HAZLITT ON RELIGION

Man Considered in Relation to God and tho Church," by W. Carew Hazlitt. (of the Inner Temple). London: Bernard Quaritch.
 This is a book into which the author declares he has put the industry of a lifetime. Originally published in 1891, it now appears in revised and enlarged form. It is a comprehensive work of over 500 pages. It includes chapters, more or less exhaustive, on Society, Free Will and Predestination, The Origin of Man, A Future State, Natural History, Purgatory, The Blood, The Brain, The Soul. Mr. Hazlitt is not a scientist in the strict sense; that is to say, he has not specialised in any one branch of science, or of abstract philosophy, or of letters. But he has read largely and thought a great deal ; and the general purport of his work is to criticise existing theories — particularly those of a religious or semi-religious origin— and to prove by a species of destructive reasoning that so-called revealed religion is utterly unreliable, and belief in the hereafter a most vain and futile thing. He writes clearly, without any parade of philosophic terms. All his arguments are easily followed. Moreover, the industry with which he has compiled and set forth known facts— particularly in the chapters on The Origin of Man and what he calls auxiliary institutions— is worthy of much praise. Many people who are not satisfied with his point of view, and object wholly to his materialistic interpretations of man and the universe, will yet subscribe warmly to much that is said about the way in which superstitions have been manipulated by teachers and preachers for their own ends. Mr. Hazlitt's hand is against every church, whether Romish, Presbyterian or Anglican, that makes a parade of knowledge of the Unseen and the Unknowable. He is severe on the so-called Resurrection "myth."' He declares— as, of course, hundreds of agnostic writers have declared before him—that the miraculous happenings of the New Testament are based on testimony that no court of inquiry, civil or ecclesiastical, would dream of accepting in these days.
  A work of this kind would be more inspiring if it had a constructive side. As, far as it goes— as far as there is anything in its tenets— it is purely destructive. Many readers will find a pleasure, if a rather malicious one, in the speculation as to the future of the church. "All the old fabric," says Mr. Hazlitt, "will probably be broken up in the course of time, although there will always remain a section which views religion as partly ceremonial and votive, partly official. But all the twaddle and all the cant and all the bluster, which the average clerk in holy orders so glibly delivers, and on which he so implicitly leans, will be one by one abjured or abandoned." The philosophy of the writer, if he can be said to have a philosophy, is summed up in the chapter on A Future State. In regard to this he has no belief at all. He ascribes the vague widespread belief in immortality —or at least the sentiment in favor of it— to nothing more, than a natural dislike of the sentient and self-conscious being to an eternity of Nothingness or of Annihilation. What right have we to assume, he asks, that other living things, at least as beautiful as ourselves, and subject to the same laws as ourselves, will die eternally, while we shall find ourselves in some way-fitted with another existence ? "Seriously speaking, when we scrutinise the matter we find our title of superiority over the rest of creation far less unimpeachable than we had been led to anticipate. We find it limited to features and qualities that fail to make out a claim for that exceptional destiny provided for us, at a tariff, by the church." The obvious criticism to which this book is liable is the one already hinted at— namely, that it reduces all life to a matter of sense phenomena, and carries the argument no further. The materialistic school flourished exceedingly in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries; but a great body of modern philosophic thought, as expressed by men like Eucken in Germany, and Bergson in England, arrives by a process of reasoning far more exhaustive than Mr Hazlitt's at a conclusion diametrically opposite. In fact, the profoundest of metaphysicians— men who have no more sympathy with superstition than Mr. Hazlitt himself, and who have gone much deeper into biology and other natural sciences —assure us that the life of the thinking man cannot be explained or accounted for by mere theories of evolution, or by purely materialistic hypotheses. There is the tangible or sense world, and there is another world also—a world of spirit about which nothing can be postulated except that it exists Mr. Hazlitt runs a vigorous campaign against what he calls superstition; but he has nothing whatever —not even a theory of moral sentiments— to put in its place.

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Saturday 1 March 1913, page 4