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to Bi due.
Vtut Religion an
A SERMON,
PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
JULY 27th, 1873,
by the
REV. CHARLES VOYSEY.
[From the Eastern Post, August 2nd, 1873.]
On Sunday (July 27th) at St. George’s Hall, the Rev. Charles
Voysey took his text from Psalm xvi., 9, “ I have set God always
before me. He is on my right hand; therefore I shall not fall.”
He said—Our meditations on the supremacy of virtue would
hardly be complete without an effort to discern more clearly the
relation between morality and religion. One of the most important
questions that can be asked is, “ What is the help which Religion
gives to true Virtue ?” I do not say that Religion ought to be
abandoned if it could be proved to be of no value in the promotion
of virtue, because Religion has other functions to fulfil in the
economy of man; but it must be owned that Religion would lose
nine-tenths of its value if it were of no moral use; and our duty
would be to abandon it altogether if it were found to be a hindrance
to morality. I am here forced to stand on the threshold of our
enquiry in order to explain what is meant in this discourse by the
word Religion. One is quite overwhelmed at the mass of different
senses in which this and kindred terms are used, and it is positively
alarming to think of the confusion that must overtake posterity
in trying to understand the theological productions of this age.
One can hardly take up a book or a magazine, or a weekly news
paper, without perceiving the perfect Babel we are in through our
use of ambiguous terms, without any effort at definition. Contro
versy will one day come to a full stop, being choked by its own
jargon. Theological polemic will at length fall into disuse when
the light of day shall reveal every belligerent in the act of “beating
the air,” and thrusting at shadows.
�2
To pass over the long list of senses in which the term religion
is used, I will briefly repeat the definition, or rather the explana
tion, of it which I have often already given. Of course I do not
give this as arbitrary and dogmatic, but only in order to leave no
mistake as to my meaning.
Religion, as I understand and use the term, is the consciousness
of a supreme God and of our relation to Him. It is the conviction
of the heart that there is an invisible One who is Source and
Ruler of the whole universe, and is especially the Lord of our
hearts and lives; whose will is always good and must be obeyed ;
whose purpose is always kind, and may, therefore, be implicitly
trusted; to whom we may turn for guidance, and on whom we
may rest all our hope—in the words of my text, “ I have set God
always before me; He is on my right hand, &c.” To have this
conviction is to be religious. To be destitute of all sense of God,
so as to doubt gravely whether there be a God or not, is to be
irreligious. Again, Religion is not merely an intellectual assent to
the proposition, “ There is a God, and He is good,” for a man may
arrive at this conclusion in various ways, and yet not have any
feeling of loyalty, or trust, or love towards God in his heart.
Religion is intensely, but not exclusively, a matter of emotion.
Observe further, that Religion is much more than mere awe and
reverence. The Pantheist and even the Atheist may feel the
emotions of awe and reverence excited by the contemplation of the
grandeur and beauty of Nature; but while it is regarded as
unconscious, and therefore irresponsive to human aspiration and
devotion, it is impossible to regard it with religious feelings. The
laws of Nature, which is the God of the Pantheist, are regarded
by him as supreme, and nobly loyal to them he endeavours to
become ; but he owns that Nature does not know nor care whether
he obeys her laws or not—that is his own business—nor is she
conscious in the least degree of his loyalty or admiration. The
Pantheist may be ravished with the sight of Nature’s beauty, but
there is no return of his loving gaze, no gratified sense on her part
of having filled her worshipper with bliss. The Pantheist may
also be a very optimist of content and hope, abiding in the immu
tability and certainty of Nature’s operations; but he can never
feel that rest and peace which those souls feel who know what it
�is “to cast their burden on the Lord.” In the Pantheist’s God
there is no consciousness, no individual will, no heart. But
Religion recognises in God all these. It is the characteristic of
religion to attribute to God more than all else—next to righteous
ness—tender sympathy and affection.
I am willing to admit that some of this, which I have called
Religion, may be erroneous, and must be defective. We know how
religion hitherto has been mixed up with errors and falsehood too
patent to remain for ever rooted in men’s minds. But Religion
has outlived all primseval superstitions, and seems to have a
vitality of its own by which it rises from the ashes of burned and
buried creeds. In spite of the thousands who are just now destitute
of all religion whatever, owing to the solemn mockery of maintain
ing a creed no longer credible, and owing in other cases to the
intense disgust at having been so long the dupe of groundless
superstitions; in spite of these, I say, Religion is taking fresh and
stronger root than ever, and is putting forth new leaves, and even
already bearing fresh and wholesome fruit for the healing of the
nations. While morality owes scarcely a single thread of its
binding power to the dying religions of modern Christendom, the
true essence of religion, set free by the destruction of the tissue of
creeds, is filling the air with its fragrance, and making glad the
hearts of those who wept when their idols were shattered.
A modern wit has immortalised himself by describing the present
State of religious feeling—if feeling it may be called—-throughout
orthodox Europe, in these terms : “To believe implicitly what one
knows to be false.” Let us hope that the time will come when it
may be truly described thus : “ To deny openly what one knows
to be false,” and when this stage is reached, “To know certainly what
one believes to be true.” Till this blessed change is consummated,
we have but one duty in regard to, religion. To be utterly true to
the convictions of the hour, and to be honest enough as well as
brave enough to abandon any position proved to be untenable. It
is impossible on this, the deepest and highest of all themes, to
attain the certainty of demonstration ; to have such knowledge of
God as would enable us, or warrant us, to teach with authority, as
if it were scientifically verified, what we feel in our hearts to be
true about God. It is alike impossible for the irreligious to know
�4
that our convictions are false, or our feelings groundless, and it is
unbecoming to dogmatise in the negative, as the orthodox have
dogmatised in the affirmative. Time alone will show who is right
and where lies the truth. Both , of us are on the side of virtue;
both alike regard it as supreme; both of us measure the worth or
the worthlessness of any religion by its influence on the culture of
morals. What better task could we pursue than to investigate to
the very foundation the claim made for religion, that in so far as
it approximates to the truth, or is set free from false admixtures,
it is . a very powerfu laid to virtue1?
Between the orthodox God, whose system is one of bribes and
threats, and the God of Matthew Arnold, who is a “ Power that
makes for righteousness,” and yet has no faculties for knowing
when we are righteous and when we are not; who does not even
know what righteousness is and has no power to think about any
thing—between these two—there is the God of pure Theism, who
“ thinks, and knows, and lovesand is present to the soul as the
most Holy One, the searcher of hearts, the Divine Father who
loves to see His child willingly good—good from choice; a God
who uses no coercion or enticement; who only whispers “ Do this,
because it is right.” “ Do not that, because it is wrong.” Now,
whether this be or be not a delusion of the mind which transfigures
the human conscience into a Divine voice, at all events, it gives a
sanction to the moral sense far more weighty than any other sup
position yet known. It is only natural and human in the highest
degree to attach unspeakable importance to what we believe to be
mandates of the Eternal Will. Every thought, word, or deed,
becomes magnified for good or ill, beyond all calculation, when it
is regarded as conforming to, or rebelling against, the law of the
most Holy One. And this part of religion—our recognition of a
Divine Law-giver, an accuser and a judge—would never fail of its
moral power were we always to 'realise what we profess to believe,
were we “ to set God always before us.” We fail, not because it
is for one instant a matter of indifference to us whether we obey
God or not; but because we cannot, in the presence of temptation,
and under pressure of physical allurements, realize to ourselves
that God Himself is warning us from temptation, or urging us to
perform some arduous duty. Indeed, we are religious in exact
�5
proportion as we do realise His right of control, and in the same
proportion is our religion a help to our virtue.
But, passing from the sense of Divine authority we come to the
still higher conviction of the Divine friendliness—God’s will that
we should be good, joined with God’s willingness to help us to
become good; not by miracle, not by invariable answei' to prayer,
not by uniform rescue from temptation; but by the whole and
mingled method of His discipline. Sometimes we are helped to
virtue by being suffered to taste the bitter fruits of disobedience,
oi’ to be stung by the remorse which belongs to it. But to feel
sure from first to last that One above, the most Holy, has devised
all our past, present, and future as a means for the perfecting of
our natures and the reproduction in ourselves of His own spotless
image, must, without doubt, be a tremendous moral force, because
it adds hope and encouragement of the highest order to the sense
of solemn obligation. I know nothing more terrible than the
weight of sin which used to be heaped upon our young heads by
the reiterated falsehood that we had broken the whole of God’s
law if we were guilty in only one point. It was simple agony to
be assured that a Perfect God demanded, and would be satisfied
with, nothing less than a perfect obedience from man, which we
knew could not possibly be rendered; and one only wonders why
more brains did not give way under the never-to-be-forgotten
weight of sin and doom. It made matters worse; resistance of
temptation more difficult; hope of renewal impossible. One’s only
refuge was in atonement and substitution and imputed righteous
ness ; leaving one no better than before and only an ungrateful
slave. But now, what a change ! Over again we can calmly
repeat, but with an infinitely higher meaning, the old orthodox
formula, “ a Perfect God requires perfect obedience from man,”
Yes, indeed! But when? Not until he can render it. Notone
moment sooner than all his faculties and surroundings shall have
made it possible to him. But what does a “Perfect God” mean, but
one perfectly just, and therefore requiring of us no more than we
can render; so that perfect obedience is only doing our very best
under our circumstances. A Perfect God can require no more;
but He can require no less. Here the burdened sinner is pacified
and encouraged; assured that God does not blame him one grain
�mor© than he Must blame himself; and consoled by the hope that
his present exertions, and even failures, shall work in at length
to the purification of his soul. It is something to be virtuous for,
if one knows that virtue in one little thing will lead to being
virtuous in many great things; and that the more one tries the
sooner one will succeed. It is some encouragement to be as
virtuous us we can be now, to beheve that we shall be perfectly
virtuous hereafter. And this hope and encouragement, I say, are
the direct fruits of true religion. Perfect trust in God’s good
purposes does provide this invaluable aid to virtue. Just, in fact,
as the old falsehood paralysed moral effort through utter despair
of success, and then sent conscience to slumber by saying, “ All
your righteousness is as filthy ragsso the new truth stimulates
to an enthusiasm of virtuous effort, and comforts the soul, not only
by assurances of Divine approval, but by promise of entire success.
Moreover, a religion like this which recognises the universal and
impartial love of God for all mankind is a powerful aid to virtue,
by inspiring affection between man and man. It was, perhaps,
excusable under the old creed to hate those whom God was supposed
to hate, and to count them our enemies; but it is impossible to
feel the same animosity towards anyone in v horn at the time we
recognise one who is very dear to God, and who, like ourselves, is
destined to perfect holiness. The mere fact of our common
relationship to one Divine Father, and our common hope of being
thoroughly cleansed from all sin and cured of all defects, must have
its influence in softening down our asperity, and in awakening our
mercy and forbearance. Whatever helps to kindle affection between
man and man is a real help to virtue. It would be an evil day for
mankind, if a mere sense of duty—invaluable as that is—only re
mained as a spur to right conduct; if our motives for doing good
were to be stripped of the lovely adornments of tender feeling and
sympathy, and our lives were only regulated by the cut and dried
rules of mechanical morals. In truth, it seems to me, though I say
it with all diffidence, that love is the real root of all virtue, and
not its tardy fruit. Men have begun by acting from tender
emotions and kind feelings, and then have discovered that their
conduct was beneficial. Even Utilitarianism must fall back on
love and kindness and the desire to do good, as the root of all
�7
morality. For why should it be right to promote the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, instead of promoting the greatest
happiness of the few who are best able to enjoy and appreciate
happiness 1 Because, behind and beneath it lies the native kindli
ness of the human heart, the instinct of generosity, the longing
that all may share in our happiness, which, when wisely directed
and organised, is called morality or virtue. Most true it is that
we need, the help of reason in the discovery of the best method of
showing kindness j and our defective reasoning requires the cor
rection of experience that we may learn how to select, and how to
perform, what is really best for the common good. But, in general,
the impulses of a kind heart go straight to the point, and are, in
nine cases out of ten, infallibly virtuous.
It is through his affections chiefly that man has ever attained a
true morality, and it is by his’affections mainly that the standard
of morals is kept steadily rising, Love deepens and widens
sympathy, sympathy thus enlarged reveals to us wants and wrongs
and sorrows of others to which we had before been blind, and this
revelation is followed instantly by fresh calls upon our sense of
duty, by new demands of the conscience. If I am my brother’s
keeper, and try to behave accordingly, the longer I keep him, the
more faithfully I watch over'his needs and perils, the morel shall
have to do for him, and the greater will be the claims made upon
my love and sympathy. It is notorious how we grow to love
more those to whom we have shown kindness. In this sense also
it is true that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” The
love born out of bounty is far greater than the love born of
gratitude.
If love then be rightly regarded as the proper root of virtue,
and a religion be found which tends to inspire love between man
and man, that religion must be a powerful auxiliary in promoting
virtue. It is on this ground that we must admire those precepts
of Christianity, and of all other religions, which inculcate “love to
the brethren,” and also detest and abjure those principles, beliefs,
and precepts which inculcate first exclusiveness, and then hatred,
malice and all uneharitableness towards those who are not theolo
gically “ brethren.” As a religion, Christianity—as developed in
Europe and America—has been nearly as much a source of strife
�8
and hatred and selfish ambition, as a source of peace, charity, and
good-will. It has hitherto, therefore, been nearly as great a
hindrance to true virtue as a help to it. By its fruits it can be
known; and by its fruits it must be judged. And in so far as it
has taught what is true, it has blessed mankind; in so far as it has
taught what is false, Christianity has been its bane.
The same sifting will be applied to the Religion of which I have
spoken to-day. Its faults will show its truth and its falsehood ;
will disclose its weakness while declaring its power. Meanwhile, it
is a comfort to know that in the long run truth alone is friend to
mankind, while every falsehood is its foe.
*
EASTERN
Post
Steam Printing Works, 89, Worship Street, Finsbury E.CJ
�
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True religion an aid to virtue: a sermon, preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, July 27th 1873
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 8 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 6. Printed by Eastern Post: August 2nd 1873.
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TRINITY SUNDAY.
A SERMON,
PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
MAY 3.1st, 1374, by tiie
REV.
CHARLES VOYSEY
[From the Eastern Post, June 'oth, 1874/1
On Sunday (May 31st) at St. George’s Rail, Langham-place, 'he
Rev. C. Voysey took his text from Psalm cxlv., 10., “All 1 hy
works praise Thee O Lord, and Thy saints give thanks unto
Thee.”
He said—As the world grows older and wiser, men begin to be
weary of Theology, and to care more for Religion. <>n this Trinity
Sunday I might, perhaps, be expected to go over the old and
tedious ground of a barren controversy, and to shew, for the
thousandth time, that Three can never be One, nor One ever be
Three, in the same arithmetical sense of the terms. But I am in
no mood for so wearisome and thankless a task. In an orthodox
pulpit such a renewal of a worn-out discussion might be very
useful and appropriate; but surely, in a place like this, it would
be a waste of time, if not an affront to your understandings, to go
over ground every inch of which must be already painfully
familiar.
Moreover, the doctrine of the Trinity, as laid down in the
Athanasian Creed, however distinctly set forth in language, how
ever frequently and solemnly repeated, has never yet been believed
bv a human being. It is as impossible for one to believe two
contradictory and intelligible propositions, as it is for one to walk
on the water, or to fly without wings. Every professed Trinitarian
is mentally conscious of believing in Three Gods, or in only one
of them at a time. No one ever achieved the miracle of believing
that the Three are not Three but One. Christendom is divided
between those who worship Jesus as Supreme God, those who
worship his mother as Supreme, and a very small minority who
worship the Father. They are all practically Monotheists,
�2
because human nature is incapable of bestowing the adoration
affection, and trust of the soul upon more than one God at a time
Polytheism, which includes Tritheism, is itself a standing proof
of my assertion. For, have as many Gods as you will, one of them
must be nearest and dearest as an object of worship. The rest fall
back into lower ranks.
As involving moral mischief, the doctrine of the Trinity is,
perhaps, the most innocuous of all the dogmas of Christianity. It
is so purely metaphysical (or would be so if it had in it a grain of
sense) that the heart is neither blessed nor injured by pretending
to hold it. It is not, therefore, worthy of our attack; it is
practically as dead and dry as an Egyptian mummy and as fruit
less for good or evil, only interesting as an antiquity, and a
curiosity of mental history.
But the passing thought we have given it suggests another of
great interest; and that is, the necessary decline ot dogmatic
Theology before the march of Human Progress; and by Human
Progress, I mean our advance in scientific knowledge, and our
advance in philanthropy.
All Theology is the result of man’s thought and observation of
the world without, and of the soul within. Whatever was true in
his reflections upon the world, whatever was correct in his obser
vation of phenomena, and whatever was exact in his self-scrutiny
entered into and became an integral part of his Theology. And
on the other hand, all his mistakes about the world and himself
were developed into Theological errors. His Theology has always
been more or less the counterpart of his own mingled knowledge
and ignorance of the things within reach of his examination.
The very subject of which Theology treats viz :—God and God’s
relation to man, has varied from age to age with the varying
growth of knowledge in other matters. At one time the conception
of a Divine Being must have been very different to what it is now.
From the beginning “God” has been made in man’s image, and I
do not see bow it could be otherwise, or how else to account for
the varieties in -Religious beliefs, or for the growths and changes of
any one of them. It cannot however be gainsaid that every
addition to man’s knowledge of any importance has been followed
by a marked corresponding change in his Theological ideas. There
�3
can be little doubt that when astrology passed into astronomy, and
alchemy into chemistry, religious ideas were vastly enlaiged, con
ceptions of God must have expanded with the - pening magnificence
of the scale of His operations in Nature. But it is in our own
times that we observe this ( subtle connexion more clearly.
Within the last twenty or thirty years the knowledge of civilized
man has grown out of all proportion to its previous rate of piogiessand with this more rapid advance have come a most remarkable
shaking of old beliefs, and a somewhat ruthless cross-examination
of the grounds on which they had been accepted. The moie we
know of the enormous extent of the universe, of the majestic forces
which are at work within it, and of the unbroken and eternal order
by which those forces are guided and controlled; the less
anthropomorphic are our conceptions of God, the less egotistical
are our notions of His relation to man. One by one the dogmas
are doubted, re-examined, thrown away. We no longer tolerate
definitions of God, still less the absurdity of descriptions of His
mode of existence. As we abandon the fables of Biblical cosmogony,
we dethrone the triple oligarchy which heretofore had ruled, and
so misruled, the world and mankind. A manipulating Creator, a
Divine artizan who is fatigued and needs rest, a disappointed
artificer whose noblest work is marred by a rival, an impatient and
petulant tyrant who drowns a whole world which he is incompetent
to govern—all these and such like notions disappear the instant
they are confronted by even our slender discoveries in true
cosmogony. The certainty and constancy of natural laws banish
in a moment the probability, if not the possibility, of miracles,
dethroning God the second, and discovering the utter baselessness
of his pretensions to power.
Scientific knowledge and scientific methods bring freedom of
mind and a sense of manly independence. We no longer accede
to any one the right to dictate our thoughts and be iefs. We
claim the right to think for ourselves and be our own guides in
matters of religion. So the time-spirit expels God the third, the
God-spirit whose authority had been claimed for Churches and
Books and PH sts; and the old three thrones are taken down
while the kingdom of darkness is retreating and retreating befire
the dawn of truth.
�4
In spite of all protests ta the contrary, the old Theology rested
entirely upon miraculous assumptions, and these it is to which
modern science has given a death-bl >w. The theology even of
professedly orthodox teachers can never again be what it once was.
But while science is thus pulling down and clearing away the
rubbish of centuries, another hand no less Divine and loyal to
truth is building up—we will not arrogantly. say a true, but a
truer theology—a more reasonable Faith. Despite all the mourn
ful and even shameless instances of se fish m ss and cruelty, this age
is undoubtedly blessed with an out-pouring of brotherly love and
sympathy, such as the world has never before seen. This love
colours everything it touches with a golden light. It manifests
itself through every virtue ennobling, justice, truthfulness,honesty,
industry, breaking down the barriers of caste and class, not by level
ing the higher to the lower, but by endeavouring to lift every lower
to the standard of the higher. Love is at work among the rich
and amcng the poor as it never was be'ore No interest is without
ir>s passionate adherents; no oppressed soul without a champion
and would-be deliverer. Men of high degree think it now their
first poiut of honour to defend the weak against the strong, and
offer as a justification for their championship, Noblesse oblige. The
rich consider themselves most blessed when they give of their
abundance to the helpless and poor. The bounty of the world is
beautiful to behold; and it comes not so much from ostentation or the
love of fame, as from tender love and sympathy with distress; for
what we see and read is not a thousandth part of what is being
done in secret through the length and br adth of our land and
nearly all over the world.
No soorner is any grand discovery made than a hundred kindly
hands are stretched out to render it practically beneficial to the
rest of mankind. The wise and learned no longer write their
books in dead languages, but in the common tongue of the people
among whom they scatter the words of wisdom and truth—very
often without money and without price. Illustrations are endless.
Never surely was benevolence so active, so enthusiastic as now.
And this, I say, is beginning to build up a new faith—new, not so
much in words as in deeds - a faith whiih is no metaphysic, but
a soul’s trust in the Soul of Goodness. Little by little it is teaching
�5
us the alphabet of scientific Theology. The old astrological or
alchemical stage of Theology is passing away—driven out by
scientific knowledge. The new stage of Theology as a science is
now coming, led by the gentle instincts of that spirit of love which
is the genius of our times. Men’s eyes are beginning to see that
if they care so much for each other, God Himself can care no less,
that if they find their supreme happiness in doing good and
rendering helpful service to each other, the bliss of the most
Blessed God must be the same — only so much the more as it is the
bliss of one who knows that His kind purpose cannot fail. All our
conceptions of the Divine are confined to spiritual and moral
qualities. We have abandoned every theory as to His nature and
mode of existence as hopelessly inscrutable to us as we are. But
we attribute to Him only such moral beauty as we ourselves in
our highest moments adore; and strange to say that the very act
of so doing seems to add to our grounds for believing in a God
at all. Our highest religious emotions are their own justification.
What may lie beyond forourselves in the future, or for our posterity,
we do not know, nor pretend to foretell; only that the past of man
kind leads us to expect with confidence that, as the present is
better tlnn the past, so the future will be better than the present.
If ever the day comes when God will not be deemed loving and
trustworthy, and an “ ever present help in time of trouble,” it
will be when human experience and human growth shall have
dwarfed these present virtues which we deem so grand; it will not
be because our notions of good and evil can ever be reversed.
There can be no possible retrogression in morals any more than in
science.
Our own integrity, sympathy, and trustworthiness towards each
other are, and I believe were intended to be, the only revelation to
us of the Divine qualities. As we grow in these, we grow in our
conception of Him, and, of course, the more these are practised,
the surer is the ground of our hope. Bor if God will not do what
we now deem to be the greatest possible kindness in those who
love one another, it must be not because He is wanting in kindness,
but b' cause He has an excess of it, and will only deny us that,
in erder to confer some better gift, some larger blessing
still.
�6
These are not only different views of God and His relation to
man, but they differ in kind from the unscientific theology of the
past, as the ground on which they stand differs from the old
foundations.
The old Theology said “ It is written,” or <f It is decreed by the
Church,” always having an assumption which either could not be
verified or could be easily disproved.
The new Theology asks “ What has God done ?” “ What is He
doing ?” and answers by pointing both to the phenomenal world
outside of us, and to the mental, moral, and emotional nature
within us. These, if there be a God, are the works of God; and
though they can only tell us a very very little of Him, inasmuch
as this whole globe is only a drop in the stream of existence, and
all the history of it we know, but one drop in the ocean of past
eternity, still that little must be true so far as it goes, and enough,
if we use it aright, to lighten our darkness, and to cheer us in
the gloom.
Science, at all events testifies there is method in the arrangement
and action of the forces. The soul of man denies it not, but says
there must be mind and will, or some infinitely higher some.hings
to correspond. Science says there is a great deal of rough play
and even cruel sport in these forces of nature. The som of man
denies it not, but says there must be love behind these sorrows and
tortures, for even to our eyes they are not all unmixed evils, but
some are disguised mercies as we have proved , and we know that
as we would not inflict wanton injury upon any sensitive cieatuie,
so neither would we bring any creature into existence purely to
torment it. Science says—I can see no good in it. The soul of
man replies—You have not seen it all yet. Wait till the end
comes, or for more light. Those who have suffered most have least
repined.
The really tortured souls whose pains never leave them till they
end in death are for the most part silent and patient, often praise
and bless God’s Holy Name for all His mercies
11 And publish with their latest breath,
His love and guardian care.”
Certain it is that the soul of man must be the interpreter of
nature’s awful mysteries. Just as his head can weigh its forces
�and tell to a nicety the machinery by which her massacres are
perpetrated, so his heart must learn the moral significance of the
deeper problem, and interpret the end and purpose for which her
catastrophes were permitted.
My friends, we claim it as our special function to pursue
religious enquiry on these principles forswearing alike all violence
to scientific conclusions, and all neglect of the testimony borne by
the human soul to the existence of the Divine. Hitherto, all
sects in Christendom have professed to base their belief on a book
or person, or some authority external to themselves. The New
School of Theology which is represented by Theodore Parker,
Professor Newman, Frances Power Cobbe and the Brahmo Somaj
of India, and lastly by ourselves, openly disclaim all ^external
authority, and as we do not rest upon it, so neither do we attempt
to claim for ourselves any right to impose our faith upon others.
We desire only to be nourished out of the wealth of the human
soul, and guarded against error by science. We are but a small
number by comparison with the Christian world. But our views
have already conquered a third, if not more, of the Unitarian
Church, are held at this moment by hundreds of the clergy and
thousands of the laity of the Church of England and spreading
rapidly through every church and sect in Christendom. We make
no new sect. It is our honour to be only leaven.
When we give God thanks for “all the truth which may have
been spoken ” let us gratefully remember that it is from the faith,
fill and earnest students of nature that we first heard those words
of truth to which this day we owe not only our freedom and
safety, but our emancipation of soul from the grovelling super
stitions which darkened the lives of our remote ancestry.
Religion will one day repay science for her somewhat stern but
faithful correction, by returning to her bosom, pure and unblem.
ished, lovely in form, and having a sound mind.
Eastern Post Steam Printing Works. 89, Worship-street, Finsbury, E.C.
��
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Trinity Sunday: a sermon, preached at St George's Hall, Langham Place, May 31st, 1874
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 7 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Printed by Eastern Post June 6th, 1874. Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 6.
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[Eastern Post]
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G3416
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Trinity
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Trinity Sunday: a sermon, preached at St George's Hall, Langham Place, May 31st, 1874), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Athanasian Creed
Morris Tracts
Trinity
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A SERMON,
PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
MAY 11th, 1873, by the
REV. CHARLES VOYSEY.
[From the Eastern Post, May 17th, 1873.]
On Sunday (May 11), at St. George’s Hall, the Rev. C.
Voysey took his text from John i., 9., “ That was the true light,
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”
The religious differences which have made, and are yet making,
such fierce discord in the world lie far deeper down than the mere
surface of various doctrine. The real root of these differences is
to be found in the method of enquiry into religious truth, in the
means by which it is believed to be discoverable. So long as men
keep on trying to substitute one set of dogmas for another, and to
impose, as dogma, any new doctrine because it is less false or more
true than its predecessor, so long shall we have the strife oftongues
and the endless confusion of conflicting sects. Not until we have
perceived the only true basis of unity, shall we cease to fight with
one another for the ascendancy of our own particular beliefs.
The votaries of all religions in turn claim that in their own creeds
lies the only pathway to God, and it stands on the face of it, that
when these creeds are opposed to each other, they cannot all be
true, though they may be all false. If one be true, who can test
its truth ? What witness could we have that would be infallible
to make the choice for us out of so many claimants ? Moreover,
if only one be true, and only one lead to God, what a frightful
injustice is done to the millions on millions who have no access to
it, who by the accidents of birth and education, have been not
only shut out from hearing of it, but have had their minds pre
occupied from childhood by false beliefs, and have been prejudiced
�2
against all other beliefs, (and among them, of course, the true
belief) by the most solemn sanctions ! Then again, supposing that
the truest belief were discoverable to day, and enforced upon a
growing and advancing posterity in consequence, posterity would
be hampered by our decrees, fettered and enslaved by our creeds
and articles, kept tied and bound in swaddling clothes instead of
having the freedom of men. What to us had served all the pur
poses of truth, because it was the truest we could discover, would
inflict all the hardship and hindrance of falsehood upon our child
ren’s children. Look at it how w’e will, in dogma and creed we
find no sure resting place for our anxious souls, no safe road to lead
us heavenward, no sure light to bring us to God. But we have
not therefore been left in darkness because errors and falsehoods
have clouded our sky. God hath not left himself without witness,
because we have neither infallible Bible, nor infallible Pope, nor
infallible heresy. Still brightly shines over us, still leads us ever
onward and upward, the true light which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world. For all purposes of a true redemption—or
to speak more correctly—of a true progress towards God, men have
now as ever the light of life, the steady burning gleam that draws
us ever onwards, and guards our wayward and storm-tost souls from
wreck and ruin.
But I should be sailing under false colours were I to use the
text which I have chosen without disowning the sense in which it
is generally understood. I quite agree with the writer in this,
that that only is the true light which is universal—•“ which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world.” Any light which fails
thus to illumine all hearts is not the true light, and cannot safely
be trusted. A partial light may serve its purpose for a while, just as
we use a lantern in the darkness while the wanton earth turns her
face from the sun, but its weak and slender rays can only lighten
a narrow circle, and by its flickering may even add to our error
and perplexity.
As the rush-light to the sun, so are the various systems of belief
to that true light which God has sent to lighten every man that
cometh into the world. But some will tell us that the author of
this text meant that Christ was that true light; and I do not see
how we can deny this to have been his meaning. In the opening
�verses of this gospel the author unmistakeably refers to the Alexan
drine doctrine of the Logos which some one has aptly termed “Pla
tonism spoilt.” He speaks of the true light as “ he” and “ him;
as “ coming into the world,” as “being received,” and being rejected
as having the glory of the Great Father, and yet as being made
flesh and dwelling visibly among men. Now we unhesitatingly
refuse to accept Christ as the true light, on the simple ground that
he does not answer to the definition, he certainly does not lighten
every man that cometh into the world. He did not lighten a
single soul of the countless generations before him, nor many
millions of his fellow-creatures in his own generation. Whatever
liaht they wanted down in Judea that Christ could give (and we
do not hesitate in saying that that light was great and glorious)
they wanted also in the uttermost parts of the, earth and in the
Antipodes to Galilee, of the very existence of which Christ had no
conception. No one who is not a theologian would attempt the
folly of making-believe that Christ was the light that was
lighting every man all over the world at the very time that he was
wandering over the hills of Capernaum or disputing with Pharisees
in the streets of Jerusalem. That the soul of Jesus, and in like
manner, the souls of the rest of the world’s greatest men shed a
glorious light over humanity, wherever their names and histories
have travelled, is undeniably true; but it is not at all the same
thing as being a universal light, or even an infallible one. For
whether Christ could help it or not, there was more than one dark
band on his spectrum, and some have been led into darkness, and
even despair by sayings attributed to him by his friends. No one
human being, no one human life, has ever been bright enough to
lighten all mankind, nor sufficiently clear and unclouded never to
lead them astray. If there is one thing that God has stamped
upon all his works, and especially upon his noblest work—man, it
is the stamp of imperfection. Nothing is absolutely perfect—
though He may behold everything which He has made and say
“ It is very good. It is exactly what I intended it then and there
to be and so far very good,” He can never say “ It is perfect, “ It
is finished,” “ It is incapable of improvement.” This must ever be
the difference between the Creator and the created. While He
alone is absolutely perfect and incapable of change or progress—
�4
the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever—all we his creatures are
in the very infancy of our existence, and have an eternity oi
change and growth before us. So the “ brightest and best of the
sons of the morning ” are each in turn displaced by a brighter and
better successor. However vast the interval between their rising
over the world’s darkness, the glory that has set is eclipsed by the
glory that has arisen anew. However, long and glad may have
been the zenith of such a star, its turn for fading lustre will surely
come, and a more brilliant orb shall take its place.
With the deepest reverence for the excellency of Jesus of
Nazareth, and with sincere gratitude for what light he brought
into the world, we, nevertheless, deliberately say of him as the
Evangelist said of John the Baptist. “ He was not that light,
but was sent to bear witness of that light.” Christ was not the
true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,
but was only one among the great cloud of witnesses on whom the
true light shone, and by whom it was most splendidly reflected.
It that light was not Moses, nor Menu, nor Christ, nor Paul, nor
Confucius, nor Sakya Mouni, nor Odin, nor Zoroaster, nor Socrates,
nor Mahommed, nor any one, nor all of the great world teachers,
because none of them were universal, what is the true light ? It
is not far to seek if the definition be accepted. If the true light
really lightens every man that cometh into the world—
ever did, ever does, and ever will give him all the light he
can ever get—then it must be found in man, in men universally,
and neither outside of them, nor in only a few rare specimens
of the race. And this is easy to find j for as in water face
answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.
We
know humanity by knowing ourselves—know it very imper
fectly, but what we do know is truth' and fact. And in
human nature we find an universal principle, instinct or affection,
call it what you will, which is the love of truth and right. In spite
of all the texts and Confessions and Catechisms, I affirm that the
heart of man is not “ desperately wicked above all things,” but,
on the contrary, is almost the only thing about him that is
thoroughly sound and good. Man, at heart, is good, because he
loves goodness, and true because he loves truth. As soon as ever
he discovers that there is such a distinction as good and evil, or
�5
truth and falsehood, his inmost heart turns with desire towards
goodness and truth. Of the idiotic and insane I here say nothing
because I know nothing; they are not only beyond the reach of
adequate tests, but they are so exceptional, and abnormal, as to
form no solid objection to the universality of the statement that
all men love goodness and truth. Of the great bulk of humanity,
from the best to the worst, from the most cultured to the most
ignorant, from the holiest saint to the most depraved sinner, it is
only the honest truth to say that they all at heart love goodness
and truth. They may love them in varying degrees, for the more
goodness and truth are known by practice, the more they are
loved, the less men know of goodnesss and truth, the less they
care for them. But at heart every sane man has some love for
goodness and truth. No man ever yet believed a lie knowing or
even suspecting it to be a lie. It is a contradiction in terms.
However false may be a man’s conviction, it is his conviction only
because it seems to him to be true. All he cares to get hold of
is truth and fact j and though he should seem to us to hold the
most absurd fancies, or cherish, even unto dying for them, beliefs
which we cannot but scorn, yet to him they are sacred, because
they seem true and because he has not begun to question or sus
pect their accuracy. From the darkest days of Fetichism, through
all the corrupt fables of Polytheism, and down the turbid stream
of Christendom to this hour, men have been ever loyal to truth—
loyal to such truth as they could discover. They have toiled to
find it; and when found, as they think, they would fight for it
and die for it, giving up all this world below and risking all that
world above for the sake of it. They might have been happy
together as one family, but no ; they loved the truth better than
peace; and they welcomed the fire and sword which laid waste
their lands and made their streets run blood rather than sacrifice
the sacred treasure which they believed God had entrusted to their
keeping. Could they have done this, could they have suffered
what was far worse than the crusader’s steel, the cruel rupture of
their domestic love, for what they thought to be a lie 1 Impossible 2
a thousand times No ! They bore it all for truth, for what they
believed to be true. But what of the persecutors ? Greater still
was the sacrifice for truth which some of these men made. The
�6
persecutors forced themselves to trample on their holiest affections
and tenderest instincts before they could put their fellow-men to
torture and cruel death. They had to stiflle every relenting sigh,
to crush their pitying breasts against the stone walls of misguided
conscience, and to train themselves to the maddening sport of
witnessing horrors of torment without a flinching eye or a quiver
ing lip. They had to lay down their manhood for the time, and
clothe themselves in the fury—not of beasts, never was wild beast
so cruel as man—but in the fury of fiends, and all for truth !
What will not men do for truth ? In spite of all counterfeits
which claim our regard, in spite of all usurpers of her rightful
throne, men are loyally, though blindly, bent on serving truth ' on
finding it if they can, and on believing it, and living and dying,
and becoming devils for it, when found.
.And as of truth so of goodness, it is true that men at heart love
goodness. It is no answer to point to the enormous crimes that
have been done and are still being done; at the vices which infest
our fields and markets and towns, our highways and byways alike;
it is no answer to take me to the prisons and galleys, and to the
dark places of the earth, where evil reigns unchecked by such
means of restraint and discipline. I still tell you these men are
not lovers of evil for evil’s sake, as you suppose, but they are
mistaken utterly mistaken—lovers of goodness. Do you suppose
God has made man such a fool as to prefer evil to good if he knows
it ? Why, even the most fiendish of all human passions—revenge__
is a thirst for gratification, for something which seems to him
exquisitely desirable in itself, or the man would not seek it. It
is at the very root of it an excessive love of justice, an exaggerated
and therefore mistaken desire for what is right. I know that men
do wrong, knowing it to be wrong, and liking it for the passing
pleasure that it may afford; but I never knew one such who
loving it called it evil, or hating it called it good. Men hate the
evil in themselves, and think that they would be better if they
could. Men’s ideas of what is good or evil may be as numerous as
the stars. Some condemning what others approve ; but they are
all alike in condemning wrong as wrong, and upholding goodness
as goodness. If a man approves what I condemn, the difference is
not a moral one, but one of judgment. To him it seems right, and
�7
he can call it by no other name. To me it is evil and I cannot call
it good. Every man in one respect is a law unto himself, however
deficient he may be in what is called ethical science, however,
outwardly indifferent he may be to the well-being of otheis, he is
nevertheless, at heart, convinced that goodness is right and evil is
wrong, and up to the dim intelligence of his feeble mind would
bear his modicum of testimony on the side of goodness.
Now what have not these instincts for goodness and truth done
for man ? They are the very foundations of all civilization, the very
root of all religion. All the progress of the world, from the first
dawn of humanity, is due to the desire after goodness and truth.
Only try to realise the changes through which our race has passed
and you can come to only one conclusion, that 11 the true light
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” is this love
of right and truth by which we have ever been led onwards. Have
not we been mending since the world of man began ? Have not
we often and often learnt to change our moral code according as
experience or circumstance showed that it was good and right so
to do ? Do we not condemn what our forefathers deemed innocent,
and add to the number or cogency of pre-existing rules? We
could only do this, because our aim was goodness, and not mere
reverence for past law-givers. Is not the standard of virtue for
ever rising, not merely by improving on the models of the past, but
by leading us to think with greater reverence of their noblest
traits ? It is only because we love goodness, and carry with us the
true light which sheds light on that which has gone as well as on
that which is to come. Religious beliefs have come and gone in
like manner, perpetually but imperceptibly being modified by our
love of truth. The love of truth ever remains, no matter what the
creed with which it is associated. The false is hugged so long
as it is thought to be true j but [once exposed as falsehood, its
day is over. Down, down, it must go ; first into lower strata of
humanity who catch it and clutch at it as it falls, and then at last
to the very lowest ground on which human feet can tread and be
trampled into dust. A new or unfamiliar truth dawns on the
horizon, and straightway the foremost lovers of truth lift their
thirsting eyes to greet its advent, and welcome it with shouts of
joy. But some will shut their eyes, and hide themselves in their
�§
inner chambers, lest it should make them dissatisfied with the old
truths which they have loved so long; and so the world becomes
divided into foes and factions, each partizan forgetting the tie that
really binds them all—their common love of truth. Let them rail
at each other’s notions as much as they please. We are barbarians
still, and know no better mode of pressing on progress, or of
keeping it within a safe rate of movement; but while we do this,
let us not forget that we are both alike loyal 'to the truth which
neither of us has really found; that we, with our more con
spicuous sacrifices for the new truth, are not alone in our costly
virtue, but they, too, have much to bear and much to lose in the
perilous and somewhat ignoble task of fighting for a mummy, and
exposing their names to the ridicule of posterity for a mere shadow.
Let it be understood on both sides that both alike love truth and
goodness, and our contests of opinion will soon lose all their bitter
ness, and our controversies their sting.
But best of all is the assurance that however wicked and erring
men have been and are, God has made them to love goodness and
truth. The time will come when that deep seated love of goodness
will assert its mastery over the whole man, and present us fault
less before the Eternal Throne, just as that radical love of truth
will bring every one at last into that glorious region where
falsehood and error are unknown.
Then shall be fulfilled that grand old prophecy, “ After those
days, saith the Lord, I will put my law into their inward parts, and
write it in their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be
my people. And they shall teach no more, every man his neigh
bour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord : for they
shall all know me from the least of them even unto the greatest.”
EASTERN POST Steam Printing Works, 89, Worship Street Finsbury, E.C.
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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The true light: a sermon, preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, May 11th, 1873
Creator
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 8 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Printed by Eastern Post May 17th, 1873. Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 6.
Publisher
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[Eastern Post]
Date
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[1873]
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G3417
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Religion
Sermons
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The true light: a sermon, preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, May 11th, 1873), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Morris Tracts
Religion
Sermons
-
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8058501fc74cf62702d00cfca2e7af55
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Text
“ Wit
f urbibme
of
(to.”
A SERMON,
PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
JANUARY 11TH, 1873, BY
the
REV. CHARLES VOYSEY.
[From the Eastern Post, January Ylth, 1874.]
On Sunday (January 11,) at St. George’s Hall, the Rev. C.
Voysey took his text from Acts xv., 18, “ Known unto God are
all his works, from the beginning of the world.”
He sai(i—I wish to set you thinking upon a subject that has
occupied my own mind a great deal, but upon which I find it
very difficult to come to a conclusion.. It is the Providence of
God. The question is often put, “Do you believe in Providence?”
when more correctly it should be asked, “ Do you believe in a
special and peculiar Providence watching over yourself different to
the general and universal order of Nature ?” To the question put
in this form, I confess myself ready to give a prompt denial. I
in no way believe myself, or any other person, to be a favourite
of Heaven, or the object of God’s peculiar care.
It is much more congenial to think and speak in the spirit of
those words of Jesus, “Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without
the will of our Father.” One of the most striking changes we
have witnessed in this age is the abandonment of those views
which flatter individual vanity—of that mode’of thought which
cherishes personal conceit in dwelling upon our relation to God.
We no longer take any pleasure in the thought that God’s loving
kindness is our peculiar inheritance; we should be loth to accept,
even at the Divine hands, gifts and privileges which all our
brethren might not share.
It would make us miserable to believe that God loved us more
than others, or was preparing for us mansions in the sky from
■which any of our fellow-men were to be shut out. It has.become
�2
a cardinal assumption with us that it must be all or cone. That
whatever the favour of God may consist in, and whatever be the
happiness of Heaven hereafter, they belong by right to all mankind
or to none. If thedifferencesin human lot, and in human culture,
on earth, present any difficulty we soon waive it out of our path
by remembering that there everyone will be made perfectly holy,
perfectly happy; and that even now these differences are no tokens
of the favour or disfavour of God, no measures of a varying love.
Just as we are assured of God’s love to ourselves whether we are.
in prosperity or adversity, in health or in sickness; so we are
assured of His love to all, whatever their lot may be. Hence we
discard entirely the notion of Special Providence, in so far as it
implies partiality or favouritism on God’s part, or any special
worthiness on our own.
But the difficulty still remains to determine what is Providence
and what is not—to settle whether every minutest event in our
lives is, as it were, ordained and regulated by a conscious
determining will, or that the events of our life are for the most
part fortiutous, or brought about by ourselves.
For some, it may be natural to say “Our lives are regulated in
great measure by our own wills and by the native qualities we
possess acted upon by the people and circumstances by which we
are surrounded. We see no need for the interposition of Providence,
things have taken their natural course, and we cannot admit the
necessity for any theory of Providence, special or otherwise.”
But forothers it is quite as natural to say, ‘‘Our lives have been
so eventful, so full of rare perils, of hair-breadth escapes; of trials
in mind body and estate so deep, and of deliverances so unexpected,
so timely, so independent of ourselves, that it looks as though an
eye of Love had been watching over us, and an unseen hand had
been leading us and supplying our wants, forestalling our griefs
and necessities. We do not say or dream that this protection has
been peculiar to ourselves, but we believe that everyone is guarded
and helped in the same way; but it has been brought home to us
in such a manner that we should be blind and ungrateful not to
acknowledge it. Moreover, we should feel the same to the end of
our days, if instead of mercies and deliverances, the cause of
�events should be reversed and bitter misfortunes be henceforward
our lot.”
This is no fancy picture, this is the real history of many and
many a happy and unhappy life. It is the history of nations as
well as of men.
For the whole Jewish people whether in
prosperity or adversity have persistently acknowledged the good
providence of God through their chequered career. Of course
they were wrong, like the Puritan Christians, and the Roman
Catholics, in claiming the divine favour exclusively for themselves,
but this narrowness has been to a great extent broken down.
The point to observe, however, is that great numbers of men and
women have been impressed with the idea tnat they were under
the care and guidance of a most loving will, and have been forced
to own it after their greatest sorrows had led them to doubt it.
The great question before us is then, are our lives over-ruled
and ordered by a divine will, or not ? If not, how can we account
for certain events too manifestly the result of forethought to be
attributed to chance 1 If there is no Providence, no will above
us which controls and arranges the course of human lot, we are
brought face to face with difficulties infinitely greater still, with
footprints on the sands of time which must have made themselves,
with marks of evident design and order which would have to be
attributed to unreflecting, unreasoning, chance.
If we attribute everything to Nature, and spell it with a capital
“ N,” admitting skill, or wisdom, or any quality of mind to be
manifest in any of its operations, we simply give up the contest;
and “Nature” so regarded becomes so far synonymous with God or
Providence. But call it what we will, we cannot deny that the
intelligent action of something underlies certain indisputable facts
of human life.
I am as far as possible from assuming the airs of a philosopher,
or wishing to tread the unfamiliar ground of metaphysics; but from
the stand-point of common-sense, I am led to believe inthe sequence
of cause and effect. We are what we are through an inconceivably
long chain of antecedents, which, if followed out far enough, would
lead us to trace our origin to the sun, or what was once the sun
when it occupied the whole space now bounded by the orbit of the
�most distant planet. I am forced to admit that this is at least true op
everything within the solar system which is visible, or which can
be apprehended by chemical, electrical and kindred science. I do
not know what my mind is or how it originated, but it must be
quite safe to say that the mind, like the bcdy, is the product of
something else, the effect of some preceding causes. We are,
therefore, entirely the results of causation, and we in turn must
affect the condition of posterity; nay, they and their entire lives
must be only and completely what they will be, in consequence of
what we are.
But of one thing I am yet doubtful. What is the extent of the
disturbing element called man’s free will? We know for certain
that there is some measure of choice allotted to each individual;
but we are equally certain that the limits within which choice can
be exercised are very narrow. A bird must have a bird’s will,
and not the will of a beast; the beast cannot have
the will of the insect or the will of the fish.
In like
manner man can only have the will belonging to his nature. That
is the first and most obvious limit to freedom of choice. And
when we come to individuals, we find the will again limited by the
personal characteristics, the inherited tendencies, the surrounding
influencies of circumstance and association. So easy does it seem
for us to choose that we quite forget that our choice is almost
forced upon us, and that we have little left of freedom of will but
the empty name. Still if we have any freedom at all, it is enough
to become what I called a disturbing element in the course of
event?. And this is exhibited in action when we find to our
surprise someone turning out in character or in conduct the direct
opposite to what we should have expected from the ordinary rule
of nature. We do, now and then, take each other by surprise and
present striking exceptions to universal law.
The effect of these considerations has been to make me not
metely question, but entirely deny, the interference of God by
what is often called “ Providence ” in the course of human or any
other destiny.
(1.)
Because it is manifestly unnecessary.
(2.) Because it would be an admission on His part that His fore
thought had been deficient, or His materials inadequate.
�(3.) Because it would have a disastrous effect upon men’s minds
to imagine that God would so interfere; for they would claim that
interference in every difficulty instead of putting their own
shoulders to the wheel, and those who had no such favour might
reasonably accuse God of partiality, and
therefore of
injustice.
If then by “ Providence ” be understood in the least degree, a
patching up, or mending, or supplementing a defect in, any part
of the universe by an act of divine interference, then, I for one,
declare mj utter disbelief in it, as unnecessary, derogatory to our
idea of God, and injurious to mankind.
But just as we discarded the old conception of God, because we
had found and embraced one inconceivably more exalted, so we
discard the common action o± Proridence for an idea infinitely
higher. Taking as a motto, “ Known unto Him are all things
from the beginning,” we conceive of Providence as the action of
an intelligent and loving Being who, whether or not he be the
cause of the universe, is one for whom it exists, and by whom
all its issues are controlled.
Not like a great mechanician making an engine for use, nor a
giant carpenter fitting pieces of clumsy material together, nor a
builder fashioning a house, nor an artificer inventing a toy. We
.know nothing whatever of God’s relation to the visible world, and
would not venture on the folly of even speculating as to how it
was originated, or whether it was ever originated at all. But we
are guided by our intuitions, and permitted by our reason, to
attribute the course of the universe to some intelligent and
beneficent guide, who, having cognisance of all that would happen
in it, or be evolved out of it; having cognisance of, and special
regard to, the various natures of the living creatures which would
occupy it, was responsible for—not their mere pleasure—but their
welfare, their truest and most lasting good.
Is not Providence—to use a figure of speech—the fiat of such
a Being. The word once spoken, “ Let all things be very good ?”
And they are good. Is not Providence simply the eternal and
unchangeable will of Him who “ is loving unto every man, and
whose tender mercy is over all His works ?” Is it not our
�6
guarantee that nothing shall ever happen by chance, or without
the prevision of His far-seeing wisdom and love ?
When we receive tokens of a watchful Providence—such as I
alluded to just now—tokens which seem to bring God down into
our very homes and families, and remind us that ‘in Him we live
and move, and have our being,” and “ The very hairs of our head
are numbered,” which is the grander thought? That He, watching
over us like an anxious parent, was attracted by our distress, and
busied himself to find means for our deliverance, while next door
to us, perhaps, distress worse than our own was being left to
remedy itself, or work its bitter way through the aching hearts of
our neighbours; or, to think of Him as one to whom every
possible contingency that might arise in the life of every creature
in all time was well known, its effects for pain or pleasure all
carefully measured, every possible consequence provided for—only
not by calculation and skilful arrangement which are our only
conceptions of forethought—but by stamping on the whole from
the beginning the one eternal law, that “ all things should work
together for good,” that the universe should be so evolved that
nothing really evil should abide therein, and for every passing
sorrow there should be everlasting joy ?
Such a view of God's providence, however, does greater things
than these. In our childish state we were wont to look only upon
God’s deliverances as marks of His love, and our misfortunes as
due only to the course of nature. Now we take the clouds and
storm, as well as the blessed sunshine, as the gifts of His bounty;
the night not less the day bears witness of His regard. Our tears
and sorrows, and sad partings— all, all are His precious memorial**
of a loving care quite as much as the joys and pleasures and blessed
meetings which make life so glad.
In that kind of Providence, let me ever believe, then no sorrow
can overwhelm my soul, no joy or deliverance can make me forge-fc
my God.
But what, if after all, this has a tendency to a kind of fatalism
which in all ages has been found detrimental to virtue, and
paralysing to the moral powers ? Here is uncertainty again. If all
has been planned from the beginning, every event in life known and
�provided for, an unworthy soul might say ‘det thingstake their course
we will just do what we must, it is sure to come right.” There
would be dangei' in this, indeed, were it not for one element which
no theories can destroy. Still we feel our responsibility, still we
have our undying sense of duty, still we hear our brothers’ cry
for help and pity, and the heart of man as God has made i t, is
by nature neither base nor ungrateful. We shall not love God
the less for knowing His good purposes towards us ; we shall not
be less kind to one another when we know their glorious destiny ;
we shall not be less diligent in duty when we perceive that
the very ends which God has in view can on'y be accomplished
with the consent of our free will. To make earth all that is fair
and lovely, and pure, and happy, each moral denizen thereof must
first become so. To make eternal bliss in heaven, each soul must
first be made eternally holy.
There is no more miracle, no more special providenee, no more
Divine interference. We have been launched on the wide ocean
of human lot, and we must bring our bark safe to land. The
breezes may blow, now for us, now against us, and angry waves
may rise and threaten us with their foaming jaws; but over the
billows we must rise and conquer even adverse winds, keeping our
eye stedfastly on the compass at our feet, or on the stars above our
heads, bound for that haven which God has promised to the brave
and the true.
If indeed it be true that
“A Providence doth shape our ends
Rough hew them how we will.”
it only means that we have not absolute control over the small
or even the great, events of life; but it never was written to dis
courage manly independent action of an honest heart aiming only
at what is right and good. Depend upon it, until we work out
our path into holy life and liberty God will not interfere to
help us to find it, or give us one moment’s rest until it is
found.
The Providence which has made man the author of his own
destinies—every one of which destinies is to be eternally good_ will not abandon such a glorious scheme of salvation, or defraud
�8
one human being of the painful and costly honour of being his
own Saviour.
Finally, as we cannot be always in the clouds of the orizing and
controversy about fate and freewill, let us give free play to our
religious emotions, and day by day learn better to recognize the
Providence of God as it is working before us in every event of life.
If we begin by lifting grateful hearts to God for every thing we
deem a joy and a blessing, we shall soon learn to welcome with a
calm and reasonable thankfulness those events which under another
light, or fn the darkness of unbelief, we deem to be evils and
curses.
Let each one of us sing in the words of the poet,
“May £ remember that to Thee
Whate’ei I have I owe
And back in gratitude from me
May all thy bounties flow.
And though thy wisdom takes away
Shall I arraign thy will ?
No 1 let me bless thy name and say
The Lord is gracious still.”
..
■‘
j<> oho
y
-
nof'-Hcdji
.1 lb>-
EASTERN Tost Steam Printing Works, 89 Worship Street, Finsbury, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The providence of God: a sermon, preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, January 11th, 1873
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 8 p. ; 17 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 6. Printed by Eastern Post, January 17th 1874.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[Eastern Post]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1874]
Identifier
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G3413
Subject
The topic of the resource
God
Sermons
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The providence of God: a sermon, preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, January 11th, 1873), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
God
Morris Tracts
Press
-
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4bc9ca592c02daad95dc97178afdac43
PDF Text
Text
Published by Request.
THE INFLUENCE OF DOGMA
UPON RELIGION.
A REPLY
TO SOME REMARKS MADE IN CONVOCATION
DURING THE DEBATE ON THE ATHANASIAN
CREED, APRIL 24, 1872.
BY
REV. CHARLES VOYSEY, B.A.,
LATE VICAR OF HEALAUGH.
LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR,
CAMDEN HOUSE. DULWICH, S.E.,
AND
TRUBNER AND CO., PATERNOSTER ROW.
Price Fourpence.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY WERTHEIMER, LEA AND CO.
CIRCUS PLACE, FINSBURY CIRCUS.
HHEBHBSBBDEBnSKSB08K9flffl
�PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE’S HALL,
APRIL 28th, 1872.
;
(J .
(( Now the axe is laid at the root of the trees.”
Matthew iii. 10.
•
During the debate on the Athanasian Creed last
week in Convocation, one of the speakers is reported
to have said, 11 Pogma and Religion must go togetherj and the Church cannot unlearn her dogmas.”
Statements, so plain and concise as this one, are
of great value, and bring out in sharp outlines the
chief points of contrast between conflicting opinions
or principles. We may be thankful to any bishop
or priest for coming forward in this way and throw
ing down the gauntlet for us to take up. The
sooner that both sides in this great dispute between
authority and individual freedom see the real issue
which is at stake, the less time will be wasted in
endless petty discussions about particular doctrines.
I therefore take up the challenge, and will this
morning endeavour to prove that religion and
dogma do not necessarily go together; that, if any
thing, dogma is a hindrance to religion; and that
�4
the cry of 11 Non possumus” is the death-knell of
any church.
(1.) Religion and Dogma do not necessarily go
together.
Not to mention the Unitarian body, a large por
tion of whose ministers and laity have no articles
and creeds, no written dogmas at all, we will only
speak for ourselves. Religion surely means a sense
of the being of God, a belief in His goodness
which inspires veneration, obedience and love on our
part, and a consciousness of our hearts’ desire to
conform our lives to His holy will. This is not in
tended to be a definition; but, I think, people of
every creed in Christendom will admit that so much
at least is included under the term 11 Religion.”
That this devout reverence towards God, this
entire confidence in His fidelity, lies absolutely
at the very foundation of our present movement
cannot be gainsaid. Many, it is true, have joined
us only because they see the falseness and corrup
tion of the prevailing beliefs; and some few have
joined us, not through sympathy with our religion
at all, but from sympathy with our principles in
the search after truth. But with these exceptions,
the rest of that large and influential body who are
with us, have undertaken this great work from
religious motives; because they love God, and would
fain deliver the Christian peoples around them from
their unwholesome dread of God, from their gloomy
superstitions, and from their degrading and de
moralising ideas of the Divine dealings with men.
•
�Does this religion depend on dogma, or does it not ?
I answer, this religion not only does not depend on
dogma, but owes its very existence to the subversion
of dogma. It is born out of the instinctive rebellion
of our own reasons, consciences, and hearts, against
dogmas which we saw to be false, immoral, and
cruel. So far from such a religion and dogma
going together, speaking for ourselves, they could
not exist side by side. Either the dogma would
kill the religion, or the religion crush the dogma.
We owe all the light and beauty and gladness of
our religion to our having been able to renounce
the dogmas of orthodoxy, and to our determination
never again to be bound by any of them.
And this leads me to say a necessary word or two
about the term “dogma.” Dogma must not be con
founded with doctrine. Doctrine is merely a tech
nical term for an opinion, say a formal opinion, and
in theology doctrine is therefore a theological formal
opinion, the expression of a thought or idea about
God, or about our relation to Him. Now it is easy
to see that there can be no religion without doctrine,
?.e., without some thought or opinion about God;
and that every one of us who is religious must have
doctrines in his own mind as the basis of his religion.
In our case, there is such a general consensus of
doctrine or opinion as to draw us together, and
enable us to worship together, with a very great
degree of unanimity, in the words of one book.
But nevertheless, each one’s doctrine is his own to
hold or to change as he pleases, and is held only to
�6
grow wider and deeper in meaning, or to be
abandoned for another which has been found to be
more true. There must be many shades of doctrine
amongst us which, if they ever came to be petrified
into dogmas, would explode our society into frag
ments; but we have a bond of union deeper still
than our doctrines, we are bound together mainly
and most securely by our principles, by the princi
ples on which we consider that all doctrines should
be held. The most important of these is the
principle of perfect liberty given and received all
round to each one to hold his own, without fear of
illegitimate pressure or interference, and above all,
without fear of God or hell-fire. Such a bond of
union, never before tried so thoroughly, so radically,
will, we believe, be found strong and lasting—
infinitely better than that delusive uniformity in
which all churches have placed their trust.
Doctrines held on such terms of perfect individual
liberty, and by each one in the hope of going on
learning more and more of religious truth, and of
changing the partial truth of to-day for the more
complete truth of the morrow; doctrines which are
thus being continually brought to the test of reason,
and into the clearer light of advancing science, can
never be identified with dogmas.
Dogmas are doctrines turned into stone, of which
Church walls are built, to shut out the rest of the
world, and to imprison those who take shelter behind
them. When a doctrine is taken up by a commu
nity or Church, signed, sealed, stamped, ratified, and
�7
passed into law, then it becomes a dogma. Dogmatism
is the death of deliberate thought, because it is the
enforcement of doctrine. It makes little difference
whether the doctrine be enforced by Act of Par
liament, and its infringement made punishable by
pains and penalties, or whether it be urged upon
the acceptance of men under threats of God’s dis
pleasure, or with bribes of heaven hereafter—if it
be enforced at all, it becomes dogma. And one of
the most hopeful signs of our times is that the very
name of dogma is execrated by the wise, and
dreaded by the loving. Dogmas are the stones by
which priests and people in all ages have killed
their prophets. While it is the very nature of doc
trines to be ever changing, dogmas have congealed
them in deadly frost. Doctrines are the living
thoughts of living men; dogmas are the lifeless
forms of thoughts which are dead, curious only as
the contents of a long-closed sepulchre. Doctrines
have the power of immortal life and ever increasing
beauty and variety; dogmas once written down
with the iron pen of Church authority on the stone of
stumbling and rock of offence, become first ghastly
and then grotesque by the ravages of time.
No wonder then that, as doctrine after doctrine
died and was buried in the sepulchre of dogma, the
collection of thoughts scattered over centuries, but
which the dogmas now present for our acceptance
en masse, should prove to be nothing but a jumble
of incoherent and contradictory propositions. The
miserable keepers of this museum of ugly relics in
�8
our own times are only still more to be pitied than
the unhappy men whose business it was, in the
sixteenth century, to build for them a new gallery,
and place them in their new niches. Whoever it
was who wrote the Thirty-nine Articles began at
least with a noble Te Deum, simple and grand, the
earnest utterance, no doubt, of a heart overflowing
with reverence and love. “ There is but One living
and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or
passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness;
the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible
and invisible.” He had only written three lines
however, before the religious emotion which had
inspired them, fled suddenly away when he was
compelled to grope amongst the ashes of the past,
and divide the invisible One into three pieces, and
then put them together again like a dreadful puzzle.
But his grief and perplexity are not to be compared
with the despair of those who have to face all these
embalmed relics to-day, and to tell the people in
solemn time and place that they are all alive and
will live for ever. Can we think without pity of
one, who knowing, e.g., what the Athanasian creed
contains, is obliged to confess: r The Church
cannot unlearn her dogmas.” To be placed in such
dire and distressing antagonism to the tide of
thought in the nineteenth century and in England
is far worse than to endure the worst penalties of
modern martyrdom. But what will not 11 Dogma”
do ? It is backed up by authority. All these
mummies of creeds and articles stand and preach
�9
to us the dreary echoes of long-dead thought, they
tie our hands, direct our steps, and force words
upon our lips. Galvanized by Acts of Parliament,
and by the still more coercive authority of a spectral
Church, they can make slaves of us as we go, can
scare us into submission, if a daring thought should
venture to rebel, and can, even to-day, darken our
last hours by visions of a fathomless despair. No
words of mine can describe their fatal power in
such vivid imagery as that of the old Hebrew
Psalmist. “Not unto us, 0 Lord, not unto us, but
unto Thy name be the praise, for Thy loving mercy
and for Thy truth’s sake. Wherefore should the
heathen say of us, ‘ Where is now their God ?’ As
for our God, He is in heaven, He hath done
whatsoever pleased Him. But their idols are the
work of men’s hands. They have mouths and
speak not; eyes have they and see not. They
have ears and hear not, noses have they and smell
not. They have hands and handle not; feet have
they and walk not; neither speak they through
their throat. They that make them are like unto
them, and so are all they that put their trust in
them.”
(2.) And these words bring me to say, in the second
place, that dogma is a hindrance to true religion.
Think first what is its influence on the preacher.
The enforcement of doctrine, whether by acts of
uniformity, by thirty-nine articles, by subscription
of clergy, by solemn oath of clerical fraternities, by
trust deeds, by inarticulate signs of assent or dis
�sent on the part of pewholders in any Church—
directly or indirectly—the imposition of dogma and
its practical enforcement on the preacher’s utterance
is a mischief indescribably deep and subtle. No
arguments can ever justify the anomaly, the ab
surdity and the cruelty of telling a man who desires
to preach the truth, that he must think in a par
ticular groove, and speak in conformity with par
ticular written or unwritten propositions; to be met,
at the moment of the discovery of some beautiful
idea, by this kind of caution, “ It is all very good,
but it is not orthodox, you know,” or that ((it may be
ever so true, but it is not safe,” &c., is to sentence
a man to lasting hypocrisy, or to temporal ruin.
Besides this, every limit put upon the freedom of
his utterance diminishes the value of every state
ment of his own true conviction, and casts discredit
upon whatever he may honestly say. How can
you be sure that your preacher in his moments of
greatest fervour is not saying what his heart belies,
if it be in the power of any of his hearers to turn
round upon him and say, “ You dare not preach
otherwise if you would.” It is therefore for the
best interest of all opinions whatsoever, to leave the
preacher absolutely unfettered.
But if you have a tongue-tied clergy you must
have a hood-winked laity. If you have falsehood
in the priest, the people will learn to love falsehood,
to prefer the poison of a lie to the nourishment of
truth.
But quite apart from this corruption, dogma most
snsHorannHi
�11
surely hinders religion, both in its essence and ex
pression. Have not hundreds and thousands been
thrown into frightful confusion and perplexity by
the dogma of the Trinity, not because it was a
doctrine, but because it was a dogma, to be believed
under peril of damnation ? Have not their hearts
sunk within them in trying to master a problem
which one moment’s free thought would have made
them toss aside with ridicule and scorn, but which
the awful dread of hell fascinated them to study ?
Treated as fanciful speculations, or as modes of
expressing theologically some subtle metaphysical
abstractions, these old creeds could do but little
harm; but as dogmas required to be believed
for one’s soul’s salvation, they have done irre
parable mischief to religion, alienated many and
many from the very thought of God, driven them
for shelter from Him and His awful mysteries
to the arms of a comprehensible and kind-hearted
man, and have forced the nations of Christendom
into an idolatry scarcely less injurious to reli
gion than the paganism which it supplanted. If
mankind are really at a hopeless distance from
God, and alienated from Him by their ignorance
and sin, dogma only adds wofully to their miseries,
dogma builds a wall between God and man over
which every prodigal son must climb, who would
11 arise and go to his father.” Every step which we
take under its guidance is, by the confession of its
own priests, full of darkness and danger. Clouds of
heaven’s wrath are waiting to burst in fury upon
�12
our unfortunate heads, pit-falls beneath our feet lie
hidden to entrap us into some shocking Sabellian
heresy, or some Homoiousian shade of a deadly
Arianism.
For this and that and the other
dogma, however hopelessly contradictory, “is the
Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully,
he cannot be saved.”
Now where is religion all this time, that we have
been picking our way over this morass and that
desert, and climbing over the walls of dogma to get
ourselves saved I To me it looks like the religion
of the lowest physical type, if it be religion at all.
It is fetichism and not religion. It is the worship
of ourselves, not of God; it is devotion to our own
safety, not to His blessed will; it is the apotheosis of
bribery and corruption. But it is dogma and
dogma only that thus debases men. Left to them
selves they would be ashamed to believe those very
creeds which “the Church cannot unlearn.” They
would hide them away as symptoms of mental and
moral disease, lest men should scorn them for their
folly or shun them for their madness.
Dogma has, alas! laid its fetters over the very
worship of mankind, and forbidden aspiration which
it could not sanction, has silenced praises which it
did not enjoin. If our thoughts of God rise and
expand, our forms of prayer and praise are still
petrified and all but lifeless. If we have outgrown
those conceptions of the Divine Being, and of the
early origin of our race, on which the liturgy was
based, we are still tied down by dogma to repeat
�13
the same old weary platitudes, and to utter the
same senseless lamentations, which once suited our
unhappy forefathers. If we have grown more bro
therly towards our fellow-men, under the blessed
sunshine of the Father’s love to us all, we are still
bound, on the Church’s highest festivals, to curse
all Arians and Unitarians, and all the millions of
the Greek Church, with a bitter curse, and to pollute
our very praises to the Almighty Father by
anathemas against our brethren.
(3.) It does not require much courage to predict
the near dissolution of any Church offering such ob
structions to true religion, and, moreover, declaring
that she “ cannot unlearn her own dogmas.” Bad as
the Church of England may be, we must not believe
she is so bad as that, or that any Anglican High
Churchman is her spokesman. The Houses of
Parliament, and not the Houses of Convocation,
have the laws of the Church in their own hands.
The Queen, and not Christ or Peter, is the real head
of the Church, and so there is some chance of her
unlearning her own dogmas. Not merely a chance
of unlearning these particular ones, which are now
embalmed in the Thirty-nine Articles and Creeds,
but a chance of her divorcing herself for ever from
all dogmas, and of allowing doctrines to resume
their proper place, as the living thoughts of living
men, whose goal is the truth, and whom neither
terror nor greed can hinder from its pursuit.
Has the past no lesson to teach the dogmatist ?
What are his own dogmas, and what is the origin of
�14
his own creeds? Were not each and all in turn
the heresies of the successive ages in which they
first appeared ? Did not the dogmas of the dying
systems struggle long and manfully against the
new opinions, and was not their fall certain only
because the new opinions were more true than
those which they displaced? Neither priests of
Jupiter nor silversmiths at Ephesus could keep
their petrified dogmas from sinking in the sands of
time, and going down into the darkness where all
that is dead must finally be laid.
Tell us, ye chief priests and rulers, you will not,
you cannot unlearn your dogmas, then we tell you
that your day has come and is gone.
The thing that will not grow and keep pace with
the march;of intellect, that cannot move with the
progress of scientific knowledge, nor expand with
the enlarging hearts of men who have found a
loving God for themselves, that thing, we say, must
die, it is dead as soon as it ceases to move onward.
Your best, your noblest dogma of all, if it be
dogma and no longer living thought, is dead already,
and you cannot for long pass off that lifeless corpse
for a living man, dress it how you will, and paint
its withering parchment with the glowing carmine,
prop it up in your busiest thoroughfares, and give
it attitudes like the attitudes of the living throng;
speak for it too, be the interpreter of its wakeless
silence to the ears of men and women who have
been scared by its cold fixed gaze; but you will not
long succeed in deluding your fellow-men. They
�15
will soon find out that you have been playing upon
their childish and groundless fears, that you have
been amusing yourself in the twilight at their ex
pense, and they will sweep you and your mummified
creeds quickly, and perhaps rudely, out of the path
way of mankind.
If religion itself were worthless, dogma would
never give it worth. But if religion still holds its
own amongst human hearts, men will find one for
themselves which shall best accord with the highest
and not with the lowest aspect of their nature, one
which can lead them on instead of drawing them back.
But one thing they will not do. They will not give
up their manly souls to the dictates of the dead, nor
suffer themselves to be enslaved by those whom they
have once discovered to be the dupes of their
own fears, who shamelessly confess that for all
time to come, no one among mankind will ever dis
cover any truth about God and man not already
known, and that no one will discover any error in
the little patch of dogmas round which the’ Church
has built its ugly stone wall. What? errors in
Paganism, errors in Judaism, errors in Mahometanism,
errors in Brahmanism, errors in Buddhism, but none
in Christianity ? No, not one I
il The Church cannot unlearn her own dogmas.”
Then the Church is dead. Cover her tenderly,
bury her reverently—but pile over her tomb the
stumbling blocks of creed and dogma, which she had
strewn in our way.
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
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Title
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The influence of dogma upon religion. A reply to some remarks made in convocation during the debate on the Athanasian creed, April 24 1872
Creator
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 6. Printed by Wertheimer, Lea and Co., London. Title page states: Published by Request. The sermon was preached at St George's Hall, April 28th 1872.
Publisher
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The Author; Trubner and Co.
Date
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[1872]
Identifier
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G3391
Subject
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Religion
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The influence of dogma upon religion. A reply to some remarks made in convocation during the debate on the Athanasian creed, April 24 1872), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/admin/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Athanasian Creed
Dogma
Morris Tracts
-
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b0733a8bb7653276a5d4ee3a1f6c4b78
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Text
erne
/
THE CUSTOM OF WEARING
“ MOURNING.”
TO THE EDITOR OF “ THE INDEX.”
Sir,
I will follow up my last letter on Funeral Rites by a few
remarks on the custom of wearing black as a sign of mourning
for the dead.
The most obvious objections to it are—that it adds unneces
sarily to the gloom and dejection already caused by bereave
ment, where grief really exists ; that where there is no real
grief, the putting on of signs of grief is a contemptible sham;
that the custom of wearing “mourning” tends greatly to per
petuate unhappy—and, as I conceive, false—views of death;
and it is also objectionable in being compulsory upon many
families who are too poor to bear the expense. I will say
something upon each of these objections.
1. That it adds needlessly to the gloom and dejection of really
afflicted relatives must be apparent to all who have ever taken
part in these miserable rites. The houses are generally closed
until the burial is over, and this of itself is a glaring instance of
self-inflicted torture. When the physical frame is already
weakened by long watchings, want of sleep, and floods of tears,
common sense would direct the sufferers to seek the refreshing
stimulants of air and sunshine ; to throw open doors and win
dows and let in God’s heavenly messengers of “sweetness and
light;” to endeavour to turn the thoughts as much as possible
away from the troubled past, and to relieve the dull pain at the
�2
heart by objects and occupations of cheerfulness; to avoid a
darkened chamber, or a black dress, as one would avoid the
devil—if there were any such “ enemy of mankind.” But no
sooner is the breath gone from the body of one of the household,
than all the blinds are drawn down and the shutters closed, and
a fearful race against time is begun with the horrid prepara
tions for “mourning.” Dressmakers are in demand, the anxieties
of economical shopping are multiplied, often at the very time
when every penny is needed for coming wants or for past
doctor’s bills. And all is black—crape—jet ; everything
hideously black, the blackness only deepened by the white cap
or white edging in which it is set. A poor widow, for instance,
must shudder afresh over all the realities of her woe, the first
time she looks in the mirror after having put on the hateful
garb. Her sorrow was surely enough without her being com
pelled to bear about on her own body its ghastly tokens.
At the funeral, this is made worse still by “mourning coaches,”
and that most repulsive thing that moves on earth—the hearse
—with its plumes of black stuck all over it, waving and nodding
like so many fiends mocking at your grief as they are carrying off
their prey. Long and costly hatbands of crape and silk, dozens
of costly black gloves which seldom fit, cloaks of the same
eternal, infernal black—all contrived to make you feel as
miserable and wretched as possible, while the woe at your heart
is almost unendurable! Why should we be reminded for months
afterwards, by outward tokens, of our sad loss ? Every time we
brush the little ring of hat left us by the undertaker, we are
carried back to that terrible day on which the crape or cloth was
first put on, and the very things we ought to try to forget are
forced upon our notice at every turn in our lives.
2. But when, as is often the case, there is no real grief, but
perhaps a good deal of real rejoicing over the death, the putting
on of “mourning” is a piece of hypocrisy and falsehood which
nothing can justify. No one will contend that “ mourning ’ is
anything but a sign of grief; therefore if the sign be assumed
when there is no grief, it is an acted lie, and helps to corrupt
�3
society and make it love shams and pretences and varnished
deceit. I greatly honour those really broken-hearted widows
who keep their “ mourning” on all their days, for it is with
them a true token, an outward and visible sign of an inward
and heartfelt grief which must abide with them through all
their weary pilgrimage ; but I utterly despise the custom of
putting on 11 mourning” because it is the fashion, and because
“ people would talk so, you know,” if the “ mourning” were to
be omitted. As a sign of grief, ‘ ‘ mourning ” would often be
much more suitable before the death than after it, inasmuch as
the grief of watching a beloved one pass through weeks and
weeks of physical torture, with the certainty of no recovery, far
exceeds the grief of bereavement. It is only a truism to say
that death is often the greatest possible relief to the poor sufferer
himself, and to the sorrowing relatives. The number of cases
in which the grief before far exceeds the grief after death, is
much larger than is generally supposed.
3. I come now to the last and perhaps most important objec
tion of all. “ Mourning” tends to perpetuate unhappy and
1
false views of death. To those who have no belief in immor
tality and re-union with our dear ones after death, it might
f
seem only natural to give oneself up to despair and to all its
fl E horrible outward signs.
But to those who profess to believe,
Efci
and who really do believe, that the dead are still living in a
I'M happier world, free from earthly pain and sorrow, it ought to
be quite natural to rejoice and give thanks “ that it hath pleased
A
Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of the departed,
a» and to deliver him from the miseries of a sinful world,”—to
quote from the Christian Burial Service. Death ought to
ed be looked upon as at least as much of a heavenly boon to the be
fol loved one, as a source of bitter pain to ourselves. But that pain
raff! itself would be greatly diminished if we were trained to think
■aol of death as we are trained to talk about it; if we were brought
nJ
up to feel that it is a manifest and real benefit, and however
£Ij1 distressing to survivors, is not to be regarded from its dark
side. By refusing to darken our homes and to gird ourselves in
�4
black raiment, we would make our protest against the melan
choly—the unmitigated melancholy—of the popular views of
death. We would shake off as much as we could that morbid
weeping and sighing which are so destructive to health and
enfeebling to the mind. We would let the world know that how
ever great our loss, however irreparable it might be on earth,
we still trusted in the loving kindness of God, and unselfishly
resigned into His hands the soul of our nearest and dearest,
believing that He can and will, as a faithful Creator, give us a
happy meeting in a brighter home above.
I have myself resolved never to put on “ mourning ” again—
not even for my children or my wife ; and I will do my best to
persuade others to get rid of this most cruel and oppressive
burden. (In the case of a public “mourning,” I would make
an exception ; but this would be altogether on different grounds,
and would be worn for the sake of strangers who know not my
private opinions.) One thing seems very clear; it is our
bounden duty to'mitigate and remove all the grief we possibly
can. We have no right to add to our natural distress by
artificial means, nor to bemoan any loss longer than we can
possibly help. If we believed in God and in His fidelity more,
we should be the better assured of our meeting again beyond
the tomb.
I am, Sir,
Yours very sincerely,
Charles Voysey.
Dulwich, S.E., March 31s^, 1873.
Wertheimer, Lea & Co,, Printers, Circus Place, Finsbury.
�
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
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Title
A name given to the resource
The custom of wearing "mourning"
Creator
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 4 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: A letter to the Editor of "The Index". From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Wertheimer, Lea & Co,., London.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
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1873
Identifier
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CT116
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The custom of wearing "mourning"), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Subject
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Death
Mourning
Conway Tracts
Death
Funeral Rites and Ceremonies
Mourning
-
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LONDON:
CARTER & WILLIAMS, Steam Printers, 14, Bishopsgate Avenue,
Camomile-street, E.C,
�The Causes of Irreligion.
A Sermon,
PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
SEPTEMBER 5, 1875, BY THE
REV. CHARLES VOYSEY.
Jeremiah, IX., 1. 2., “Oh that my head were waters and
mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night
for the slain of the daughter of my people.
Oh that I
had in the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men, that
I might leave my people and go from them....................... for
they lend their tongues like their bow for lies, they are not
valiant for the truth upon earth..................... and they
know not me saith the Lord
E
W are met together once more, my friends, to worship
God in such simplicity and truth as we are capable
of, and to pursue the great work which binds us in
one heart and soul—the redemption and preservation of true
Religion.
Religion has well-nigh become a by-word and a reproach
in this age of boasted enlightenment. The record of its past
has made good men weep, and wise men scoff. The. con-:
temptible triviality of the questions it has raised has often
found a fearful contrast in the storms of fierce passion which
have raged over them and the rivers of blood in which they
have issued.
While philosophers had no alternative but to cast aside
with derision the absurd assumptions of theologians ; while
moralists and philanthropists have mourned over the obstacles
to human welfare and progress everywhere set in their path
by Christian dogmas ; the various champions of conflicting
Rev. C. Voysey's sermons are to be obtained at St. George's
Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden
House, Dulwich, S.E. Price one penny postage a halfpenny.
�■
creeds have been doing their worst, unconsciously, to under
mine all reverence for religion, to alienate the hearts of men
from the very thought of God, and to foster the vices and
follies which Religion is supposed to condemn.
With many it is quite a question whether religion is not
the greatest blunder man has ever committed since the world
began. With others, it has ceased to be a question at all
and has become a settled conviction. Go into any mixed
society and you will find types of at least three prevailing
modes of thought about religion. One is partisanship,
another indifference, a third denunciation. You have the
dogmatic sectarian, believing himself and the rest of his sect
or party to be the prime favourites of Heaven ; another who
makes his boast of being utterly worldly and irreligious, and
can afford to do so seeing so many around him to keep him
countenance ; and a third who never loses an opportunity of
scoffing at religion and laying at its door every foul act which
comes to the surface. These three are common types. The
first is the strongest numerically ; the second socially; the
third intellectually.
Now there is an obvious cause tor each of these three modes
of thought upon religion; and it might be well to point it
out for the benefit of those who ought to be most interested
in the maintenance of religion. We will begin with the first
class, the dogmatic sectarian. What is it that makes him
what he is ? Simply an entirely false notion of religion
itself. Nearly all the teaching of Christendom has been to
the effect that man is saved or. damned according to his belief,
and not according to his life. And even where the ideas of
salvation and damnation have been kept in abeyance and
worthier motives have been substituted, there has been the
same false notion at the root, viz : that God is pleased or dis
pleased with us according as we think truly or think falsely
respecting Him. I am not one, as you well know, to hold
loosely in my regard the value of true opinions on any sub
ject, much less in matters pertaining to religion. We all of
us, by our readiness to encounter suffering in the mainten
ance of our opinions, testify to the importance of believing
and proclaiming what is, to our minds, true. But one and
all deny with our whole hearts the notion that to hold right
�3
beliefs is praiseworthy, or to hold wrong beliefs blameworthy;
that our opinions can make any possible difference to the
favour or disfavour of God ; still less that on such a slender
thread can hang our immortal destiny for bliss or woe. Men
can only believe as they may be persuaded; according to the
cogency of the arguments before them, or, what is much
more common, according to the tendency of their own minds
coupled with their early training or surrounding associations.
The Christian Missionary in vain confronts the Mussulman
and shaking the Bible at him says, “ You reject God’s word,”
for the Mussulman with equal right ’can shake the Koran at
the Christian and say, “ You are rejecting God’s word.”
To believe or accept any book or body of doctrine, or any
illustrious individual as a Divine teacher, is itself an involun
tary act of the mind and cannot deserve praise or blame.
God is no more disobeyed or dishonoured by a man refusing
to acknowledge the Divine authority of the Bible, of Jesus
or of the Church, than He is dishonoured by another man
accepting as Divine the authority of the Koran and of
Mahomet. But we need not pursue these common-places.
It is more to our purpose to observe what inevitable conse
quences of conduct, feeling, attitude must follow upon believ
ing that our creed or religious opinion secures our salvation
from perdition, or in any way merits the favour of God. The
first and most obvious effect of this is to set the holders of
different creeds at war with each other. They cannot help
it. Their very differences, small at first, perhaps, become
magnified and raised into essentials of salvation. Kindhearted men on either side try to convert each other, each
truly fearing that the other is going to hell. Hard-hearted
men will add hatred to this conviction and resort to violence
as in the days of the Inquisition, or to other milder means of
coercion as the state of civilization will permit.
Next, there comes an over-culture of the sentiment of
pride, which soon breeds arrogance and unlawful ambition.
Those who believe themselves to be the repositories of God’s
truth would fain conquer the world, and if they cannot force
all men to believe with them, the effort is made at least to
force them into outward conformity. And there, in the per
son of Pius the ninth, we see the embodiment of this principle
�4
and the action in which it finally issues. Nothing can be
more logical or more practically consistent. The Pope simply
acts, or tries to act, so far as his crippled liberties will allow
him, up to his convictions that he is God’s vicar on the earth
and the sole repository of Divine truth. But in looking at
the Roman Pontiff, every dogmatic sectarian ought to see
the reflection of wrhat he himself would be if he could. The
principle of Rome and that of all her rebel children is the
same. The difference is only such as exists between a hen
and her chickens. The nature is identical, and, if suffered to
develope, each sect would become an imperial ecclesiasticism
like that which is governed from the Vatican.
Another result of attaching undue value to opinion is the
development of dogma from what was originally perhaps
simple and reasonable to what is complex metaphysical or
absurd. The Jews,
who did not at first hold this foolish
idea of being saved for their creed, never wanted any other
God but Jehovah, nor sought to define Him in riddles of
speech or to depict Him in any similitude until they caught
the infection from those who thought more of creed and wor
ship than of duty and love. But this dire necessity of con
ceiving rightly about God on pain of His everlasting
displeasure set men groping in the thick darkness among
mysteries of their own contriving. Nothing but metaphysical
definition would satisfy them. The native trustfulness of
heart towards the Good Spirit was gone, and in its place came
fear and trembling, and speculation; and, like drowning men
catching at straws, they invented first one and then another
god to keep company with the Supreme, and around every
fresh name were clustered webs and mazes of ever-deepening
perplexity, every item and detail of which must be held
faithfully and kept whole and undefiled, or “ without doubt
they should perish everlastingly.”
It would be impossible to believe unless the facts were un
disputed, that our Christian forefathers fought and wrangled,
and finally ruptured Christendom over the question whether
or not the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Son as well as
from the Father. The celebrated filioque dispute has never
been settled to this day, and it is more incredible still that
any one in the whole of Christendom should be found
�5
sufficiently antiquated to care a straw for the clause in
question.
But the Church of Rome (and the Church of England too)
damns to everlasting fire all who reject this diminutive
dogma. According to us and Rome, the whole Eastern
Church is under sentence of endless perdition, because she
rejects the statement of the double procession, and for good
reasons known to herself will not have fiilioque in her Nicene
Creed. 'The recent conference at Rome with the best inten
tions has nevertheless brought back the smile of contempt
to the faces of impartial spectators ofthe Churches’ squabbles.
If the voice of God out of Heaven could reach the solemn
meditators over this infinitesimal problem, saying, “ What
doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to do justly and
to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?” those
men whose minds and hearts are worthy of better themes
would quietly let that double procession fall under their
table, would let go one by one all the silly inventions which
led up to it and gave to it its grand but fictitious notoriety,
and would disband and go home impressed with the really
vital and tremendous questions on which the welfare of so
many millions of mankind is now hanging. They would say
in their quickened souls “While we have been mooning
over the procession of the Holy Ghost and the filioque, God
Himself is being eclipsed—the lamp of faith is dying out for
want of the oil of gladness, and the world is hastening into
the night of despair. While we were seeking for new
Shibboleths, and torturing language to call white black and
to affirm and deny the same proposition with one breath, the
voice of j oy and peace in believing is fading, fading away ;
and when men and women in their sadness call on us for
comfort, for one word to strengthen their failing faith, we
shall be dumb with astonishment and there will be no voice
nor any to answer.”
But why all this wanton waste of time, and toil and brain ?
Because they and the whole aggregate of Churches have been
taught to believe that on their believing rightly down to the
minutest dogma depend all their hopes of salvation. Hence
and hence only has arisen this scrupulousness about questions
inherently contemptible. Hence has come the utter neglect
�6
of the really important questions, the first and most necessary
foundations of all true religion ; and hence has sprung the
contempt into which religion has been plunged, and the still
wider indifference to it which has fallen like the sleep of
death over the most influential people in our land.
And I think they will bear me out if I speak apologeti
cally for them on this theme. They would most likely
say :—“We do not hate religion because it is good ; for
though we are mirthfully disposed and detest puritanism
and asceticism, we are men at heart. and have an eye for
what is pure and lovely quite as clear as yours. We should
not despise religion if the professors and teachers of religion
were only to talk a little sense and not treat us as if we
were babies. We should not despise it if the preachers were
to make some attempt to draw the line between what may
reasonably be inferred and what is too incredible to be
swallowed. We should not despise religion if it was more
natural and appealed to our common sense and better feel
ings, instead of giving us patent absurdities like the
Athanasian Creed, immoral and revolting dogmas like those
of the atonement and everlasting fire ; if they did not go
on asserting that ‘ it .the resurrection of Jesus as recorded in
the gospels be not true, then all that Christianity teaches is
a falsehood,’ or thatf if the gospels are not all true then Jesus
must have been an impostor and other foolish talk of the
same kind. We should not despise religion if men and
women—especially the clergy—did not quarrel over it so
much and manifest such bitterness, jealousy, -animosity, and
slander towards each other. We should not despise it, if
the poor preachers had a chance of speaking their honest
minds ; but if we go to church the parson must say what
he is bidden to say by the 39 Articles ; and if we go into a
chapel the minister must say only what he is bidden to say
by the congregation. We see, therefore, the whole system
made systematically insincere, and hollow; and without
reckoning the wearisome monotony of second-hand doctrines
repeated from Sunday to Sunday all the year round, we are
fairly disheartened by the conviction that the preachers are
all gagged and muzzled, and whether they believe what
they teach or not, we have no means of discovering. Finally,
�4
we despise religion because we are for ever being told that
it is wicked not to believe this, that, or the other ; and no
matter what we do or how we live we shall be damned if we
do not believe in the blood of Christ or submit ourselves to
the dictates of the church. We know better than that.
We have the sense to discern the malignity and injustice of
such an arrangement, even if our consciences did not tell
us that we shall be sure to have to pay the full penalty—
no more and no less than our sins deserve. We despise
religion too because they tell us not to use our reason ; that
it is impious to doubt or question any of their assertions or
the still more incredible assertions in their Bibles and
Prayer-books. We know that must be wrong, for if there
be a God and He has given us reason, without which we
cannot move one step in the discovery of what is right and
true, He must wish us to use our reasons in searching after
Him and in the discovery of His will; and that religion
carries its own condemnation which says it is wrong or
dangerous to think for oneself. This is why we despise
religion and will no more of it till the preachers talk sense
and are permitted freely to say what they really believe.”
Such, I believe is the testimony of the indifferent. In
some, indifference has been pushed to the extreme of active
hostility ; but the alienating cause is the same in either
case. These reflections, loose and fragmentory as they are,
should lead us to hope that true religion consistent with
common sense, with duty and with cheerfulness, is yet
possible to those who have been alienated by what bears the
sacred name of religion in our day. Men and women clo
love that which is good, are ready to believe that which is
true, are thankful to embrace hopes for the future which do
not outrage the intellect or demoralize the heart.
If there be a God in Heaven—and when I say “ if,” I do
not falter one moment in my grateful trust in Him—then
surely He will continue to draw to Himself the hearts of the
gentle and aspiring, the hearts -of the weary and careworn,
the hearts of the tempted and the enchained, the hearts of
the weak and the hearts of the strong; the young, the
prime, and the aged, those who toil and those who rest, the
sick and the dying. If God loves, He needs us as much as
�we need Him, or we should never have been here at all. If
He is as good as He is wise, He will not alter the hard path of
our lives to suit our discontent, however justifiable, nor sur
render into our childish, short-sighted control, the guidance
of our lives and destiny.
True religion must live, in spite of false religion, indiffer
ence, or hostility,—or this world will be turned into hell;
might will overcome right; aud every soul which survives
the catastrophe will in weeping and wailing and gnashing
of teeth cry out like Lucifer in his fall “ Evil be thou my
good.”
D. WILLIAMS & CO,, Printers, 14. Bisliopsgate Avenue, Camomile Street, E.G,
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The causes of irreligion. A sermon preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, September 5, 1875
Creator
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 8 p. ; 19 cm
Publisher
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D. Williams & Co.
Date
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[1875]
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G3390
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The causes of irreligion. A sermon preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, September 5, 1875), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/admin/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Subject
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Religion
Atheism
Belief and Doubt
Religion
-
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0ad360d75903ca25ae9873092564dc67
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Text
“SCIENCE AND RELIGION.”
JL SZEZHLMZOTST,
PREACHED AT
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM
PLACE, SEPTEMBER 20, 1874, BY THE
REV.
CHARLES
VOYSEY.
Tlie text was taken from J oh xi, 7, “ Canst thou by
searching find out God? ”
He said—After much hesitation, I have consented to speak
to you, my friends, on the Inaugural address recently de
livered before the British Association by Professor Tyndall.
It is scarcely necessary to explain that I hesitated to do
so partly through a diffidence which it is impossible to con
ceal, and partly because I shrink from the ridicule which I
should deserve if I came forward as Professor Tyndall’s
apologist or eulogist. . Such a man needs no defence, and for
a clergyman to patronize him would be to earn derision.
At the same time no one would lament more than the
Professor himself an excessively jubilant tone on the part of
either believers or unbelievers over his Address. He would
be equally displeased to hear the believer say “ Now we can
go on believing in God, because Professor Tyndall says we
may
and to hear the unbeliever say “ We have no souls
and there is no God, because Professor Tyndall has declared
in favour of materialism.” But despite all the great teacher’s
modesty and moderation, there will be many on both sides to
feel, if not to say, such silly things. Leaving this attitude
for the little-minded and shallow-headed, we are nevertheless
conscious of the great importance to our own times of an
ex cathedra declaration of the latest scientific conclusions. It
is of consequence to the world at large what such a Professor
may think and what he may say on such an august occasion.
And although the truly wise will never take any opinion, or
accept any inference, merely out of reverence for the speaker;
the speaker has a claim on the attention of the enlightened
world in proportion to his knowledge and his uprightness.
�I do not intend to review at any length, or with any
attempt at criticism, the Address with which I hope we are
all familiar. All I desire to do is to direct special attention
to certain striking points in it and especially to those which
have more bearing on religious questions.
At the outset, 1 own with pleasure that the oftener I read
the Address the more I like it and admire it. In the first
place it is delightfully honest, and, I am sure, that is no
small claim on our attention. It is of course full of learning
as one might expect, and will help to popularize the best
thought of our best men. Its tone is everywhere moderate
and generous, which ought to soften even the prejudices and
asperities of bigotry itself. And while the Professor declares
boldly his present convictions, and presumes that time and
further research will only strengthen them, he admits the
possibility of future modification, and leaves to us—as a
right not to be disputed—the field of religious enquiry, so
long as our researches therein shall not be pursued to the
injury or enslavement of the understanding.
I do not say that this concession was necessary, but it was
generous. The Professor had a perfect right to proclaim his
theory of materialism, to show how the doctrine of evolution,
amongst others, overthrows the popular conceptions of God
and the soul, and to have religion unnoticed. No one—
especially in the present jealous attitude of theology towards
science—could have blamed him for steering clear of all such
reefs and shoals. But it seems an act of consideration to
have admitted the existence of some kind of religious enquiry
which in the opinion of the speaker did no violence to the
claims of science. It was a condescension to opponents who
have hitherto done little to deserve tender treatment.
The most striking of what I may call the negative con
clusions of the Professor are these : First, that he secs no
necessity for a Creator ; the term Creator here being used in
the hitherto popular sense of the term. There is no room
in nature’s operations for the interference of the gods.
Secondly, that he can discover no soul in man, as the term
“ soul ” is popularly understood, or even as it is represented
by Bishop Butler under the figure of an operator using a
machine. Thirdly, with the popular idea of soul, personal
immortality also vanishes from his conception of human
destiny.
�3
Now if we bear in mincl that these negations are not put
forth as dogmas, but as inferences ; are not so much the con
clusions of scientific knowledge, as confessions of scientific
ignorance, we shall be able to examine them and to hear
them repeated without the least mental disturbance. They
are put forth much in this wise :—Science reveals that natural
laws and forces are sufficient to account for all phenomena.
Matter is and ever has been adequate to produce all that we
see and all that we are. The origin of matter is still undis
covered, and a great mystery still hangs over the mighty
past and present which is yet unsolved. Everything tends
to prove that matter existed from all eternity, and every atom
of it is everlasting. The perpetual changes in the combina
tion of molecules are enough by themselves to produce all
the varying forms of animate and inanimate existence.
Creation by jumps is out of the question. Origin of species
by caprice, or by independent exercises of a creative will, is
but a bungling method of explaining what is now perfectly
clear without any such Divine interference. Science does
not say there is no God at all ; but only says, There is no
room in the perfect self-sufficiency of matter for that
manipulating, contriving artificer of a God whom the ortho
dox world have called “ The Creator of the Universe.”
Now I wonder what there is in all this for any religious
man to take objection to ? As a firm and unshaken believer
in God, I have long been familiar with the modern scientific
conceptions of the universe, and my faith has never quailed
before them. Years ago, before a country congregation, I
preached the doctrine of the eternity of matter and suc
ceeded in showing my rustic hearers that there was no more
difficulty in believing that, than in believing the eternity of
God Himself—far less difficulty indeed than in believing
that God made everything or anything whatever out of
nothing. Our notions of God’s relation to matter might
change again and again, without our losing any assurance
of His Being and His Love.
Moreover, when Darwinism arose—instead of dismay—
wonder and admiration were awakened afresh at the mar
vellous wisdom of the world’s order. To have had a toad or
a snail for one’s grandsire only added to the awe and thank
fulness of feeling that one was a man and could worship Gocl!
It is what we are, and not whence we came or how we were
born, that should regulate our conception of Him.
�4
There is nothing whatever, then, in tlie first of these
negative propositions hostile to religions belief. On the con
trary, in so far as it of necessity relieves the idea of God
from unworthy conceptions, it is an aid to faith, and leads to
an exaltation of religious feeling.
The next proposition, that man has no soul independent of
his body and brain is at first sight a little more alarm
ing. But in the first place, science here only confesses she
cannot find a soul, and points somewhat triumphantly to
the utter absence of all mental or spiritual phenomena when
the brain is totally disabled by torpor or death. The evidence
is only what might have been expected. Even in life-time
we can give no demonstration of our own “soul” as it is
called ; nor receive any proof from others that they have
souls. Accepting entirely and frankly the hypothesis that
the so-called “soul” is only the product of a living brain,
(though how produced is admitted to be another great
mystery) yet there is no evidence forthccming that once
produced it is not immortal; that impressions made upon
the mind are not indelible somew/zere—the dissolution of
cerebral tissue notwithstanding. Hitherto Science has not
proved this negative, and, what is more to the purpose, we
do not expect to find that the most minute microscopical in
vestigations can ever reveal what we call the soul, or make
manifest to the senses what can only be found in an entirely
different region. As we cannot find God in matter, so we do
not expect to find the soul in man; though in each we may
detect, as it were, the footprints of a presiding ruler, and the
traces of a force which eludes our grasp.
While Life itself remains shrouded in an impenetrable
mystery, how can we dream of understanding even the
nature of a soul or God? The term “soul” is after all only
an apology for our ignorance. One of the commonest of
human weaknesses is to give a name to what no one under
stands. We so label some of our aches and pains, just to
distinguish one from another, but the name seldom throws
light on the nature of our malady. But whether it be named
or not, no man can rid himself of that thing, or aggregate of
things, or product of things, which is commonly called his
soul—himself—the source of his most solemn action, the
medium of his communion with other souls and with the
Father of all souls—God. That self, or soul, is a reality, while
�5
it lasts, and cannot be left out of linman consideration,
merely because we cannot weigh it in our scales or seize it
with our forceps. But I go further still and say, should it
ever be proved that the “soul” is material and God Himself
also material—in the sense understood by men of science
who include invisible gases, electric and magnetic phenomena
and the forces which produce them, under that term—I do
not think I should lose my faith in God or immortality. At
this present moment I have the impression that there is
something common between me and my God, some identity
of nature between Him and what I call my spirit, although I
do not know in the least degree what that nature is, or how
it differs from tangible matter. It is enough that I am, and
that I think invisible thoughts and feel imponderable
emotions towards one who corresponds, so to speak, with my
aspiration and sympathizes with my feeling. I did not make
myself thus. I accept the doctrine of Herbert Spencer on
this matter without reservation, and conclude that my
emotions are the result of the accumulated emotions of my
ancestors. Still Nature has made me thus, and—let my
soul and God be what they may, material or not—they meet
here in this life ; trust is inspired, and love follows trust, and
hope promises endless communion.
The apparent inadequacy of the means to the end is no
serious discouragement; for this is Nature’s way—from the
embryo, to the wisest of philosophers—her beginnings are
feeble and seemingly contemptible when contrasted with
her finished work. Of course we have no proof, nor as yet
can we get one, of a future so carefully veiled from our sight
and experience, and only opened to our imagination and
hope. But the change from the primal cell to the perfected
living man, is not less marvellous and a priori incredible,
than would be the production of an immortal soul from the
mortal brain. To leave, however, all speculation, we admit
and have admitted many times, that neither God, nor the
soul, nor immortality is as yet capable of demonstration
either by scientific or any other means ; and yet we believe.
In this address Professor Tyndall has said nothing ot a
negative character which, as true and firm believers in God
and immortality, we could not honestly endorse.
I now turn to those passages in the Address which may be
termed Concessions of Science to Religion,
�6
They may be summarized as follows :
(1) Physical science does not cover the whole ground of
man’s being, or exhaust the legitimate objects of his interest
and study.
(2) There is still behind Nature, and what we call Life,
a mystery, as yet unsolved.
(3) There is a kind of enquiry into this mystery involving
the exercise of religious emotions, which is not contrary but
supplementary to science.
With reference to the second of these important admissions
by Professor Tyndall, I need say very little, as there is no
controversy about it whatever. The more we really know,
the more we find there is to be learnt. And science herself
having made such vast explorations in our own times, in every
possible direction, admits with every fresh conquest, that
new fields yet untrodden are rising to view on every side.
It is the glory of science to recognize the limits beyond
which scientific investigation cannot pass. Those who have
reached the confines of knowledge in our own day, are the
first to confess that the mystery of mysteries lies yet under
an impenetrable veil. This of itself is justification enough
for proper religious enquiry, and ought to silence the scorn
of those who deride religious investigation as childish and
futile.
But in the other two concessions, the Professor goes much
further. To him the mystery is insoluble, and on that
account investigation may have been abandoned by him as
altogether fruitless. He is, however, not so narrow-minded
as to turn round upon others and forbid their searching into
the mystery, if they please. He has no words of ridicule
for those whose chief pursuit is in a field of enquiry, which, to
him, cannot be explored. So far from that, he announces,
almost at the outset, that “ Man never has been, and he
never will be satisfied with the operations and products
of the understanding alone ; hence, physical science cannot
cover all the demands of his nature." Later on, he says,
“ It comes to pass that, over and above his understanding
there are many other things appertaining to man, whose
prescriptive rights are quite as strong as that of the under
standing itself.” Amongst these rights, he ennumerates, the
exercise of awe, reference, love, and what he calls the “ deep
set feeling ” of humanity, that which <£ incorporated itself
into all the religions of the world.”
�7
“ You,” lie says, “ who have escaped from these religious
into the high and dry light of the understanding, may deride
them; but in so doing you deride accidents of form merely,
and fail to touch the immoveable basis of the religious senti
ment in the emotional nature of man. To yield this
sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of problems
at the present hour.”
I think you will agree with me that no rebuke, so just and
well-timed, has been administered to the fashionable Atheism
of the day from any pulpit in Christendom. Professor
Tyndall has discerned what has escaped less thoughtful
minds, that it has been the errors, the assumptions, and the
intolerance of the religions of the world, which have earned
the contemptuous rejection of the wise ; and not Religion
itself, which has been wrongly identified with its corrupt
forms and accessories.
It is to solve “ this problem of problems,” that we, my
friends, are bound together.
To yield to the religious
emotions a reasonable satisfaction. We have, each in his
own way, given up all for this. Despite our failures and dis
couragements, we hold our ground with a desperate determina
tion that we may hew out a path for others to walk in, and
by kindling a little twilight that others may usher in the day.
Our religion is nothing if it be not reasonable. Long ago
did we renounce that fatuous hostility to and dread of science
common to Theologians, knowing well that whatever science
might reveal, it would bring glory to the God of the whole
universe, and give us better for our worse, more truth for our
partial and dim perceptions—yes, and more ground for hope
that every thing that breathes was wrapped in the same
everlasting arms of Divine Love. We welcomed science as
our schoolmaster, and our constant guide to warn us from
the pitfalls of ignorance and superstition, to give us the
ballast of sober thought when enthusiasm or imagination
might tempt us to soar too high. We have nothing to fear
from science so long as she is true to herself and speaks the
plain truth. As plainly as words can speak, she bids the
seeker after God forego his fruitless search for demonstration
in the realm of matter, “ Why seek ye the living among the
dead ? He is not here, but He is risen—risen from your
earlier and false conceptions into a region where only the
spiritual eye can find Him.”
We were, indeed, on the
�wrong scent when we were mixing up our speculations on the
origin and formation of matter with our search for the living
(rod, and though we may use out of mere habit, or in
religious poetry, the term. “ Creator,” yet we have long since
abandoned the meaning of that term which science has con
demned. What may be G-od’s relation to matter must for a
long time remain an insoluble mystery, but this does not con
cern those who love Him, and strive to do His will, and trust
His constant goodness. We do not know what we ourselves
are—how much less can we know what God is 1 But we
know that “we love Him because He first loved us,” and
in that daily, hourly, most profound satisfaction, we have the
consent of our understandings that it is perfectly reasonable.
I will conclude with a fragment from Professor Tyndall’s
peroration, in which every one present will recognize the
spirit and aims of our own work.
“I would set forth equally the inexorable advance of man’s
understanding in the path of knowledge, and the unquench
able claims of his emotional nature, which the understanding
can never satisfy.
*
*
*
»
*
«
“And, if still unsatisfied, the human mind, with the
yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will turn to the
mystery from which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it
as to give unity to thought and faith—so long as this is done,
not only without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with
the enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of conception
is here unattainable, and that each succeeding age must be
held free to fashion the mystery in accordance with its own
-needs; then, in opposition to all the restrictions of
materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest
exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may
be called the creative faculties of man. Here, however, I
must quit a theme too great for me to handle, but which
will be handled by the loftiest minds ages after you and I,
like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the
infinite azure of the past.”
Carter & Williams, General Steam Printers, 14, Bisliopsgate Avenue, Camomile-street, E.C
�
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Science and religion: a sermon, preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, September 20, 1874
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 8 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 6.
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Morris Tracts
Science and Religion
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ORTHODOXY AND PANTHEISM
A SERMON,
PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM PLACE,
DECEMBER 29th, 1872, by the
REV. CHARLES VOYSEY.
On Sunday {Dec. 29tli) at St. George’s Hall, the Rev. C. Voyscy
took his text from the 2 Corinthians, iv. 13 v., “ We also believe,
and therefore speak.”
He said—In a splendid oration before the scholars of Liverpool
College, the Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone made an
appeal to his young hearers on behalf of the Christian religion,
warning them against the Pantheism which Dr. Strauss has
recently put forth, with all frankness and courage, in a book
entitled, “ The Old Belief and the New.”
We cannot but sympathise with the pious intention of this
warning, nor can we fail to admire the high and generous tone
which the speaker' adopted in reference to the great critic whose
opinions he deplored and denounced. The temper of the speech
was as perfect as its eloquence, and, although we may find grave
fault with some of the positions he assumed, we feel quite assured
that the speaker was honestly doing his very best for the moral
and religious interests of the youths before him, and that he was
only uttering forth the most cherished convictions of his own
heart.
In the interests of that very religion of the soul, which Mr.
Gladstone would defend with all the great powers of his mind and
tongue, we must, however reluctantly, bring to light some of the
mistakes into which he has fallen, and place the relations of
Orthodoxy and Pantheism in a new light.
I say, in the interests of time religion, we must do this; for
whether Orthodoxy be true or false, there are thousands of Orthodox
people who are truly religious, who are living lives of earnest
faith and. love towards the highest God they can conceive, and
while they thus live (kept back by some cause or other, not of
�their own fault, from rising into a higher conception) they are
truly religious; and God above, whom the best and wisest of us
know so imperfectly, will surely say of them all “ They have done
what they could, it is not their fault if they have done no more.”
So far as the words we are considering were spoken by a truly
religious man, we must sympathise with him in his repudiation of
Dr. Strauss’ Pantheism. The learned critic declares his Pantheism
with a plainness of speech which commands our gratitude. He
says, “There is no personal God; there is no future state;. all
religious worship ought to be abolished. The very name of Divine
service is an indignity to manInstead of God he offers to us
what he calls the All or Universum., This All or Universum has
neither consciousness nor reason. But it has order and law. Now
Dr. Strauss might be right or wrong. We are not now discussing
the question, we only contrast this Pantheism with the devout
language of our own hearts ; and it is no stretch of enthusiasm to
say the contrast is as between darkness and light—Heaven and
Hell. We who utterly believe in a God who has both reason and
consciousness, in One who knows all about the past, present, and
future of every one of us; in One who really love us each and all
with a fatherly and motherly affection, and who has . taught ms to
look up to Him, and love and trust Him, and seek to do His will,
foi’ the sole satisfaction of doing it; we to whom good and illfortune, health and disease, life and death, are all ministers of His
Divine will to work only for our good; we, who thus believe, should
be plunged into the outer darkness of despair if Dr. Strauss’
Pantheism were true. You may put out a man’s eyes and sentence
bim to livelong night, but in the dreary gloom there come sweet
voices of loving friends, gentle hands to make sure the companionsliip, and to guide the steps, and beams of Heavenly sunshine to
warm the chill blood in his veins, and tell him that the glorious
light still shines on. But if you put out the eyes of a man’s soul,
who across that nethermost abyss can reach him with a word of
hope, or melt the frozen fog in which his spirit is imprisoned ? The
darkness of night is as clear as noon-day compared with the
blackness of despair when the light of the soul has been put out.
But to feel this horror, in all its intensity, you must once have
known what it is to see God, and to live joyously in his presence.
To be born blind is not to suffer l,OOOth part so much as to have
ones had eyesight and lost it. The Pantheist or Atheist is almost
�always one who never was truly religious, who never did really
believe in God at all. Now and then you find exceptions of those
who have lived in the blaze of Heavenly sunshine, and then
suffered a total eclipse of faith, and as far as my experience goes
such sufferers have nearly lost their reason, and some have put an
end to their torture by suicide.
I do not wonder, then, at the earnestness with which Mr. Glad
stone pleaded with those young people not to go too near that
awful precipice. I think that passionate fear for their safety
justified him in warning them of their peril.
If we have nothing but unconscious unreasoning Universum,
we have no God. Its boasted order and law are cruel and inex
orable. Nay, rather they can have no moral significance to the
moral beings who are tortured by their caprice. Without the
heart of man to reflect the heart of God, the order and laws
manifested in the phenomena around us chiefly tell of reckless
disregard of human feeling and utter negligence of cieature happi
ness. What is it to me to be told that the greatest number are
happy, when I may be one of the wretched few whose life is a
torment ? Take away God, and the whole creation is cursed—not
a single solution left of all its malignant riddles, not a grain of
hope left at the bottom of nature’s infernal gifts. Its very joys
mock us; it sweetest pleasures grind to ashes as we taste them.
But oh! with just one gleam from Heaven, refracted from the poor
dull broken mirror of the heart of man; what light and joy
spring forth ; how all the woes of earth are relieved, how its most
suffering victims are pillowed on a mother’s breast, how its worst
despair is conquered by the feeblest hope! If we only believe in
One just a little better than ourselves, a Heavenly voice goes through
the world cheering the drooping souls on its way with the celestial
song, “ Glory to God in the Highest, on Earth there shall yet be
peace, for all is goodwill to man.” And they hear a voice
behind them saying, “ Fear not, for I am with thee. Be not
dismayed, for I am thy God. I will help thee. Yea, I will
strengthen thee, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my
righteousness.”
I must pause for a moment to explain what we mean by a
“personal” God. We use this term only in contrast to Pantheism,
It is commonly taken to imply a God in some form or other, possibly
hunian. But of course that is not the sense in which we use it,
�4
We mean by it only the individual self-conscious existence of God,
which enables him to say Ego et non-Ego—T and the Universe, [
and you. However mysterious and subtle the connexion may be
between God and matter, yet we believe God is able to say “I and
matter,” that he is able to think, and to will, and to love. This is
why we speak of a “ personal ” God, even while we have not the
remotest anthropomorphic conception of the mode of His existence,
or of the nature of His substance or essence.
To return to Mr. Gladstone’s speech. The safeguard against
Pantheism or Atheism which he proposes, is to hold fast “the
faith once delivered to the Saints,” viz., “Belief in the Deity and
Incarnation of our Lord.” These he describes as “ the cardinal
and central truths of our religion,” “confessed by many more than
ninety-nine in every hundred Christians.”
With quite as deep a horror of Atheism as he has, we neverthe
less demur altogether to his antidote, and we will give our reasons
for it.
First, in passing, we may well question whether the Deity and
Incarnation of Jesus was the faith once delivered to the Saints, or
the belief of the Apostles rhemselves. But as it is a matter of
no consequence whatever, except to the critics, we pass on at once
to give our reasons for demurring to the efficacy of the safeguard
proposed.
1st. Mr. Gladstone seems to us to make his first mistake in
identifying a belief in the Deity and Incarnation of Jesus with
religion. You will, perhaps, remember in my recent sermons on
“ Faith: Intellectual and Emotional” how I endeavoured to shew
that Intellectual Faith was not only not essential to religion, but,
for the most part, calculated to weaken and destroy religious
emotion. I will not go over this ground again, but I can quite
understand Mr Gladstone identifying the two things which are
radically distinct, because all his own religious emotion has been
derived, in the first instance, from impressions connected with the
Christian doctrines, and they are now practically bound up
together. That is, the historical Jesus, of whom his Church and
his Testament speak, has become to him a God in Heaven, and the
personal solace of his own soul. He cannot enter into the
feelings of the Jew who, while looking upon Christ as only one of
his countrymen and a mere man, lifts up his soul to Jehovah in
the words of the Old Psalmist, “ Whom have I in Heaven but
�3
Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of
Thee.” To a votary of Mary or of Jesus, the religious man of
another creed is an inscrutable enigma, he is an object of pity ;
considered to be only a poor lame or blind traveller in a wrong
road, who shall be dealt with mercifully, if at all mercifully,
because he was ignorant; and so the real religious element which
is to be found in men and women of all creeds is thought, by all
in turn, to be peculiar to their own creed.
Mr. Gladstone’s creed may be true or false. Whether it be one
or the other, true religion is to be found connected with all creeds.
But we demur to this safeguard on another ground, viz., that it
is a belief resting solely on external authority, and not on the
reason, conscience, and love of the human soul. Any religion
coming to us on such terms, claiming belief in external authority,
must expect to have its claims challenged, its witnesses crossexamined, its authority sifted.
Now-a-days we cannot expect men and women to believe the
Deity of Christ because Mr. Gladstone believes it, or because
others before him, not a bit more entitled to credit on such a
subject, believed it. The appeal to antiquity is vain, for it proves
too much; it proves Brahminism, Judaism, Buddhism, and ever
so many things, false as well as true. Dr. Strauss himself, the
master of modern criticism, has examined these historical claims
for Christianity, and found them wanting. He began, no doubt
as many begin, by thinking that the only God in Heaven was the
God revealed in the Bible, and when he found that the Bible told
falsehoods, and that the image of God, in some places therein
described, was a foul image, to be hated and not loved by man, he
ceased to believe in God at all. He cannot have had any religion,
as we understand it, apart from his intellectual conceptions of the
Divine Being, as drawn from the Old and New Testaments,
interpreted by the Church, or else his belief in God would have
survived the shock of his discovery. But having no idea of God,
apart from what he had been taught, he came to the only logical
conclusion—that there was no God at all. Dr. Strauss will pardon
me if I have misread his experience; but it is that of thousands
and thousands. It is not merely natural, it is inevitable.
The same process is going on around us in all the religious
bodies of this country. So far as men and women have been
taught that their Bibles and Churches are the only means of
�G
knowing anything about God, so far, when they discover, as they
inevitably must, the falsehoods and errors, and impieties of their
Bibles and creeds, will they become Atheists, or Positivists, or
believers in Dr. Strauss’ unconscious Universum. Put a Bible
into a man’s hand and say to him “ This is God’s Holy Word. It
is all true, and right, and good.” If he have no religion indepen
dent of what he gets out of that book, resting on its authority
alone, then as soon as its authority is shaken, or his eyes open to
see its falseness and immorality, he loses his religion entirely, and
has no alternative at first but to make a frantic effort to swallow
it all down without another moment’s reflection, or to turn his
back on it for ever, and perhaps to sink down into the torpor and
misery of Atheism.
f
It is, therefore, not only the Christian creeds, but the Christian
method of imposing them on the acceptance of men which is to
blame for Pantheism and Atheism. You churches have done it;
You Christian Evidence champions, in your mistaken zeal; You
sticklers for dogma; You believers in moral and physical monstrosi
ties ; You slave-bound idolaters of the traditions of antiquity. It is
you that have slain these poor souls, or shut them up in the dun
geons of despair. It is on your heads that the blood of these
victims will fall, and it cries up out of the ground for vengeance
at the hands of the living God. No, not for such vengeance as
your Bible teaches, 11 a fearful looking-for, ©f fiery indignation, to
consume the adversaries ”—not that; but for the plucking up, and
tearing down, and ruthless burning of your false creeds, which are
only cruel when they are not childish and silly. All these thou
sands and thousands of stray souls, driven out by your curses from
green pastures into a waste howling wilderness—these bear witness
against you, that when they asked you for bread you gave them
only a stone; when they sought the Lord God who made them,
you set before them a fierce and burning savage, more awful than
Moloch, and then tried—but vainly—to shade his hideous image
by the Cross of Calvary; when they wanted the eternal, you gave
them only the temporal; whenthey panted for the living God, you
gave them only a dying man. Oh ! shame on your cowardice,
your childish fears, which bind you to these old wives’ fables, and
make you an incubus on the face of God’s fair earth. You make a
darkness where all ought to be light, and would be light too, but
for your crypts and cells. You make desolation where joy and beauty
�f
ought to flourish, and the songs of the happy fill the spacious air.
Is there no revelation of God in men’s own hearts, that you must
needs read solemnly your ancient tales of magic and Incarnation,
and tell them this is God’s only visit to earth, his one only con
descension to the children of men ? Does not my heart, from its
lowest depths, scorn a boon so rarely, so grudgingly, so partially
given, when I have my God with me, and about my
path and about my bed by night and by day, healing
all mine infirmities, saving my innermost life from destruction,
and crowning me with mercy and loving kindness ? What
Incarnation or Deified prophet can bring God so near to me
as he is now, has ever been, and always will be ? To make
me believe your old story would be to darken all my soul, and
drive me, as it has driven thousands, to blank despair. But
what if, besides this story of the Incarnation, your gospels and
creeds drive me to believe in the damnation of unbelievers, and
in the eternal wrath of your crucified God ? Can you expect
me to keep my reason, not to say my religion, in the presence
of such a nightmare as that? Oh, if you would really save
your young men and maidens from that horrible despair of
hcpeless Atheism, in the name of God I charge you to take from
them their Bibles and Cathechisms, and tear out those horrible
leaves which tell such awful and blasphemous falsehoods to the
dishonour of God, and the discredit of Christ. If you would have
them grow up to be religious, keep far from them the sight and sound
of those very things which you prize most dearly as “ the cardinal
and central truths ” of your religion. The new world, taught by
science, and it is to be hoped by a standard of morality not
lower than the present, will laugh at your story of the miraculous
birth, will grow impatient at the blindness of any who will
think the Incarnation a great act of God’s love and condescension,
and will become indignantly deaf to the enchantments of any
one who dares to follow up your antiquated legends with threats
of hell-fire everlasting, if they do not believe them. Take it home
to your heart while you are still earnest to serve God, that you
are doing his cause and his children infinite wrong by persisting
in enforcing your absurd creed upon an age which has well-sifted
its pretensions, and thus driving all restless souls from one extreme
of a paralysing superstition to the other extreme of a blank and
hopeless infidelity.
�But there is yet hope for men and women in this world if the
croning churches will but hold their peace. In the hearts of the
young are strains of Heavenly music, which will lure them on into
paths of holiness and peace, if the sounds be not overwhelmed by
the threats of the creeds. “ My son give me thine heart ” is no
pretty fiction of fabulist or poet; but a great multitude, whom no
man can number, have heard that celestial entreaty and have cast
themselves into the Father’s everlasting arms, Tell them far and
wide, over the whole earth, “ God is Love.” “ God is Just.”
“God is Holy.” Use what terms you will to express all that is
noblest and highest—only, “ Speak good of his name.” Dishonour
it not by your old fables. Blaspheme it not by your Bible
curses. “ Speak good of His name.” “ 0, let your songs be
of Him, and praise Him.” “Let your talking be of all His won
drous works.” “ Be telling of His righteousness and salvation
from day to day.” And then surely you will find even the young
ones more ready to embrace the holy joy, more willing to learn
more about so great and good a God; and then the poor Atheists,
too, whom your false creeds have blighted, will perchance come
back, as many have done already, under the genial rays of such a
gospel, and begin to believe in very earnest what their hearts had
so long told them was “ too good to be true.” Let it never be
forgotten that there is a third alternative between Orthodoxy and
Pantheism, a true religion of love and trust towards God, and of
love and duty towards men, without Bible, or dogma, or church ;
without Christ, or Paul, or John. And as it is most certainly true
that Orthodoxy must fall when you take away from its foundations
the bottomless pit of hell fire, so it is true that, so long as man is
man, his faith will survive the ruin of the churches, and the
burning of creeds and Bibles; and as the ages roll on, he will
wondei- not that he can walk so well without these long disused
props and crutches, but that he could ever have borne at all
such frightful and dangerous impediments to his communion with
God.
If I have spoken too fiercely, I must say “ my zeal hath even
consumed me.” I may be reproached for “pride and perverseness,”
but I am not ashamed of being proud to bear witness for the
noblest conception of God ever held by mortal man, noi’ ashamed
of a perverseness which refuses to be made the slave of foolish
ness, or the accomplice of Atheism.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Orthodoxy and pantheism. A sermon preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, December 29th, 1872
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Tracts 6.
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[s.n.]
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[1872]
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Pantheism
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Morris Tracts
Orthodoxy
Pantheism
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the Itebibaliste’
or is it Jfatee?
JL SEPuMOlV,
PREACHED
AT
ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LANGHAM
PLACE, APRIL 25, 1875,
REV.
CHARLES
BY THE
VOYSEY.
Psalm CIII., 9. u He will not alnay be chiding, neither
keepeth he his anger for every
Y task this morning is anything but easy and
pleasant; and at its outset I ask for a fair and
candid weighing of my words, as in the face of God
I desire to say nothing but the simple truth. I have under
taken to make some answer to the all-important question, Is
the Gospel preached by Messrs. Moody and Sankey true, or
is it false ? The issues which depend on this alternative are
enormous, whether we consider them in their bearing on our
own individual destiny or as affecting the welfare of all man
kind. On such a momentous theme, it is not merely foolish
but heinous to halt between two opinions.
The documents from which I draw the particular state
ments of this Gospel are (1.) An elaborate account of the
New Evangelists published by Ward, Lock and Tyler, and
B
Rev. C. Voysey's sermons are to be obtained at St. George's
Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden
House, Dulwich, S.E. Price one penny, postage a halfpenny.
�2
sold at every railway book-stall in the kingdom. (2.) The
book of Hymns and Songs used in the revival services. (3.)
Two pamphlets containing many sayings of Mr. Moody’s,
collated by the Bev. A. S. Herring, with the object of getting
subscriptions for a Church which he is hoping to build. (4.)
The various reports of his sermons which have appeared in
the newspapers.
On every ground, I would not for the world misrepresent
the doctrines I am about to attack; and I emphatically
repeat my conviction that these men thoroughly believe what
they say, and think they are doing God service.
I go further still, and say that they are far more consistent
in making all this stir than the thousands of clergy who hold
pretty nearly the same opinions and yet make comparatively
but little effort to rescue their brethren from perdition.
Now, what is their great theme, the key-note of all their
preaching and the essence of all their hymns ? It is Jesus.
In their own language, it is “ The old old story, of Jesus and
his love.” And in order to get at the kernel of their Gospel,
it will be necessary to raise a few questions.
1. Who is this Jesus?
2. In what was his love for man manifested ?
3. What benefit did his work on earth procure ?
4. How came man to be in need of that benefit which
they call salvation ?
5. Was it God, or was it the Devil, whose wrath was
pacified by Christ’s death ?
6. What is the penalty for disbelieving “the old old
story ? ”
I think when we have answered these questions in the
exact sense, if not always in the exact words, of the
Revivalists, we shall have before us a clear conception of what
they teach.
1. Who is this Jesus?
Nothing less than Almighty God; infinite and eternal
God. Only trustworthy as a Saviour because he is God ;
one of their hymns contains these two lines :—
�3
“ 0 Jesus the crucified ! Thee will I sing,
My blessed Redeemer, my God and my King.”
So entirely is this taken for granted, that seldom in the
sermons is any reference made to a contrary opinion. The
Revivalists—much to their credit—never touch scholastic
theology at all. I do not suppose the doctrine of the Trinity
ever enters their heads; but they undoubtedly believe in the
true Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy
Ghost. When they go to Heaven they expect to meet, face
to face, God the Father and God the Son, as distinct as any
two persons on earth; though why they never speak hopefully
of seeing also God the Holy Ghost, I have not been able to
discover. At all events our first question needs no further
reply. They believe that Jesus is a God—God’s Eternal Son.
We turn next to the fact that nearly all their songs and
sermons are upon the love of Jesus. It is only just to say
that in quantity and emphasis this theme predominates
over every other, and may be called the cardinal doctrine of
their Creed. The question then to be next answered is,
2. In what was the love of Jesus manifested ?
It was in taking upon himself a human form and then
dying upon the cross that he might thus bear the whole
weight of the punishment due to the sins of mankind.
A hymn entitled Substitution, gives an exact answer to
our question :
“ 0 Christ, what burdens bowed thy head I
Our load was laid on Thee ;
Thou stoodest in the sinner’s stead,
Didst bear all ill for me.
A victim led, Thy blood was shed,
Now there’s no load for me.
Death and the curse were in our cup—
O Christ, ’twas full for Thee!
But thou hast drained the last dark drop—
’Tis empty now for me.
That bitter cup—Love drank it up ;
Now blessings’ draught for me.”
This is only one specimen out of scores that I could quote.
The whole Hymn Book rings with the same note. Let us
ask in passing, Who can wonder at men loving Jesus, if
Jesus so loved men ? His heart inust be a heart of stone
�4
who could withhold his love and gratitude for such a
deliverance!
The third question, “ What benefit did his work on earth
procure ? ” is partly answered by the hymn just quoted. The
benefit is two-fold (a) the cancelling of a debt due by the
sinner, the release from a sentence of eternal woe; and (6)
the peace of mind which the knowledge of that cancelling or
release brings with it. Sinners are not only set free from an
awful penalty, but they are delivered from their fears of it,
and are assured of everlasting happiness instead of everlasting
misery.
To quote again from the Hymns :
“ Your many sins are all forgiven,
Oh hear the voice of Jesus ;
Go on your way in peace to heaven,
And wear a crown with Jesus.
All glory to the dying Lamb!
I now believe in Jesus;
I love the blessed Saviour’s name,
I love the name of Jesus.
His name dispels my guilt and fear
No other name but Jesus;
Oh how my soul delights to hear
The blessed name of Jesus! ”
Who, I ask again, can wonder at such absorbing regard
for Jesus, if the “ old old story ” be true?
I pass on to the fourth question, “ How came man to be in
need of that benefit which they call Salvation ? ”
Here again, as in the matter of the Godhead of Jesus, we
find very little information. The preachers studiously avoid
controversy unless it be forced upon them. They take for
granted that their hearers believe already that they are lost
and doomed through Adam’s fall and their own trans
gressions ; and that for these sins they deserve to be cast
into an endless hell. One hymn certainly contains the
doctrine :
“ God loved the world of sinners lost
And ruined by the fall;
Salvation full at highest cost
He offers free-to all.
0 ’twas love, ’twas wondrous love,
�5
The love of God to me ;
It brought my Saviour from above
To die on Calvary.”
But though the repulsive doctrine of the curse against
mankind for the sin of our first parents, and the still more
awful sentence of everlasting torments, are not obtrusively
prominent in either sermons or hymns, the preachers rest
upon these frightful tenets just as much as they do on the
Godhead of Jesus. Their preaching would be sheer nonsense
if the story of the fall and the doom of mankind and the
reality of hell-fire were to be by them for one moment
doubted. All their rapture for Jesus and their songs to his
love turn upon the supposed reality of this awful curse from
which he is believed to have saved them. Salvation, on their
lips, is the correlative of eternal damnation ; the former has
no meaning in their theology without the latter. In a sermon
Mr. Moody says, “ I believe in the old-fashioned hell, if I did
not believe in hell for ever, would I come here to preach
night after night ?” Indeed it is here chiefly that their move
ment deserves the name of a Revival, inasmuch as the doctrine
of a lost and ruined race, of an everlasting fire for the
damned was rapidly dying out and the belief in it con
siderably modified. The theology of Mr. Maurice and his
school has shaken also the belief in substitution. If the
Revivalists produce any desired effect on their hearers, it will
be to restore these horrible doctrines to the position' which'
they have recently 1-ost, and to excite afresh fears which were
nearly quelled. I am therefore not misrepresenting them
when I affirm that the doctrines of the fall and the conse
quent doom of mankind to endless, hopeless, misery lie at
the very foundation of their Gospel th at . Je sus came and
died to save us.
The fifth question, Was it G id, or was it the Devil whose
wrath was pacified by Christ’s death? may be readily
answered by some more verses of a hymn already quoted:
“ Jehovah lifted up his rod—
0 Christ, it fell on Thee !
•
Thou wast sore stricken by thy God,
There’s not one stroke for me.
Thy tears, Tby blood, beneath it flowed ;
Thy bruising healeth me.
�6
Jehovah hade His sword awake—
0 Christ, it woke ’gainst Thee!
Thy blood the foaming blade must slake;
Thy heart its sheath mnst be—
All for my sake, my peace to make;
Now sleeps that sword for me,”
If any further reply to this question be needed, we have
only to turn to Mr. Moody’s sermon on “ The Blood,” which
seems tto have been elicited by a letter he had received
asking, “ If believing in Christ’s death or the shedding of
His blood as an atonement for sin, be the only way by which
a sinner can be saved, how is it that Christ himself never
spoke of it in that way ?, nor do we find it mentioned in the
Acts of the Apostles as the Gospel preached to the Gentiles.”
Mr. Moody, in reply to this letter “ wondered how this per
son had read his Bible. God helping him he would answer
the question, because he believed that the Blood was the
foundation of all their hopes. Take the Blood out of the
Bible and he would not carry it home. That book did not
teach anything else. For the last 4,000 years it has been
telling the one story that man was saved by the Blood. The
first glimpse they caught of the Blood was in the 21st verse
of the 3rd Chapter of Genesis, in which it was stated that
unto Adam and his wife the Lord made coats of skin. Skins
could not have been got from animals without the shedding
of blood. In the next chapter it was stated that Abel
brought of the firstlings of his flock, and that the Lord had
respect for Abel’s offering, but no respect for the offering of
Cain. Why ? Because there was no Blood in it. Abel came
to God according to God’s way. Cain came in his own way.
He was like a great many who were saying now, What
have I to do with blood : Why can I not come in my own
way ; if I do about as nearly right as I can, will it not be
all right with me ? Cain did not see why his beautiful fruit
should not have been more acceptable than a bleeding lamb,
which was repulsive to him ; but Abel came by way of Blood,
and his offering was accepted. There were a great many
Cainites now who did not like the doctrine ; but he challenged
them to find in the Bible any other way to Heaven save by
Blood. There was no doctrine that the world attacked so
much as that of the Blood ; but the more the world assailed
him (Mr. Moody) about it, the more thoroughly he was con
�7
vinced he was right. The whole Bible went the moment this
doctrine was touched. It was a terrible thing for a man to
speak contemptuously out of any pulpit of the doctrine of
Blood ; and he did not know when be was more shocked than
when he heard a minister of the Gospel in Dublin say of the
doctrine of the precious Blood of Christ that it was the doc
trine of the shambles. It was horrible—damnable. Might
God keep them from trampling the Blood of Christ under
foot! ”
There can be no doubt then on this head. It was the
wrath of God and not the wrath of the Devil that was
appeased by the Blood of Christ.
The sixth and last question is one that must have some
little interest for us, Cl What is the penalty for disbelieving
the old old story ? ”
Again a verse of a hymn shall be our answer :
“ But if you still this call refuse,
And. all His wondrous love abuse,
Soon will He sadly from you turn,
Your bitter prayer for pardon spurn.
‘ Too late 1 too late ! ’ will be the cry,
Jesus of Nazareth has passed by.”
“ Almost persuaded, harvest is past,
Almost persuaded, doom comes at last
‘ Almost ’ cannot avail;
‘ Almost ’ is but to fail!
Sad, sad, that bitter wail—
‘ Almost ’—but lost"
il A Terrifying death-bed.—A man had often been lovingly
warned, but no heed was taken. The unexpected messenger
showed itself. The agonising soul cried aloud, “ The har
vest is passed, the summer is ended, and I am not saved I ”
(Jeremiah viii. 20.) Weaker, he said it a second time ; in
a very faint whisper he again breathed it out, and instantly
expired. Yes, my dear unsaved friends, he died a Christless death, was wrapped in a Christless shroud, was put into
aChristless coffin, and lowered into a Christless grave.”
In a sermon entitled For or against Christ; this night or
never, Mr Moody said “ he believed thousands were
trembling in the balance between heaven and hell. Every
�8
one of them’ must decide the question for themselves
That very hour they would receive Him and be saved, or
reject Him and be damned.”
This is a pleasant prospect for you and me, and I think
our anxiety to test the truth needs no apology. If it be
true, we are 11 in a parlous state ” instead.
I pause herefor one moment to gather up in the fewest possible
words the Gospel which these revivalists preach, that there may
be no mistake as to what we are about to attack. All man
kind were doomed for the sin of our first parents, and for
our subsequent sins, to everlasting woe. God was so angry
with men, that, but for Christ he would have sent them all
to hell. Christ, however, came down to earth and shed His
blood; God looked at the Blood and was satisfied. He
accepted the sufferings and death of Christ instead of the
everlasting sufferings of mankind, but only on one condition,
viz :—that men should accept it on their parts as He had
done on His part—should take it and believe it and be ,
thankful. Then they should be forgiven, and saved, and go
to heaven; but that if they did not believe it, they should
be damned after all, and Christ himself would turn against
them, become their fierce judge, and in the words of Mr
Moodythey would be lost for all eternity.”
Now, until very lately this has been the main Creed of
Christendom. Of course each church or sect adds somethingto it of its own. But they all agree in a lost and doomed
race, a dying, and bleeding God, and a salvation all owing to
Him. Messrs Moody and Sankey are only giving us the old
story of orthodox Christianity, the message of the greater
part of the New Testament, the “ the Gospel once for all
delivered to the saints.” They are now saying in striking
and novel language what the whole Church and aggregate
of Churches (except the Unitarian) have been saying ever .
since the day of Penticost. So when we challenge the truth
of their Gospel, we are challenging what the whole world
recognizes as the Christian Faith, which, however erroneously
it may be claimed to be based on the authority and teaching
of Jesus himself, is commonly called Christianity. Moreover,
it strangely shows itself as the common element in all the
divisions of Christendom, except the Unitarian. A revival
�9
of this Faith would be a revival of universal Christianity in
which every church and sect would share. No one calling
himself an orthodox Christian ought to breathe a word of
complaint against Messrs Moody and Sankey’s doctrines.
I now proceed to analyse this Gospel, and shew the grounds
on which I impugn it and declare it to be false.
May I not lay down as axioms that no doctrines can be
true which are based on a primary falsehood; and that every
proposition must be false which declares or implies that
God is unjust? I pass then from the structure of this
Gospel to the very foundation, and analyse the cardinal
assumption on which it all rests. It is over and over again
repeated that God cursed all mankind with an exceedingly
bitter curse and sentenced the whole of our race to endless
torments in hell, as a punishment for sin.
There is no shadow of doubt that nearly the whole of
Christendom has imputed to God this sentence of doom.
In spite of all they say about His love for lost sinners in
sending His Son to save them, there the awful charge stands
arrayed against Him. of having pronounced this;most unjust
and cruel sentence. He, the Maker of all things made this
pit of everlasting fire for the endless torment of his frail
creatures. We need not think of its matchless cruelty, but
only ask Was it just and right? Did man deserve such an
awful fate ? I demand an answer to this question from every
minister who preaches to me the Gospel of Salvation by
Christ. I claim to be told on what grounds of eternal
justice, even the most awful sin which man or devil could
commit, can be punished with endless, hopeless woe without
a chance of repentance ? Even if the sinner had been born
absolutely perfect, with fullest measure of reason and moral
power, in sovereign command of every faculty, and had
entered into solemn contract with the Almighty to do His
bidding without fault or wavering, and had, in spite of these
overwhelming advantages and responsibilities, set his
Maker at defiance and drawn a host of his fellows into
rebellion—even then, I say, a Being who had the power
over him, and who had the right of vengeance, would be a
fiend of the blackest dye if he condemned that rebel to neverending torture. But how awfully aggravated is the injustice
�10
ascribed to God in the damnation of a creature like man.
Putting aside the use of Adam and Eve as exceptional, the
whole of their posterity were born weak and sinful, and more
ready for evil than for holiness. Nay, the Gospellers are
never weary of expatiating on our total depravity by nature,
and our utter inability to keep the laws of God. And yet
they dare to say of the most Holy and Righteous God that
He has doomed us frail sinners to everlasting Hell, in order
that the Majesty of His Law might be vindica
ted !
I demand an answer from these preachers ; Is
this right and just?
Is it conduct which the
Old Testament at all events bids us imitate ? Is it
not the exact opposite of that mercy and love which their
God Jesus is believed to have shown? Further, the damna
tion so unjust as against frail sinners is more unjust still as
against unbelievers ; for men cannot control their beliefs,
they must believe as they are convinced, and this is an in
tellectual process over which they can exercise little or no
control. Indeed, there is everything to induce them to
believe, for the Gospel says they will escape the awful
damnation and win an endless bliss if they will only believe
it; therefore if anyone refuses to believe, it is because he
cannot help it. So whether the doom of hell be pronounced
against sinners, as sinners, for their own and Adam’s trans
gression, or against unbelievers for their unbelief, it is a
monstrous and inexpressible injustice ; and all the sins of
the whole world piled up together are righteousness itself—
are as white as snow—compared with the infamy, the black
hearted fiendishness of sending one soul to perdition.
The doctrine of hell, then, is in our view the most fearful
blasphemy which can be spoken against God, and therefore
it cannot be true. Therefore, since it is absolutely false,
mankind are not, nor ever were, in danger of eternal damna
tion ; never needed the salvation which these preachers pro
claim ; therefore they did not need Jesus or anyone else—
God or man—to bear their punishment in their stead; if there
was no hell to be saved from, they wanted no saviour; if
there was no burning wrath of Jehovah against them, they
needed no mediator to slake it; if no death nor curse were
in their cup, they needed no Christ to drink its bitter draught.
The dying love of Jesus, and the precious Blood flowing to
�11
hide men’s guilty stains from the eye of the Christian
Moloch, are all a myth, a pure fable, as little worthy of
credit as the labours of Hercules or the banquet of Thyestes.
And it is not our fault that we utter this unwelcome rejection
of their Gospel. It is theirs and theirs alone. They have
put into our hands this very weapon to strike at the vitals of
their Gospel. They have kept on telling us that Christ
came to save the lost; that he would not have come at all,
but to rescue us out of the burning pit of destruction, and so
we have only to echo their ’ words and to shew the helpless
falsehood of their whole Gospel by exposing the utter
falseness and impiety of the fundamental assumption on
which the whole fabric is based. This conclusion was long
foretold by the orthodox themselves. The very first time
that the eternity of Hell-fire was questioned, they murmured
in sorrow and fear that if that went, Christianity would soon
follow. A Bishop once told me that if I did away with
everlasting Hell, there would be no ground for the atonement,
and if the atonement were needless, so also was the Incarna
tion and so too were all the miraculous events of Christ’s life
and death. He was quite right. He had been at the Bar and
knew how to reason. I deliberately therefore denounce the
Gospel according to Messrs. Moody and Sankey, and the
prevailing teaching of Christendom, as utterly false and
fabulous, resting entirely on a proposition inherently untrue,
because it charges God with the most wicked of crimes and
the most cruel injustice.
Time forbids me to say more to-day. I only wish that
this challenge or one of a similar kind may be sent to these
popular preachers and by them fairly met and answered. If
they are in earnest, as we may well believe, they will surely
find it to the interest of their cause to meet and not to evade
this challenge, to look again at the very foundation stone of
their religion, lest the whole fabric fall unawares upon
themselves and their deluded followers, and in its fall may
crush and bury all the good and pure and lovely thoughts
which, in spite of its falsehoods, still cluster around lt the old
old story of Jesus and his love.”
�LONDON:
CARTER & WILLIAMS, Steam Printers, 14, Bishopsgate Avenue,
Camomile-street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Is the revivalists's gospel true, or is it false?. A sermon preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, April 25, 1875
Creator
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Voysey, Charles [1828-1912]
Description
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 11 p. : 19 cm.
Notes: A response to the Gospel preached by Moody and Sankey.
Publisher
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[Carter & Williams]
Date
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[1875]
Identifier
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G1597
Rights
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<p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img style="border-style:none;" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a> <br /> This work (Is the revivalists's gospel true, or is it false?. A sermon preached at St. George's Hall, Langham Place, April 25, 1875), identified by <a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Subject
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Christianity
Gospels
Revivalism