I. 2. THE DECLINE OF FAITH The Church in the World. By DEAN INGE. Longmans. 1927. The Way of Modernism. By J. F. BETHUNE-BAKER. Cambridge University Press, 1927. 4. By R. A. KNOX. Benn. 1927. I Believe in God. By A. MAUDE ROYDEN. Benn. 1927. 5. Religion Without Revelation. By JULIAN HUXLEY. Benn. 1927. THERE "HERE was a time, two or three centuries ago, when the only point on which good Christians could reasonably be expected to agree was their unreasonable hatred of each other. But faith and charity, those two incompatible sisters, have gradually changed their position since the days when the hope of salvation was almost synonymous with the fear of the stake. As the manners of the churches improved, the elder and more forbidding virtue gradually relaxed the sternness of her features; severity slowly softened into sorrow, repression altered imperceptibly into resignation. As the membership of the congregations diminished, even charity was admitted to their doors; and so serious has the prospect recently become that several sects have agreed, or at least contemplated the possibility of agreeing, to sink minor administrative or even doctrinal differences in face of a common peril. Good has thus come of evil, and a beneficent miracle been worked by misfortune. Yet a stranger who examined the position from outside would discover the odd paradox that the decay of the churches seems to coincide with a revival of interest in religion. The pews may be empty, but the publishers' lists are full. The services and sermons may be neglected, but there are weeks when the popular newspapers give almost as much attention to theology as to tennis, and the graver periodicals sometimes allot nearly as columns to the sacraments as to the stock markets. many Assuredly this is an interesting, and it may even be an important symptom of contemporary life. In part it springs, no doubt, from the current decay of interest in politics. Theoretically we are more democratic than ever, but practically the individual becomes more and more a regimented and controlled unit of the State. The demagogue has been followed by the dictator abroad and by disillusion at home; and when the promised land fails to materialize in this world, men are more ready to consider what prospects they may have in the next. It remains a question how far the Church, or rather the competing Churches, can satisfy this occasionally insistent and always recurrent need for religion. They claim to deal with the graver issues and the more permanent problems of life, and the more successfully they solve those problems the greater will be their prestige and authority. The fact that their influence is declining, while the interest in religion continues alive, suggests that some at least of their solutions have been tried in the balance and found wanting. A very brief survey of history is necessary to prove that such is in fact the case. Apart from those practical questions of government and order which have so often troubled its peace, the Church has faced and fought five fundamental issues in the sphere of philosophy and science in its nineteen centuries of existence. Two it has won, but won at a price. Three it has definitely lost. (I.) The first critical problem arose quite early in Christian history, when the expectation of a speedy and probably catastrophic end of the world was disappointed or at least postponed. The mere lapse of time showed that in this matter, at any rate, the prophets were in error; and although the belief was revived nearly a thousand years later, it was again and finally discredited when the anticipated date passed without disaster. The texts of the predictions survive in the New Testament, but the meaning has long since been symbolized out of the message. (II.) The first vital conflict of reason with revelation was therefore tacitly conceded; authority bowed its head, revised its doctrine, and silently passed on to other issues. A second challenge however, or rather a second series of challenges, was decisively met and conquered. During three centuries the still fluid beliefs in the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement were discussed, debated, and in the end dogmatically defined. These issues were incapable of direct proof or disproof by reason; and the higher and more difficult the assumption, the more vigorously, and ultimately the more successfully, it was maintained. Orthodoxy was therefore finally established at the price of a schism over the first question, a series of persistent heresies over the second, and a periodic revision or re-statement of the third. (III.) The third great issue, like the second, was won; and again the higher and more difficult assumption prevailed. The central sacrament of the Church was exalted from a memorial to a mystery, and from a mystery to a miracle. The full development, or at least the final definition, of the doctrine of Transubstantiation was delayed over a thousand years. But again the Church won, and again it won at a price. The prime cause of Protestantism was indeed a revolt against ecclesiastical abuses and moral corruption. But the rebels soon began to doubt, and presently to deny the dogmas they had once accepted. The Catholic Church courageously reformed its administration and recovered much of the strength that had been sapped by a series of unworthy Popes. But it could no longer modify a doctrine that had received its final form at the Council of Trent, and the almost accidental controversy that arose at the Reformation over the Real Presence became, in the end, a permanent division of Christendom. (IV.) On the second and third of these grave issues philosophy had much, but science little to say; on the fourth, which was almost contemporary with the Reformation, the position was reversed. The Copernican theory was first published in 1543three years before the death of Luther, and two years before the assembly of the Council of Trent; and at the moment, and for many years afterwards, the new astronomical hypothesis seemed far less important than either of those events. But in the end it effected a mental revolution far greater than either Reformation or counter-Reformation achieved: for it was not merely a new doctrine, but a new idea of the universe, that it introduced. The Church could hardly fail when challenged to oppose teaching which contradicted both its sacred documents and its classical authorities, and it appears to have never formally withdrawn its censure of Galileo. But authority has long since yielded the untenable ground, and tacitly recognized that in this matter at least the truth lay with science and not with religion. A reasoned hypothesis came directly into conflict with revelation, and prevailed. (V.) Three centuries later another revolutionary doctrine appeared, was still more violently assailed, and then slowly won a similar acceptance. The Copernican hypothesis had destroyed the idea that a flat earth was the basis of a universe which revolved around it; the Darwinian theory undermined the belief that man was the final but fallen work of God, and that this bipedal digestive tube with brain attached was made in the image of the Creator. The churches continued to anathematise, but the evidence continued to accumulate; and presently the thunder died away, and the still small voice of reason began to prevail. Rome by bull, and Tennessee by statute, still refuse to recognize evolution. But the Church of England, more tolerant and more receptive than either, has now tacitly accepted the new teaching, although it is still reluctant to accept for the present the serious theological consequences of that doctrine. On the first, fourth, and fifth of these grave issues, then, on which definite evidence is available, the Church has proved to be wrong. Is it any wonder if on the second and third of these problems, on which definite evidence is not available, that men should begin to doubt whether it can possibly be right; and should question its competence, dispute its authority, and above all, deny its infallibility, in matters of faith and doctrine? The old claims are still indeed sometimes made, and with something of the same appearance of assurance. "The Church is our Mistress," says Father Ronald Knox, " in that her teaching secures us from speculative error." And since he happily finds himself able to affirm that stupendous proposition in face of so much evidence to the contrary, it is perhaps not very wonderful that he can yet cast a regretful eye backward to the great days of the past, when the Inquisition carried out his principles in practice on the bodies of those who disagreed. He allows, indeed, that torture is not likely to be resorted to again—in these degenerate times we happen to dislike the smell of burning-but he would be quite ready to coerce opinion if he could. When we demand liberty in the modern State we are appealing to its own principles, not to ours. You cannot bind over the Catholic Church, as the price of your adhesion to her doctrines, to waive all right of invoking the secular arm in defence of her own principles. The circumstances in which such a possibility could be realised are indeed sufficiently remote; but, given such circumstances, is it certain that the Catholic Government of the nation would have no right to insist on Catholic education being universal, and even to deport or imprison those who unsettled the minds of its subjects with new doctrines? It is certain that the Church would claim that right for the Catholic Government, even if considerations of prudence forbade its exercise in fact. The Catholic Church will not be one among the philosophies. Her children believe, not that her doctrines may be true, but that they are true . . . and a body of Catholic patriots, entrusted with the government of a Catholic State, will not shrink even from repressive measures in order to perpetuate the secure domination of Catholic principles among their fellow-countrymen. If Father Knox will forgive my saying so, he has constructed one of the most convincing arguments for Protestantism, and the toleration that has followed in the wake of Protestantism, that I have ever seen. Protestantism may not in its origin and early practice have been more friendly to freedom of thought than Rome, but its very divisions have secured a liberty of the spirit which England at least will not willingly let go. And if he prays-as no doubt he does pray-for the conversion of this country to his own form of belief, he would be wise to abandon all such claims of coercion; these hopes are dreams and delusions at this hour. Political dictators are in fashion at the moment, but the States of Europe are no more likely to forward an ecclesiastical tyranny over the minds of their subjects than President Hindenburg to go to Canossa. English people in particular may be persuaded, but they will not be coerced. The fact is that while the authority of the State has increased because the growing complexity of contemporary civilization demands a strong executive, the authority of the Churches has diminished because their teaching has been found to be vulnerable on vital points. Now clerical infallibility cannot be like the curate's egg: it is not enough for it to be good in parts. There is, it is true, no concerted or organized revolt against orthodoxy like that of the English Deists or French Encyclopædists in the eighteenth century. But there is something much more dangerous for the Churches in evidence to-day, and much more difficult for them to combat-a very prevalent uncertainty as to where they stand or what they stand for, a widespread indifference to their teachings, and a vague but extremely significant inclination to run after anything that can plausibly dignify itself with the title of a new revelation. |