE ANGLICAN PETITION FOR FREEDOM 1 37
honor; as though honor were separable from
loyalty to truth. This awakens us to the disad
vantage under which this vital inquiry is being
pursued. The clergy of all denominations, the
men by vocation set apart, by their training
specially equipped, by their personal aspirations
dedicated to the service of spiritual life, are by
their ordination vows debarred from conscien
tious inquiry. They are fettered by doctrinal
chains forged in days of imperfect knowledge and
sectarian strife, in some cases fully as much by
the hand of political power as by that of theologi
cal conviction. Is it not our interest that they
should be set free?
To take the case of the present remonstrants.
I happened many years ago to be the guest of my
revered and beloved friend Archbishop Tait when
he was called upon to decide a question of ritual.
Being occupied at the time, he turned me into
his library to look up the historical point for him.
In doing so I could not help being struck with
the fact that the code of belief and worship by
which all the clergy of the Church of England
were to be unalterably bound was the motley and
ambiguous product of a series of revolutions,

138 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
all of which were the immediate work, not of
spiritual authority or conviction, but of political
power, and of political power in far from spiritual
hands. The first two revolutions, that conducted
by Thomas Cromwell and the reaction which
afterwards followed the change of ascendency
in the King's Council, were the work of Henry
VIII. The third was the work of the intriguing
politicians who formed the Council of Edward VI.
The last, and that which has left the deepest trace,
was the work of Elizabeth, for whose character
unspiritual is the mildest term, and of the worldly-
wise statesmen of her reign. Through all the
stages of the transition the secular power can be
proved to have been supreme. The ecclesiastical
Convocation was set at naught. The Anglican
compromise between the old and the new faith
which the statesmen of the reign of Elizabeth
installed might be politic for the time, but interest,
not conviction, is the region of compromise,
and the history of the Anglican Church has been
an intermittent wrestle between the Catholic
and Protestant ideals, closely connected with
political party, which under Charles I. broke out
in political revolution. This may be said without

THE ANGLICAN PETITION FOR FREEDOM 139
withholding from Anglican piety its due or failing
to recognize the service done by it to Christendom.
We now see the two elements contending for
the possession of the Church under the supremacy
of a Parliament for which Anglican belief is no
longer a qualification and in which religious
interests of any kind can hardly be said to prevail.
High Churchmen are desperately contending for
the liberty of interpreting the Protestant Articles
by the light of the semi-Catholic Liturgy. The
Articles were framed after the Liturgy and are
a dogmatic and original manifesto, which the
Liturgy is not. Rich though such an institution
may be in personal and pastoral excellence, how
can its formularies be, as the Montreal Episcopate
seems to think that they are, a final determination
of religious belief?
What is said of the Anglican Church may be
said of all other churches, the clergy of which
are bound by stereotyped creeds, products of
antiquated controversy or enthusiasm now ex
tinct, and by ordination vows. Little, it would
seem, can be done by revising the Thirty-nine
Articles, the Westminster Confession, or any
other standard of belief. To prove all things

140 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
and hold fast that which is good is surely the only
ordination vow fit to be imposed at the present
time upon a keeper and teacher of religious truth.
If amid these doubts and difficulties we look to
the clergy for guidance, ought we not to begin
by setting them free? Freedom would entail
no secession, no renunciation, no change of con
viction other than such as conscience might
require. While I write, a Presbyterian clergyman is
praying for complete emancipation from the
shackles of the Westminster Confession.
May, 1905.

XXIX
THE REMEDY FOR RELIGIOUS DOUBT
The Sun has been receiving communication
speaking bitterly of these letters. Their writer
does not fail to receive outpourings of feeling,
now from the side of orthodoxy, which denounces
him as an atheist, now from the side of ultra-mate
rialism, which taxes him with cowardly adherence
to theistic superstition. He is but one of many
who in these days of perplexity and doubt are
trying to find some secure foundation for belief
in the moral government of the universe, in the
authority of conscience, and in the more hopeful
view of the change which is to take place at death.
For the aged perhaps the last question has more
pressing interest than for the young.
The Sun tells us that there is an increase of
formal membership in the orthodox, a decrease
in the more rationalistic, churches. Granting
this to be the case, does it denote a decrease of
rationalism and an increase of orthodox belief?
i4i

142 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Would a seceder from an orthodox Church be
likely at once to register himself elsewhere? Is
formal membership proof of unshaken conviction ?
Judging from my observation in England, I should
say that it was not. Does not this increased resort
to aesthetic attractions betray a feeling of mistrust ?
Do we not hear from one church after another,
now from the Presbyterian, now from the Anglican,
an appeal of conscientious and enlightened clergy
men for a removal or relaxation of tests? Has
not unrest been disclosed by a series of trials
for heresy? Have not leading clergymen of the
Church of England petitioned for liberty to deal
freely and critically with the New Testament?
Has not Presbyterianism produced the writings
of Robertson Smith? Is not the "Encyclopaedia
Biblica," in which the resurrection of Christ is
treated as a vision, edited by a Canon of the Angli
can Church and professor of theology at Oxford ?
We surely have come to a crisis in the history
of religion and all that rests upon it.
There might be less disposition to cling to tra
ditional formularies of belief and greater willing
ness to set the clergy, our natural guides, free
from their present shackles if we had present

THE REMEDY FOR RELIGIOUS DOUBT 1 43
to our minds the extent to which denominational
creeds had been fixed, not by spiritual authority
of any kind, but by secular power, and largely
for political ends. In the case of the Anglican
Church it may, I think, be clearly shown that from
the commencement of the religious revolution
under Henry VIII. to its close under Elizabeth
the representation of the clergy never had an
effective voice. Convocation, had it been allowed,
would have perpetuated the Catholic settlement
of Mary; and of the episcopate, in the eyes of
Anglicans a special channel of true belief, all
the members but one, or if Sodor and Man
is to be counted, two, resigned. In the Scotch
Reformation also influence distinctly political
was very strong.
One is surprised to find that a champion of
Catholicism writing to the Sun can point to
300,000,000 nominal Catholics as testifying by
their unshaken belief to the stability of his church.
In the Papal city itself, while Ignatius Loyola
still rests in his shrine of lapis lazuli and gold,
not far off rises the statue of Giordano Bruno,
erected by "the age which he foresaw" on the
spot where he was burned. But where would

144 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
even nominal Catholicism now be if political
power had not in Italy, France, Spain, Austria,
Bavaria, the Spanish Netherlands, forcibly crushed
freedom of inquiry ? The principle on which after
the Thirty Years' War the States of Germany were
practically settled was that the political sovereignty
should determine the State religion. With polit
ical liberty has come freedom of thought, and with
freedom of thought the questionings about tradi
tional belief and about the mysteries of our being to
which only reasonable satisfaction can put an end.
Let those who shrink with horror from the spread
of free inquiry draw encouragement and charity
at the same time from a grand example. Glad
stone, as Morley's Life of him shows, was to the
end of his days a High Churchman, intensely
religious, a believer in special providence, in the
inspiration of Scripture, in the efficacy of prayer.
Yet he could not only associate and act heartily
with free thinkers, but look with satisfaction
on the activity of the general conscience, and say
that while there had never been an age so much
perplexed with doubt, there had never been one
so full of the earnest pursuit of truth.
June, 1905.

XXX
THE origin of life
We are told that the origin of life has at last been
discovered. This, if it is true, might seem to
make the case in favor of materialism complete.
But is it the origin of life that has been discovered
or only the beginning of life on this planet ? That
sooner or later the beginning of life on this planet
would be discovered by science was almost cer
tain. But the beginning of life on this planet
cannot be assumed to be its origin. Something
there must apparently have been in that particular
particle in which life commenced distinguishing
it from other particles and from matter in general.
If the source of this has been found, the origin
of life has been discovered; otherwise what has
been discovered is not the source, but only the
beginning. The proof of physical evolution is
heartily accepted. But as at present advised,
we challenge the assumption that physical devel
opment out of a germ-plasm is the beginning and
end of all. L 145

146 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
We must be patient and make it our great aim
at present to keep on the right path to truth.
It is said that we need not fear the ascendency
of materialism, since at present "Psychism"
is coming on us in a flood. Yet spiritualism,
wrongly so called, since the apparitions have
to materialize in order that their presence may
be felt, seems to have been pretty well exploded,
with all its accessories, table turning, clairvoyance,
and planchette. Professor Hyslop gently rebuked
me the other day for requiring that the communi
cations of the spirit should be dignified. The
showmen of the spirits, however, deem it neces
sary to maintain that they are.
Telepathy still claims recognition; but no at
tempt has yet been made on behalf of this wire
less telegraphy of the soul to suggest a possible
medium of transition.
Undoubtedly there are mysteries still to be
explored in our physical nature. The mystery
of memory, for example, and that of the creative
imagination in dreams. But no discoveries in
this direction apparently can confirm the author
ity of conscience or establish the foundations
of religion.

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 1 47
An eminent Canadian journal contends that
what appears to be the disturbance of religious
belief is in fact merely the progress of theological
science, analogous to the progress of other sciences.
It asks whether, when all the other sciences are
advancing, we can expect the "queen of the
sciences" to stand still. The term "queen of
the sciences" applied to theology is mediaeval,
and what the queen of mediaeval science was,
the perusal of a few pages of Thomas Aquinas
will show. Mediaeval theology assumed as pos
tulates the very things which are now in question,
and spun out from them an immense web of
deductions which were taken for supreme truth.
The mediaeval queen of the sciences is to-day
as dead as alchemy.
June, 1905.

XXXI
RATIONAL CHRISTIANITY
The present writer's "attitude toward Chris
tianity" has been the subject of lively comment
in clerical quarters. He is denounced as an
"atheist," a term which seems to be deemed
applicable to one who, though he has by no means
renounced theistic belief, has lost faith in the
evidences of a miraculous revelation and in the
authority of dogma. My attitude, and I appre
hend not mine alone, is that of one who has heard
the words of the Founder of Christendom on a
hillside in Galilee. No miracle was needed to
confirm belief in his words, nor was any performed
by him on that occasion. Of dogma nothing
fell from his lips.
The evidence of Christianity to people of my
way of thinking is the character which it has pro
duced and the effect which its approximate in
fluence has had on the progress of mankind,
notwithstanding all the adverse forces, including
148

RATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 1 49
the perversion of religion itself by Popes, Inquisi
tions, Jesuits, and fanatics of various kinds.
No other creed, Buddhist, Mohammedan, or
Rousseauist, has shown such power for good.
"I express myself with caution lest I should
be mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed
the only faculty we have to judge concerning any
thing, even revelation itself; or be misunderstood
to assert that a supposed revelation cannot be
proved false from internal characters." So says
Bishop Butler, of all apologists the greatest.
If reason has been given us by the author of our
being as our guide and our sole guide to truth,
are not the discoveries of science and criticism
as really revelations as though they had been
dictated to an inspired penman or proclaimed
amid the thunders of Sinai?
Of the miracles not one is better attested than
the casting out of devils into a herd of swine at
Gadara. Mark the apologetic agonies of Dean
Farrar and other orthodox commentators in dealing
with this passage. Are their devices less injurious
to Christianity than the belief that in this case as
in many others there has gathered about the adored
head a halo of miracle; miracle in this case,

150 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
like the character, wholly beneficent, not destruc
tive or mere display of power?
As to dogma, the whole structure apparently
rests on the Mosaic account of the Creation and
of the Fall of Man. Without the Fall there could
have been no room for the Incarnation and the
Atonement. But who, in the face of the discoveries
of science, can continue to believe in the Mosaic
account of Creation and the Fall of Man?
It must be added that throughout the Bible,
and notably in the Gospel histories, the presenta
tion is distinctly geocentric. To those writers this
earth of ours, and the heaven which over-arched
it and was the abode of Deity, were the universe.
This earth was the entire scene of divine action.
Man was the sole object of divine care. Astron
omy has now taught us that heaven is not an
arch over this planet and that there are more
worlds than one.
August, 1905,

XXXII
FREE THOUGHT AND CHURCHMANSHIP
The question was started by a critic the other
day whether a Christian of my way of thinking
could be a member of the Anglican Church.
A professor of the Anglican creed he could not
be, though he might sit in an Anglican pew. But
he might find himself in other respects out of
place. I attend a church where I am safe against
religious recognition of war. Till materialism
has thoroughly proved its case, a man, as I said
before, will hardly do well, as it seems to me, in
cutting himself off from religious life.
Extreme materialism lays it down that the three
great obstacles to our well-being are the belief
in a God, the belief in immortality, and the belief
in the freedom of the will. It is not easy to see
what special harm pure theism has done. Its
effects might be thought even to give it some
claim to consideration as a practical key. Im-
mortality in the strict sense is unthinkable, and
151

152 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
the doctrine has been presented in a form which
shocks. But without that belief in account
ability which is the support of conscience the world
would hardly have been better than it is.
Nor apparently would man have been better
braced for improving effort by the belief that he
was an automaton and that responsibility was
a dream. The frank abandonment of that which
reason, our only guide, as Bishop Butler says,
has disproved is the first step toward the attain
ment of truth. Free thought does frankly abandon,
although it may be with a sigh, whatever science
and criticism have disproved. It admits the
difficulty of the theistic hypothesis arising from
the conflict in the universe of that which seems
to us disorder and evil with that which seems to
us order and good. It lays Paley's "Evidences"
and the Bridgewater Treatises on the shelf.
But reason surely bids us be on our guard, not
only against the influence of tradition which now,
among the educated, lingers chiefly in clerical
circles, and even there is tempered by "Lux
Mundi," but against the rush of physical dis
covery and the immediate assumption that the
germ-plasm which science, overturning our infan-

FREE THOUGHT AND CHURCHMANSHIP 153
tine creeds, has shown to be the beginning of
human life, must carry in it the limitation of
human development, aspiration, and hope.
That surely is a critical moment in the history
of man in Which he first confronts the enigma
of the universe and of his own being and destiny
with reason enlightened by science and unclouded
by tradition. Single thinkers may have done this
before. But they were still in the penumbra
of tradition and had comparatively little of the
light of science. Tradition could still tender
as evidence of the Noachic deluge the finding of
fossil shells at high elevations, and philosophy
could reply that the shells were cockles dropped
by palmers from their hats in crossing the moun
tains. Can these inquiries be deemed profitless?
Does it matter nothing to a man whether his
death may be change in being or annihilation?
Does it matter nothing to society whether the
witness of conscience is true? Dr. Osier makes
light, and thinks that people in general make
light, of the question about the immortality
of the soul. Perhaps, as was hinted before, the
form in which the doctrine was presented, repelling

154 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
belief, has had something to do with the levity.
However, Dr. Osier is happy in this life. So
probably it would be found are most of his Gal-
lionian compeers. But if happiness is the object,
and this life is the end, what balm has Dr. Osier
for the less fortunate?
"M. C. G." arraigns me as a destroyer of the
supernatural, without which he deems we should
be lost. This seems to imply that God is not
in nature. But the theist believes that God is
in nature and is manifested through it.
September, 1905.

XXXIII
RELIGION AND MORALITY
A correspondent of the Sun, after asking
whether religion was the only vehicle by which
ethics could be instilled into the mind of a child,
went on in effect, if I understood him aright, to
discard religion as a basis of morality, holding
our only moral standard to be "the will and
opinion of the majority." The religious basis
he regards as a figment of the sacerdotal caste.
Some religious systems, he says, have been lower
ing to humanity; which is unquestionably true.
To fabricate a religion, or uphold one which
had been proved false, as a foundation for morality
would plainly be worse than folly. That house
would be built on something weaker than sand.
Let us all lay this to heart.
The will and opinion of the majority would
furnish a rule and criterion of social action and,
embodied in municipal law, would regulate the
conduct of those who were unable to defy or elude
155

156 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
the law. Would they move to virtuous effort,
to the formation of a high character, to benevo
lence, to self-sacrifice? Take the whole vocabu
lary of moral aspiration, excellence, and beauty;
translate it into that of conformity to the will and
opinion of the majority, and a great deal would
surely be lost.
Under many forms and names, as self-culture,
benevolence, self-devotion, patriotism, pure love,
even as poetry and sense of beauty, something
seems to be at work in the universe and to be
approximately asserting itself, which is not the
will and opinion of the majority or mere social
expediency, and which takes the forms of religions
varying in their character and dignity. The Greek
pantheon is sensual. The State religion of Greece
is irrational. But in Greek sentiment, as expressed
in history, drama, poetry, even apart from philos
ophy, you find that which seems to be not the will
and opinion of the majority or expediency in any
form, but the essential spirit of religion.
Even in our respect for the sanctity of human
life is there not a certain religious element?
Could it exist in full force without the idea of a
brotherhood of man, which seems to imply, if not

RELIGION AND MORALITY 157
a distinct belief in the fatherhood of God, some
thing beyond mere identity of species? Is not a
somewhat diminished sanctity of human life
already showing itself as a concomitant of the
decay of religion?
One correspondent of the Sun seems to sus
pect that those of my way of thinking are edging
towards mediaeval faiths which have faded away.
For my part toward nothing mediaeval am I con
scious of edging. Mediaeval dogmatism denounces
me as an atheist. I have made it clear, I hope,
that I presume not to propound any theory of my
own. I fully share the doubts and perplexities of
the time. I only plead for three things. The
first is a recognition of the vital importance, even
on social grounds, of the question between ex
treme materialism and faith in spiritual life. The
second is fair consideration of all the phenomena
of humanity and not of physiological phenomena
alone. The third is a perfectly free, however
cautious and reverent, search for truth. That
there is at present "something in this world amiss"
is terribly certain. Faith and hope quail before
the proofs of it. But something is struggling to
" unriddle " it, and it seems too early yet to succumb

158 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
to the belief that we are only a very superior
class of the beasts that perish, some of us, no doubt,
with much higher pleasures, but all of us with
keener, and too many of us with infinitely keener,
pains. October, 1905.

XXXIV
THE CONFERENCE OF THE CHURCHES
This anxious conference of the Churches
shows that they believe a religious crisis to be
at hand. It is a social crisis also. Though
the ideas of God and a future state may not
have been very distinct or always present, who
can doubt that they, with conscience, the author
ity of which depends upon them, have had
a practical influence; that they have reconciled
people in general to the dispensation and to
the terrible inequalities of the human lot ? Social
science in the end may take their place. But
there seems not unlikely to be a perilous inter
regnum. Do we not already see an increase
of intensity in the struggle for the wealth and
pleasures of this world?
It is difficult to get true statistics of church-
going, still more difficult to learn how much of it
is religious, how much is social. That a good deal
159

160 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
of it is social appears certain. In the case of the
State Church of England not a little of it probably
is political. I think I have even known churches
to be built or restored from political motives by
avowed sceptics. The State Church is torn by
parties which would break it up were not the
ecclesiastical polity maintained by a Parliament
full of dissenters and unbelievers. In all the
Churches, notably in those of which the clergy
are most highly educated, there are searchings of
heart, heresy trials, struggles to loosen the bonds
of the old creeds, such as the Westminster Con
fession. Even in the Anglican Church free criti
cism of the Bible has been gaining ground and
High Churchmen write such books as "Lux
Mundi." Anglicans are struggling to get rid of
the Athanasian Creed, though only in paradoxical
and denunciatory form does it differ from the
other creeds. The Mosaic account of the Creation
and the Fall of Man may be said to have been
generally abandoned. With it apparently must go
the dogmas of the Atonement and the Incarnation.
We are not at liberty to rationalize the sacred nar
rative and substitute for that which science has
confuted a pure invention of our own. On what

THE CONFERENCE OF THE CHURCHES l6l
grounds then could the Unitarians be excluded
from the conference of the Churches?
Christianity was in its origin a moral, not a
dogmatic revelation. In its great manifesto, the
Sermon on the Mount, there is not a word of
dogma. Nor is there anything really dogmatic in
the Epistles of St. Paul, though dogma of rather
a portentous kind has been distilled from them.
Their soul is passionate love of the character of
the Founder, with fervid faith in the new mo
rality. Dogma makes its first appearance in the
Fourth Gospel, which is proved by other signs
to be the work not of a Palestinian but of an
Alexandrian Jew. Now comes Hellenic theosophy
with its metaphysical theories about the nature of
Deity, its Logos, its Homo-ousians and Homoi-
ousians, its Trinitarian orthodoxies and Arian
heresies, its Decrees of Ecclesiastical Councils
regulating theological fancies and making pro
fession of them a condition of Christian member
ship as well as a test of Christian faith. Then,
the Church having become the thrall of the State,
and that State being the Byzantine despotism,
orthodoxy becomes loyalty and heresy becomes
treason. State persecution is the natural result.

1 62 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Presently we have Popes instigating the Norman
to the conquest of England and Ireland in the
interest of the faith. Innocent III. exterminating
the Albigenses, the Inquisition with its autos-da-fe,
religious wars, Jesuitism, the St. Bartholomew,
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the
Dragonades follow in due course.
The Reformation, where it prevailed, got rid of
Papal despotism, of sacerdotalism, of asceticism,
of thaumaturgy, of saint worship, and presently of
persecution. But it did not get rid of dogma. It
rather fell back on dogma as a pledge of stability
and security in place of the authority of the Church.
It kept religious belief subject to political authority.
That principle is professed in one case and more
or less practised in all. The political influences
of that hour are not very strong warrants for ever
lasting and universal truth.
Mutual toleration and charity there may at once
be to any extent, and they are invaluable. Of
reunion there seems to be little hope otherwise
than by going back from Alexandria, Nice, Con
stantinople, Rome, Geneva, Augsburg, Zurich, and
Canterbury, to the hillside in Galilee and the moral
revelation proclaimed there. But at all events

THE CONFERENCE OF THE CHURCHES 163
tests may at once be relaxed, and those who are
elected and have been equipped to act as our
spiritual guides may be set at liberty to speak the
truth. December, 1905.

XXXV
WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT?
Kind "Orthodoxy," taking pity on one gone
astray, sends him a passage from the Old Testa
ment, striking enough, as "Orthodoxy" thinks, to
have the effect upon him of a miraculous resur
rection from the dead.
Of the changes that I have seen in a long life
not one is more momentous than the change in
the position of the Bible. As the collection of a
national literature, intensely interesting and some
times spiritually grand, the Old Testament will
live forever. As a supposed course of divine reve
lation it has yielded to critical inquiry. The
reputed authorship of much of it has been dis
proved, and it has been shown to be a human
mixture not only of that which is sublime with that
which is the reverse of sublime, but of good with
evil. Vain, surely, is the attempt to restore its
unity and divinity by any application to its ethics
of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Would
164

WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT? 165
Deity in revealing itself to man stoop to personate
the primitive delusions of the human mind and
the lower stages of human morality? In what,
after all, does the supposed evolution end? In
persistent tribalism, in Pharisaism, in the crucifix
ion of the Great Teacher of Humanity, in the
narrow ceremonialism of the Talmud.
It might be difficult to say what on the whole
the effect of belief in the inspiration of the Old
Testament on character and progress has been.
The opening of Genesis is sublime, as Longinus
felt. It seems, compared with what follows, the
work of a superior mind. But devout belief in it
has barred, nearly down to our own day, rational
inquiry into the history of the planet and the
origin of man. Two generations ago scientific
lecturers might be heard pitiably struggling to
force science into conformity with faith. Then,
from the grand "Let there be light !" we drop to
the God who makes man of dust, woman of man's
rib, and manufactures coats of skin for them. We
have God walking in the garden in the cool of the
evening. We have the Tree of Knowledge and
the talking Serpent. The patriarchs living nine
centuries, the giants, the Deluge with its infantine

l66 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
delusions and impossibilities, the loves of the
angels, and the Tower of Babel, are all on the
level of the commonest mythologies. Yet they
have clouded the mind of the most advanced
members of the race.
In the higher passages of the Prophets such as
that cited by my orthodox well-wisher, we have
grand manifestoes of faith in the God of righteous
ness, though we hardly find aspirations after
spiritual self -culture, or, saving perhaps in pas
sages of the Psalms, anything like the tenderness
of Christian ethics. There are glimpses, though
only glimpses, of a universal religion. There is
no glimpse anywhere of a life beyond the present,
though there are allusions to a shadowy world of
the dead. We have in the book of Job a deeply
interesting effort to solve a mystery of the moral
world, albeit with an abortive conclusion. We
have the beauty of pastoral life and character in
the book of Ruth; we have chivalrous affection
in the friendship of David and Jonathan. In the
Mosaic law, compared with the codes of the most
civilized nations of antiquity, notable advances
may be traced.
On the other hand, we have the picture of a

WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT? 167
Deity covenanting to advance the interests of one
tribe above those of the rest of mankind on the
condition of the performance of a tribal rite, and
thus stamping tribalism as perpetual. We have
a Deity prospering the craft of Jacob, hardening
the heart of Pharaoh so that he will not let Israel
go, and then slaying all the guiltless firstborn of
the Egyptians; sanctioning predatory invasion of
Canaan and extermination of its people; making
the sun to stand still in heaven that the slaughter
may be complete ; approving the treason of Rahab,
the murder of Sisera, and the hewing of Agag in
pieces; chronicling without condemnation David's
putting to a death of torture the people of a
captured city; prompting the butchery of all the
prophets of Baal ; sending forth a lying spirit to
betray King Ahab to his ruin ; causing forty chil
dren, for mocking a prophet, to be torn to pieces
by bears. It can hardly be doubted that these
presentations of Deity and the divine government
have had their effect on the character of men, that
they are partly responsible for the darker features
of Puritanism and for the use of persecuting force
in the supposed interest of religion.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." What

1 68 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
crimes and horrors followed in the train of the
dark superstition which had its fancied warrant in
those words !
The idea of a Chosen People still lingers and
leads to aberrations. Perhaps the tribalism of
which it is the Hebrew version may not have been
without its effect in maintaining too sharp a dis
tinction between Christendom and the rest of
humanity. It may be difficult to strike the balance. What
is certain is that free inquiry has at length pre
vailed over tradition and empowered us to choose
the good, of which there is rich store, such as the
passage tendered for my conversion, in the Old
Testament, and eschew the evil.
What is the relation of the Old Testament to
the New? The Sanhedrim, for its part, gave that
question a decisive answer. Devotees of Judaism
have spoken of Christianity as its supplement.
The relation is difficult to define, but to the pupil
of Gamaliel the religion of Jesus was evidently a
new dawn and a new life. We have Judaism still
before us perpetuating its lingering tribalism by
the tribal rite; refusing to blend with the races
among which it dwells ; to intermarry with them ;

WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT ? 1 69
to break bread, if it can help, with them ; treating
that which is unclean for itself as clean for them;
celebrating the feast of Purim in memory of its
ancient feud. I speak, of course, of the strict
and Talmudic Jew as he is found in Russia or
Poland, not of those whom the Sun describes as
having undergone American influence and be
come practically citizens of the American republic,
or rather perhaps of the world, and not Tal-
mudists, but simply theists.
December, 1905.

XXXVI
JUSTICE HEREAFTER
Of Professor Osier's "Counsels and Ideals,"
which came into my hands the other day, the bulk
is professional. But at the end are some pages
on religion, death, and immortality. The illus
trious professor rather affects the peculiar style
which fascinates us in the writings of the doubting
philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne. Yet his senti
ments can hardly be mistaken. "As a rule, man
dies as he had lived, uninfluenced practically by
the thought of a future life." "The Preacher was
right: in this matter man hath no preeminence
over the beast. ' As one dieth, so dieth the other.' "
In these sentences we have the keynote. At death,
then, it matters nothing whether a man has been
the benefactor or the scourge of his kind, the best
of citizens or the worst of malefactors, the most
self-denying of philanthropists or the grossest of
voluptuaries ; nor for the myriads who by no fault
of their own have suffered and perhaps suffered
patiently in this life is there any hope of compen-
170

JUSTICE HEREAFTER 171
sation hereafter. This is a doctrine which, like
other doctrines, if it is proved must be accepted, but
of which we should naturally wish to see the proof.
The unhappy and the oppressed assuredly will. So
will those who are losing the objects of their love.
If the opposite belief depended on stories of
death-bed visions or on the emotions of the dying,
the task of the sceptic would be easy. But to
rest the case on the attitude at death is surely
to look in a wrong quarter. It is in the liv
ing and healthy conscience that the intimation,
not of immortality, which, strictly speaking, is
inconceivable and therefore undemonstrable, but
of a future existence, is to be sought. Conscience
appears, in all in whom it has not been seared and
silenced, to speak of a supreme justice, the awards
of which are not limited to this world and which
is not to be baffled, as in numberless cases earthly
justice is, by the power or arts of the evildoer.
That this idea is not constantly and distinctly
present to the minds of men is no conclusive
proof of its falsehood. If it is not constantly and
distinctly present as the expectation of another
life, it is present as the voice of morality in con
flict with temptation.

172 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
Professor Osier's point of view, if I read him
aright, seems to be that of a thoroughgoing
evolutionist. Like other thoroughgoing evolu
tionists, he seems to assume that life is self-gen
erated in the germ-plasm. But self-generation is
inconceivable. There must have been something
to indue that particle with generative force. Ex
treme evolutionists seem also to assume that con
tinuity of development precludes essential change.
"The individual," says Dr. Osier, "is nothing
more than the transient offshoot of a germ-plasm,
which has an unbroken continuity from generation
to generation, from age to age." But if there is
not essential change from the germ-plasm to
Newton or to the highest example of spiritual
aspiration, what change is essential? The un
folding may not be entirely from within. It may
be due to influence from without. Once more,
the evidence of our bodily senses may not be an
exhaustive revelation of the universe. At all
events, it seems difficult to maintain that continuity
of development precludes essential change, or that
an ascending series of states commencing in the
germ-plasm might not culminate in spiritual life.
January, 1906.

XXXVII
OUR PRESENT POSITION
No candid reader, I hope, can have supposed
that these letters were penned by an enemy to
religion, though they may have frankly admitted
the difficulties of belief. Their writer was moved
by the gravity of the crisis, social as well as politi
cal, so great a part having been socially played by
religion. He has been attempting to define the
position, drawing the line between that which
must be abandoned and that which is left, trying
to guard against" the proclivities of the hour and
pleading for perfect freedom of inquiry, especially
on behalf of the clergy, an order set apart and
specially qualified for spiritual work.
There has been no more attack in these letters
upon any particular religion than upon religion in
general. Nothing of that kind could have been
offered to the Sun.
Thus we stand. From highly educated and
perfectly open minds the belief in the Bible as an
173

174 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
inspired volume on which the Christian world had
been resting seems to have departed. We are left
with the collected body of Hebrew literature, pro
foundly interesting, profoundly important, forming
on the whole an upward step in the movement of
humanity, but varying with the different authorships
in elevation as well as in literary character, and
marred in parts by tribalism and by the primitive
morality of early times which, being taken for the
divine morality, has wrought much evil.
Few now deny that Genesis is mythical. The
dogmatic part of Christianity must apparently
share its fate. If there was no Fall of Man, there
could be no occasion for an Atonement, no room
for an Incarnation. The sophistication of the
myth in Genesis to which apologists rescrt is
surely hopeless. The evidence of the Gospel
miracles, and notably of the Resurrection, has
given way under critical examination. But there
still remain to us the character of Jesus and his
teachings, with the record of the effect of those
teachings, so far as they have been allowed fair
play, on human character and progress. The
barrier between Christendom and Heathendom is
falling. The liberal theism of the Christian begins

OUR PRESENT POSITION 175
to join hands with the liberal theism of the
Hindu. On the optimist theism of Leibnitz or the Bridge-
water Treatises we can rest no more. Science
has revealed much in the heavens as well as on
earth, and forced us to see on earth many things,
such as the ruthless waste of animal life, to which
we had before shut our eyes. Evidently, if in the
government of the universe perfect benevolence
and justice are combined with omnipotence, the
benevolence must be in the ultimate design. A
hint of that kind our own consciousness may supply
in our feeling that effort is essential to moral per
fection. The movement, in the case of humanity
at least, is on the whole upward and onward;
while through the nobler part of our nature, with
its pure affections, its poetry and tenderness, and
even through the beauty of the earth and the glory
of the starry skies, a spirit seems to commune and
sympathize with ours. Metaphysical arguments
will not hold. That a thing cannot be conceived
by us may be a proof only of our mental limitations.
But certainly nothing can to us be more incon
ceivable than the generation of mind and spirit
from matter. "No man hath seen God at any

176 IN QUEST OF LIGHT
time." Such, apart from the intimations of
conscience, appears to be the sum of our present
knowledge respecting the Power which rules the
universe. From the uniformity of natural law
we infer the unity of its author. Hypotheses non
fingo was the motto of Newton, which in this
matter it will be specially well for us to observe.
The belief seems to be gaining ground that life
beyond the grave is a fond illusion, at best a pla-
tonic speculation; that man at the last lies down
and dies like the dog; that death consequently
cancels all moral distinctions and levels the great
est benefactor with the worst enemy of his kind.
The old arguments in favor of the doctrine of
immortality, derived from the separate existence
and indiscerptibility of the soul, such as were used
by Bishop Butler, physiology, it must be owned,
has swept away. There remains to us the testi
mony of conscience, telling us that as we do well
or ill in this life it will be well or ill for us in the
end. No more, in fact, was told us by the Founder
of Christendom, whose words concerning a future
state, notably the story of Dives and Lazarus,
are homily and imagery, not revelation. But the
voice of conscience has not yet been explained

OUR PRESENT POSITION 1 77
away. From the' fear of the Dantean hell, and
the hideous idea of God as an eternal torturer,
which it involves, the world has been set free.
It seems premature to assume that the visible
beginning of life is its origin, or that the material
character of the germ necessarily limits the devel
opment and bars a spiritual outcome as the end.
Always we have to remember that our knowledge
is^bounded by our senses, and that we may be in
a world quite other than that which sense reveals.
In the ministries of the different churches are
a number of men, dedicated to a spiritual calling,
whose character and learning, if they were free,
might be very helpful. But they are in bondage
to tests under which many of them writhe, resort
ing to shifts of interpretation whereby they do
more harm than good. It is surely in the interest
of all who desire the truth that clerical thought
and speech should be set free.
Such in general outline appears to be our pres
ent position. There is no use in paltering with
its facts or concealing its difficulties. Nor is
there any way of salvation for us but unwavering
and untrammelled pursuit of truth.
February, 1906.

WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.

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