Mr. Lecky, author of an interesting memoir of " The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," published a few years ago, has here produced a much more valuable and noteworthy book. He sets himself to trace the growth in Europe of " the spirit of rationalism ; by which I understand," he says, " not any class of definite doctrines or criticisms, but rather a certain cast of thought, or bias of reasoning, which has, during the last three centuries, gained a marked ascendancy in Europe"—the cast of thought, in fact, which " leads men, on all occasions, to subordinate dogmatic theology to the dictates of reason and of conscience, and, as a necessary consequence, greatly to restrict its influence upon life ; and which predisposes men, in history, to attribute all kinds of phenomena to natural rather than miraculous causes; in theology, to esteem succeeding systems as the expressions of the wants and aspirations of that religious sentiment which is planted in all men ; and, in ethics, to regard as duties only those which conscience reveals to be such." This is certainly a subject worth handling, and Mr. Lecky handles it with great learning and judgment, and with yet greater liberality and Christian tenderness. He believes that the world has suffered grievously, in former ages, from blind acceptance of dogmatic teaching, and that the greatest element in the improvement of modern times is the growing disposition of thoughtful men to question, criticise, and, where they find it needful, to reject this old dogmatic teaching, accepting only what their consciences approve, and their own judgments sanction ; and, that others may see this and profit by the lesson, he very skilfully details the most important incidents in the history of the change.
The greatest triumphs of modern rationalism, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, have been the "destruction of the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecution, the decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punishments which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered the character of mankind, the emancipation of suffering nationalities, and the abolition of the belief in the guilt of error, which paralysed the intellectual, and of the asceticism, which paralysed the material, progress of mankind." In tracing their development he fills two learned volumes. Without any attempt at criticism, which would be quite out of place in so brief a notice as can here be given of a work on so extensive and profound a subject, we shall content ourselves with reference to a few of the many topics treated, so as to illustrate the general character of the whole.
" During the fierce theological controversies that accompanied and followed the Reformation, says Mr. Lecky, " while a judicial spirit was as yet unknown, while each party imagined itself the representative of absolute and necessary truth in opposition to absolute and fatal error, and while the fluctuations of belief were usually attributed to direct miraculous agency, it was natural that all the causes of theological changes should have been sought exclusively within the circle of theology. Each theologian imagined that the existence of the opinions he denounced was fully accounted for by the exertions of certain evil-minded men, who had triumphed by means of sophistical arguments, aided by a judicial blindness that had been cast upon the deluded. His own opinions, on the other hand, had been sustained or revived by apostles raised for the purpose, illuminated by special inspiration, and triumphing by the force of theological arguments. As long as this point of view continued, the position of the theologian and of the ecclesiastical historian was nearly the same. Each was confined to a single province, and each, recognising a primitive faith as his ideal, had to indicate the successive innovations upon its purity. But when, towards the close of the eighteenth century, the decline of theological passions enabled men to discuss these matters in a calmer spirit, and when increased knowledge produced more comprehensive views, the historical standing-point was materially altered. It was observed that every great change of belief had been preceded by a great change in the intellectual condition of Europe, that the success of any opinion depended much less upon the force of its arguments, or upon the ability of its advocates, than upon the predisposition of society to receive it, and that the predisposition resulted from the intellectual type of the age." The great intellectual tendency of the present is—we may rue it, or we may rejoice at it, but we cannot deny it—a tendency to doubt and disbelieve all the teachings of former times about the supernatural and the intangible that are not sanctioned by our own judgments, and do not commend themselves to our own reason.
"Great God!" cried Wordsworth some fifty years ago—
" Great God ! I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn,
Have sight of Proteas rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn ;"
and many, shrinking with him from the new revelations of an awakened science and a revivified philosophy, did really seek shelter in " an outworn creed." Their spiritual history is told in such books as Dr. Newman's " Apologia pro Vita Sua.'" But most honest thinkers have not been able to do so. They have listened to the questions, not new, but newly asked with startling force and earnestness, and have answered them in ways not much in accordance with the strict rules of orthodoxy, but very healthful to themselves, and very beneficial to the world. Their history is told in those verses penned by Mr Tennyson in reply to the assertion that " doubt is devil-born."
" I know not ; one, indeed, I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true :
" Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds.
At last he beat his music out.
There lies more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
"He fought his doubts, and gathered strength
He would not make his judgment blind;
He faced the spectres of the mind,
And laid them ; thus he came at length
" To find a stronger faith his own ;
And power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone."
The old theologies are dead, or quickly dying, in all enlightened circles. If they yet live in name, their distinctive elements are gone. Men no longer really believe in an ever lasting future, where the millions of human souls are to suffer every conceivable and inconceivable kind of torture, while the chosen hundreds are to reveal in endless bliss, one element being the spectacle of woe in the fiery gulf beneath them ; or in any other of the distinctive features of mediæval Christianity, as it was called. But, as Mr. Lecky urges, " if it be true. Christianity to dive, with a passionate charity, into the darkest recesses of misery and of vice, to irrigate every quarter of the earth with the fertilising stream of an almost boundless benevolence, and to include all the sections of humanity in the circle of an intense and efficacious sympathy ; if it be true Christianity to destroy or weaken the barriers which had separated class from class, and nation from nation, to free war from its harshest elements, and to make a consciousness of essential equality and of a genuine fraternity to dominate over all accidental differences: if it be, above all, true Christianity to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake, a spirit of candour and of tolerance towards those with whom we differ—if these be the marks of a true and healthy Christianity, then, never since the days of the Apostles, has it been so vigorous as at present, and the decline of dogmatic systems, and of clerical influence, has been a measure, if not a cause, of its advance."
The first great triumph of rationalism detailed by Mr. Lecky was in the overthrow of faith in magical and miraculous powers. In all the early ages men believed, with an unquestioning belief, in the power of good men to perform miracles, and in the corresponding power of bad men to practise witchcraft. All the circumstances of every-day life were referred to supernatural influences. The whole world was thought to be the scene of great and endless rivalry between two great beings—God and the Devil—and all the operations of nature were looked upon as their immediate workmanship. Every good thing, or every bad thing that commended itself to the liking of the recipient, was regarded as the direct gift of God ; all the so called evil was ascribed to Satan. " The powers of light and the powers of darkness were regarded as visibly struggling for the mastery. Saintly miracles, supernatural cures, startling judgments, visions, prophesies, and prodigies, of every order, attested the activity of the one, while witchcraft and magic, with all their attendant horrors, were the visible manifestations of the other." So it was with the old teachers of Christianity, who clustered round the Church of Rome ; so it was with Lutherans and Calvanists ; so it was, most of all, with the rigid Reformers of Scotland and the staunch Puritans of the New World. John Wesley, the greatest religious leader of the past century, was one of the last and most strenuous supporters of this view. Hence, century after century abounded in stringent laws, enforced by cruel persecutions, against sorcery ; and if zealous Christians, trying to perform miracles, and finding themselves impotent, had to abandon their claims to the power, they only clung the more eagerly to the doctrine, not so capable of actual disproof, that they were the constant favourites of divine interposition ; that all their steps were personally directed by the Ruler of mankind, and that, if the world at large was subject to laws, they at any rate were constantly protected by miraculous interference with those laws. There are people who think so still ; but this faith is following those that are already dead. " In early times," writes Mr. Lecky, " Christianity was visibly instinct with the supernatural. Miracles of every order and degree of magnitude were flashing forth incessantly from all its parts. They excited no scepticism and no surprise. The miraculous element prevailed all literature, explained all difficulties, consecrated all doctrines. Every unusual phenomenon was immediately referred to a supernatural agency, not because there was a passion for the improbable, but because such an explanation seemed for more simple and easy of belief than the obscure theories of science. In the present day Christianity is regarded as a system which courts the strictest investigation, and which, among many other functions, was designed to vivify and stimulate all the energies of man. The idea of the miraculous, which a superficial observer might have once deemed its most prominent characteristic, has been driven from almost all its intrenchments, and now quivers forcibly and fully through the mists of eighteen hundred years."
Another, perhaps the most prominent characteristic of the Christianity of the dark ages, and even of the mediæval and later times, is also dying out. It is hard to conceive how good and earnest men, anxious to follow the teaching of their gentle and all-loving master, can ever really have accepted that strange importation of Orientalism which, assigning to the chosen few an everlasting life of bliss, doomed the great mass of mankind to an eternity of unutterable woe. But so it was. Tender and true Christians, as far as their own life was concerned revelled in the prospect of the torments in reserve, not only for those who actually rejected the dogmas that they set before them, but also for the myriads of heathen to whom the gospel had never been preached. "The agonies of hell," says Mr. Lecky, " seemed the central facts of religion, and the perpetual subject of the thoughts of men. The saint was often permitted in visions to behold the agonies of the lost, and to recount the spectacle he had witnessed. He loved to tell how by the lurid glare of the eternal flames he had seen millions writhing in every form of ghastly suffering, their eyebrows rolling with unspeakable anguish, their limbs gashed and mutilated and quivering with pain, tortured by pangs that seemed ever worse by the recurrence, and shrieking in pain for mercy to an unpitying heaven. Hideous beings, of dreadful aspect and of fantastic forms, hovered around mocking them amid their torments, casting them into cauldrons of boiling brimstone, or inventing new tortures more subtle and more refined.
Amid all this a sulphur stream was ever seething, feeding and intensifying the waves of fire. There was no respite no alleviation, no hope. The tortures were ever varied in their character, and they never palled for a moment upon the sense. Sometimes, it was said, the flames, while retaining their intensity, withheld their light. A shroud of darkness covered the scene, but a ceaseless shriek of anguish attested the agonies that were below." Such views could not but have a most baneful effect. " They chilled every natural impulse towards the Creator. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Men were told that the Almighty, by the fiat of His uncontrolled power, had called into being countless millions whom He knew to be destined to eternal, excruciating, unspeakable agony; that he had placed millions in such a position that such agony was inevitable; that He had prepared their place of torment, and had kindled its undying flame ; and that, prolonging their lives for ever, in order that they might be for ever wretched, He would make the contemplation of those sufferings an essential element of the happiness of the redeemed. No other religious teachers had ever proclaimed such tenets, and as long as they were realised intensely, the benevolent precepts, and the mild and gentle ideal of the New Testament could not possibly be influential. The two things were hopelessly incongruous. The sense of the Divine Goodness being destroyed, the whole fabric of natural religion being crumbled in the dust. From that time religion was necessarily diverted from the moral to the dogmatic, and became an artificial thing of relics and ceremonies, of credulity and persecution, of asceticism and terrorism." It is well for society that this corner stone of orthodoxy has, during the last hundred years or so, been gradually crumbling away. We wish we could think with Mr. Lecky that it now lingers only " among the least educated Dissenters, and in the Roman Catholic manuals for the poor." But it is true that, among very many, though without formal recantation or change of dogmas, it has virtually passed away. " The hideous pictures of material fire and of endless torture have been replaced by a few vague sentences on the subject of 'perdition,' or by the general assertion of a future adjustment of the inequalities of life and a doctrine which grows out of the moral faculty, and is an element in every truly moral religion, has been thus silently substituted for a doctrine which was "the greatest of all moral difficulties." The history of this change is curious. More curious and instructive is the history of its effect upon the well-being of society. As Mr. Lecky shows, the cruelty of the old penal codes was a necessary consequence of the theological tenets of the people who framed and composed them. Believing God to be cruel and vindictive, they could but seek to reproduce this spirit in their previous legislation.
But no sooner had statesmen and teachers acquired better views of the character and will of the Father, than they began to recognise the principle of mercy in the administration of justice. Men like Voltaire and Beccaria began the reform ; and, in our own country, men like Romilly, Mackintosh, and Brougham have given it due effect.
And in all sorts of other ways the change in religious thought is producing a corresponding change in social institutions. One of Mr. Lecky's most interesting chapters traces the good work of Rationalism in " the secularisation of politics ; " another shows how, having broken through the spirit of asceticism, and inclined men to see the value of industrial pursuits, it has laboured nobly and successfully with commerce for the advancement of sound political economy and the healthy life of all classes of the people. " Generation after generation the power of the moral faculty becomes more absolute, the doctrines that oppose it wane and vanish, and the various elements of theology are absorbed and recast by its influences. The indifference of most men to dogmatic theology is now so marked and the fear of tampering with formularies that are no longer based on general conviction, is with some men so intense, that general revisions of creeds have become extremely rare ; but the change of relief is not the less profound. The old words are indeed retained, but they no longer present the old images to the mind, or exercise the old influence upon the life. The modes of thought and the types of character which those modes produce are specially and universally transformed. The whole intellectual atmosphere, the whole tenor of life, the prevailing enthusiasms, the conceptions of the imagination, are all changed. The intellect of man moves onward under the influence of regular laws in a given direction, and the opinions that in any age are realised and operative, are those which harmonise with its intellectual condition. If the prospect of constant change should appear to some minds to remove all the landmarks of the past, there is one consideration that may serve in a measure to reassure them. That Christianity was designed to produce benevolence, affection, and sympathy, being a fact of universal admission, is indefinitely more certain than that any particular dogma is essential to it ; and in the increase of these moral qualities we have therefore the strongest evidence of the triumph of the conceptions of its founder."—Manchester Examiner.
* History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By W. E. H. Lecky, M.A. In two volumes,-."Longmans.
Empire 4 January 1866,
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