how the observation and knowledge of nature, and the conditions of society affect religion and theology. an instructive parallelism. conclusion.

consider the lilies of the field.—gospel of st. matthew.

the powers that be are ordained of god.—epistle to the romans.

it was 8 o’clock in the evening when i left brussels. at 6 o’clock the next morning i stepped upon the platform of the charing cross station. so ended, after very nearly five weeks, my little excursion. in the foregoing pages i have set down, not only what i saw, which could not have had much novelty, but the thoughts, also, as well about man as about nature, which what i saw suggested to me; and these, too, may not have much value. to some, however, everything in nature is instructive and interesting, and so is everything in man; or they seem to be so. but, in order to secure this instruction and interest, i believe that they must be viewed connectedly. the one is properly intelligible only by the light that shines from 251the other. to regard either separately is to misunderstand both. nature is the field in which he, whose form no man hath seen at any time, reveals to us his creative power, for the purpose that the intelligent contemplation of the objects, he presents to our view, should engender in us certain sentiments and ideas, which have from the beginning, in the degree and form possible at each epoch, underlaid religion. our fellow men are the field in which he reveals to us the capacities and conditions; the strength, the weaknesses, the workings, and the aspirations of moral and of intellectual being, as conditioned in ourselves: another, and perhaps a higher, revelation of himself; and the consciousness of which being in the individual constitutes, as far as we know, in this visible world of ours, the distinctive privilege of man; and the exercise of which, under the sense of responsibility, crowns the edifice of religion. the study of both has been equally submitted to us, is equally our duty, and is necessary for the completion of our happiness. they are the correlated parts of a single revelation, and of a single study. the man who shuts his eyes to the one, or to the other, cannot understand, at all events as fully as he might, either that portion of the revelation at which he looks exclusively, or himself, or him, who makes the revelation, in the sense in which he has willed that each should be understood.

252the products of our modern advanced methods of agriculture bear the same kind of relation to the products of the burnt stick (they could both support life, but very differently), that the religious sentiments and ideas produced by our knowledge of nature bear to those which the ignorant observation of a few prominent phenomena, as thunder and lightning, the power of the wind and of the sun, the action of fire, life and death, produced in the minds of the men of that remote day. the mind of the inhabitants of this country, precisely like the land of this country, was just the same at that day as at this. the powers and capacities of each are invariable. what varies, and always in the direction of advance, is that which is applied to the mind: as is the case also with respect to the land. the knowledge of what produces the thunder and lightning, of the laws that govern the motions of the heavenly bodies, of what originates and calms the wind, of the forces of nature, of the structure of animals and plants, are so many instruments, by which the constant quantity, the human mind, is cultivated for greater productiveness. no one dreams that we have approached the end of such knowledge, any more than that our agriculture has reached its last advance. the state of knowledge, whatever it may be at any time (from that of our rudest forefathers to our own), produces corresponding ideas and sentiments. its reception into the 253mind unfailingly generates those ideas and sentiments, just as the application of any method of agriculture, with the appliances that belong to it, gives the amount and kind of produce from the land proper to that method and to those appliances. as an instance taken from a highly civilized people, the close observation of the instincts of animals, and of the properties of plants, offered to the leisure, accompanied by some other favouring circumstances, of the ancient egyptians, but unaccompanied by any knowledge of the laws, the forces, and the order of nature; that is to say, their existing knowledge, together with the existing limitations to that knowledge, led unavoidably to the ideas and sentiments we find in them; that is to say, to what was their religion, which combined the worship of plants and animals, with belief in a future life.

the other self-acting factor to that organization of thought and sentiment, which is religion, is the observation of what will perfect human society, and the life of the individual, under the conditions of their existence at the time. certain things ought to be removed: it is religion to remove them. certain things ought to be maintained: it is religion to maintain them. certain things ought to be established: it is religion to establish them. certain knowledge ought to be propagated: it is religion to propagate it.

now both these contributions to religion, the 254knowledge of nature, which is inexhaustible, and the conditions of human society, which are endlessly multiform, are progressively variable quantities; religion, therefore, the resultant of the combined action of the two, must itself vary with them; that is to say, must advance with them.

it is a corollary to this, that from the day a religion forms itself into a completed system, it becomes a matured fruit; the perfected result of a train of anterior and contemporary conditions, that have long been working towards its production. thenceforth it is useful for a time just as a fruit may be. it has, also, in itself, as a fruit has, the seed of a future growth. but with that exception, though still serviceable, it is dead, though organized, matter. a certain concurrence of conditions, which can never be repeated, because knowledge and society are ever advancing, produced the fruit, which, like that of the aloe, can only be produced once out of its own concurrence of conditions. man’s spiritual nature feeds on that fruit, and is nourished by it, for a greater or less number of generations. at last, for it must come, a new concurrence of conditions arises, and a new fruit is produced. the vital germ that was in the old fruit, passed into the milieu of the new ideas and sentiments, and a new growth commenced. organization then ensued, and in due time bore, as its fruit, its own matured and perfected system. at the establishment 255of christianity, in the order of knowledge, the perception of the absurdity of thousands of local divinities, and, in the social and political order, the establishment of an universal empire, which gave rise to a sense of the brotherhood of mankind, combined in demanding that the whole organization of religious thought should be recast. everyone can see the part these two facts had in the construction, and in bringing about the reception, of christian ideas and christian morality. in these days we see that social and political conditions are changing, though we cannot so exactly define and describe in what that change consists as we can that just referred to; but we know that at the time of that change there was, though it was distinctly felt, the same absence of power to define and describe it distinctly. about the recent advance, however, in knowledge there is no want of distinctness: that is as palpable as it is, beyond measure, greater than the advances of all former times. it amounts almost to a revelation of the constitution and order of nature. the ideas and sentiments this new knowledge has given rise to are somewhat different from, for instance they are grander and give more satisfaction to thought than, the ideas and sentiments that accompanied the knowledge, or rather the ignorance, on the same subjects, of two, or of one, thousand years back. this must have some effect on the religion of christendom, and the effect cannot but 256be elevating and improving. this knowledge cannot possibly be bad, because it is only the attainment of the ideas, which, on the theory both of religion and of commonsense, were in the mind of the creator before they were embodied in nature; which were embodied in nature, and were submitted to us, in order that they might be attained to by us, for the sake of the effect the knowledge would have upon our minds, that is to say, ultimately on our religion.

this knowledge, it is notorious, is not estimated in this way by many good men amongst us, they, on the contrary, being disposed to regard it rather with repugnance, horror, and consternation. the reason is not far to seek. they have, probably, in all such cases, received only a theological and literary training. now every theology, as is seen in the meaning of the word, and as belongs to the nature of the construction, contains an implicit assertion, both that no new knowledge, which can have any good influence on men’s thoughts, sentiments, and lives, can be attained, subsequently to the date of its own formation; and that the workings of human society will never lead to advances beyond those, which had at that time been reached. and literary training, in this country, has hitherto meant a kind of dilettante acquaintance with the literature of the ancient greeks and romans, regarded, not as a chapter in the moral and intellectual history of the race, but rather as supplying models for 257expression. no wonder, then, need be felt at finding those, who are conversant only with what is dead, scared at the phenomena of life. the wonder would be if it were otherwise. but the same conditions, we all know, act differently on differently constituted minds: and this explains the opposite effect which modern criticism has upon the minds of some of those who have had only literary training. this criticism they find opposed to some of the positions of the old theology; and the effect of this discovery upon them is that it makes them hostile to religion itself. as well might newton have felt horror at the idea of gravitation because ptolemy had believed in cycles and epicycles. it is the preponderance of literary training in them, also, that issues in this opposite result.

religion is the organization of all that men know both of outward nature and of man, for the purpose of guiding life, of perfecting the individual and society, and of feeding the mind and the heart with the contemplation of the beauty and order of the universe, inclusive of man and of god, that is to say, of the conception we can form, at the time, of the all-originating, all-ordering, and all-governing power. this is, ever has been, and ever will be religion, unless we should pass into a new dispensation, at present inconceivable, because it would require the recasting, at all events, of man, if not of the external conditions of his existence, that is, of the world also. but as long 258as things continue as they have been, knowledge will always advance religion; and religion will always conform itself to knowledge. the essential difference between one religion and another, from fetishism up to christianity, is one of knowledge.

before the construction of systematic theologies, knowledge and religion were convertible terms. it was so under the old dispensation; and so again in the early days of christianity. after their construction the former term was modified. it had been generic, it thenceforth became specific. the differentiating limitation imposed upon it was that of this particular theology, exclusive of all other theologies; and, as it was a theology, this involved the exclusion of the ideas of correction and enlargement.

error and insufficiency must, from the nature of the materials dealt with, after a time be found in every theology. in this sense every church has erred, and could not but have erred. the mischief, however, is not in this error and insufficiency, for they are remediable. the progress of knowledge which points out the error, often indeed creating it by the introduction of additional data, supplies the means for correcting it; and the advance in the conditions of society, which creates the insufficiency, suggests the means for correcting it, too. nor, again, is the mischief in the ignorance of the majority, for that can to the extent required be removed. it is in the determination 259of some, from whom better things might have been expected, not to examine all things with the intention of holding fast that which is true; but to close their eyes and ears, as theologians, against all that the educated world now knows, and all that the uneducated masses are repelled by in what is now presented to them as the word of god. this determination puts them in the position of being obliged to support, and encourage, only those who address themselves to the ignorance of the age, but not for the purpose of removing it; and to oppose, and discourage, those who address themselves to the knowledge of the age, for the purpose of making it religious. we need not repeat what we have been told will happen, when the blind lead the blind.

the recollection of what has given to our political constitution its orderly and peaceful development might be of use here. it goes on accommodating itself smoothly, and without convulsions, to the altering conditions of society, because political parties amongst us are not coincident with classes. members of the popular party are to be found in the highest classes as well as in the lowest, and of the stationary party in the lowest as well as in the highest. this is what has here exorcized the demon of revolution. if party lines had been drawn horizontally instead of vertically, class would have been arrayed against class; and, probably, ignorance and violence, supported 260by numbers, would have made a clean sweep of our institutions, and, to no small extent, of our civilization. what has been advantageous in the political order would be equally so in the religious. what has saved us from a political, might, if adopted, save us from a possible religious, crash. it is a miserably short-sighted policy to endeavour to drive from the camp of religion, or of the national church, those who have accepted the knowledge of our times, and who have sympathies with the existing tendencies or possibilities of society: so that on one side shall be arrayed only those, who rest on what is old, and on the other only those, who have no disposition to reject what is new. whereas the true bridge from the present to the future can be constructed by neither of these parties alone; but must be the work of those, whose wish and effort are to combine, and to harmonise, the new with the old. this appreciation of what is needed, is, at all events, in accordance with the meaning of the saying, to the authority of which we must all defer, that ‘every scribe, who is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, will bring forth out of his treasures things new as well as old.’ the course taken by those, who lose sight of the guidance offered them in this saying, can only bring them into a false position.

it is very instructive to observe how circumstances analogous to those, which existed among the chosen 261people, at the date of the promulgation of christianity, are, at this moment, amongst ourselves producing analogous effects. we have lately heard those, who are attempting to make the knowledge, men have now been permitted to attain to, an element of religion, which is what knowledge must always become in the end, described as ‘maudlin sentimentalists.’ precisely the same expression, motivated by precisely the same feelings, and ideas, might have been applied with the same propriety, or impropriety, and with the same certainty of disastrous recoil on those who used it, to the teaching of the divine master himself. he appealed from the hard, narrow, rigid forms, in which the old law had been fossilized, to the sense men had come to have of what was moral, and needed, and to the knowledge they had come to have of what was true, under the then advanced conditions of society and of knowledge. the maintainers of the fossilized law were for binding heart and mind fast in the fetters of dogmatic human traditions. he was for setting mind and heart free by the reception of what was broad and true; at once human and divine. that alone was desirable, beneficent, and from god. it blessed, strengthened, emancipated, and gave peace. no authority, however venerable, could be pleaded against it. no thrones, principalities, or powers, however exalted, would be able to withstand it. there was no fear or possibility of its being refuted: for it 262was nothing but the perception, and the practical recognition, of existing knowledge, and of existing conditions. men, they might be many, might reject it, but to their own detriment only. the facts would remain. the rest, all whose eyes were open, or could be opened, to perceive what was before their eyes, would receive it as from god. the more it was set in the broad light of day the better. it must be proclaimed in the highways, and the market-places, and in the temple itself. if those who had received it were to hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. it was god’s truth. it was god’s word: not because it was written, for as yet it was not written, but because, as the word of god ever had, and ever would, come, it came from the pure heart, and the enlightened understanding, and approved itself to those, who had eyes to see, and ears to hear, and hearts to understand. let every one examine it. if in that day had been known what is now known of man’s history, and of nature, and of what is seen of the possibility of raising men, throughout society, to a higher moral and intellectual level than was heretofore attainable, we may be sure that there would have been no attempt to discredit such knowledge, and such aspirations; and that they would have been urged as extending our knowledge of god, and of his will; that they would have been appealed to, and that men would have been called upon to raise themselves to 263the level of what had become conceivable, and, conceivably, attainable. at all events, the one great point, the one paramount duty, was to proclaim what was then seen to be true. to keep back nothing. to care nothing for the consequences, in the way of what it might overthrow; to be ready to spend and be spent for the consequences, in the way of the good it must produce. the requisite boldness would come to its promulgators from feeling, that it was god’s work, and that he was on their side. the issue could not be doubtful. the gates of hell could not prevail against the truth. it was, notwithstanding its ‘maudlin sentimentality,’ mighty to the pulling down of strongholds; and went forth conquering, and to conquer. so will it do again. so will it do ever. the parallelism is complete at every point. it is only strange that it has not been seen, and dwelt upon, till all have become familiar with it. the facts, the situation, the ideas, the hopes and fears, are the same. so, too, is the language needed to describe them, each and all.

the thoughts, which this chapter outlines, were often, as might be supposed, in my mind during the little excursion described in the foregoing pages. they are, as far as i can see, the logical and inevitable conclusions of the acquaintance some have, such as it may be, with history and with physical science; and i suppose that travelling further along the same 264road would only enable them to see the object to which it leads with more distinctness. in switzerland there is much both in the singularly varied mental condition of the people themselves, and in the impressive aspects of nature, to confirm them. the narrative, though its form, in keeping with the particular purpose in which it originated, is at times somewhat minute, may yet, as things were, for the most part, seen and regarded through the medium of ideas i have just referred to, contribute a little to their illustration. it was my wish, at all events, that my mind and heart should be always open, unreservedly, to the teaching of all that i saw, both of man and of nature; but still, i trust, with that caution, and sense of responsibility, that befit the formation of opinions, by which—for one is conscious that they are the inner man, the true self—one must stand, or fall, and in which one must live, and die.