religions, ‘working hypotheses’—newman’s illative sense—origins of religions—ghosts and spirits—fetishes—nature-worship—solar myths—planets—evolution of nature-worship—polytheism, pantheism, and theism—evolution of monotheism in the old testament—evolution of morality—natural law and miracle—evidence for miracles—insufficiency of evidence—absence of intelligent design—agnosticism—origin of evil—can only be explained by polarity—optimism and pessimism—jesus, the christian ormuzd—christianity without miracles.
having thus, i may hope, given the reader some precise ideas of what are the boundaries and conditions of human knowledge, we may proceed to consider their application to the highest subjects, religions and philosophies.
in the introductory chapter of this work i have said that all religions are in effect ‘working hypotheses,’ by which men seek to reconcile the highest aspirations of their nature with the facts of the universe, and bring the whole into some harmonious concordance. i said so for the following reasons. in a discussion at the metaphysical society on the uniformity of laws of nature, recorded in the ‘nineteenth century,’ huxley is represented as saying that he considered this uniformity, not as an axiomatic truth like the first postulates of geometry, but as a ‘working hypothesis’; adding, however, that it was an hypothesis which had never been[147] known to fail. to this some distinguished advocates of catholic theology replied, that their conviction was of a higher nature, for their belief in god was a final truth which was the basis of their whole intellectual and moral nature, and which it was irrational to question. this is in effect cardinal newman’s celebrated argument of an ‘illative sense,’ based on a complete assent of all the faculties, and which was therefore a higher authority than any conclusions of science. the answer is obvious, that complete assent, so far from being a test of truth, is, on the contrary, almost always a proof that truth has not been attained, owing either to erroneous assumptions as to the premises, or to the omission of important factors in the solution of the problem. to give an instance, i suppose there could not be a stronger case of complete assent than that of the inquisitors who condemned the theories of galileo. they had in support of the proposition that the sun revolved round the earth the testimony of the senses, the universal belief of mankind in all ages, the direct statement of inspired scripture, the authority of the infallible church. was all this to be set aside because some ‘sophist vainly mad with dubious lore’ told them, on grounds of some new-fangled so-called science, that the earth revolved round its axis and round the sun? ‘no; let us stamp out a heresy so contrary to our “illative sense,” and so fatal to all the most certain and cherished beliefs of the christian world, to the inspiration of the word of god, and to the authority of his church.’ ‘e pur si muove,’ and yet the earth really did move; and the verdict of fact was that galileo and science were right, and the church and the illative sense wrong.
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in truth the distinction between the conclusions of science and those of religious creeds might be more properly expressed by saying that the former are ‘working hypotheses’ which never fail, while the latter are ‘working hypotheses’ which frequently fail. thus, the fundamental hypothesis of cardinal newman and his school of a one infinite and eternal personal deity, who regulates the course of events by frequent miraculous interpositions, so far from being a necessary and axiomatic truth, has never appeared so to the immense majority of the human race: and even at the present day, in civilised and so-called christian countries, its principal advocates complain that ninety-nine out of every hundred practically ignore it. it is not so with the uniformity of the laws of nature. no pal?olithic savage ever hesitated about putting one foot after another in chase of a mammoth from a fear that his working hypothesis of uniform law might fail, the support of the solid earth give way, and with his next step he might find himself toppling over into the abyss of an infinite vacuum. in like manner greeks and romans, indians and chinese, monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, jews and buddhists, christians and mahometans, all use standard weights in their daily transactions without any misgivings that the law of gravity may turn out not to be uniform. but religions theories vary from time to time and from place to place, and we can in a great many cases trace their origins and developments like those of other political and social organisms.
to trace their origins we must, as in the case of social institutions, look first at the ideas prevailing among those savage and barbarous races who are the best[149] representatives of our early progenitors; and secondly at historical records. in the first case we find the earliest rudiments of religious ideas in the universal belief in ghosts and spirits. every man is conceived of as being a double of himself, and as having a sort of shadowy self, which comes and goes in sleep or trance, and finally takes leave of the body, at death, to continue its existence as a ghost. the air is thus peopled with an immense number of ghosts who continue very much their ordinary existence, haunt their accustomed abodes, and retain their living powers and attributes, which are exerted generally with a malevolent desire to injure and annoy. hence among savage races, and by survival even among primitive nations of the present day, we find the most curious devices to cheat or frighten away the ghost, so that he may not return to the house in which he died. thus, the corpse is carried out, not by the door, but by a hole made for the purpose in the wall, which is afterwards built up, a custom which prevails with a number of widely separated races—greenlanders, hottentots, algonquins, and fijians; and the practice even survives among more civilised nations, such as the chinese, siamese, and thibetans; nor is it wholly extinct in some of the primitive parts of europe.
this idea obviously led to the practice of constructing tents or houses for the ghosts to live in, and of depositing with them articles of food and weapons to be used in their ghostly existence. in the case of great chiefs, not only their arms and ornaments are deposited, but their horses, slaves, and wives were sacrificed and buried with them, so that they might enter spirit-land with an appropriate retinue. the early egyptian tombs were as nearly as possible facsimiles of the house in[150] which the deceased had lived, with pictures of his geese, oxen, and other possessions painted on the walls, evidently under the idea that the ghosts of these objects would minister to the wants and please the fancy of the human ghost whose eternal dwelling was in the tomb where his mummy was deposited.
another development of the belief in spirits is that of fetish-worship, in which superstitious reverence is paid to some stock or stone, tree or animal, in which a mysterious influence is supposed to reside, probably owing to its being the chosen abode of some powerful spirit. this is common among the negro races, and it takes a curious development among many races of american indians, where the tribe is distinguished by the totem, or badge of some particular animal, such as the bear, the tortoise, or the hare, which is in some way supposed to be the patron spirit of the clan, and often the progenitor from whom they are descended. this idea is so rooted that intermarriage between men and women who have the same totem is prohibited as a sort of incest, and the daughter of a bear-mother must seek for a husband among the sons of the deer or fox. possibly a vestige of the survival of this idea may be traced in the coat-of-arms of the sutherland family, and the wild cat may have been the totem of the clan chattan, while the oak tree was that of the clan quoich, with whom they fought on the inch of perth. be this as it may, it is clearly a most ancient and widespread idea, and prevails from greenland to australia; while it evidently formed the oldest element of the prehistoric religion of egypt, where each separate province had its peculiar sacred animal, worshipped by the populace in one nome, and detested in the neighbouring one.
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by far the earliest traces of anything resembling religious ideas are those found in burying-places of the neolithic period. it is evident that at this remote period ideas prevailed respecting ghost or spirit life and a future existence very similar to those of modern savages. they placed weapons and implements in the graves of the dead, and not infrequently sacrificed human victims, and held cannibal feasts. whether this was done in the far more remote pal?olithic era is uncertain, for very few undoubted burials of this period have been discovered, and those few have frequently been used again for later interments. we can only draw a negative inference from the absence of idols which are so abundant in the prehistoric abodes explored by professor schliemann, among the very numerous carvings and drawings found in the caves of the reindeer period in france and germany, that the religion of the pal?olithic men, if they had any, had not reached the stage when spirits or deities were represented by images.
for the first traces therefore of anything like what is now understood by the term religion, we must look beyond the vague superstitions of savages, at the historical records of civilised nations. as civilisation advanced population multiplied, and rude tribes of hunters were amalgamated into agricultural communities and powerful empires, in which a leisured and cultured class arose, to whom the old superstitions were no longer sufficient. they had to enlarge their ‘working hypothesis’ from the worship of stocks and stones and fear of ghosts, to take in a multitude of new facts and ideas, and specially those relating to natural phenomena which had roused their curiosity, or become important to them as matters of practical utility. the establishment[152] of an hereditary caste of priests accelerated this evolution of religious ideas, and from time to time recorded its progress. the oldest of such records are those of egypt and chald?a, where the fertility of alluvial valleys watered by great rivers had led to the earliest development of a high civilisation. the records also of the chinese, hindoos, persians, and other nations take us a long way back towards the origins of religions.
in all cases we find them identical with the first origins of science, and taking the form of attempted explanations of natural phenomena, by the theory of deified objects and powers of nature. in the vedas we see this in the simplest form, where the gods are simply personifications of the heavens, earth, sun, moon, dawn, and so forth; and where we should say the red glow of morning announces the rising of the sun, they express it that aurora blushes at the approach of her lover the mighty sun-god. it is very interesting to observe how the old chald?an legend of the creation of the world has been modified in the far later jewish edition of it in genesis, to adapt it to monotheistic ideas. the chald?an legend begins, like that of genesis, with an ‘earth without form and void,’ and darkness on the chaotic deep. in each legend the spirit of god, called absu in the chald?an, moves on the face of the waters, and they are gathered together and separated from the land. but here a difference begins: in the original chald?an legend ‘the great gods were then made; the gods lakman and lakmana caused themselves to come forth; the gods assur and kesar were made; the gods anu, bel, and hea were born.’
the appearance of the gods lakman and lakmana[153] was the primitive mode of expressing the same idea as that which is expressed in genesis by saying that god created the firmament separating the heaven above from the earth beneath; assur and kesar mean the same thing as the hosts of heaven and the earth; the god bel is the sun, and so forth. it is evident that the first attempts to explain the phenomena of nature originated in the idea that motion and power implied life, personality, and conscious will; and therefore that the earth, sky, sun, moon, and other grand and striking phenomena, must be regarded as separate gods.
as culture advanced astronomy became more and more prominent in these early religions, and solar myths became a principal part of their mythologies, while astrology, or the influence of planets and stars on human affairs, became an important part of practical life. the chald?an legend referred to contains a mass of astronomical knowledge, which in the genesis edition is reduced to ‘he made the stars also.’ it describes how the constellations were assigned their forms and names, the twelve signs of the zodiac established, the year divided into twelve months, the equinoxes determined, and the seasons set their bounds. also how the moon was made to regulate the months by its disc, ‘horns shining forth to lighten the heavens, which on the seventh day approaches a circle.’
in the still older egyptian pyramids we find proof of the long previous existence of great astronomical knowledge and refined methods of observation, for these buildings, which are at once the largest and the oldest in the world, are laid down so exactly in a meridian line, and with such a close approximation to the true latitude, as would have otherwise been impossible. in[154] fact there is every reason to believe that while they were constructed as tombs for kings, they were at the same time intended for national observatories, for the arrangement of the internal passages as such is to make the great pyramid serve the purpose of a telescope, equatorially mounted, and showing the transits of stars and planets over the meridian, by reference to a reflected image of what was then the polar star, a knowledge of which was essential for accurate calculation of the calendar and seasons, for fixing the proper date of religious ceremonies, and very probably for astrological purposes.
the prevalence of these solar and astronomical myths among a number of different nations separated by wide intervals of space and time is very remarkable. egyptians, indians, babylonians, chinese, mexicans, and peruvians had myths which were strangely similar, indeed almost identical, based on the sun’s annual passage through the constellations of the zodiac. his apparent decline and death as he approached the winter solstice, and his return to life when he had passed it, gave rise to myths of the murder of the sun-god by some fierce wild boar, or treacherous enemy, and of his triumphant resurrection in renewed glory. hence, also, the passage of the winter solstice was a season of general rejoicing and festivity, traces of which survive when the sirloin and turkey smoke upon the hospitable tables of modern christmas. one remarkable myth had a very universal acceptance, that of the birth of the infant sun-god from a virgin mother. it appears to have originated from the period, some 6,450 years ago, when the sun, which now rises at the winter solstice in the constellation of sagittarius, rose in that of pisces, with the constellation of the virgin, with upraised arms[155] marked by five stars, setting in the north-west. anyhow, this myth of an infant god born of a virgin mother holds a prominent place in the religions of egypt, india, china, chald?a, greece, rome, siam, mexico, peru, and other nations. the resemblances are often so close that the first jesuit missionaries to china found that their account of the miraculous conception of christ had been anticipated by that of fuh-ke, born 3468 b.c.; and if an ancient priest of thebes or heliopolis could be restored to life and taken to the gallery of dresden, he would see in raffaelle’s madonna di san sisto what he would consider to be an admirable representation of horus in the arms of isis.
the planets also, still more mysterious in their movements than the sun, and therefore still more endowed with human-like faculties of life, power, and purpose, were from an early period believed to exercise an influence on human affairs. of the universality of this belief we find traces in the names of the days of the week, which are so generally taken from the sun, moon, and five visible planets—mercury, mars, jupiter, venus, and saturn—to whom special days were dedicated. if every seventh day is a day of rest, it was originally so because it was thought unlucky to undertake any work on the sabbath, saturday, or day of the gloomy and malignant saturn.
as time rolled on and civilisation advanced, this simple nature-worship and deification of astronomical phenomena developed into larger and more complex conceptions. following different lines of evolution, polytheism, pantheism and monotheism began to emerge as religious systems with definite creeds, rituals, and sacred books. these lines seem to have been determined[156] a good deal by the genius of the race in which the religious development took place. the impressions made on the human mind by the surrounding universe are very various. suppose ourselves looking up at the heavens on a clear starry night, what will be the impression? to one, that of awe and reverence, and he will feel crushed, as it were, into nothingness, in the presence of such a sublime manifestation of majesty and glory. another, of more ?sthetic nature, will be charmed by the beauty of the spectacle, and tempted to assign life to it, and to personify and dramatise its incidents. a third, of a scientific turn, will above all things wish to understand it.
thus we find the impression of awe preponderating among the semitic races generally; and as in their political relations, so in their religious conceptions, we find them prone to prostrate themselves before despotic power. with the greeks again the ?sthetic idea almost swallowed up the others, and the old astronomical myths blossomed into a perfect flower-bed of poetical and fanciful legends. the chinese never got beyond a simple pantheism, which looked upon the universe as being alive, and saw nothing behind it; while the more metaphysical and physically feebler races of hindoos and buddhists refined their pantheism into a system of illusion, in which their own existence and the surrounding universe were literally
such stuff
as dreams are made on,
and to be ‘rounded with a sleep’ was the final consummation devoutly to be desired.
monotheism developed itself later, partly from the[157] feeling of the unity of nature forcing itself on the more philosophical minds; partly from that feeling of reverence and awe in presence of the unknown which swallowed up other conceptions; and partly, in the earlier stages, from the feeling which exalted the local god of the tribe or nation, first into a supremacy over other gods, and finally into sole supremacy, degrading all other gods into the category of dumb idols made by human hands. in the old testament we can trace the development of this latter idea in its successive stages. until the later days of the jewish monarchy it is evident that the jews never doubted the existence of other gods; and their allegiance oscillated between jehovah and the heathen deities symbolised by the golden calf, worshipped in high places, and contending for the mastership in the rival sacrifices of elijah and the priests of baal. but the prophetic element gradually introduced higher ideas, and in the reigns of hezekiah and josiah the worship of jehovah as the sole god became the religion of the state; and old legends and documents were re-edited in this sense in the sacred book, which was discovered and published for the first time in the reign of the latter king. the subsequent misfortunes of the nation, their captivity and contact with other religions in babylonia, strengthened this monotheism into an ardent, passionate national faith, as it has continued to be with this remarkable people up to the present day. christianity and mahometanism, children of judaism, have spread this form of faith over a great part of the civilised world; and of the three theories of polytheism, pantheism, and monotheism, it may be said that only the two latter survive.
polytheism was bound to perish first, for slow as[158] the advance of science was, the uniformity of most of the phenomena, which had been attributed to so many separate gods, could not fail to make an impression; and as ideas of morality came slowly and tardily to be evolved as an element of religion, the cruel rites and scandalous fables which so generally accompanied polytheistic religions became shocking to an awakening conscience.
it is worthy of remark that this element of morality, which has now gone so far towards swallowing up the others, was the latest to appear. even in the jewish conception jehovah was for a long time just as often cruel, jealous, and capricious, as just and merciful; and st. paul’s doctrine that because god had the power to do as he liked, he was warranted in creating a large portion of the human race as ‘vessels of wrath,’ predestined to eternal punishment, is as revolting to the modern conscience as any sacrifice to beelzebub or moloch. if we wish to see how little necessary connection there is between morality and monotheism, we have only to look at mahometanism, which, in its extremer forms, may be called monotheism run mad.
the wahabite reformer, we are told by palgrave, preached that there were only two deadly sins: paying divine honours to any creature of allah’s, and smoking tobacco; and that murder, adultery, and such like trivial matters, were minor offences which a merciful allah would condone. he held also that of the whole inhabitants of the world all would surely be damned, except one out of the seventy-two sects of mahometans, who held the true faith and dwelt in the district of riad. this illustrates the insane extremes into which all human speculations run, if a single idea—in this[159] case that of awe, reverence, and abject submission in presence of an almighty power—is allowed to run its course without check and obtain undue preponderance.
apart from these extreme instances we may say that the two religious theories which have survived to the present day in the struggle for existence, are monotheism and pantheism. pantheism is, in the main, the creed of half the human race—of the teeming millions of india, china, japan, ceylon, thibet, siam, and burmah. how deeply it is rooted in their conceptions was very forcibly impressed on me in a conversation i had on board one of the p. and o. steamers with an english missionary returning from china. he told me how he had dined one evening with an intelligent chinese merchant, and after dinner they walked in the garden discussing religious subjects, and he tried to impress on his host the first principles of the christian religion. it was a starlight night, and for sole reply the chinese gentleman stretched his hand to the heavens and said, ‘do you mean to tell me all that is dead—do you take me for a fool?’ the chinese ‘illative sense’ was as absolute in its conclusions for pantheism, as that of cardinal newman for theism. in fact pantheism, though not the whole truth, and almost as inconsistent as polytheism with the real facts of the universe as disclosed by science, has a certain poetical truth in it, to which chords of human emotion vibrate responsively, and is perhaps not so widely in error as some of the extreme theories which treat matter as something base and brutal. wordsworth’s noble lines—
a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
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and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
a motion, and a spirit that impels
all thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
and rolls through all things—
are pure pantheism, and yet we cannot but feel ourselves to a great extent in sympathy with them.
so also the well-known lines of a greater than wordsworth, shakespeare, are pure buddhism:
the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
and, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
leave not a rack behind. we are such stuff
as dreams are made on, and our little life
is rounded with a sleep.
no one can read these lines without feeling that the buddhist conception is as far as possible from being a trivial or vulgar one, and that the triviality and vulgarity are rather with those who cannot, up to a certain point, understand and sympathise with it.
the religions of the east are very philosophical, and have kept very clearly in view this fundamental distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. in the ‘century magazine’ of july 1886, there is an interesting account of a conversation between an american missionary and the bozu or chief priest of the great temple of the shin sect of buddhists at kioto in japan. the priest was an intelligent and highly educated gentleman who spoke english, and was well versed in the speculations of modern philosophy. the conversation turned on theological questions, and when pressed by the argument for a divine creator, from design shown in the universe implying intelligence, he replied:—
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‘no; god cannot make matter. only artificial things show design, only things which can be made. what do you mean by saying a thing shows design? you only mean that by trying a man could make it.’
and he proceeded to illustrate it thus:—
‘you show me a gold ring; the ring shows design, but not the gold; gold is an ultimate element, which can neither be made nor destroyed. when men can make a world, then they can prove that this one shows design, for the only way they know of design is by what they make.’
he went on to argue for the immortality of the soul, and as a consequence for its pre-existence and the transmigration of souls, from the conservation of energy; and concluded his argument against the creation and government of the world by a comprehensible, anthropomorphic creator, by adducing the existence of evil.
‘there is a sickness,’ he said, ‘called fever and ague; what do you call the medicine to cure that?’
‘quinine.’
‘yes; now we have not found that long; a good god would not have let so many people suffer if he could have given them that. a man found it by chance. the sickness and suffering in this life are for wrong done in another life.’
we may not accept this unproved theory of the cause of sickness and suffering, but it is very interesting to find that candid and intelligent minds, brought up in a society and religious beliefs so widely different from our own, have arrived practically at the same conclusions as john stuart mill, herbert spencer, and other leaders of advanced thought in modern europe, and drawn almost identically the same line between that[162] which is knowable and that which is unknowable by the human mind.
but, however large-minded we may become in seeing the good in other forms of creed, we english of the nineteenth century are not going to turn either pantheists or buddhists, and practically the contest of the present day is between the supernatural or miraculous, and the natural or scientific, hypotheses.
according to the former the operations of the universe are carried on to a considerable extent by what may be called secondary interferences of a supernatural being, who with will, intelligence, and design, like human though vastly superior, frequently interposes to alter the course of events and bring about something which natural law would not have brought about. the other hypothesis cannot be stated better than in bishop temple’s words, that the great first cause created things so perfect from the first, that no such secondary interferences have ever been necessary, and everything has been and is evolved from the primary atoms and energies in a necessary and invariable succession. the supernatural and the natural theories of the universe are thus brought into direct antagonism.
for the supernatural theory it must be conceded that it is quite conceivable, as is proved by the fact that it has been the almost universal conception of mankind for ages, and remains so still for the greater number. it is, as i have said, the inevitable first conception when men began to reflect on the phenomena of the universe, and to reason from effects to causes. i have always thought that hume went too far in condemning miracles as absolutely incredible a priori. it is a question of[163] evidence. a priori, i can conceive that the true explanation of the universe might have been natural law, as the general rule, supplemented by miracles; just as readily as that it is law always, and miracle never. the verdict must be decided by the weight of evidence. the two theories must be called, face to face, before the tribunal of fact, and its decision must be respected. this is exactly what has been going on for the last two centuries, and specially for the last half century, and the record of decisions is now a very ample one. in every single instance law has carried the day against miracle.
instance after instance has occurred in which phenomena which in former ages were attributed without hesitation to supernatural agencies have been conclusively proved to be due to natural laws. take the obvious instance of thunder. when horace wrote:—
jam satis terris nivis, atque dir?
grandinis misit pater, et rubente
dextera sacras jaculatus arces
terruit urbem,
he wrote to a public to whom it was an undoubted article of faith that thunder and lightning, hail and snowstorms, came direct from the father of the gods in the sky. even to a late period this was the general faith, and the prayers in our rubric for rain or fine weather remain as a survival of the belief that these things, when unusual or in excess, are supernatural manifestations. but benjamin franklin said, ‘no, there is nothing supernatural about lightning. i will bring it down from the clouds and manufacture it by turning a wheel.’ appeal being made to fact, the verdict is that franklin was right, and that lightning-conductors protect ships and houses better than prayers or incantations.[164] again, when galileo and the church joined issue as to whether the earth was round or flat, inspiration and authority were cited in vain for the received theory; fact said it was round, and it was proved to be so by men sailing round it. the law of gravity was considered a very dangerous heresy, and for a long time pious divines held out against its conclusions, and contended that it was no better than atheism to doubt that comets were signs of god’s anger sent to warn a sinful world. but halley calculated the time of his comet’s return according to the laws of gravity, and appeal being made to fact, the comet returned true to time.
this has occurred so often that few are left who doubt the universal prevalence of law in the material universe, where former generations saw miracles at every turn. nor is the defeat of miracle less conspicuous in the spiritual world. where former ages and rude races saw, and still see, possession by evil spirits, modern doctors see fevers, epilepsies, or insanity. once more appeal being made to fact, the old medicine-men administered incantations, the new ones quinine—which cure the most patients?
in like manner demonology and witchcraft, with all their train of cruelties and horrors, once universally believed even by men like justice hale, have passed into oblivion as completely as the lami?, phorkyads, and other fantastic figures of the classical walpurgisnight. is the world the better or the worse for this triumph of natural law over supernaturalism?
the triumph has been so complete in innumerable instances, without a single one to the contrary, that belief in the permanence and universality of natural law has become almost an instinct in all educated minds,[165] and even those who cling to old beliefs must admit that the most cogent and irresistible evidence is requisite to establish the fact of a real supernatural interference. it may be taken as an axiom that wherever a natural explanation is possible, a miraculous one is impossible.
now this is just the point on which, as knowledge has increased, the evidence for miracles has become weaker, almost in the exact ratio in which the necessity for evidence has become stronger.
take, for instance, the following case recorded by dr. braid of glasgow. miss r. had suffered from ophthalmia and was totally blind. she could not discern a single letter of the title-page of a book placed close to her, though some of the letters were a quarter of an inch long. dr. braid placed the patient in a condition of hypnotism or artificial somnambulism, and directed the nervous force, or sustained attention of the mind, to the eyes by wafting over them. after a first sitting of about ten minutes she was able to read a great part of the title-page, and after four more sittings she was able to read the smallest-sized print in a newspaper, and was quite cured for the rest of her life. in another case, that of mrs. s., blindness of the left eye had occurred owing to an attack of rheumatic fever, the structure of the eye, both external and internal, being considerably injured, and more than half the cornea covered by an opaque film. after a few sittings the cornea became transparent, and the patient was cured.
in both these cases the blind were made to see by processes which were purely mechanical, for hypnotism was induced by the simple means of making the patient strain her attention on some fixed idea or object, commonly on a black wafer stuck on a white wall, and the[166] stimulation of the optic nerve to greater activity did the rest. and if the blind could be made to see, a fortiori the deaf were made to hear, and the lame and halt to walk, by the same mechanical process. here there is an explanation of nine-tenths of all recorded miracles by purely natural causes.
again, take the well-known case of the berlin bookseller, nicolai, who, having fallen into ill-health, for a whole year saw, when awake, visions so real and palpable that he may be said to have lived in the company of disembodied spirits, undistinguishable from actual men and women. this is a common phenomenon in vivid dreams, but the berlin case takes us a step farther, and shows us how subjective impressions may assume the form of objective realities, even in the case of a man wide awake, of a sceptical turn of mind, and in full possession of his reasoning faculties. why then should we be driven to the alternative of miracle or imposture, to account for similar dreams or visions being taken for objective realities by enthusiastic minds, living in an atmosphere of religious excitement, in an uncritical age, when supernatural occurrences were considered to be matters of course? and history is full of instances which show how any supernatural germ, planted in such a medium, propagates itself and extends to millions, almost as rapidly as the bacillus germ does in an epidemic of small-pox. st. vitus’s dance, or the dancing mania, ran the round of europe like the potato disease, and even yet survives in the hysterical affections of the sect of shakers. the gift of tongues spread like wildfire through irving’s congregation, and only died out because it had fallen on the uncongenial soil of the nineteenth century; even the story of the tail of the lion over the gateway[167] of the old northumberland house being seen by many passers-by to wag because one had asserted it, illustrates the contagiousness of nervous sympathy, and the tricks which ‘strong imagination’ can play with the senses.
another great blow has been dealt against the miraculous theory by what can only be called the singular want of intelligence displayed in the exercise of miraculous power as commonly recorded. the raison d’être, or effect desired to be produced by miracles, is to convert mankind from sin, or to attest a divine mission by convincing proofs. even ordinary human intelligence—and how much more so that of a superior being—must see that to attain this end the means must be to make the proof convincing. there is no reason in itself why it should not be so. the fact that a man who was alive and signed a will is now dead, is attested as regards the latter proposition by a proper medical certificate, and as regards the former by two credible witnesses, who are prepared to come into court, give their names and addresses, depose on oath to the signature, and stand cross-examination. if this testimony is required to establish a fact so antecedently probable as that one particular man has undergone the common fate of millions of millions of other men, that is to say, that he has died after being alive, how much more must it be requisite to establish the fact so antecedently improbable, as that one man among those many millions after having died came back to life. and yet where is the recorded miracle for which even this minimum amount of testimony is forthcoming? why are miracles so constantly performed in holes and corners, in obscure localities, among little knots of ignorant and enthusiastic adherents, attested by the[168] vaguest hearsay evidence of unknown or incompetent witnesses, and apparently under circumstances inevitably calculated to defeat their object and engender doubts in the minds of reasonable and conscientious men. take, for instance, the miracles now said to be wrought at lourdes. the object must be taken to be to convert infidel france to the catholic faith. but obviously this object would be far better attained by a single undoubted miracle wrought at paris before a commission headed by a man like pasteur, than by any number of miracles scarcely, if at all, distinguishable from those of dr. braid, alleged to occur at an obscure village in the presence of peasants and pilgrims. or, take a higher instance, that of the demand made by the pharisees to jesus for a sign to attest his messiahship. consider the circumstances of the case, and see if it is at all possible that if he had possessed the power of working miracles he should have replied, ‘why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily i say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation’ (st. mark ix. 12). in the first place the statement throws discredit upon all the miracles said to have been wrought, by the positive and explicit declaration that none should be wrought. but beyond this, the very essence of the mission of jesus was contained in the words, ‘repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ he had a firm conviction that the kingdom of heaven, or a millennium of peace and goodwill, was close at hand, and its advent only retarded by the sinfulness and want of faith of his chosen people. he thought it his bounden duty to do all he could to remove the obstacle and expedite the coming of the kingdom. with this conviction, though fully seeing the[169] risk and counting the cost, when he found that he was making no decided headway by preaching in a remote province, he determined to go to jerusalem and make there one great effort to accomplish his object. can it be doubted that he would use every means in his power to carry his mission to a successful conclusion? if, having the power to do so by working a miracle, he had refused, he would from his point of view have been guilty of a great sin—that of preventing the coming of the kingdom of heaven.
again, who were the pharisees? no doubt there were formalists and hypocrites among them, but the position of the sect in the jewish nation was almost exactly similar to that of the english puritans in the reign of charles. they were the embodiment of the patriotic and religious spirit of the race, the sons of the heroic fathers who fought under judas maccabeus against antiochus, the fathers of the equally heroic sons who made the last desperate stand against the legions of titus. it was their duty, when a claim to messiahship was advanced, before departing from the traditions of their ancestors, to require evidence. the universally expected evidence of a temporal deliverer being wanting, there remained only the evidence of miracles, which, moreover, were assigned as the test of a messiah by all their prophets. to refuse them a sign, if a sign were possible, was to do injustice to many sincere and conscientious men. nay, more, it was an act of cruelty if leaving them in their old faith entailed eternal punishment. the same thing applies to all records of miracles. they are never wrought under circumstances where they would be the most effective means for attaining proposed ends. they are[170] never wrought under circumstances which leave them clear of the suspicion of being subjective illusions or misinterpretations of effects due to natural causes. they never convince any but those who are more than half convinced already.
it would be easy to multiply instances showing the inadequacy of the evidence adduced to establish such an exceptional and extraordinary fact as the occurrence of a real miracle. but it is unnecessary to do so, as all thinking minds have come, or are fast coming, to the conclusion of dr. temple, that ‘all the countless varieties of the universe were provided for by one original impress, and not by special acts of creation modifying what had previously been made.’
it is only when we look behind the phenomena of the universe at this great first cause, that i see anything to object to in the definition of dr. temple, and of christian philosophers generally. they assume it to be a personal deity, who is to a great extent known or knowable, and therefore must have attributes conformable to human perceptions which are the basis of all human knowledge. in other words, however much we may purify and enlarge these attributes, he must be essentially an anthropomorphic god or magnified man. to this theory there seems to me to be this fatal objection, that it gives no account of the origin of evil, or rather that it makes the divine creator directly responsible for it. the existence of evil in the world is as palpable a fact as the existence of good. there are many things which to our human perceptions appear to be base, cruel, foul, and ugly, just as clearly as other things appear to be noble, merciful, pure, and beautiful. whence come they? if the existence of good proves a[171] good creator, how can we escape the inference that the existence of evil proves an evil one? this is never so forcibly impressed on me as when i read the arguments of those who insist most strongly on the conception of a one, anthropomorphic god. when carlyle says, ‘all that is good, generous, wise, right—whatever i deliberately and for ever love in others and myself—who or what could by any possibility have given it to me but one who first had it to give? this is not logic, but axiom.’ i cannot but picture to myself the sledgehammer force with which, if he had approached the question without prepossessions, he would have come down on the cant, the insincerity, the treason to the eternal veracities, which refused to look facts in the face, and apply the same reasoning to the evil. or if arnold defines the deity as the ‘something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,’ how of the something not ourselves which makes for unrighteousness? the only escape i can find from this dilemma is to accept existing facts and not evade them. it is a fact that polarity is the law of existence. why we know not, any more than we know the real essence and origin of the atoms and energies which are our other ultimate facts. but we accept atoms and energies, and accept the law of gravity and other laws; why not accept also the law of polarity, and admit that it is part of the ‘original impress’: one of the fundamental conditions under which the evolution of creation from its ultimate elements is necessitated to proceed. this the human mind can understand; beyond it is the great unknown or unknowable, in presence of which we can only feel emotions of reverence and of awe, and ‘faintly trust the larger hope’ that duality may somehow[172] ultimately be merged in unity, evil in good, and ‘every winter turn to spring.’
as nations advanced in civilisation there has always been a tendency among the higher and purer minds to relegate the great first cause further and further back into the unknown, and to divest it of anthropomorphic attributes. when socrates said, ‘that divinely revealed wisdom of which you speak, i deny not, inasmuch as i do not know it; i can only understand human reason,’ he spoke the identical language of darwin, spencer, huxley, and those leaders of modern thought whom theologians call agnostics. even in religions based on the idea of a single anthropomorphic deity the same tendency often appears among the highest thinkers. thus emmanuel deutsch, in his learned work on the talmud, tells us, ‘its first chapter treats of the deity as conceived by jewish philosophy. the existence of god is, of course, presupposed. but what of his attributes? has he any? scripture literally taken seems to affirm this. yet taken in a higher sense, as understood by the alexandrines, the talmud, and the targum, it denies it.’
the great jewish doctors, ibn ezra, jehuda hilmi, and maimonides, take this view of a divine origin shrouded in ineffable mystery. maimonides says, ‘if you give attributes to a thing, you define this thing, and defining a thing means to bring it under some head, to compare it with something like it. god is sole of his kind. determine him, circumscribe him, and you bring him down to the modes and categories of created things.’ even st. paul says, ‘o the depths of god. how unsearchable are his judgments, and how inscrutable his ways’; and the creed of our own church, in[173] the midst of a string of definitions all implying that god is comprehensible, has the words ‘the father incomprehensible.’
it is evident that the reasons why these anticipations of the prevailing tendency of modern thought only appeared by glimpses, and among a very limited number of philosophic minds, arose from the fact that the miraculous theory of the universe everywhere prevailed. every unusual occurrence was supposed to be owing to the direct supernatural interference of a being acting in the main with human attributes, and therefore to be a direct refutation of the theory which denied the possibility of defining his attributes, and relegated him to the dim distance of an incomprehensible creator. with the utter breakdown of the miraculous theory, and the certainty that all the countless varieties of the universe arise, not from special interferences, but from one original impress, this theory of a reverent and devout agnosticism becomes impregnable and holds the field against all rivals. it, and it alone, is consistent with the facts of science, the deductions of reason, the axioms of morality, while at the same time it denies nothing, and leaves an ample background on which to paint the visions of faith, and to reflect back to us spectral images of our hopes and fears, our longings and aspirations.
some seek for a solution of the mystery, and try to reconcile the existence of evil with that of an almighty and beneficent creator, by assuming that in the long run everything will come right. evolution, they say, has led constantly to higher and better things, and when carried far enough will lead to a state of society in which wars will cease, evil passions die out, and[174] universal love and charity prevail—in other words, to a millennium.
even if this were true, what of the untold millions of the human race who have perished in their sins while evolution was slowly working out this tardy millennium? are they the chair à canons, whom a napoleon-like deity sacrifices with cynical indifference, in the calculated moves of the game of creation? is this their idea of an all-wise and all-merciful father who is in heaven?
and again, is it true that evolution works constantly for good and promises to bring about such a millennium? it is doubtless true that evolution means progress, and the ever-increasing development of the more and more complex and differentiated from the simple and uniform. but is this all for good, or all for happiness; and is not evolution, like everything else, subject to the primary and all-pervading law of polarity? we have only to ask the question to answer it. in the case of the individual, which is the epitome of the history of the species, is development from the engaging innocence of childhood always in the direction of goodness and happiness?
so far is this from being the case that, as individuals and societies advance, and become higher and more complex in the scale of organisation, the law of polarity asserts itself with ever-increasing force, and contrasts become sharper. the good become better, the bad worse; and as we become less
like the beasts with lower pleasures,
like the beasts with lower pains,
if our happiness becomes more intense, so does our misery become more intolerable. i refer not merely to[175] physical conditions, though here the contrast is most apparent. an intelligent traveller who recently circled the world, surveying mankind with a keen and impartial eye ‘from china to peru,’ says, as the result of his experience, ‘the traveller will not see in all his wanderings so much abject repulsive misery among human beings in the most heathen lands, as that which startles him in his civilised christian home, for nowhere are the extremes of wealth and poverty so painfully presented.’ this is perfectly true; but it would be a rash conclusion to infer that civilised and christian countries are worse than heathen lands, or that those who march in the van of progress and succeed in the struggle for life, have a larger dose of original sin than the laggards and those who fail.
accumulations of population and accumulations of capital are alike causes and effects of progress in an industrial age. but you can no more have a north without a south pole, than you can have this progress without its counterpart of suffering. when an educated gentleman was, like the good vicar,
passing rich with forty pounds a year,
how many struggles and how many heart-aches were avoided. when ‘merry england’ dwelt in rural hamlets and villages, the ‘bitter cry’ of east london could scarcely have been written. turn it as you like, increase of population means increase of poverty. say that only five per cent. fail in the battle of life, from their own or inherited faults; from bad luck, ill-health, weakness of mind, adverse surroundings; five per cent. on thirty millions is a larger figure than five per cent. on ten millions. and the lot of those who fail is[176] aggravated by the success of those who succeed. the scale of living rises, and the cost of living increases, while competition becomes keener. increase of population in a limited area means increased difficulty of finding employment; and the complex relations of international commerce send panics and crises vibrating throughout the world, which throw millions out of work, or reduce them to starvation wages. in simple forms of society every one accepts the condition in which he finds himself as a matter of course, while in a more complex civilisation the fiend envy steps in, and teaches the baser natures who are failures, to regard every success as an insult and every successful man as an enemy. hence labour rises in mad revolt against capital; socialists attack society with dynamite; and utopian theorists preach a millennium to be attained by abolishing private property and individual liberty.
if we turn to the moral aspects of the question, it is still more clear that evolution does not tend solely to the side of virtue. there is doubtless less ferocious savagery, less rude and unconscious or half-conscious crime, in civilised societies, but there is far more deliberate and diabolical wickedness. the very temptations and opportunities which, if resisted, lead to higher virtues, if succumbed to, lead to greater vice. even the intellectual advance, if perverted, becomes the instrument of greater crimes. a chemist discovers nitro-glycerine, and dynamite becomes a resource of civilisation. there is a saying that there is ‘no blackguard so bad as a scotch blackguard,’ which, as a patriotic scotchman, i take to be a tribute to the generally high intellectual and moral character of my countrymen. a powerful polarity is powerful, as the case may be, either[177] for good or evil. why then should we believe that evolution, which, carried thus far, has developed more strongly the contrast between good and evil, will, if carried a little farther, extinguish it by annihilating the evil?
in fact, the good and evil resulting from the higher evolution of society are so equally balanced that it depends very much on place, time, and temperament whether we are optimists or pessimists. if my liver acts properly i am an optimist; if it is out of order, a pessimist. personally i incline to optimism—that is, i think that this world, if not exactly ‘the best of all possible worlds,’ is yet on the whole a very tolerable world, and that life to the majority, and on the average, is worth living. i think also that progress is certainly towards higher, and very probably towards happier, conditions. it seems to me that in the most advanced english-speaking communities, the condition of at least one half—viz. the female half—of the population is distinctly better, and that the working class, who form the majority of the male half, though many are worse off than formerly, are, on the whole, better fed, better clothed, better educated, and better behaved.
this, however, is perhaps very much a matter of temperament. greater minds than mine have seen things differently and inclined to pessimism. buddhism, and almost all oriental religions and philosophies, are based upon it, and look to nirvana or annihilation of personal identity as the supreme bliss. pauline christianity assumes that all mankind, except a few chosen vessels, are so hopelessly bad as to be predestined to eternal damnation. and even more remarkable, shakespeare, the universal genius, who one would say had as[178] happy a temperament and led as successful a life as any man, had his moods of despondency in which he could say:—
when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
i all alone bemoan my outcast state;
wearying deaf heaven with my fruitless cries,
and look upon myself, and curse my fate.
or declare with hamlet that no one would bear the ills of life if
he himself could his quietus make
with a bare bodkin.
with instances like these, and the disgust of life manifested in so many modern societies by the increase of suicides, and the spread of pessimistic theories like those of schopenhauer and hartmann, who can deny that the great magnet of modern civilisation has a south as well as a north pole, and that progress is not all towards perfection?
the attempts of theologians to reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of an almighty creator, by relegating the adjustment to a future life, only make the fact of this fundamental polarity more apparent, for their conceptions of a heaven and a hell obviously do not reconcile, but only intensify, the opposite polarities. the good are better, the bad worse, the happy happier, and the wretched more miserable, in all these attempts to define the undefinable and to reconcile divine justice with divine mercy. all that remains really clear to each individual is that by his efforts in this life he can do something to keep the balance of polarities somewhat more on the side of good, both in his own individual existence, and in that of the aggregate of units, of which he is one, which is called society or humanity.
[179]
the great advantage of this form of religious hypothesis, which for want of a better name i call zoroastrianism, is that, in the first place, it gets rid of the antagonism between religion and science, for there is no possible discovery of science which is irreconcilable with the fact that there is a necessary and inevitable polarity of good and evil, and in the background a great unknown, which may be regarded with those feelings and aspirations which are inseparable from human nature. and secondly, there is the still greater advantage that we can devote ourselves with a whole heart and sincere mind to the worship of the good principle, without paltering with our moral nature by professing to love and adore a being who is the author of all the evil and misery in the world as well as of the good. if it were really true that there were such a being as theologians describe, who created the immense majority of the human race vessels of wrath doomed to eternal punishment, either from pure caprice or to avenge the slight offered to him by the disobedience of a remote ancestor, what would be the attitude of every healthy human soul towards such a being? rather that of prometheus or satan, than of gabriel or michael; of heroic defiance than of abject submission. we may gloss this over in words, but the fact remains, and it is difficult to overestimate the amount of evil which has resulted in the world from this confusion of moral sentiments which has made good men do devil’s work in the belief that it had divine sanction.
the horrors of demonology and witchcraft had their origin in texts of the old testament; religious wars and persecutions arose out of the fundamental error that intellectual acceptance of doubtful dogmas was the one[180] thing necessary for salvation; and ruthless cruelty was justified by an appeal to god’s anger with saul for refusing to hew in pieces the captive amalekites. a follower of zoroaster would see at once that these were works of ahriman and not of ormuzd, and that in taking part in them he was deserting the standard under which he had enlisted, and doing deeds of darkness while pretending to serve the prince of light. this idea of being a soldier enlisted in the army of light seems to me to afford one of the strongest practical inducements to hate what is evil and cleave to what is good. a bad deed or foul thought is felt to be not only wrong but dishonourable: a disloyal going over to the enemy and abandonment of the chief under whom we had enlisted, and of the comrades with whom we had served. this is a very strong motive, and even in the humble ranks of the salvation army we can see how powerfully it operates to make men true to their banner.
indeed a great deal of what is best in genuine christianity seems to me to resolve itself very much into the worship of jesus as the ormuzd or personification of the good principle, and determination to try to follow his example and do his work. it happens to me to receive a good many circulars from the devoted men and women who are doing so much charitable work to assist the poor and fallen, and i observe that the appeals are almost constantly made in the name of jesus. when the salvation army made an appeal the other day to its members for funds to prosecute their campaign, it was touching to read the replies and see men parting with an overcoat or giving up their beer, and women going without a new bonnet or cup of tea,[181] to contribute their mite. but always for the ‘love of jesus,’ for the ‘saviour’s sake,’ as an offering to the ‘dear redeemer.’ theological christianity says that the one thing needful is to believe in the catholic faith as defined by the athanasian creed, without which we shall ‘without doubt perish everlastingly.’ practical christianity has completely dropped the holy ghost as a sort of fifth wheel to the coach, and relegated the father into ever vaguer and greater distance; while it has fastened more and more on the figure of jesus of nazareth as the practical living embodiment of the good principle of the universe. in a word, christianity, as it has become more reasonable, more charitable, more pure, and more elevated, has approximated more and more to zoroastrianism, and for practical purposes modern christians are, to a great extent, without knowing it, worshippers of ormuzd, with christ for their ormuzd.
to this i see no sort of objection. the tendency to personify abstract principles in something which is warmer, dearer, nearer to ourselves, is ineradicable in human nature; and especially among the great masses of mankind who cannot rise to the height of philosophical speculations. it is impossible in the present age to invent new personifications, or to revive old ones. jesus has the immense advantage of being in possession of the field, with all the accumulated love and reverence of nineteen centuries of followers. it would be difficult to invent a better ideal or a more perfect example. no doubt the ideal, like all human conceptions, is not absolutely perfect; it is subject to the law of polarity, and its excellences, if pushed to the ‘falsehood of extremes,’ in many cases become faults. it would not[182] do in practice if smitten on one cheek to turn the other, or to take no thought for the morrow and live like the sparrows. the opposition between the flesh and the spirit is also stated so absolutely, that it is apt to lead to a barren and ignoble asceticism. but those are elements which, practically, are not likely to be pushed to excess, and which serve rather to mitigate the tendencies of modern civilisation to an undue preponderance of the opposite polarities of selfishness, worldliness, and sensuality. courage, hardihood, self-reliance, foresight, a love of progress, and a desire to attain independence, will always remain prominent virtues, especially of the stronger races, and the gentler teachings of christianity will long be wanted as an influence to soften, to elevate, and to purify. by all means, therefore, let christians remain christians, and see in christ their ormuzd, or personification of the good principle. only let them remember that there are two sides to every question, and cease to entertain hard and bitter thoughts towards those who follow the truth after a different fashion. let them delight rather to discover unity in the spirit than differences in the letter, and instead of anathematising with athanasius those who dissent by one hair’s breadth from the catholic faith, strive with st. paul after that charity which ‘suffereth long and is kind: beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.’
this will be easier if they recollect that love and reverence for jesus, as the personification of the good principle, is in no way connected with the supernatural dogmas and legends which have come down from superstitious ages, and which are seen every day, more and more clearly, to stand in direct contradiction to the[183] real facts and real laws of the universe. he is the bright example of the highest ideal of human virtue, not on account of miracles, but in spite of them; not because he was a transcendental abstraction with attributes altogether outside of human experience or conception; but because he was a man whom other men can love and other men can strive to imitate. the dogmas and miracles may quietly fade out of sight, as so many articles of the athanasian creed have already done, like mists before the rising rays of larger knowledge and purer morality, and yet the essence of christianity will remain, as a worship of the good and beautiful, personified in the brightest example which has been afforded—that of jesus, the son of the carpenter of nazareth.
