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AN
EXAMINATION
OF
SOME RECENT WRITINGS ABOUT IMMORTALITY.
By W. E. B.
“ Is it not unreasonable to expect to see clearly through such a veil as death ?”
“ Let me do the will of God, and be swallowed up in His work. Conscious that His
goodness is perfect, let me spend not a thought on the contingencies of my future,
which He will provide as His wisdon sees good.”—F. W. Newman.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Sixpence.
��AN
EXAMINATION
OF
SOME RECENT WRITINGS ABOUT IMMORTALITY.
----------- ♦----------- -
Modern Materialism and its Relation to Immortality. By John
Owen, Theological Review, October, 1869.
Practical Aspects of the Doctrine of Immortality. By Presbyter
Anglicanus, Theological Review, April, 1870.
Immortality and Modern Thought. By John Owen, Theological
Review, July, 1870.
The Doctrine of Immortality in its Bearing on Education. By
Presbyter Anglicanus. Scott, Ramsgate.
Is Death the End of all Things for Man ? By a Parent and
Teacher. Scott, Ramsgate.
A Reply to the Question, “ What have we Got to Rely on, if we
cannot Rely on the Bible? ” By Prof. F. W. Newman. Scott,
Ramsgate.
Another Reply to the Question, “ What have we Got to Rely on if
we cannot Rely on the Bible?” By Samuel Hinds, D.D.
Scott, Ramsgate.
A Reply to the°Qucstion, “ Apart from Supernatural Revelation,
What is Man’s Prospect of Living after Death?” By Samuel
Hinds, D.D. Scott, Ramsgate.
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Mr Owen’s first article was written in review of
Professor Huxley’s well known paper in the Fort
nightly Review for Feb., 1869, “ On the Physical Basis
of Life.” Mr Owen is very indignant with Professor
Huxley for having asserted that the “ matter of life ”
is composed of ordinary matter, “ differing from it only
in the manner in which its atoms are aggregated.”
Whether the Professor was or was not justified in
making this assertion we may fairly leave him to settle
if he can with Mr Owen. But after reading the after
part of Mr Owen’s paper, in which he elaborates an
argument in favour of immortality which he expressly
�4
An Examination of some
declares to be quite unassailable by any materialistic
objections, it is difficult to account for tbe reason of
his indignation with Mr Huxley for this statement,
and for other remarks about protoplasm. Future
scientific inquiry may throw more light upon Professor
Huxley’s protoplasmic researches, and may either con
firm or refute what his reviewer terms his ‘‘ dogma
tism ” concerning them. With no pretence to scientific
erudition, I should feel it to be presumptuous to hazard
a prediction either way, and am content with a simple
protest against Mr Owen’s assertion of the probable
finality of our knowledge in the direction referred to.
The main portion of Mr Owen’s Constructive argu
ments in favour of immortality seem to differ from
those which the most thoroughgoing materialist might
advance, chiefly, if not solely, in nomenclature. If he
would use “ force ” always, as he does generally, in
place of “ spirit,” all, or nearly all that he advances
with any pretence of logical demonstration, could be
endorsed by an advocate of materialism. Mr Owen
thus states his argument in its briefest terms :—“ The
spiritual force of the universe is eternal; man is an
unit of that spiritual force ; therefore man is immortal.”
The conclusion of this syllogism is somewhat incorrectly
stated. It should be, “ therefore man is eternal,” and
the necessity which Mr Owen evidently felt of substi
tuting one word for the other fairly illustrates what
appears to me to be the fallacy of his syllogism. Man
as man, that is as a combination of what is commonly
distinguished as matter and spirit, is not an unit of
any purely spiritual force, any more than man as man
is eternal. Mr Owen’s meaning would probably be
better represented as follows :—The spiritual force of
the universe is eternal; the spiritual force of man is
an unit of the spiritual force of the universe; therefore
the spiritual force of man is eternal. This argument
from a spiritualistic standpoint is of course unassail
able. The materialist would simply substitute material
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
5
for spiritual, and would then adopt the altered syl
logism as his own. The real dispute is whether there
exists any spiritual force in the universe (and inclusively
in man) at all. If then it be possible to demonstrate
scientifically by protoplasmic researches or otherwise
that what are now termed spiritual or mental forces are
precisely similar to material or physical forces, it seems
that, after all, Mr Owen’s claim for the security of his
argument from materialistic refutation would fall to
the ground. In fact he admits this when he says :—
“ If, indeed, it could be proved, as the materialist
assumes it can, that the force we call vital or mental is
of precisely the* same nature with what he terms
physical forces, no doubt the question might be
regarded as settled, so far at least as the human claim
to immortality is concerned (although even in that
case the mind, which finds expression through the
laws of the universe, would be left unaccounted for by
his theory, and an eternal witness against its unlimited
application).” But Mr Owen goes on to state his
belief, and li that of those who have most closely
surveyed it from either side,” that the gulf between
matter and mind “is primordial and utterly impass
able.” It is plain then at the outset that although
his arguments may help to strengthen the convictions
of those who already have faith in immortality, they
can be of no avail with people whom materialistic
probabilities or possibilities have rendered doubters,
since they rest on an assumption which begs the
question. He makes this plainer still as he proceeds ;
for not only does he assert that—“ Whoever ... re
cognises, whether in the operations of nature, or in the
course of history, or in the constitution of his own
being, a peculiar spiritual force which cannot even in
imagination be conceived as identical with such
material force as electricity or magnetism, will always
find a firm standing ground whereon to build his hope
of immortality; ” but he actually goes so far as to
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An Examination of some
assume “ the undeniable fact (the italics are mine) of
man possessing within him such a spiritual force, by
whatever name it is called, so distinguished from ail
other forces of which he can have any cognisance.” It
is not much to claim that an argument is impervious
to the assaults of opponents so long as it rests upon an
assumption which they at the outset deny. The
parenthesis of a previous quotation from Mr Owen to
the effect that on the materialistic basis “ the mind
which finds expression through the laws of the universe
would still be left unaccounted for,” exposing as it
does the most hopelessly weak point in the materialistic
theory, gives a. far sounder foundation to what, for
want of another name, we term spiritualism than does
the argument on assumption that Mr Owen deems
so thoroughly impregnable. This is in effect the
“ design argument.” which, in spite of a vast amount
of denial and ridicule, remains, and will remain, a
stronghold, if not the chief stronghold of anti-mate
rialistic faith.
Further on in his article, Mr Owen pleads for “ the
recognition of the essential unity of all spiritual
forces.” Why not of all forces spiritual or other
wise 1 Must not the creative or initiative force of the
universe include within itself, or contain the germs of,
the physical and organic as well as the mental and
“ spiritual ” forces which we are cognisant of 1 If this
be admitted, the syllogism of Mr Owen before quoted
must be extended, so as to include all material as well
as spiritual forces as units of the force of the universe.
In concluding his paper, Mr Owen remarks :—“ No
scientific discovery will ever suffice to prove that his
torical progress is the creature of physical forces, or
that virtue is an amiable manifestation of heat or
electricity. Hence the ground taken by Bishop Butler
in the well-known chapter of the Analogy, will always
be that which the more thoughtful of the defenders of
immortality will choose to occupy—the ground of pro-
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
7
bability supported by analogy. . . . Recognizing as
we do the scientific impossibility that the least part of
a physical force should be annihilated, we have en
deavoured to prove the analogical improbability that
any, even the smallest part, of divine energy can be
entirely and irreparably lost.” The conclusion, then,
to which Mr Owen’s clever arguments bring us is, that
all force is immortal. But does not his analogy carry
us too far—at least, if we wish to be convinced of in
dividual immortality? No particle of matter is an
nihilated although it is transformed, any more than an
unit of force is lost when it is transmuted. Then, does
not the argument from this analogy lead us to suppose
that as matter in the form of a human body certainly
does not everlastingly retain its individuality, so neither
does the force individualized in a human mind or
spirit ? In spite of some remarks by Mr Owen to the
contrary, this seems to me to be the only logical con
clusion of his argument from analogy. He indeed
admits that to him “ this qiiestion of personal, in
dividual existence in a future, world is of mere
secondary importance compared with the grand fact of
such existence,” and he quotes with approval Schleiermacher, whose arguments might comfort a Buddhist,
but would scarcely give consolation to a Christian.
Abrwana is not that for which those bereaved by
death so passionately yearn. The hope of immor
tality would lose by far its strongest and sweetest in
tensity with all but a few, at any rate amongst the
western nations, and would probably perish entirely
with the majority, if “incorporation into the divine
substance” could be proved to be the only Heaven
we may reasonably aspire to.
“ Presbyter Anglicanus,” in his paper on The Prac
tical Aspects of Immortality, is more occupied in
pointing out the effects that would result from the
acceptance of Mr Owen’s conclusions, than in con
troverting his arguments. It is always a subject for
�8
An Examination of some
regret when a controversialist introduces to the con
sideration of a question the bias which inevitably
results from taking into account the practical results of
the acceptance of such or such a conclusion, instead of
criticising it from the purely philosophical stand-point
of whether it is true or false. But in those portions
of his essay in which “ Presbyter Anglicanus” brings
his clear common sense to bear upon the mysticism of
a portion of Mr Owen’s argument, deprecates the in
troduction of scriptural teaching as of any supernatural
authority, and points out the unphilosophical nature
of the theory of immortality for the righteous and
annihilation for the wicked, he has done good service.
He has, however, in my opinion, done anything but
good service to the cause of a pure morality in those
remarks of his which point to the doctrine of a future
life as the only sound basis of moral teaching. “ That
the whole moral as well as the religious training of
Englishmen,” he states, “ rests on the belief of the
continued existence of each individual man after death,
no one will probably dispute. Whether we regret the
fact or not, the fact itself is patent; and the remark
applies equally to the instruction given by men of all
schools of thought (for it will not be pretended that
at the present time there is any systematic instruction
to the young based on the professed negation of con
tinued life).” In making this statement, “ Presbyter
Anglicanus” seems entirely to ignore the Utilitarian
school; for although the Utilitarian philosophy is not
systematically taught to the young on a large scale per
haps, it certainly has at the present time some influence
upon the moral training of Englishmen. The separation
of ethics from theology is one of the most promising
signs of the times, and I confess it is with surprise
that I find “Presbyter Anglicanus” holding to the
old mischievous combination. I altogether fail to see
that if we tell the young “ that acts tend to make
habits, that habits determine our character and affect
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
9
our spiritual condition indefinitely,—if we tell them
that right is to he done at whatever cost, and that
success here is to be to us as nothing in comparison
with our growth in all good and kindly qualities,—we
are using language every word of which implies not
only human immortality, but the continued existence
of each individual being whom we address.” It is as
well, however, to observe that the signification of the
expression (l success here ” involves a considerable
portion of the question at issue. That it is best in
the only true sense to be and do the best we can, is an
axiom of pure and enlightened ethics. If the majority
of men are not yet sufficiently enlightened to receive
it, let us try to educate them to it, and not teach down
to them a more sensual philosophy. It is a pity that
one so advanced in enlightened thought as “ Presbyter
.Anglicanus” undoubtedly is, should not know what
reply to make to one with “ a mind not yet matured,”
“ if he asks us why he should cause himself trouble
and discomfort by seeking to reach a high standard of
action, when life would be easier and pleasanter, and
probably more successful, by contenting himself with a
lower one, &c.” One who intelligently believes in the
present moral government of the world would reply
that life is not—cannot, in the order of Divine Pro
vidence, be easier, pleasanter, and more successful in
the highest and only true sense of those terms to the
man who contents himself with a low ideal, than to
him who strives to live up to a high one. For, are
not the eternal and divine laws of morality something
more than, or rather, quite different from mere arbitrary
restrictions upon the inclinations and pleasures of
human beings ? Should we not, on the contrary, be
lieve that we are only forbidden to do that which is in
the real sense injurious to us collectively as the great
family of God’s creatures, and to each of us individually
as a member of that family? Does not the highest
sense of ease, pleasure, and success consist in living, in
B
�IO
An Examination of some
accordance with our noblest instincts and tendencies ?
Is there not, for instance, a far nobler, sweeter ease in
the knowledge acquired at the cost of much labour
than in the gross indolence that rests stupidly content
in ignorance 1 Is not the pleasure derived from the
perhaps at first tiresome cultivation of music, or of
poetry, or of pure intellectuality, far superior to the
delights of the palate, or to the gratification of any of
the comparatively gross sensual faculties ? And is not
the success of a noble, beautiful life, such as is in
accord with all the most exalted attributes of our
nature, far more gratifying and satisfying than the
mere satiety of acquisitiveness, of love of fame, or of
desire for power ? To teach the converse of this—to
teach that this life is in itself a failure, and that a
supplementary life is necessary to compensate for the
bankruptcy of this is, in my opinion, one of the worst
forms of infidelity. I hold with Mr Owen, and against
“ Presbyter Anglicanus,” that whether we believe or
doubt future existence as individuals, we should live
precisely the same, that, to take the lowest view, virtue
pays in the only true and extended sense of the word,
and that consequently the belief in personal immor
tality can have no influence whatever upon a rightly
conceived and inculcated system of morality.
Mr Owen, in his reply to “ Presbyter Anglicanus,”
puts this truth concisely before his readers, when he
says :—Our most advanced and enlightened thinkers
have arrived at last at the conclusion that the morality
founded upon the assumed weal or woe of a future
world is not of the most noble or disinterested charac
ter ; and hence there have been various attempts to
place Christian ethics upon another and a sounder
foundation, adopting either the Utilitarian basis of the
welfare of humanity, or else insisting on the divine and
a priori immutability of ethical distinctions.” And
again :—“ In all our teaching (z.e., to the young) on this
subject, we should studiously avoid basing the simplest
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
11
ethical teaching upon their possible destiny in another
life. Our better aim, as well as that most in harmony
with the nature of the proof we assign to immortality,
would be to instil into them mere unselfish and
elevated rules of conduct, teaching them that, in any
case, it is better to be virtuous than the reverse, and
that the present is sacred, and has its hallowed duties
quite irrespective of what the future may happen to
be.” He well enforces this when he states :—“ Nothing
is more certain than that a child ” (and he might have
added, a man also) “ lives in the present, and is in
fluenced mainly by present and immediate considera
tions. Hence the reward that is future, or the
punishment that is distant, has but little effect on his
conduct. Present sanctions, such as honour, truth,
goodness, are therefore far better fitted to make an
impression on his character, than those which are
derived from a remote future with which he has little
or no sympathy.” A practical illustration of the truth
of this last statement is afforded by the fact that an
honourable “ man of the world,” who is but little if at
all influenced by doctrinal theology, is really, as the
popular estimate assumes him to he, more trustworthy
in all that relates to honour, truth, and magnanimity,
than is the representative “ religious ” man, as the
term is commonly applied.
Mr Owen seems to me to be a less reliable guide
when he reverts to his mysticisms—when, for instance,
in reply to the declaration of “ Presbyter Anglicanus”
that he does not understand what is meant by Schleiermacher’s definition,—“ In the midst of the finite to be
one with the Infinite, and in each passing moment to
have eternal existence, that is the immortality of re
ligion,” he says :—“ If ‘ Presbyter Anglicanus ’ could
by possibility have asked Schleiermacher himself what
was to be understood by these words, he would pro
bably receive for a reply, that they were to be inter
preted not by the intellect, but by the feeling.’
�12
An Examination of some
Nothing seems more certain than that feeling (i.e.,
sensation) alone can interpret no theory ; and the
appeal to the feelings, so common with those who are
pushed beyond the confines of logic by a sound argu
ment against vague or otherwise unsubstantiable
theological doctrines, is unworthy of a careful thinker
like Mr Owen. Equally objectionable is his further
elucidation of Schleiermacher’s formula, that “ it is a
necessary deduction from his (Schleiermacher’s) defini
tion of religion ; i.e., it consists in ‘ the consciousness
of the eternal,’ in the feeling (my italics) of per
manency, so to speak, which underlies our transitory
existence.” To this it must be objected that there is
no such intuition as “consciousness of the eternal,”
and that all belief is the result of thought, and not of
feeling, although our sentiments may welcome, and to
some extent give support to, a faith that is in conson
ance with them.
In disavowing the inference of Presbyter Anglicanus,
that if we accept Schleiermacher’s definition of immor
tality there are few who can hope for it, Mr Owen
affirms :—“ It must be borne in mind, the spiritual
energy with which we, on behalf of our race, claim
kindred, is revealed by more than one variety of
manifestation. On the one hand are its ethical ele
ments, duty, patience, love, self-denial; and on the
other, its intellectual elements, imagination, foresight,
hope, and desire.” If then he admits the intellectual
elements to kinship with the “ spiritual energy ” which
gives in his opinion a title to immortality, it is evident
that the brutes may put in their claim ; for whether or
not we allow that the lower animals possess any of the
ethical elements, we cannot deny that some of them
at least show capabilities of imagination, foresight,
hope, and desire. Indeed Mr Owen sees that his
arguments tend in this direction, and further on in
his paper, after speculating upon probable differences
in the condition of those who will enjoy a future
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
13
existence, he says :—“ And if this were once thought
reasonable and in accordance with what we now
observe of God’s operations in this world, one great
difficulty connected with a belief in a future existence
would be obviated; for we might then reasonably
extend it to imperfect types of intellectual or moral
growth, whether among our own race or among races
of animals which we, often unworthily, call c inferior.’”
Why not down to the lowest of the animals? It
would be difficult to find any creature of which it
could be absolutely declared that it possesses no
“ intellectual elements ” whatever. At least it would
be impossible for us to draw the line; and as animal
and vegetable life in certain forms are said to be indis
tinguishable, and as, further, organic force in its
simplest stage is as far as we can judge by observa
tion, identical with what is at present distinctively
termed physical force, Mr Owen’s arguments once
more lead us to a conclusion so broad that they lose
all value as supports to the belief in individual
immortality—namely, to that of the eternity of all
forces.
In some further remarks in reply to those arguments
of Presbyter Anglicanus against which I have strongly
protested, Mr Owen is most eloquent and impressive,
and it would be easy and pleasant to quote largely
from them. They are in the main an enlargement
upon the principle that “ evil is essentially antagonistic
to the divine energies which govern the world,” and
that therefore there is a firm basis for ethics altogether
apart from the doctrine of future retribution.
There is no portion of Mr Owen’s essay so weak as
that in which he exhibits a leaning towards the
illogical theory of the annihilation of the wicked.
This theory is of course strikingly incompatible with
that in which he bases the claim to immortality upon
the possession of some intellectual or moral elements
akin to the spiritual energy of the universe. But he
�T4
An Examination of some
veils the inconsistency in a cloud of mysticism. He
argues that “if there are individuals who do not
exhibit in any form or in the very least degree the
spiritual force of which we have been speaking, then
we are fully prepared to “ grant that nothing but non
existence can be predicated of such beings. But it
must be borne in mind that this is not annihilation as
commonly understood. Annihilation is generally used
of the entire extinction, the reducing to nothingness of
what once had existence. We, however, predicate of such
individuals as we have above mentioned, not their final
extinction, but their present non-existence” (my italics).
It is to be presumed that Mr Owen means their spiritual
non-existence in some mystical sense. Having spoken
of them as individuals, he cannot of course mean to
affirm their individual non-existence. Then their an
nihilation as individuals would after all be “the reducing
to nothingness of what once had existence,” the vulgar
conception of annihilation which Mr Owen disclaims.
But this is probably another of the beliefs that are “ to
be interpreted not by the intellect, but by the feeling
for it is obvious that there is nothing very rational in it.
The method of simply denying the existence of an
obstruction to the reception of a doctrine is, no doubt,
very convenient for the purposes of argument. It has,
however, in this case one drawback which, to thinkers
not mentally intoxicated by a wrapt contemplation of
German mysticism, detracts somewhat from its value,
and that is its utter unintelligibility. It is, moreover,
difficult to imagine why Mr Owen need have troubled
himself to introduce this extraordinary proposition.
It certainly was not necessary to the purpose of his
argument, since, according to his definition of the title
to immortality, the “ non-existent ” being becomes a
mere myth, the veriest madman, by the possession of
■imagination, having a claim to everlasting life.
In taking leave of Mr Owen as a contributor to
modern theories of immortality, I can only declare the
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
15
impression, which, a careful and unprejudiced considera
tion of his essays leaves upon my mind. It is this,
that however strong he may he against materialists—
and no doubt materialists as well as spiritualists assume
a great deal that they cannot sustain by proof—his
elaborate arguments give but little support to the only
doctrine of immortality which ninety-nine out of every
hundred perhaps of his readers would care to have
substantiated.
Presbyter Anglicanus, in his pamphlet on “ The
Doctrine of Immortality in its Bearing on Education,”
written mainly in further reply to Mr Owen, whilst
with some reason complaining of misrepresentation of
his views through miscomprehension, goes on to repeat
what I agree with Mr Owen in considering to be false
and mischievous theories concerning the basis of
morality. After in effect disclaiming the pessimism of
those who conceive of this world as a 11 vale of tears,”
in which the good man has much the worst of it, and
the wicked man triumphs, and from which the good
man must hopelessly turn off his eyes, and look to that
future life in which alone he can hope for compensation
for the wrongs of this—after affirming his belief that
the divine “ purpose which runs through all the ages,”
and which “ must be accomplished,” “ is the highest
good of every creature, and that this highest good lies
in the absolute harmony of the human will with the
will of God” (p. 6)—after declaring that he has
“nowhere spoken of either restraint or punishment,
or even of suffering, except in that sense in which
(he supposes) even M. Comte or Mr Congreve would
assert that the wilful disregarding or violation of our
duty brings with it, generally or always a sense of
dissatisfaction, remorse, or wretchedness” (p. 8)—after
all this it is passing strange that Presbyter Anglicanus
should still contend “ that no teaching which positively
asserts that death is the end of existence to the indi
vidual man can furnish an effectual motive, that no
ethical system can be based upon it, and that any
�An Examination of some
ethical system which is said to be consistent with it
lies really on a foundation of treacherous and shifting
sand” (p. 11).
The explanation of the apparent
inconsistency between the last quoted utterance and
the preceding extracts, lies evidently in the fact that
Presbyter Anglicanus does not believe that the divine
purpose—the highest good of every creature, is ever
completely accomplished in this life, nor even that it
is best in the only true sense, to be and do one’s best
as far as this life only is concerned. Now there is,
perhaps, no harm in teaching that this divine purpose
is not completely accomplished here, but that there is
a future life in which it culminates in a fruition of
bliss which is far beyond what any one pretends can
be enjoyed in this life ; but to teach, either directly or
by implication, that it is not best to be and do one’s
best here, even if there be no life to come, is, in my
opinion, a mischievous error, involving as it does
involve the infidel (although “orthodox”) assumption
that the spirit of evil is triumphant in this world.
Presbyter Anglicanus is further indubitably teaching
this erroneous doctrine, when he says that “ we dare
not tell ” the thoroughly vicious and degraded, “ that
they and many generations after them must, if they
care to get out of their slough of filth, toil on with
heroic energy for next, to no recompense here (the italics
are mine) and no recompense whatever hereafter”
(p. 12). I trust indeed that we dare not tell them any
such terrible falsehood.
I agree with Presbyter
Anglicanus too, that we should “ feel the inhumanity
of telling ” “ those for whom their physical life here is
one of protracted and hopeless suffering,” that “ they
have the highest consolation for their years of agony
in the thought that their patience, hope, and faith are
all to go for nothing (my italics) (p. 12). But does
Presbyter Anglicanus think that patience and hope
ever do go for nothing, even if a faith, possibly
mistaken may 1 And does he regard physical disease
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
17
(often, though not always in itself a punishment for
evil conduct) as a virtue that in justice demands a
reward ?
In making these latter remarks, however, I am far
from underrating the terrible difficulty which all
thoughtful men must feel in the contemplation of
these lives of protracted suffering (as in the contem
plation of many other apparently absolute evils of this
world), especially when traceable to no error of the
sufferers themselves. The visiting of the iniquities of
the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth
generation is, unfortunately for an easy faith, as true
as it is scriptural. Nevertheless, this does not affect
the question before us, for the difficulty remains,
whether we believe in a future life or not, since happi
ness in future life would not prove the justice of
punishing an individual here for sins that are not his.
I pass on with pleasure to those eloquent passages
in which Presbyter Anglicanus gives us the reasons
for his faith in immortality, and I gladly recognise in
some of them a far more forcible plea for individual
immortality than can be extracted from the ostensibly
more philosophical arguments of Mr Owen. I say in
some of the passages, because in others the plea is
based upon the same erroneous views of life which
have above been combatted. Presbyter Anglicanus
holds that the doctrine of immortality “ by no means
rests only on the foundation of probability supported
by analogy,” since “ the reduction of a proposition into
an absurdity is taken as a proof of its converse; and
the direct negation of immortality . . . involves a
series of absurdities which shock alike our mental and
moral sense ” (p. 18). I gladly admit the full force of
this passage :—11 It is shocking that the love which
has withstood the waves of a thousand griefs, tempta
tions, and disasters, and whose flame has burnt clearer
and purer with advancing years, should he rewarded
with extinction,” except that I must demur to the use
�18
An Examination of some
of the word rewarded. It is shocking to believe that
this love should ever be extinguished ; but surely it
brings its own reward in this life. Equally forcible is
this :—“ It is shocking that the thoughts, the aspira
tions, and yearnings of the wisest and best of men
should be a mere delusive dream—that the words
which bid us hope and strive on because we cannot
know here the fulness of blessing which God has
prepared for them that love Him, should be a mere
cheat and a cruel deception.” But with regard to the
other passages (see pp. 18 and 19 of the pamphlet) let
me ask—do the inferior forms of life have full scope
and exercise any more than man has ? How about
the worm crushed under foot, or cut through with the
spade ? Is there not a claim for “ compensation ” here
if anywhere ? And are not the faculties of animals
“ extinguished ” sometimes “just when they are rising
into vigorous activity ? ” Again, is iniquity ever truly
successful ? And do “ striving, and effort, and pur
pose, and will” ever go for nothing even in this
world ?
The writer of the pamphlet, “ Is Death the end of
all Things for Man ?” goes over much the same ground
as that traversed by Presbyter Anglicanus in the papers
already noticed, and his position on the question
exhibits in the main the same strength and the same
weakness.
Professor E. W. Newman in his Pamphlet disclaims
the authority of Scripture as an argument for immor
tality, and in reply to those who complain that the
discrediting of that authority has robbed them of a
“ delicious dream,” he eloquently observes: “ The true
heaven does not consist in aspirations quite ridiculous
in puny man, but rather in self-forgetfulness ; in that
faith which says, ‘ Let me do the will of God, and be
swallowed up in His work. Conscious that His good
ness is perfect, let me spend not a thought on the con
tingencies of my future, which He will provide as His
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
J9
wisdom sees good.’ ” This is an epitome of the sublimest piety and faith. “ But,” he proceeds, “ I am
gravely sensible that there is another view of immor
tality in which self is quite forgotten; in which the
enlargement of men’s destiny beyond the grave is
viewed as ennobling our nature and assuaging the
grief with which we see human afflictions end in dark
moral degradation. Such a doctrine of immortality is
encumbered with severe logical difficulties to a Theist,
but with fewer (I think) than with those which meet a
Biblical Christian” (p. 13). And surely it seems to
me this view of immortality is encumbered with fewer
difficulties than any other. Then follows a frank and
manly divulgence at once of the faith and the “ honest
doubt ” of an honest man. “ In my book called
1 Theism,’ I have elaborately developed all the argu
ments which commend themselves to me. When I
read them, I find them very powerful. Some of them
are even short enough, if sound, to generate vivid
electric faith. The discomfort to me is, that they do
not wholly refute, they rather outweigh, arguments on
the other side; and where you deal with a balanced
argument, you strike the balance differently, I believe,
in different frames of mind. Perhaps when I am too
much pre-engaged by sense, and too little devout, the
spiritual arguments for immortality lose force with me.
Whether that is the explanation I cannot tell; but I
frankly confess that what at one time I think to bring
full conviction, at another time seems overbalanced by
objections. I do not at all imagine that I have solved
the problem. I sometimes think that the half faith
which I sustain may be precisely the thing most whole
some to men; and, indeed, is it not unreasonable to
expect to see clearly through such a veil as death 1 ... .
Let your complainant exercise the grace of waiting for
light, and of hoping that more light may dawn on our
successors than God has yet granted to us” (pp. 13, 14).,
This is truly a noble confession of faith and of doubt
�20
An Examination of some
such as no mind but a large, brave and honest one
would ever have made. We feel as we read it that a
great soul has revealed itself to us, strengthening our
belief to a far greater extent than volumes of half sin
cere though more positive dogmatism can. Here at
any rate we have a mind which does not despair of
morality because it cannot demonstrate a future life.
And there is a faith beyond the faith of all the creeds
in the trust that the good Spirit, in whom we live, and
move, and have our being, has given to us all the light
that is necessary to guide us here, and that to Him
belongs the care of us hereafter. And this faith will
enable each one of us to say with the grand old Scotch
man in Alton Locke, “I have long left the saving of my
soul to Him who made the soul.” (Iquote from memory).
Dr. Hinds, in the first of his two interesting tracts,
reminds those who ask what we have to rely on
if we cannot rely on the Bible, that a question of like
import, and of equally vital interest to those who asked
it, has been answered in modern times to the satisfac
tion, at least, of all Protestants. That question was,
“If we cannot rely on the Church, what have we got
to rely on?” The reply was, “The Bible,” and an
infallible Bible accordingly was substituted for an
infallible church. Dr Hinds proceeds very ably to
advocate the giving up of the assumption, “ that God
must have provided an infallible teaching of religious
truth,” and to warn those who manifest a want of faith
by asserting that they recognise no foundation for
religion apart from the Bible, to be on their guard
“ against substituting a vain and presumptuous prying
into the hidden things of the Lord, for the desire to
know Him by seeking to conform to His will” (p. 13).
He thinks that “ the tree of knowledge in the garden
of Eden, the craving after which caused Adam and Eve
to be banished from the tree of life, may serve as an
emblem to us.” For, “ we too, in our eager pursuit
after forbidden knowledge, may find ourselves wander-
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
21
ing far away from the life which is destined other
wise to nourish and prepare us for heaven” (p. 14).
It is only, thus, indirectly that this pamphlet hears
upon the subject of immortality, which is directly
treated by Dr Hinds, in his “ Reply to the Question,
Apart from Supernatural Revelation, What is Man's
Prospect of Living after Death ? ” Dr Hinds limits
the scope of his reply to the question of individual
immortality, stating that to this only “ our thoughts
and aspirations are directed,” and that “to believe that
we shall revive from death in total oblivion of any
previous existence, would be as little consolatory as to
believe that the extinction of life is final.” “The
question, therefore,” he writes, “ which I am requested
to consider must be whether, excluding from the
inquiry all supernatural revelation on the subject,
there is any reason for believing that death is a
passage to a new phase of life, on which we enter with
the consciousness of personal identity with our former
selves” (p. 1). Proceeding to answer this question,
Dr Hinds says, “ Our reasonable course is to see, in the
first instance, what light is thrown on the subject by
the analogy of creation. And it must be admitted
that the result is disappointing to our hopes and
wishes. There is no annihilation of any part of the
material universe, so far as we can observe............... The
process which is going on, and has gone on, as it would
appear, through successive ages, is the continual dis
integration of the several substances of which the
world is composed, and the working of them up into
new combinations............... We do not perceive, as in the
case of the material substance, what becomes of the
principle of life ; but this principle is no less than the
component parts of the human body, or of a rock or
tree, a portion of the elements on which creative power
is exercised. Arguing then from what takes place in
the case of these elements which are seen and felt, to
that which is not an object of the senses, we should
�An Examination of some
infer that the same law of creation must be applicable
to that also, unless it can be shown that there are
different laws for the two. That the one is visible and
tangible, the other not, is a difference which does not
imply that the law of creation is not uniform” (pp. 1, 2).
I quote thus at length because it is impossible to put
into fewer words the sense thus simply and clearly
conveyed.
Dr Hinds goes on to discuss the question whether
there is anything in our human nature to lead us to
suppose that the analogy does not hold good with us,
“whatever may be the fate of the inferior creatures.”
He decides that the possession of a reasoning faculty
gives us no title to individual immortality, since it is ap
parently shared in an inferior degree by the brutes, and
only characterizes man “ as the highest in the scale of
that manifold creation, the general law of which is that of
a continual dissolution of its elements, and a recombina
tion of them.” He thinks that as far as the argu
ment from analogy goes, we must conclude that the
same law holds good with mind, even as, although less
palpably than it does with matter. But he argues,
“ there is a surer resting place for our hope, in the
desire for personal and conscious immortality which
the Creator has made part of man’s nature.” For, not
only does the possession of this desire “ distinguish us
from all the rest of earthly creation,” but we are
justified in arguing from it, “ that the Creator would
never have made it a part of our nature, if the object
to which alone the desire is directed were unattainable.”
(p. 5.) This argument is repeated with even greater force
a little further on : “ the strength of the argument lies
as I have observed, in our conception of the divine
nature as revealed to us in creation. To suppose that
the Creator has made man with a strong desire as part
of his nature, and that the object on which alone that
desire can be exercised, does not exist, is as incon
sistent with what we know of Him and His ways, as
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
23
to suppose that He might have given His creatures
eyes when there was no visible object, or ears when there
was no such thing as sound,” (p. 6.) This, then, is an
argument from analogy after all, only the analogy is
between one intellectual conception of the truth of
which we have ample evidence, and another which we
desire to substantiate, and not between a set of ob
served physical laws, and a spiritualistic theory. The
former, if it be sound, warrants us in sustaining a
firm hope of personal immortality ; the latter leads us to
quite a different conclusion. It will be observed,
however, that this argument of Dr. Hinds rests upon
an undoubted belief in an intelligent Creator and
Sustainer of the universe, and consequently that to
one who has no such belief, it possesses no cogency.
And it is well to recognize the fact that it is impossible
in the present state of knowledge to bring forward any
arguments in favour of individual immortality, that have
any force with a pure materialist. As pointed out in a
preceding portion of this paper, Mr Owen’s arguments
prove from analogy, as far as an argument from analogy
can prove anything, universal indestructibility, and
the materialist would be the first to admit this; but
they possess no validity if urged in favour of individual
immortality. The analogy to be of any use in this
direction, must be based, like that employed by Dr.
Hinds, upon a Theistic foundation. Indeed, we are
fully warranted in saying that a belief in a personal
God is indispensable to a faith in personal immortality.
For these reasons it seems to me that Mr Owen
has greatly underrated the effect which a future
development of such speculations as those of Mr.
Huxley on Protoplasm, may have upon the only faith
in immortality which is cherished by the vast majority
of religious thinkers, in what are called Christian
countries at least. For my own part, however, I have
no fear that the course of future scientific inquiry will
ever substantiate the theories of those gross materialists
�2.4
An Examination of some
who deny the immanence of a great Intelligence in
the universe. No Theistic theories seem to me so
utterly wild and unreasonable as those of the Antitheists. And so long as a reasonable belief in a
moral and intelligent Creator remains, so long will the
true analogical argument of Dr Hinds possess a force
which cannot be denied. But, forcible as it is, this
argument may, even on a Theistic basis, be disputed.
In the first place it may be questioned whether the
desire for personal immortality is so nearly universal
as to justify us in considering it to be a part of our
nature; and in the second place, it may be argued
that even admitting this, it does not follow that such
a desire will be realized in accordance with our present
conceptions. As to the first of these objections, it
must be admitted that we have ample evidence to
prove that some primitive races of mankind have no
belief in a future state of existence, and it is more than
doubtful whether the ancient Jews had. Nay, it may
even be that some who are advanced in the religious
thought of the present time, look upon the idea of a
life that will never, never end, with more of dread than
of delight. I sometimes think that if it were not for
the relatives and friends whom we lose by death,
most of us would have but little, if any, desire for a
future life. We cannot bear the thought of parting
for ever from those we love, and this makes us cherish
the hope of meeting them aJer death. This last con
sideration, however, only serves to strengthen Dr
Hind’s position.
With regard to the second objection that, admitting
the desire for immortality to be a part of our nature,
it does not follow that such a desire will be realized
in accordance with our present conceptions, there is
much that may be urged in its favour. The Indian’s
happy hunting ground is as truly an ideal of future
existence for him, as our hopes of Heaven are for us.
If his conception seems gross to us, may not ours seem
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
25
equally so to those who will live in a more enlightened
age to come ? Is it not possible that our yearning
for an extension of our poor individual lives beyond
the grave, may embody after all only a less gross
ideal of immortality than that of the Indian1? Mr
Owen at any rate seems to have some such idea as
this.
But Dr. Hinds thinks we have another indication of
personal immortality in “ the universal craving for
spiritual communion ” with God. And he goes on to
remark : “ However diverse may be the shapes which
the effort to satisfy this craving has taken, and still
takes, they all testify to the fact, that the Creator has
made the craving a part of man’s nature.” (p. 6).
This craving, he says, is not fully satisfied in this life.
However devout a man may be, and however great
the comfort which he derives from the measure of
intercourse with God that is vouchsafed to him here,
there is no true and full communion, since “ there is
no reciprocity.” Bor, although Christians believe
that God does in some way answer prayer, and may
“ substitute faith for conscious fruition of a Divine
intercourse with them when they address Him,” yet
there is not that interchange of communication which
we call communion when we speak of intercourse
between man and man, and for which Dr Hinds
thinks there is a natural craving.
The measure of force which this argument may
claim must obviously vary greatly with different minds,
and even with the same mind in different states of
feeling. I fear that the vast majority of human beings
have no conscious yearning for communication with the
Divine Being, though that is no proof that it is not
an undeveloped tendency of their nature—a tendency
perhaps stunted and all but destroyed by the influence
of gross and demoralising theological theories. As
soon as man emerges sufficiently from a state of
brutish savagery to speculate upon the origin of all
�26
An Examination of some
that he sees around him, he naturally begins in
some sense to feel after God ; hut the religious sen
timents must be considerably developed before he
will be conscious of any longing after divine com
munion. Such yearning, when it does come, is ap
parently the result of thought combined with religious
love and veneration. It can scarcely be considered as
a definite instinct of our nature, though it may be a
natural tendency, that only develops itself when our
noblest faculties have become paramount. And is it
not possible that the highest state of religious thought
and sentiment would give to us a satisfactory con
sciousness of actual reciprocity in a strong sense of
direct communication between the Divine Spirit and
our own ? May it not be that our present con
ception of communion with God is after all a low
one, and that a higher one is possible to us, which
would be capable of completely satisfying our re
ligious aspirations? That, Dr Hinds might reply,
would be heaven itself, and if it could be attained
here, no future state would be necessary to satisfy the
longing after divine communion. But then, he might
justly urge, the cessation of such a heaven in death
would be even more dreadful and incomprehensible
than the cessation of our life under existing conditions;
and, besides, how about those who had died with the
longing still unsatisfied ?
Dr Hinds further urges : “ There is this peculiarity,
too, about man, which, if there is no future state for
him, makes him an anomaly in creation. In all other
living creatures completeness characterises the Creator’s
work; in man, incompleteness. . . . The individual
is almost a different being, according as his spiritual
part has been cultivated by education and other social
influences ; progress of the inner man marks the his
tory of the human race; and still there must be an
-incompleteness in the work of his Creator, until he
reaches that further stage of existence in which the
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
desires that distinguish him from all other animate
beings on earth shall be provided with their appro
priate objects, and shall be fully developed in the
realization of those objects ” (pp. 8, 9). It would be
impossible for a theist to deny the force of this argu
ment. The atheist would reply that our desires are
now superstitiously misdirected, and therefore have no
claim to realization. This, then, like the rest of Dr
Hinds’ arguments, is calculated to strengthen the con
viction of the theist and spiritualist, but would have
little if any weight with the atheist and materialist.
For the latter, probably, Dr Hind does not write.
The plea for a future life to compensate for the
inequalities of this, I have already noticed in my
remarks in reply to Presbyter Anglicanus.
The
argument, considered by itself, has the fault of proving
too much, if it proves anything. Dr Hinds puts it
before us concisely enough, when he writes : “ There
are inequalities in the divine government of the world
which would seem to be inconsistent with the divine
nature and attributes as otherwise made known to us,
unless there is another life to complete the present, in
which their inequalities are to be redressed ” (p. 10).
But animals, and even vegetables, are subject to the
unequal conditions of existence here equally with man,
although they cannot, of course, be said to suffer
equally with man on that account. The poor donkey,
half starved and otherwise brutally treated ; the dog,
chained for the greater part of his existence to a
kennel in a back yard ; the half-killed pigeon, and
the often hunted fox,—all made wretched for the use
or sport of man, have surely, according to this argu
ment, a claim for future compensation, even if the
plant, stunted and starved on the barren rock, has not.
One more argument Dr Hinds briefly notices, namely,
that which he draws from “ the belief in the occasional
apparition of dead men.” Dr Hinds thinks that
whether this belief be a delusion or not, its existence
�28
An Examination of some
is “ one more evidence of the strong craving after that
future world of continued life, which God has made a
part of our nature ” (p. 12). The same remark applies
to the modern belief in so-called spiritualistic mani
festations. “ Spiritualists,” as the believers in these
alleged manifestations, with rather arrogant distinctive
ness, term themselves, claim for their new “ revela
tion ” that it has rescued hundreds of sceptics from
the doubt of immortality. Whether this be correct
or not, it is certain that many thoughtful men, in their
desire for certain evidence of independent spiritual
existence, were disposed to inquire with eager hope
into the nature of the manifestations, but soon became
disgusted with the imposture and buffoonery that are
so intricately mixed up with them, even if there be
anything genuine.
In concluding my imperfect review of this and the
other essays noticed, I wish to enlarge a little upon the
objection which I have taken to each and all of them,
namely, that they start from the spiritualistic thesis,
instead of endeavouring first to prove it. By this
method the real opponents of the belief in immortality
are merely passed, and are not encountered. The
primary question in dispute is not whether the soul is
immortal, or whether it dies with the body, but whether
there be a soul to live or die. The Materialists are the
real opponents of the doctrine of immortality, and they
deny the existence of the spiritual entity called the
soul. They deny that there is anything in man be
yond matter and force. The sublimest thoughts and
the devoutest aspirations are to their conception only
brain in action. It is useless to deny the strength of
their position, for they have much to urge in its favour
which it is difficult, if not impossible, entirely to re
fute, though it may be possible to overrule on the
ground of superior probability. Their arguments may
he briefly stated as follows:—We observe (they say)
that the character of a man depends upon the size and
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
29
conformation of his brain, and the nature of his tem
perament. If certain brain organs are defective in the
individual, we observe a corresponding defectiveness in
his mental and moral manifestations. Very defective
mental organs invariably co-exist with idiotcy, and
deranged ones with insanity. A brain otherwise de
fective—defective in what are termed the moral organs,
again, always indicates a low state of moral sensibility
in the possessor of it, and a derangement of these
organs manifests itself in what is called moral insanity.
The health of the body obviously influences not only
the intellectual but also the moral characteristics. A
blow on the skull benumbs all mental activity. Sleep,
drunkenness, over-eating, over-working, fasting, and
semi-poisoning distinctively influence what Spiritualists
term the “ soul.” If there be a spiritual entity in man,
it seems then that it is merely a characterless spiritual
force which can only manifest itself in accordance with
the constitution and varying conditions of the corporeal
organism. This we prefer (for want of a better name)
to call vital force, and we see nothing more spiritual
in it than we recognize in chemical, electric, muscular,
or nervous force. We fully admit the indestructibility
of all matter and force. Matter decays and forms new
combinations, and force is thereby transmuted. We
see no evidence of any different result with regard to
what we call the moral and intellectual organism, and
what you Spiritualists term the soul. Therefore we
find no ground for belief in personal immortality.
In reply to all this the Spiritualist may say:—You
Materialists assume too much when you infer from the
fact that what we call the soul can only manifest itself
by means of the material organs of the brain, that
there is nothing but these organs to be manifested—or
nothing beyond what you term vital force. In all
probability it is the character of the soul which de
termines the characteristics of the mental organism,
and not vice versa. Or, even if it be otherwise, it is
�30
” An Examination of some
obvious that if the Supreme Spirit Himself were to
became the occupant of a human frame, He could only
manifest Himself by means of the human faculties of
the particular individual so occupied. Each one of us
is able to think about his bodily frame and ailments as
something belonging to rather than constituting him
self. From this it seems reasonable to infer that there
is something within, and distinct from mere brain
matter which so speculates. The individual conscious
ness, or, in metaphysical terminology, the ego, is able
to take cognizance of and speculate about the material
brain organs through which alone it (or he, or she) can
be outwardly manifested—speculate even about their
possible future derangement. Does not this fact of
consciousness prove that there is an indwelling in
dividual spirit—not a mere vital force—"which per
meates the human organism, and acts upon and through
it, even as we believe there is a Divine Spirit per
meating, and acting upon and through the material
universe ?
Much more might be urged on either side. Self
consciousness is said by some to be distinctively
human, but this is a very questionable assertion. The
Materialist sees in it nothing more than thought turned
inward. He has, too, some questions to ask which it
is very difficult for the Spiritualist to answer. For
instance, he asks when the soul first takes up its abode
in the human frame. Is it in the foetus at the instant
of conception, and if not, at what stage in the growth
of the foetus, the child, or the man ? Inability to reply
adequately to a question, although a serious drawback
to a constructive theory, is not, of course, a proof
against it. But then the issue seems to be nothing
more than a balance of probabilities, and I fear that
this is the only available issue for us in the present
state of knowledge. For my own part, I do not feel
qualified to give full force to either side of the contro
versy, and can only state the difficulties of the situation
�Recent Writings about Immortality.
31
honestly and fairly as they present themselves to me,
leaving it to those who are more positive to teach with
more authority, or at least to blow the trumpet with
less uncertain sound.
One truth shines out clearly, and it is this, that as
our Creator has given us no absolutely certain evidence
of a future life, however strong the probabilities may
be, it is not intended that we shall base our rule of
conduct here on any future prospects that faith and
imagination may place before us. We have a life to
live in this world, at any rate, and to live that worthily
is full occupation for our energies. Those who despise
it are not taught to do so by God. If there be an
everlasting Heaven for us, we shall best prepare for it
by leaving it entirely out of consideration, as far as our
practical life is concerned. To do our duty according
to the purest light that is manifested to us, that is the
best preparation for life and death alike. The sublimest faith is that which sustains us in a perfect trust
in the divine government in this world, and which
will enable us fearlessly to resign ourselves to the care
of the living God in the hour of death, believing that
whatever may be in store for us will be best for us,
seeing that it will be what seemeth to Him fit.
POSTSCRIPT.
Since the above paper was written, a pamphlet in
reply to Presbyter Anglicanus, entitled “Does Morality
depend on Longevity?” by Edw. Vansittart Neale,
has been published by Mr Scott. It consists chiefly
of a very able and interesting historical argument
against the doctrine that morality depends upon a be
lief in immortality. Mr Neale not only shows that
the most moral of the ancient nations had no belief in
a future life, but that some of the most horrible wars
and cruel murders can be traced to the prevalence of
�32
Recent Writings about Immortality.
that belief. His motive for entering into the contro
versy seems to have been the same which has prevailed
with me, and affords that full justification for entering
publicly into so abstruse a subject which, in my own
case, I feel to be necessary. I here give, and fully
endorse his words :—“ It does appear to me . . .of no
small importance in the education of the young, that
we should rest the principles of conduct upon the
knowable and present, instead of upon a future, about
which we can only dogmatise, without knowing any
thing certain. With this view, I propose to adduce
some considerations, which seem to me to show that
there is no necessity for making this uncertain fore
cast in order to gain a solid foundation either for reli
gion or morality” (p. 5).
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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An examination of some recent writings about immortality
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Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 32 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. A review of eight articles which have appeared in earlier Scott pamphlets including work by John Owen, Francis William Newman and Samuel Hinds. Includes bibliography (p.[3]).
Creator
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Bear, William Edwin
Date
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[187-?]
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Thomas Scott
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Immortality
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (An examination of some recent writings about immortality), identified by Humanist Library and Archives, is free of known copyright restrictions.
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RA1607
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
Immortality
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7168b9e6d63bf8d4daaa8fcf0b879366
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Gift 1^2A LETTER FROM A FREEMASON
TO GENERAL H.R.H. ALBERT EDWARD,
PRINCE OF WALES,
Duke of Saxony, Cornmall, and Rothesay ; Earl of Dublin, Colonel
Ifyth Hussars, Colonel-in- Chnef of the Rifle Brigade, Cap
tain- General and Colonel of the Hon. Artillery
Company, K.G., G.C.S.I., K.T., G.C.B.,
K.P., etc., etc., etc.
TO BR.-. H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES.
Dear Bra—I do not ask you to pardon this, to the profane,
perhaps an apparently too familiar style of address, although
I do pray pardon if I have unintentionally omitted many of
your numerous titles in the formal superscription to this
letter. I have never written before to a Prince, and may
lack good manners in thus inditing; but to my brother
Masons T have often written, and know they love best a
plain, fraternal greeting, if the purpose of the epistle be
honest
You have voluntarily on your part, and unsought on my
side, commenced by accepting me as a brother, and you have
cemented this fraternity by specially swearing to protect me
on appeal in my hour of danger; and though history teaches
me that sworn promises are less well kept than steadfast,
manly pledges, and that Princes’ oaths are specially rotten
reeds to lean upon; yet in the warmth of newly created
brother, I am inclined to believe you brother—for we are
brethren, you and I—not brothers perhaps as we §hould be
of the same common humanity—for in this land I know that
Princes are no fair mates for those who are pauper born;
but we are brothers by your own choice, members of the
same fraternity by your own joining; men self-associated
in the same grand Masonic brotherhood, and it is for that
reason I write- you this letter. You, though now a Past
Grand Master, are but recently a free and accepted Master
�2
Letter to the Prince of Wales.
Mason, and probably yet know but little of the grand tradi
tions of the mighty organisation whose temple doors have
opened to your appeal. My knowledge of the mystic branch
gained amongst the Republicans of all nations is of some
years’ older date. You are now, as a Freemason, excommu
nicate by the Pope—so am I. It is fair to hope that the
curse of the Church of Rome may have a purifying and chas
tening effect on your future life, at least as efficacious as
the blessing of the Church of England has had on your past
career. You have entered into that illustrious fraternity
which has numbered in its ranks Swedenborg, Voltaire, and
Garibaldi. These are the three who personify grand Idealism
and Poetic Madness; Wit and Genius, and true Humanity;
manly Energy, sterling Honesty, and hearty Republicanism.
My sponsor was Simon Bernard—yours, I hear, was the
King of “Sweden.
In writing, dear brother, I do not address you as a Prince
of Wales, for some of our Princes of Wales have been
drunken, riotous spendthrifts, covered in debt, and deep in
dishonour; but you, dear brother, instead of being such an
one, figure more reputably as the erudite member of a
Royal Geographical Society, or as a steady fellow of the
Worshipful Company of Fishmongers. Happily there is no
fear that in your case a second Doctor Doran may have to
pen the narrative of a delicate investigation. If Junius
were alive to-day, his pen would not dare to repeat its
fierce attack on another Prince of Wales. Junius charged
George, Prince of Wales, with quitting the arms of his wife
for the endearments of a wanton, with toying away the night
in debauchery, and with mocking the sorrows of the people
with an ostentatious prodigality. But your pure career,
your sober and virtuous life, would win laudations even from
Junius’s ghost. You are an English gentleman, as well as
Prince of Wales ; a good and kind husband in spite of being
Prince of Wales; with you woman’s honour is safe from
attack, and sure of protection; The draggled and vice
stained plumes on your predecessors’ escutcheons have been
well cleaned and straightened by modern journalism, and
the Prince of Wales’ feathers are no longer (like the Bourbon
fleur de lis) the heraldic ornament of a race of princes sans
foi, sans moeurs. Fit were you as profane to make the
journeys to the Altar, for fame writes you as sober and chaste,
�Letter to the Prince of Wales.
3
as high-minded and generous, as kind-hearted and truthful.
These are the qualities, oh Albert Edward, which hid your
disability as Prince, when you knelt bare-kneed in our audi
ence chamber. The brethren who opened your eyes to the
light, overlooked your title as Prince of Wales in favour of
your already famous manhood. Your career is a pleasant
contrast to that of George Prince of Wales. Yet because
you are as different from the princes whose bodies are dust,,
while their memories still remain to the historian as visible
monuments of shame, I write to you, not as English Prince,
but as brother Master Mason. Nor do I address you in
your right as one of Saxony’s princes, for amongst my memo
ries of other men’s readings, I have thoughts of some in
Saxony’s electoral roll, who were lustful, lecherous, and vile;
who were vicious sots and extravagant wasters of their
peoples’ earnings, who have lured for their seraglios each fresh
face that came within their reach : while you, though Duke of
Saxony, have joined a brotherhood whose main intent is the
promotion of the highest morality. I do not indeed regard
your title of Duke at all in writing you, for when we find
a Duke of Newcastle’s property in the hands of Sheriffs’
Officers, his title a jest for bankruptcy messengers, and the
Duke of Hamilton’s name an European byeword, it is
pleasant to be able to think that the Duke of Cornwall and
Rothesay is not as these Dukes are; that this Duke is not
a runner after painted donzels, that he has not written
cuckold on the forehead of a dozen husbands, that he is not
deep in debt, has not, like these Dukes, scattered gold in
filthy gutters, while deaf to the honest claims of justice. We
know, brother, that you would never have voluntarily en
rolled yourself in the world’s grandest organisation, if you
had been as these. It would have been perjury if you had
done so—perjury which, though imperially honoured at the
Tuileries, would be scouted with contempt by a Lancashire
workman.
I do not write to you as Earl of Dublin, for Ireland’s
English-given earls have been as plagues to her vitals and
curses to her peoples. For 700 years, like locusts, they
have devoured the verdure of her fields," and harassed the
tillers of her soil. From the Earl of Chepstow to the Earl
of Dublin, is the mere journeying from iron gauntlet to
greedy glove—take and hold ; and Irish peasantry, in deep
�-------
*
4'
Letter to the Prince of Wales.
despair, unable to struggle, have learned to hate the Earls
with whom English rule has blessed them. Nor even is this
letter sent to you as Knight of the Garter, for when I read
“ Honi soit qui mal y pensef I shrink from calculating the
amount of evil that might fall upon some people in the world
who occupy their thoughts with princes who are Gartered
Knights. Nor do I pen this to you as Colonel either of
Cavalry, Infantry, or Artillery, for I can but wonder at and
admire the glorious military feats which, though your modesty
has hidden them, have nevertheless entitled you to command
your seniors, one at least with a Waterloo medal on his
breast. Our history tells us of a warrior “ Black Prince,”
who killed many foes ; it can also in the future write of you
as a gallant soldier before whom pheasant, plover, and
pigeon could make no stand.
I write to you as a fellow Master Mason, as to one on an
equality with myself, so long as you are true to your Masonic
pledge, less than myself whenever you forget it. I address
this epistle to you as fellow-member of a body which teaches
that man is higher than king; that humanity is beyond church
and creed; that true thought is nobler than blind faith, and
that virile, earnest effort is better far than dead or submis
sive serfdom.
The Grand Lodge of England has just conferred upon
you a dignity you have done nothing to earn; but you saw
light in Sweden, and that initiation should have revealed to
you that the highest honour will be won by manly effort,
not squeezed from slavish, fawning sycophancy. Free
masonry is democracy, are you a Democrat ? Freemasonry
is Freethought, are you a Freethinker? Freemasonry is
work for human deliverance, are you a worker ? I know
you may tell me in England of wine-bibbing, song-singing,
meat-eating, and white kid glove-wearing fashionables who
say “ Shibboleth,” make I royal salutes," and call this
Freemasonry; but these are mere badge-wearers, who lift
their legs awkwardly over the coffin in which truth lies buried,
and who never either know the grand secret, or even work
for its discovery. Come with me to-day, and I will show
you, even in this country, lodges where the brethren work
day and night to break through conventional fetters, where
they toil hourly to break down imperial and princely shams,
where as a prince they would scorn you, and where as
»
�1
Letter to the Prince of Wales.
5
a man they would give you a brother’s grip, and die with you
or for you in the fight for human redemption and deliverance.
Go to Joseph Mazzini, and he will tell you of lodges where,
for fifty years, Poles and Italians have kept the sparks of
liberty alive whilst Russian and Austrian tyranny was
striving to trample and crush them out. Go into France,
and the imperial tottering Lie—which has stood too long in
the shadow of the first Desolator’s bloody reputation—will,
if it can (now it is near its grave), forget its daily life
practice, and speak truth by way of change—tell you that
the Masonic Lodges of France have been the only temples
in which for twenty years it has been possible to preach
the gospel of civil and religious liberty. Read Br. •. Adolph
Cremieux’s recent declaration : “ La Magonnerie n’est pas la
religion, n’est pas la foi, elle ne cherche pas dans le Magon,
le croyant, mais l’homme.” Get Odo Russell to ask Mastai
Ferrati, or some old woman, to inquire of Monseigneur
l’Eveque d’Orleans, and each will tell you that in the lodges
are the greatest enemies of the falling churches, the bravest
preachers of heretic thought, and the most earnest incul
cators of Republican earnestness. Or instead of going, with
some noble German glutton, to a paltry casino, read, if only
once or twice, a page of Europe’s history for forty years
before ’93, and then Germany’s and Sweden’s Master
Masons, speaking from their graves, shall tell you how their
teachings helped to pulverise crowns and coronets, and build
up living citizens out of theretofore dead slaves.
You have joined yourself to the Freemasons at a right
moment, for true Freemasonry is about to be more powerful
than Royalty. In Spain, at this moment, they have a
government without a king; nay, more, in that land dis
graced by many an auto dd fe, there is hope of the growth
of a people not in the hands of priests. The Revolution
which trampled on the Crown, has raised the brain, and
heresy has been spoken boldly in the legislative chamber.
Freemasonry has in Iberia a grand mission, an arduous task.
The Revolution has exiled the weak and wicked Queen.
Freemasonry, to prevent the return of such royalty, has to
strive for the development of a strong and useful people.
In Italy, where the Honorary G.’. M.l is our brother,
Joseph Garibaldi, to-day they dream of a Government with
out a monarch. Turin, Florence, Naples, Rome, forgetting
�6
Letter to the Prince of Wales.
petty dissensions and local differences, no longer misled by
royally-tinselled vice, are striving and hoping for the time
when an Italian Republic, with a Roman Senate, may once
more claim the right to be in the vanguard of civilising
peoples. Read, Brother, how at the recent Masonic Banquet
at Florence, Frederic Campanella was greeted with vivas for
the union “ di tutti i Galantuomini ” for the salvation of
Italy. In England, even at this hour, we are—if the organs
of blood and culture speak truly—very near forgetting the
use of a Queen. The least learned in politics amongst our
peoples now know that kings and queens here are only the
costly gilded figureheads of the ship of State, its helm being
in the hands of the nominees of our territorial aristocracy.
Some begin to wonder whether the State might not be
better served by sign less gaudy, and more in accordance
with the material of which the bulk of the vessel is built
Others grumble downright that a sort of base Dutch metal
should be imported in large quantities, as if we had no good
British oak out of which to carve a king without disfiguring
German silver or Dutch leaf. In France, men are working,
with prospect of near success, to overthrow the fear-stricken,
soi-disant nephew of the great Emperor; and in Europe, the
Republic of United Germany is not so far away but that the
grandchildren of living Prussian and Austrian subjects may
read with wonderment of the value that foolish Englishmen
set upon petty German princes. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternity,
form the Masonic trinity in unity. Do you believe in this
trinity ? Which will you be, prince or man ? You give me
the right to ask, for, cradled a prince, you have to-day (in
the time which ought to be your manhood) sought admission
to the ranks of men. In Freemasonry there are no princes;
the only nobles in its true peerage muster-rolls must be noble
men—men noble in thought, noble in effort, noble in en
durance—men whose peerage is not of a parchment patent,
but foot-trodden on the world’s weary-to-climb life’s ladder.
In our Masonry there are no kings save in the kingship of
manhood, “ Tons les hommes sont rois.” Kings with pens
for sceptres, king poets who make burning verse, and grand
music to give life to the half-dead nation. Kings of prose,
who pen history as impeachment of the few cruelly strong
in the past, and who pen it that the many may learn neither
to be cowardly nor weak in the grand struggle of the future.
'
�Letter to the Prince of Wales.
7
You are a prince, but dare you be a man: for the sake of
the Danish flower, whose bloom should gladden your life;
for the sake of the toiling millions who are loyal from habit,
and who will revolt reluctantly, but for peace will pay taxes
readily; for the sake of the halo that history will show round
your head in its pages ? If you dare, let us see it. Go to
Ireland—not to Punchestown races, at a cost to the people
of more than two thousand pounds—but secretly amongst
its poor, and learn their deep griefs. Walk in London, not
in parade at its horse shows, where snobs bow and stumble,
but in plain dress and unattended; in its Spitalfields, Bethnal
Green, Isle of Dogs, and Seven Dials; go where the unem
ployed commence to cry in vain for bread, where hunger
begins to leave its dead in the open streets, and try to find
out why so many starve. Don corduroy and fustian, and
ramble through the ploughed fields of Norfolk, Suffolk,
Northamptonshire, Wiltshire, and. other counties, where
thirteen shillings per week are high wages, out of which the
earner has to feed and clothe man, wife, and family, and
pay rent
Brother, before you die you will hear cries for a Republic
in England, cries that will require the brains of a grand
man to answer, cries which are gathering now, cries from the
overtaxed, who pay, without thought and without inquiry,
many more pounds in unearned pensions, for yourself and
brother princes, than they will by-and-bye pay shillings,
unless indeed you all work miracles, and make yourselves
worth your money to the nation. Yet even this you might
do; you might—you and your fellow princes in Europe—
if you would disband your standing armies, get rid of the
tinselled drones and gaudy court caterpillars, the State
Church leeches, and hereditary cormorant tax-eaters, and
then there would be a renewed lease of power for you, and
higher happiness for the people. But whatever you deter
mine to do, do quickly, or it will be too late. The Pive la
Republique now heard from some lips in Paris, Lyons, Mar
seilles, Bordeaux, will soon be the voice of France, and
there is an electric force in the echo of that cry—a force
which evokes the lightning-like flash of popular indignation
with such directness against princes who mock peoples,
against kings who rule for themselves, and against peers who
govern for their own class, that as in a moment the oak
�8
Letter to the Prince of Wales.
which has stood for centuries, is stripped of its brown bark,
and left bleached and blasted to wither, so is royalty stripped
of its tinselled gilding and left naked and defenceless to the
cold scorn of a justly indignant nation. As a Freemason
you are bound to promote peace, but peace makes the
strength of peoples, and discovers the weakness of princes.
As a Freemason you are bound to succour the oppressed of
the world, but then it will be against your fellow-princes.
As a Freemason you are bound to aid in educating the
ignorant, but if you do this you teach them that the sole
authority kings can wield they derive from the people; that
a nation may elect a chief magistrate to administer its laws,
but cannot give away their liberties to a master who shall
have the right to bequeath his authority over their children
to his child. As a Freemason you are bound to encourage
the development of Freethought, but Freethought is at war
with the Church, and between Church and Crown there has
ever been most unholy alliance against peoples. You were
a prince by birth, it was your misfortune. Your have enrolled
yourself a Freemason by choice, it shall either be your
virtue or your crime—your virtue if you are true to its
manly dutifulness; your crime if you dream that your blood
royalty is of richer quality than the poorest drop in the
veins of
A Free and Accepted Mason.
price one penny.
London : Printed and Published by C. Bradlaugh, 17, Johnson’s
Court, Fleet Street, 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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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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A letter from a freemason to General H.R.H. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, Duke of Saxony [...]
Description
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Published anonymously. Author believed to be Charles Bradlaugh. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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[C. Bradlaugh]
Date
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[187-?]
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G4942
N272
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Freemasonry
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[Unknown]
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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 (A letter from a freemason to General H.R.H. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, Duke of Saxony [...]), 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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Freemasonry
NSS
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97fb761ed0a265387e08e64daa147f0d
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Text
THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY:
ITS RELATION TO THE OTHER FACULTIES,
AND ITS PERILS.
MATTHEW MACFIE.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Price Sixpence.
��THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY:
ITS RELATION TO THE OTHER FACULTIES,
AND ITS PERILS.
HE religious instinct in man, and. the function it per
forms,
of human nature, has been
Tvariously as a constituentTheist would represent the reli
defined. The
gious sentiment within us as implanted expressly to excite
aspirations which can only be satisfied with high con
ceptions of the Infinite. Religion, according to him,
consists in adoring some one Almighty Cause—a being
clothed with the attributes of what we are accustomed
to term a Person^ very wise, just, and kind ; a sort of high
order of man indefinitely magnified, to whose control we
should at all times cheerfully submit. Religion, as con
ceived by the Positivist, on the other hand, and in many
instances by the Pantheist, ought not to be connected
with the worship of an alleged Infinite Intelligence, or
an alleged almighty Person at all; because, as the
holders of these opinions aver, the existence of a per
sonal God is not capable of proof. All so-called
evidences of the existence of such a God, they remind
us, are a petitio principii—the major and the minor
premises in the argument, ever and anon changing
places, the subject relating to something foreign to all
known analogies,—quite outside the possibilities of our
grasp and the bounds of our experience. Religion, as
understood by the disciples of these two latter schools,
is simply perverted when manifested in the conventional
�4
The Religious Faculty.
forms of praise and prayer, addressed to an Entity we
choose to call God ; and to adore as a great and good
Father, such a personage, it is insisted, is but the pro
jection in the mind of the most exalted ideal of human
Fatherhood. They tell us that the end of our constitu
tion and the interests of humanity can only be effectu
ally served by the real and the knowable in this busi
ness, engaging our attention to the exclusion of the in
definable and the unknowable. There is sense and
nobleness, say the Positivist and the Pantheist, in the
attitude of a mind inspired by the high intellectual and
moral qualities found in “ the illustrious living and the
mighty dead there is something beautiful and becom
ing in the passionate and self-sacrificing love of a brave
man, cherishing and adoring a chaste, lovely, unselfish,
and sweetly-cultured woman; it is a rational and
proper vent for the religious sentiment to pour itself
forth in tender and devout reverence for higher
humanity as the one comprehensible organ of great
achievements in the realms of thought and deed in the
universe ; true religion consists in opening up by word
and example, to our less enlightened fellow creatures,
the power and glory of obedience to law in every
department of being, as the cure for the world’s mani
fold evils; and in unfolding this revelation of law in
all its rich beneficence in a genuine sympathetic spirit,
and thus contributing to the general improvement of
the race; so our friends of Comtism and philosophic
Pantheism would inculcate. They are not so dogmatic
as positively to deny, a priori, the possibility of a per
sonal God. They confess themselves ever open to con
viction on the subject; they simply say that in the pre
sent state of our existence the subject is evidently
unsuited to our faculties, and that we are at present
incapable of solving the problem. But, howsoever the
religious sentiment arose, and whatever be the proper
and rational objects on which it ought to expend itself,
one thing is certain, that there is an element in
�The Religious Faculty.
5
humanity, known by the name of Religion, though
unanimity in the definition of it seems to be unattain
able. Now, what I wish more particularly to assert, is
that the religious faculty, tendency, principle, or what
ever one may please to call it, bears an analogy in its
origin, growth, and development, to the other powers of
the mind. Like any other mental force, the religious
principle is governed and trained by fixed laws and
knowable conditions. Its place in our constitution is
just as natural as that of the other powers, and it has
no more contact with the supernatural than any other
attribute of the mind. If the other powers are under
supernatural influence, so is this one ; if it is under such
an influence, so are they. In this respect, there is no
difference between them.
It is found—this tendency to worship—in different
degrees of strength and forms of manifestation in
different individual organizations. In some minds the
sense of music is naturally strong, and where this is the
case, contact with melodies and harmonies instinctively
thrills the soul, wakes up to consciousness the born
affinity for the beautiful in sound, where that affinity
exists, and lifts up the nature in joyous emotion. The
nice discrimination of chords rises in such persons to
the height of a divine passion; and where the musical
faculty towers above the other powers it usually
prompts to effort in mastering the science of music or
the use of some musical instrument. But while this is
true, the appreciation of music is not confined to men
of great musical tastes. There is no sane mind without
the capacity, more or less, of receiving pleasant impres
sions from musical compositions, performed or sung.
But there is always this marked difference between the
average man and the one who is a musician by nature,
that the possessor of the born gift has a specific genius
that places him in rapt sympathy with the object to
which that genius irresistibly tends, whereas the
ordinary mind has only so vague and unimpassioned a
B
�6
The Religious Faculty.
sense of the thing as to be unable clearly to distinguish
the strains of a Mendelsohn from the drawl of some
village Puritan meeting-house.
The very same difference comes before us every day
in reference to all the arts and sciences. In numbers,
physics, painting, philosophy, poetry, philanthropy,
commerce, and morals, it is clear that men are not con
stituted alike, with the same power to enjoy these kinds
of human culture, and excel in them. Everybody
knows something of arithmetic; it is only intellectual
giants that ever soar to the sublimer knowledge and
applications of Mathematics. We all understand some
thing of the rocks; few have the geological instinct of
a Murchison. We can all handle a pencil; few deserve
to be called artists. Most can appreciate the practical
results of logic; it is rare to meet men whose keen
penetration can see through the fallacies of reasoning,
and who can build up systems of immortal wisdom.
All can make rhyme; few can utter 11 thoughts that
breathe and words that burn.” Not many are entirely
destitute of pity for suffering, want, and ignorance ; yet
the world has known few Howards, whose devotion to
the cause of easing the burdens of suffering was a
supreme delight to them. Anybody can be an obscure
trader; but that peculiar grasp and enterprise are
seldom met with which place men in the rank of largeminded merchants. There is no man absolutely without
a conscience; it is only in a small minority that the
moral faculty is delicately sensitive, shrinking from
equivocal speech and unfair dealing, as the open eye
would shrink from the prick of a needle.
In human beings, then, the spiritual capacity or re
ligious organ is analogous to other powers of the mind,
and is naturally of very varied grades. I suppose there
is no nation or individual without some sense—latent
or developed, crude or cultured—of religious veneration.
Among the common order of Chinese this veneration
takes the form of the worship of ancestors ; among the
�‘The Religious Faculty.
7
lowest Africans, the worship of a fetish ; among the
followers of Comte, the worship of woman in the
domestic circle and the worship of Humanity in its
highest aspects, in public religious observances. Most
Christians worship an Almighty One, whom tradition
has taught them to regard and address as an Infinite
Person. But have we not known people-—-some of
them of high moral principles and refined tastes—who
seemed almost incapable of entering into popular re
ligious ideas, so constitutionally faint was their power
of realising the Infinite with awe, love, or devotion?
While others, differently constituted, have been stirred
to deep feeling by hymn, prayer, or theological dis
course, this class of minds have remained stoical
phenomena to themselves quite as much as they have
appeared to be to others. Of course I only refer here
to persons who act from principle, and not to the un
thinking, sensual multitude. If this stoical but en
lightened class join in the ritual of any Church, it is
simply in deference to some ancestral practice, or for
the sake of example; if they refrain from uniting with
assemblies of worshippers, it is because what interests
and invigorates the minds of others seems to persons
of their ideas unreal, if not unnecessary. They frankly
own that they do not feel the least dependence on
public or private devotional services for stimulus in the
expansion of their intellect or the discipline of their
character.
The most superficial observation shows it therefore
to be an unjust and an unsafe test of character to judge
men by, whether or not they take an intense and a con
tinuous interest in popular religious devotions and ser
mons. There can be no doubt that large numbers of
most thoughtful, high-minded, and earnest men and
women believe that they derive considerable moral
strength and direction from the habit of observing the
ritual of some Church or other; and what they feel to
be true to their religious wants and tastes they ought
�8
The Religious Faculty.
not to be discouraged from following. At the same
time it must be confessed that it is possible for a man
to be irresistibly drawn within this charmed and
hallowed atmosphere of conventional worship, and yet
be very imperfectly cultured and developed in reason
ing, aesthetic, social and moral qualities—elements of
the first importance in a complete human development.
The mind is a dwelling of many chambers. In some
instances, one or two rooms are spacious and wellfurnished, and signs of special life and activity are
visible in them; while the other rooms are very small
and mean, and a stillness reigns in them that would
almost lead one to think they were untenanted ; and
to make matters worse, there are in such minds no
doors or windows communicating between chamber and
chamber, but these are separated from each other by
blank walls. Such is a rough illustration of a mind
badly constructed, ill-balanced, misgoverned. But in
the dwelling rightly built, the rooms, though of various
size, are all well-kept and occupied by living and active
tenants, and there is a free, wdiolesome, and pleasant
communication between chamber and chamber—the
judgment, the imagination, the memory, the will, the
affections, the conscience, the religious organ, all active,
all living harmoniously under the same roof, all aiding
each other’s mutual concord, vigour, and elevation.
But to say that the man fondest of theological ways of
looking at things, and habituated to what are techni
cally known as “religious services”—to say that he
in whom the tendency to worship is strongest has
necessarily the noblest type of mind, is a fallacy which
a wider view of the science of mind, of life, and of re
ligion must sooner or later dispel. We are, as to the
master-bias of the mind, very much creatures of organi
sation, and we ought not to attach a superstitious and
an undue value to that part of us, right and useful as it
is in its place, which it has been the interest of priest
craft in all ages to rate above all the other powers. It
�The Religious Faculty.
9
has been the fashion to think that if a man be only
■what is termed “ a religious character,” he must be good
in the best and broadest sense all round. But this
statement is not to be implicitly accepted. I see no
reason to grieve if strong religious tendencies, such as
manifest themselves in pious but vague emotionalism,
have not been born in our constitution. We are only
■responsible for the talents we inherit; and different
preponderating faculties in different men are all equally
needful, like the variegated hues in nature, to give
beautiful and harmonious diversity to intellectual,
moral, and religious life. It is an absurd superstition
to think that because a man has not a natural capacity
for intense religious impulse, but only possesses a cool
reasoning mind, artistic skill, or fine moral intuitions, he
is therefore inferior to the person who is susceptible of
rhapsodical fervours. There is an impression, none the
less real though not often openly declared, that the re
ligious fanatic, even if he almost graze the line between
the saue and the insane, possesses a gift intrinsically
more precious than those gifts, in minds of the induc
tive order, which have been chiefly instrumental in
unlocking the wonders of science, and setting forth the
multiplying harmonies of the universe. The lips that
indulge most eloquently in improvable and often far
fetched conceptions of spirit life in that state from
which no traveller has ever returned to describe; the
lips that pour forth in most bold, burning allegorical
diction, penitent laments and earnest petitions to the
Almighty Person, are held to be touched with a more
god-like inspiration than are the lips that only utter
the varied wisdom pertaining to visible things and
every-day life. The notion, not so much preached as
acted in orthodox circles, is that the Almighty is
chiefly an ecclesiastical potentate, a punisher of theolo
gical heresy, a sort of Pope or “ Holy Father,” who is
rather disposed to look askance at the strivings of mere
philosophic, scientific, and literary minds after the
�io
The Religious Faculty.
ideals of perfection that lure them on respectively in
their different spheres of thought and struggle towards
perfection. He is mainly conceived of by Christendom
as seated in a high chair of state, surrounded with
angels and pensive saints, very much as Pio Nono is by
his cardinals, with his hand stretched out to bless hiselect, or to deal out damnation to the reprobate. The
position which the devoutly orthodox deem most be
coming and most divinely approved, is one of incessant
humiliation, self-crucifixion, and supplication. What
is the natural and, in general, the actual result of this
sentimentalism, which nine-tenths of the frequented
churches and chapels tend to foster? One-sided as
contrasted with many-sided culture, which latter is the
happy, rational, and healthful distinction of the man
proportionately developed—excess and unshapeliness
in one direction, and defect and contraction in another
direction. The strength that should have been har
moniously diffused over the whole man has been caught
up and monopolized by some morbid, over-grown part.
The consistent evangelical devotee is taught to wander
so habitually in the imagined scenes of a life at present
unrevealed, that the pith required to enable us to
grapple with the difficulties, and to give effect to the
enterprises of this world, is thereby greatly impaired.
Hence we look in vain, as a rule, to this lop-sided class
of minds, for the most part, to aid powerfully in the
wise conduct of public affairs in the nation or in the
borough, or in extending the domain of science. Their
celestial musings give to them a contorted and lack-adaisical air, which in a great measure unfits them for a
thoroughly human, unbiassed interest in the universal'
progress of society.
By a few artistic touches, Mr Matthew Arnold hits
off the portrait I would fain sketch, with more truth
than may to some be palatable. With special reference
to Evangelical non-conformists (though the description
quite as aptly applies to Evangelical churchmen), he
�The Religious Faculty.
11
asks, “What can be the reason of this undeniable pro
vincialism, which has two main types, a bitter type and
a smug type, but which in both its types is vulgarising,
and thwarts the full perfection of our humanity ? . . .
It is the tendency in us to Hebraise, as we call it;
that is to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the
religious side. This tendency has its cause in the
divine beauty and grandeur of religion; but we have
seen that it leads to a narrow and twisted growth of our
religious side itself, and to a failure in perfection. If
we tend to Hebraise even in an Establishment, with
the main current of national life flowing round us, and
reminding us in all ways of the variety and fulness of
human existence, . . . how much more must we tend
to Hebraise when we lack such preventives. . . . The
sectary’s Eigene grosse Erfindungen, as Goethe calls
them,—the precious discoveries of himself and his
friends for expressing the inexpressible, and defining
the indefinable in peculiar forms of their own, cannot
but fill his whole mind. He is zealous to do battle
for them and affirm them, for in affirming them he
affirms himself, and that is what we all like. Other
sides of his being are thus neglected, because the re
ligious side, always tending in every serious mind to
predominance over our other spiritual sides, is in him
made quite absorbing and tyrannous by the condition
of self-assertion and challenge which he has chosen for
himself. And just, what is not essential in religion, he
comes to mistake for essential, and a thousand times
the more readily because he has chosen it of himself,
and religious activity he fancies to consist in battling
for it. All this leaves him little leisure or inclination
for culture. . . . His first crude notions of the one thing
needful do not get purged, and they invade the whole
spiritual man in him, and then making a solitude, he
calls it heavenly peace. The more prominent the re
ligious side the greater the danger of this side swelling
and spreading till it swallows all other spiritual sides
�12
The Religious Faculty.
up, intercepts and absorbs all nutriment which should
have gone to them, and leaves Hebraism rampant in us,
and Hellenism stamped out. Culture and the har
monious perfection of our whole being, and what we
call totality, then become secondary matters ; and the
institutions which should develope these take the same
narrow and partial view of humanity and its wants as
the free religious communities take.’'
“ But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are
again and again failing, and failing conspicuously, in
the necessary first stage to perfection, in the subduing
of the great faults of our animality, which it is the glory
of these religious institutions to have helped us to
subdue. True, they do often so fail; they have often
been without the virtues as well as the faults of the
Puritan ; it has been one of their dangers that they so
felt the Puritan’s faults that they too much neglected
the practice of his virtues. I will not, however, ex
culpate them at the Puritan’s expense; they have
often failed in morality, and morality is indispensable ;
they have been punished for their failure as the Puritan
has been rewarded for his performance. They have
been punished wherein they erred; but their ideal of
beauty and sweetness and light, and a human nature
complete on all sides remains the true ideal of perfection
still, just as the Puritan’s ideal of perfection remains
narrow and inadequate, although for what he did well,
he has been richly rewarded.”*
The chief peril, then, to which persons of the reli
gious temperament are prone consists in supposing as
much of the evangelical teaching of the country has
led many to do—that intense fondness for the forms,
ceremonies, and theological speculations of orthodoxy
is necessarily a mark of great superiority of character,
great breadth of view, strength of moral purpose, and
general elevation of mind. But we do not usually find
*“ Culture and Anarchy,” pp. xxii., xxiii., xxiv., xxxii.,
xxxiv., 27, 28.
�The Religious Faculty.
the two classes of qualities to be quite compatible.
The organisation, may be ill-adjusted. The religious
sentiment may predominate just as an inordinate ten
dency towards music, poetry, mathematics, or any other
engrossing pursuit may predominate, and make the
character one-sided. The love of acts of worship and
•of devout themes may be so fervent as to tempt the
-religious enthusiast to look upon the sober realities and
•duties of the work-a-day world as stale in comparison
with the former. He may be so blinded by his ruling
passion as not to see the close bearing which that ruling
passion should have upon the rough work of ordinary life.
Misguided constitutional religiousness may isolate him
from humanity, and may become content to find a
channel for itself in a mere round of little church
activities. I should be far from disputing the sunshine
shed upon scenes of ignorance and trouble by zeal and
benevolence of the ecclesiastical type, narrow though its
range may be. But this extreme susceptibility to im
pression from mystic symbols, and pious ceremonials,
and celestial contemplations, those high-toned emotions
of reverence, and imagined affection for the Infinite;
that resistless impulse to adore God—sometimes in lan
guage too familiar to befit our very dim and partial
knowledge of Him—may, after all, be but a refined form
of luxuriousness, which often, like a huge upas-tree,
uasts its deadly shade upon the virtues of moral courage,
self-restraint, transparent honesty, candour, charity,
and open-hearted kindness. It by no means follows
that because a man has strong affinities naturally for
worship—“ the dim religious light,” the prostration of
soul, the poetry of religious sentiment, and the associa
tions of a church, that he should therefore necessarily
have a vigorous moral faculty, or a fuller and clearer
sense of right and duty than other men have. Just as
there is no necessity in one being a poet because he is
an eminent mechanical inventor, or in another having
a penchant for languages because he revels in the art of
�14
The Religious Faculty.
painting. So a man is not necessarily distinguished
for unselfishness because he has acquired the habit of
devout exercises. Yet this last is the illusion that en
chains and lowers morally many of the religious sects of
the land. It is the working of this jaundiced idea of
religion as a thing fed by pious books, theological
dogmas, and acts of church devotion, that at the present
moment is stopping the way of such a sound secular
education as the nation urgently requires. While the
clergy of different churches are squabbling as to what
form of grace should be said before meat, the poor
children gathered to the meal are starving. The ortho
dox tell us that where something technically called
“ grace ” enters the heart it supernaturally leavens the
whole being, and inevitably moulds the mind into en
lightenment and obedience.* But do we see it to be
so in fact ? On the contrary, many who think they
have received the so-called principle of “ grace ” are
often the greatest sinners against the laws of reason,
the laws of physiology, and the laws of family and
social life; and no wonder, for the whole tendency ©f
popular religious teaching is to foster the notion that
the surest outward sign of godliness lies in a quickened
inclination to attend to the religious duties prescribed
by ministers and churches. If there be any remissness
in this matter, the worshippers are soon reminded that
their spiritual life is on the wane, that “the Holy
Ghost” is forsaking them, and that to recover their
enthusiasm they must come together, pray for “the
outpouring of the Holy Ghost,” and be revived.
General culture of intellect, disposition, and character
goes for little with them, or is only treated by the
* Henry Ward Beecher cannot help sometimes letting the
latent force of the strong common sense within him burst
through the stratum of dogmatic theology that overlays it. In
a frank mood of this kind, he is reported to have said, and said
justly : “ A man born right the, first timeis very superior to the
man who has been converted under the influence of religion.”
�The Religious Faculty
i5
preacher as a “self-righteous delusion ” as long as an
unctuous sort of interest in prayings and preach
ings is absent. While this constant forcing of thereligious organ is kept supreme in the evangelical mind,
it is not to be expected that the enforcement of moral
virtues from the pulpit would have much effect. How
rarely do we find the true end of life have its proper
place in sermons ; I mean the discipline and culture of
the whole nature as the highest matter. Every part
getting its due, so that the building shall grow up
“ fitly framed together.” In well arranged minds; all
the powers—animal, intellectual, moral, and religiousare duly proportioned. A suitable education is brought
to bear for the right and harmonious unfolding of these
powers ; and in that case, religion is like the summer
air, which plays over the whole bright landscape, and
diffuses health and fragrance around. But when, either
from a mis-shapen mind or a defective training, the
religious organ has come to be a monstrous growth,
when it overshadows the other powers, and draws up
into itself the strength needed for the support of the
other powers, and fritters its power away in whining or
hysterical excitement; then this very supremacy of the
religious element offers temptation to neglect of moral,
and intellectual self-training;—offers temptation to omit
proper care for the plain homely virtues that shed radi
ance in the family and in general society. According
to the doleful system of thought and life, accepted as
religion in orthodox christendom, the supreme aim is to
get to Heaven, and the supreme method of giving effect
to that aim, is to resemble on earth, as much as possible,
the ideal life of Heaven as conceived by evangelicism ;
and what does the orthodox world mean by Heaven 1
The. words of Andrew Jackson Davis come forcibly tomy mind : “ Almost every one’s educational memory will
answer that by ‘ Heaven ’ is meant a place far off, the
residence of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; a
solemn celestial abode where mirthfulness is not per-
�16
The Religious Faculty.
mitted ; where persons appear as monks and nuns,
beautifully arrayed in white, but always with a medita
tive, abstract poetic appearance, and on their faces, an
indescribable expression of unsmiling, cadaverous piety
. . . all engaged in the same rapt devotions to the
august family of gods ; a cold and dreary place ; a place
of unbroken circumspection and inferiority. It makes
us feel as though we were on the verge of an everlast
ing graveyard, to think of it.” * Where such religious
conceptions prevail, I do not hesitate to say that the
man of naturally strong devotional fervour cannot yield
to them without mental injury. Excessive, absorbing
acts of worship, offered in this spirit, tend to drain off
the strength that ought to sustain the other powers,
and that it should be so, is according to natural law.
What is strong in us grows stronger by use, and what
is weak grows weaker by disuse. Let there be an
inordinately active brain by nature, and correspondingly
feeble limbs. Of course the more the passion for study
is gratified, where there is such a constitution, the more
quickly does the vigour of the feeble member decline.
It is not otherwise with the faculties of mind, as experi
ence and history abundantly prove.
Individuals, societies, and even nations supply sad
and striking examples of the danger of falling into subtle
temptation, to lift the religion of sentiment above the
religion of high morals, to lose sight of the claims of
the one in the sensuous fascinations of the other. This
forgetting of a sense of practical goodness in holy
raptures and visions, this blending of contradictions in
the same character, appears at a very early period. The
life of the patriarch Jacob—if we may rely on the Old
Testament story—was poisoned by this error. “ Like
those tissues of the loom, which, seen from one point
of view, are all bright with colours and radiant with
gold, while, if you change your position, they appear
dark and sombre, the life of Jacob comes before us as a
strange paradox, shot with the most marvellous diversi* Morning Lectures, American Edition, p. 107.
�The Religious faculty.
J7
ties. lie is the hero of faith, and the quick, sharpwitted schemer. To him the heavens are opened, and
his wisdom passes into the cunning which is of the
earth, earthy. One may see in him, lying close
together, the beginning of all we reverence in St John,
and of all that we tremble at in Judas.” *
This marvellous compound of the precious and the
vile in the Psalmist King is familiar to all thoughtful
readers of the Bible. While wafted in his poetic soar
ings to super-mundane spheres, and delighting in the
Tabernacle as the divinest spot on earth, there was a
plot going forward in his spirit of one of the foulest
deeds that ever stained humanity. The characteristics
of the Pharisees point in the same direction. During
a considerable period in Jewish history public opinion
put so high a value on ceremonial strictness, that a man
who prayed and fasted plentifully more readily got
credit for being a saint than if he had applied the same
zeal in keeping the natural and moral law, and, as
might be expected, candidates for the honour of saint
ship were not wanting where the terms were so freely
open to the competition of fanaticism, cant, and hypo
crisy. Not that all the Pharisees were victims of these
failings, though the tendency of their religious system
was to make them so. Religious observance was viewed
by orthodoxy then as now, as higher than moral duty.
The unwholesome air of their affected sanctities re
pressed the healthy workings of the natural conscience
within them, and, as will always beneficently happen
in such circumstances, the violated laws of nature
had their revenge. In being untrue to the higher
instincts of their being, the Pharisees, as a sect, fell a
prey to self-deception and hollowness, the natural
penalty of all religious unreality. The punctilious
tithing of “ the mint, the anise, and the cummin,” came
to be regarded by them as a weightier concern than the
claims of “judgment, mercy, and faith,” and thus the
* “Theology and Life,” Plumptre, pp. 299.
�18
The Religious Faculty.
religious element actually proved a barrier to their
proper moral development. There grew up in their
minds side by side, a sort of dreamy reverence for the
minute details of the Temple and Synagogue service on
the one hand, and an insensibility to the moral import
of religion on the other.
I wish I could believe that the perils and temptations
to which the religious faculty is exposed in persons of a
pre-eminently religious temperament, were things only
of the past. I fear these perils and temptations are
none the less insidious in worshipping communities
now. The life of great towns and the habits of civiliza
tion, though they do not exclude the recklessness of
Esau, tend more directly to produce the ungenerous
craft and mean subtlety of Jacob. I am not indifferent
to the painful fact that the mass of human beings in
the present very primitive stage of their rational de
velopment, are found living mere animal lives, reck
lessly disregarding ennobling influences, which lack of
culture, or lack of the opportunity for culture, incapaci
tates them from appreciating. But we cannot forget
that there are faults of another kind,—prudential
vices, such as narrow bigotry, bitter spleen, gnawing
envy, brutal uncharitableness, pious superciliousness,
unworthy bland trickiness, and the like, unfortunately
compatible with orderly and reputable lives. And the
formidable aspect of the case is that these are largely the
besetting perils of men constitutionally inclined to reli
gion; and perhaps there is no class of men more prone to
these peculiar dangers and temptations than those whom
popular superstition still more or less invests with the
halo of sacred separation as professional religious
teachers. * On no class of men is outward success in
their calling more morally deteriorating, none are so
tempted to court the breath of popular applause, and
none are more prone to professional envy and jealousy.
Such dangers and temptations do not usually connect
themselves with a formal and deliberate hypocrisy, but
�The Religious Faculty.
*9
■with characters trained to some form of Theistic worship
and the sincerity of whose religion, as far as it goes,
there is no reason to doubt.
I despair of civilized nations ever reaching a very
high type of character as long as there are in the
institutions of popular religion such narrow tests of
piety and moral excellence as I have been describing,
for these tests cannot fail to divert the common mind
from those great moral principles and obligations to
which even religion itself was meant to be subservient.
What more calculated to distort the nature, nurse per
nicious conceit, and render a man indifferent alike to
the necessity and glory of moral advancement than the
theological fancies pandered to by Evangelical preaching
and writing ? The “ communicant ” is taught to believe
that he has been the subject of a miraculous change
from which the common herd of mankind is excluded,
that he has “ passed from death unto life,” that he has
been favoured with manifestations of some fond attach
ment on the part of Deity denied to ordinary mortals.
This “object of eternally electing love,” this “subject
of supernatural grace,” may be mean-spirited, may be
ignorant of the laws written upon his constitution, and
essential to be understood and obeyed as a condition of
rational happiness and intelligence ; he may have been
the victim of some habitual vice all through life, up to
the period at which he was “converted.” No matter;
let him only pass through the conventional process of
evangelical “regeneration,” and the very flower of in
tellectual and moral culture in the world, reverent
seekers after truth like Darwin, Herbert Spencer,
Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and Lecky, who are con
scientiously opposed to orthodoxy, are held to be
“ children of wrath,” and “ under the curse,” while this
ignorant, fanatical, conceited boor—as he may neverthe
less be,—is looked upon in his church as “born of God,”
“redeemed,” “a saint,” furnished with a passport to
heaven ! Am I rash, then, in asserting that the factitious
�20
The Religious hacuity.
importance attached to conversion and church-member
ship offers a strong temptation, especially to the weak
and crude natures, which are usually carried away by
such influences, to look down with a quiet, self-satis
fied arrogance upon those who have no .sympathy with
ecclesiastical ways of doing things as if they were,
religiously, plebeians. Albeit many of those frowned
upon by the churches have often a keener sense of
honour and kindness and unselfishness, and a more in
stinctive aversion to what is false and mean than many
who are reputed to live in the odour of sanctity.
There is one question that, with me, determines in a
moment the value of all creeds and churches. Do the
forms and dogmas of churches tend most effectually to
quicken and shape in us the development of the true,
the beautiful, and the good ? Are the characters which
are the logical outcome of creeds and rituals—conform
ing or nonconforming—really nobler and more enlight
ened than those planted in the virgin soil of natural
thought and natural morals ? Are the orthodox more
apt in the use of their understanding, more tender and
pure in their affections, more harmonious in the unfold
ing of their powers, more useful to mankind, more for
giving, more patient, more free from the enslavement
of passion or appetite, more faithful in the discharge of
social and relative duties ? I am not convinced by any
means that the legitimate product of evangelicism has
the advantage in this comparison.
I wish only to add that the business of religion
simply has to do with our being true to the higher
principles of humanity which are latent or developed
in the mind of every sane person, and with our obey
ing these principles after the fashion of our separate
individuality. Types of being vary even in the same
species through the realms of animal and vegetable life.
If the lily had the power to envy the rose, or the lichen
to covet the majesty of the oak, it would be a silly
waste of temper in that case to shew the envious or the
�The Religious Faculty.
21
■covetous disposition, for each, flower and tree has a
nature of its own so worthy of being cultivated that it
can afford to be above desiring to be not itself but
something else. So with man. Let any one but set
himself to make the most of himself, unsparing of his
imperfections, exercising a fostering care over his strong
and good qualities, and he will have no cause for regret
that he did not happen to have a different name and a
different nature. Churches and creeds cast all their
votaries into the same mould. Genuine religion makes
each one who understands and lives up to it, true to his
own higher individuality, while it causes his pulse to
beat in unison with the great common sentiments of
civilized humanity. I see no cause to mourn if my
religious faculty be not so vigorous as St Paul's, if my
piety be not formed on the pattern of John Bunyan’s,
or if I cannot take kindly to the leadership of Simeon,
Pusey, or Maurice. So far as I find these men striving
after those principles of eternal morality which underlie
all theologies and ecclesiasticisms; and respecting the
type of their separate individualities, I feel bound to
honour them as heartily as I may differ from them
conscientiously. So far as I find reason to believe
their motives pure and earnest, I am profited by their
example. But the principle which is to determine the
precise shape my mind and character shall take is the
natural cast of my being, the peculiar inborn struc
ture of my faculties and powers. The building up of
myself, according to the better idiosyncracies of my
constitution, is to me a sacred work. If I lose sight of
the claims my individuality imposes on me and set up
some model to copy and work by outside myself, I at
once pervert the divine plan in my individual life, ignore
the dictates of my nature, desecrate what in me is holiest,
and sink into a wretched plagiarist and mimic—my guilt
being none the less heinous because I am affecting to
be like some great saint or philosopher, attempting, in
short, to be something I was not intended to be.
�
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
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
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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
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 religious faculty: its relation to the other faculties and its perils
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Macfie, Matthew
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 21 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[187-?]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5470
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religion
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 religious faculty: its relation to the other faculties and its perils), 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>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Religion
-
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4ce1534d4af2d690b3b4c5d885ed9b86
PDF Text
Text
RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION
IN
SECONDARY FOUNDATION
SCHOOLS.
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT.
HE writer of the following brief remarks has been
impelled to commit them to print by the reflection
that whilst the propriety of allowing the Masters of
Primary Schools to give instruction in religion has for
the last two years formed a prominent subject of
national discussion, the objections which lie against
allowing or requiring the Head Masters of Secondary
Endowed Schools “to make provision, in conjunction
with the Governing Body,” for similar instruction, have
not, as far as he is aware, received adequate attention.
Under the system which at present obtains in the
Secondary Endowed Schools of England, a Head Master
of honesty and intelligence is evidently liable to find
himself in a dilemma of the following kind; either he
must teach the scholars (and whether he does so by
explicit inculcation or by the implication of reticence,
makes but little difference to the resiflt), at a peculiarly
impassionable age, that every detail of the Biblical nar
rative is truth unquestioned and unquestionable on pain
of offending God, and. the maxims of conduct therein
commended, of perfect morality; or he must acquaint
them with some at least of the conclusions to the con
trary established or advanced by modern criticism.
The first alternative, it will be admitted, is not only
very unfavourable to the teacher’s growth in accuracy
of thought on religious topics, and sensitiveness to the
responsibilities of his position, but involves the risk of
drawing the children of parents of broad and en
lightened religious opinions back into the terrifying
misapprehensions, to use no stronger word, which it cost
themselves possibly years of mental agony and painful
study to outgrow. The second alternative would most
assuredly involve him in contentions with the Governors
of the School and with parents of a narrow, unculti
vated, and, by consequence, intolerant type of ortho
doxy, whereby would be caused very probably the im
mediate decadence of the School, and, finally, the ruin
of the Head Master by dismissal where possible.
T
�2
Two courses are open by which the evils indicated
may be avoided. Either the curriculum of instruction
in these schools may be restricted to secular knowledge,
as is the case in the nascent Public Schools and Col
leges in New Zealand, among our colonies ; or the treat
ment of the text of the Bible may be conformed in
practice to that of the histories of Livy and Herodotus,
and the ethical treatises of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero,
the established conclusions and critical methods of
modern science and historical proof being no more
ignored, discredited, or suppressed in the case of the
one department of study than in that of the other.
It is to be feared that some time must yet elapse
before either of these two courses is introduced by legis
lative enactment into Secondary Endowed Schools. He
desires, therefore, to advocate the immediate establish
ment of a College of Secondary Education, on the Pro
prietary system, after the model of Cheltenham College,
in which the second of the courses defined above, which
is also the one which appears to him abstractedly the
best, may form the distinguishing feature.
He entertains the conviction that the number of
persons has enormously increased of late years, and is
daily increasing still more rapidly, who, so far from
desiring to see promoted in their children, by the in
struction given them in school, a retrogression in reli
gious conceptions from the standard of enlightenment
they have themselves attained, desire to see them aided
and encouraged in achieving and maintaining a like
moral enfranchisement. He is also of opinion that in
the foundation of a school of this kind is to be found
the remedy for the fact that whereas many of the most
able and the most ardent friends of religious enlighten
ment only achieve late in life the mental development
necessary to qualify them for a position in the ranks of
its adherents (perhaps but a few years before they are
removed from active service by death or the infirmities
of advancing years), the champions of obscurantism,
obstruction, and intolerance are recruited, owing to the
present system of Public School education, by the enlist
ment of each successive generation in its childhood.
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
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
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
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
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
Religious instruction in secondary foundation schools: how to deal with it
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London?]
Collation: 2 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[Thomas Scott?]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[187-?]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5536
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education
Religion
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
[Unknown]
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 (Religious instruction in secondary foundation schools: how to deal with it), 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>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Education
Religious Education
-
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be492c371e2fa2bc39236dc4a1a14006
PDF Text
Text
PSYCHE TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
A CHANT OF LOVE AND FREEDOM.
BY FRANCES ROSE MACKINLEY.
Arise ! my soul, thou breath of God !
Awake, to a full sense of thine all-coinprising consciousness
To hymn the praise of Love-Creative—
And Freedom-Regenerative of Humanity.
Disrupt the tyrannic bonds ;
That have held captive thy sex for ages !
Recklessly speak thy thought;
Mindful only of allegiance to Truth !
O for a voice !
That could resound throughout the universe.
A voice !
Not pitifully plaintive, like wailing Philomel’s ;
“'Tor calling aloud for relief,
Ake Israel in bondage;
Nor yet a voice, shrill and sharp,
Jenetrating the spheres
Like that of the soaring skylark—
3ut a voice, new made,
Louder, clearer, sweeter, fuller, than any voice yet heard—
An archangelic breath ! a voice divine !
Wherewith I could arouse Humanity from its lethargy,
And make lovers and freed of all women and men.
A voice to chant a Pean of Freedom, boundless as space ;
And love infinite and all embracing.
A voice, to stir in woman
Some inspiration of her coming destiny,
�2
That she may know that, in the future,
She is to lead the van of the Army of Progress,
Now advancing with victorious strides.
This age asks for new women—
Women, untrammeled by the temporary and stationary,
.Not stunted or warped by prejudgment or bias :
No more bigotries! no more prejudices'
For the woman who is to come—
The true woman, the pure woman.
I would sing the glory of the sexual act;
The most ecstatic bliss of the body !
I would sing the praise of creative copulation !
The act generative of an immortal soul;
Wherein, God as man, and Nature as woman,
Blend their essences.
1 would sing, of the coming woman—
Moulder of a new race;
Made perfect by her recognition
Of the goodness and purity of nature’s laws;
Of the woman who prides herself
On every particle of her delicious and sublime body,
The habitation and sanctuary of the Eternal Spirit.
The woman—slave of the Time Being—
Who is ashamed of herself—ashamed of Nature—
Will be ashamed of me.
Let the good and perfect woman
Have compassion on the woman
Who is ashamed of herself!
Who invented this trick electric, of nature—this Eroto
mania—
Whereby immortal consciousness is forced into entity ?
Was it invented ? No ! it is coeval with existence !
Invention and conception are forms of the same process;
And this material feat of concentrated sensuousness
Symbolizes the creation of intuitive and inventive thought.
�3
Eternal Coition is, then, the will automatic of the universe;
O ¡Nature's cunning method of causation;
Tnat.inct working itself up, forever, into reason;
By the principle of ceaseless and inexorable evolution.
The idea of one supreme is but a thought-limit;
Or the swell of presumptuous vanity, in the mere male mind.
The Elohim, that spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai,
Proclaimed his Godhood bi-sexual:
So, God and Nature—male and female—are perpetually be
getting ;
And the lustful Jove is but Jehovah in another character.
Into this instantial moment of transcendent felicity,
Nature concentrates every possibility of pleasure.
Science has exhausted the study
Of the outward, unconscious universe.
In this causal deed of the energy of nature,
Science must find the true origin of all things.
To study, know and apply its highest laws,
Will be to people the planet with gods,
And bring about the Millennium.
In the antique time, *
They consecrated temples to the Gods of Love:
To Venus, lascivious and free—
To Eros, hot and ardent—
To Lamps icus of the garden, fierce and lusty—
To the goatish Pan, chasing wood nymphs.
These deities are spiritual symbols
Of qualities of the soul.
Build anew to-day
These Fanes embalmed in poesy!
Science now knows these ancient'cults
To have been the worship of truth, not myths.
Build them!
Tokens of our return to the ecstacies of nature;
From the cold mathematics of Mammon,
Into which we have fallen.
�4
Crown with a wreath of lilies, emblems of purity,
The men and women—angels of love and freedom—
Who will offer, at the shrine of these attributes of Divinity,
Incense of honor and adoration !
Confess the sanctity of your natures ! Declare
How sweet, to man'or woman,
Is the tremulous and tingling titillation of nature’s battery.
Evolving a conscious soul-spark out of chaos !
Earth holds, for me, no more beautiful picture,
Tuan the nude bodies of a man and woman,
Clean, fresh and white (or be it brown or black),
United in amorous fondness,
As before they were severed by Jupiter.
The quivering lips, red cheek, bright eyes and palpitating
form,
Aie but the shadows of the convulsive throes of nature.
O for Venus-loving women ! for Sapphic souls !
And Lesbian natures !
I had a dream,
Aphrodite, the Celestial Goddess, appeared to me,
More radiant, more glowing, more interfused with love,
Than when first she sprang from the foamy sea.'
“ Daughter,” she said,
“ Repair to Cyprus !
Thence to all corners of the globe, send bidding,
Announcing that my worship is to be renewed.
Grecians loved me in lascivious wiles;
And in licentious rites.
This was a true tribute to my power.
Too much of love, too much of freedom,
Too much of delight, thou canst not have.
But I am to be worshiped, in the future,
As I have never been in the history of the earth :
With all the voluptuous imagination of the past,
And all the light of the science of to-day.
�5
In Olympus,
The fulfillment of an olden prophecy is expected :
Astrea returns to earth
Whence she fled, ages agone, from the cruelty of men,
The Goddesses sit in council and co-operate,
Hoping that the gentle and feminine virtues
Are about to replace the cruel reign of male force.
Minerva, Psyche and myself clasp hands in heaven,
As knowledge, soul, and love, must conjoin on earth.
And thus am I Venus !
To be venerated in reason and principle,
As well as adored in love.
Because my name has been mentioned with blushes ;
Because the arts I taught humanity
Have been practiced in secret and in shame,
Men have been converted into monsters of absurdity,
Instead of monuments of grace;
And penury and misery reign
Where art and plenty should.”
So spake the Goddess.
Join with me, O women,
In this song of love and freedom !
And, by the truth and beauty of your lives,
Inaugurate the reign of Psyche, Minerva and Venus '.
��
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
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
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
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
Psyche to the nineteenth century: a chant of love and freedom
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Macinley, Frances Rose
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: {s.l.]
Collation: 5 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. A poem.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[s.n.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[187-?]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5309
Subject
The topic of the resource
Poetry
Women's rights
Sexuality
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 (Psyche to the nineteenth century: a chant of love and freedom), 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>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
Free Love
Poetry
Poetry in English
Sexual Relationships
Women's Rights
Women's Rights-United States
-
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23deaeaef7a79127eda4dff6ad165408
PDF Text
Text
CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE SOCIETY:
ITS
PROFESSED PRINCIPLES and ACTUAL POLICY.
NTEREST in the career of this promising though
hitherto disappointing institution prompted a
visit to Willis’s Rooms on Friday afternoon, June 5,
when the third anniversary was being celebrated.
Whether “ celebrated ” is the happiest term or not,
may be decided after acquaintance with what follows.
In the circular which accompanied the request for our
subscription, the Christian Evidence Society declares
(after enumerating the various aggressive efforts of
heterodox propagandists) that it is their object to
“stem the tide of scepticism.” They “hold that
difficulties must be met by fair argument, and doubts
removed by candid explanations. They desire, too, to
meet the bolder and more aggressive propagation of
infidelity, to confront its champions, and refute their
arguments; to rescue inquiring minds from being
misled by objections—essentially old, capable of refu
tation, and oft refuted, which nevertheless, if un
challenged in their new forms, may be thought un
answerable because unanswered.” A most laudable
object, would to Heaven they would carry it out!
and it was to hear the Society’s own report of its
warfare that our visit was paid.
I
�2
There were about 150 persons present, of whom
perhaps two-thirds were ladies, and a large proportion
of the remainder clergymen, as might perhaps be ex
pected, seeing that the speakers comprised the Arch
bishop of York, Bishop of London (in the chair),
Bishop of Gloucester, Bishop of Oxford, besides lesser
dignitaries of the Church. Prayers were read from
a small book, having no special reference to the work
of the Society. The report was lengthy; common
place at first, it grew chilly as it proceeded, until it
left us decidedly dull. Por, after reviewing the year’s
work, the opposition to which was characterised as
“ only feeble,” and planning out schemes to come,
the dismal truth had to be spoken, that Christians
had not rushed to the defence of the “ faith once
delivered” with the hoped-for energy: the sinews of
war were failing, the funds are dreadfully low. The
receipts had been 1,493Z.; expenditure, l,480Z.; leaving
a balance of 13Z. only “ to stem the tide of scepticism.”
Worse remained behind, the loss of large benefactors;
and there would not have been even a balance at all,
had not pressure of circumstances forced them to sell
out one-fourth of their reserve fund. We were much
relieved to hear, after this, that some of the members
have offered special prayers on the evening of the last
day in each month, in private, for the benefit of the
Society; and though at present the answer had not
been all that might be expected from a “ prayer
answering God,” we were all earnestly requested to
do likewise, since this mode of raising subscriptions
had been “ specially sanctioned by his Grace the
Archbishop of York,” who yawned heartily during
the whole of the report.
The Bishop of London struck the uppermost chord
in the hearts of all present by deploring, in his least
cheerful manner, “that society is saturated with
infidelity from the highest grade to the lowest,” that
men are satisfied to live according to the dictates “ of
�3
their own evil hearts.” The masses, he confessed,
do not attend church, and he believed that the extent
of passive unbelief is more harmful than active infi
delity. Still, he thought that this infidelity is not
deeper to-day than formerly, but more multiform, as
they are now attacked at once by the coarse objections
of Paine, and by the keen criticism of Strauss and
others. His lordship favoured us with a long cata
logue of various phases of modern unbelief, which he
summed up in one word, “ Egotism,” that is the root
of all heresy to-day. He considered that Christians
had been too full of apology and defence of late, and
advised the taking of higher ground in future, stating
boldly that they believe would perhaps have a better
effect with the people than mere argument. He did
not add that assertion was better than proof, when
proof is wanting. The Bishop effectually damped
our not over lively spirits, but there was possibly a
special providence in the fact that very few could
hear a word of his very badly read address. He
concluded with a feeble apology for the existence
of the Society, “ whose work is so valuable, but the
results of which,” said his lordship, “ will only be
known—hereafter. ’ ’
The Chairman stated that a “ good deal of the
infidelity of the day arose from ignorance, and hence
the necessity of a society like the Christian Evidence
Society, which met the Infidel on his own ground,
an.d showed by lectures, pamphlets, and tracts that
Christians were in the right.” Surely the Bishop of
London forgot the facts of the case. It is true that
ignorance breeds superstition, a state of mind largely
traded on by priests of all denominations ; but the
so-called infidelity of the present day, which the
Christian Evidence Society does not attempt to touch,
is the result of the increasing amount of intelligence
in all classes, leading to the examination of the
grounds on which certain facts are said to rest, and
�4
thereby the said facts are proved to have no
existence.
It is to be feared that the clergy comprising the
Christian Evidence Society are hardly so scrupulous
in their statements as their profession should make
them. Had the Bishop said that without the sup
port of the ignorant and superstitious such societies
as the Christian Evidence Society could not be kept
alive, he would indeed have uttered a great truth.
To ignore, as the Christian Evidence Society has
hitherto done, such challenges as that by Judge
Strange or Mr Thomas Scott, seems proof that they
fear to meet such writers. At any rate they ignore
them wholly ; as yet the Society has shrunk from
“ confronting the champions ” of free thought, and,
like Ealstaff, shows its bravery only by big words.
Or are, perhaps, these gentlemen so ignorant and
obscure as to be quite beneath their notice F
It is to be hoped that a steady persistence by these
gentlemen, and a host of others like them, in the
work of laying bare the immense assumptions and
assertions of the orthodox, may at last force this
Society to give some public reply to their various
pamphlets.
The Archbishop of York is abetter specimen of the
Church Militant than his brother of London, and as
he shook himself together it was evident there was
to be a serious deliverance. After paying the con
ventional compliment to “My Lord Bishop ” for the
magnificent oration from the chair, His Grace reluc
tantly declared he could not share the Bishop’s hope
that infidelity is decreasing. With great emphasis
he assured us it is increasing every day. We were
taken to Germany and France, and back to England,
in proof of the terrible encroachment of the great
army of sceptics, and were told how an astronomer had
given a detailed explanation of the movements of the
planetary bodies to one who, astounded, said to the
�5
man of Science, “ Why, you have never even men
tioned the name of God ! ” “ Sir,” said the philo
sopher, “ there is no need of such an hypothesis.”
His Grace also believes that the appearance of one
■who believes is quite as effectual as an argument,
which met with the approbation of many around him.
However potent for good the sight of a live Arch
bishop or Bishop may be, and we do not doubt it in
the least, it seems hardly probable that an exhibition
of lecturers or even the lectures themselves, will effect
much towards the Society’s object—“ the refutation
of arguments which may be thought unanswerable
because unanswered.” He deprecates evidential dis
courses and arguments in the pulpit, which might
cause many to doubt who did not doubt before, but
advises special lectures in suitable places, although he
rightly added that “ Christianity is just as true to-day
as ever it was.” Children ought not to be taught the
proofs of Christianity, nor to reason upon its facts, but
this sentiment was strongly opposed by several succeed
ing speakers. His Grace grew boisterously eloquent
with acknowledged borrowed illustrations and quota
tions upon “ the intellectual side of the Trinity,”
treating us to a little sermon suitable to the Calendar.
But sadness followed with the words “ there have been
works published this year which are as hard to answer
as any that have ever appeared.” He gave no signs of
any intention to reply to them himself, and deliberately
pooh-poohed a suggestion of the report, offered as an
incitement to further subscriptions, that the Society
should publish some works, after the pattern of
Butler’s ‘ Analogy,’ carefully reasoned out, which
shall claim the attention and dispose of the objections
of the cultured sceptic, who will not trouble himself
with their small publications. The Archbishop said
they must let this alone : “you cannot do it properly,
you must not become a publishing society, leave that
to the S.P.C.K. and continue as you are doing.” With
�6
an excuse for himself and Right Reverend Brethren,
that they could not be of much use to the cause,
having so little time at command, His Gtace con
cluded with an earnest appeal for—not arguments,
but funds, and. left the hall. The Rev. W. Arthur,
Wesleyan Minister, followed with an able speech of a
few minutes, in which he demolished Comte with
consummate ease in five sentences and a half. He
held that a child’s mind soon expands, delighting
in argument and reason [this unlucky oversight
of the Creator], could only be remedied by in
stilling into it early the glorious principles of the
Christian doctrine. Dr Jobson, Wesleyan, cheer
fully objected to be classed as a Nonconformist,
since he would willingly sign the Thirty-nine Articles.
He agreed with the last speaker that “ the children
should not be left to Satan,” and after saying nothing
for another five minutes, sat down. Dr J. H. Glad
stone announced himself as a man of Science. “ Some
of us,- or rather two or three of the few who are
known as men of Science, are supposed to be unbe
lievers ! ” A slander against which he vehemently
protested, for though one or two (e.y., Huxley, Tyndall,
Carpenter, and such like scientists) may not be “ with
us ” in all points, they are but units compared with the
great company “ of us,” who reconcile fact and faith.
This gentleman apparently forgot he was not lectur
ing to his class of youths, but at length, after sundry
“ scientific ” sneers at men who pretend to know more
than himself, the well-prepared performance closed.
Thus far we heard nothing about the victories won, or
schemes of future operations ; we were lost in contem
plation of the in-flowing “ tide of scepticism.” The
Bishop of Gloucester is given to plain speaking, espe
cially when advising how to dispose of an inconvenient
opponent, so we looked for light. His lordship had
charge of a resolution embodying a proposal to pub
lish the big books, previously discouraged by the
�7
Archbishop. With great ingenuity, more worthy of
the bar than the bench, his lordship found a way to
support the Society without coming into conflict with
His Grace, by dwelling upon the word “ further;” that
is, the Society will not publish, but only “further”
the publication of the two works, one of which is to
be upon the Gospels, and the other upon the Miracles.
An author of great eminence has undertaken one of
these already. The speaker dealt with many topics,
but managed to omit the interesting question, lost
sight of by all speakers, “ What has been done to
‘ refute the arguments ’ of the many scholars of
eminence who have pointedly challenged the Society ?
The Bishop read extracts from the most recently
published work of this kind, to show us how terribly
infidel in character our first writers are becoming.
But not one word of reply, not a sign of “ refutation ”
or “ stemming the tide.” He also lamented that his
time is so fully occupied, or he might—(no, he did
not say that.) He showed how Butler of the
‘ Analogy ’ is useless to-day, and so of the rest.
The brightest gem of his speech was when he
announced, in seductive tones, that the Christian
Evidence Society has plenty of room,—room for men
of genius to work for her, room for money to pay the
men of genius, and in sad need of the prayers of all
who, like their lordships, could not supply anything
else.
Others followed, but it was a weary wail through
out. The principles of the Society seem to flourish
in an inverse ratio to their efforts to propagate them.
Thev were a more powerful force in their first days
than now in their third year. Their confessions of
failure, whether in gaining respect, sympathy,
adherents, or money, are of more worth to the
opponents they ignore than to the cause they
profess to support. They challenge, but do not
fight; they argue, but do not reason; they see
�8
the gauntlet, but look another way; they profess
to be bold, but accept the taunt of cowardice.
It is their principle “to meet difficulties with fair
argument, and remove doubts by candid explana
tions;” it is their policy to meet the doubter with
exploded arguments, and that not sufficing, either
press him into their own army or dismiss him con
firmed in his doubt. Their apparent advance, when
closely observed and challenged, proves to be a stra
tegic movement culminating in retreat. Three years
of patient effort to arouse these apologists to their
duty of answering the persistent attacks of men
abler and more consistent than themselves, have
proved the impossibility of galvanising a moribund
body into active life. The deepest conviction of im
partial minds upon leaving the meeting was that the
Christian Evidence Society has, at great expense,
done little else than furnish evidence of the weakness
of the cause it defends, a conviction which, “how
ever capable of refutation,” if not removed by
“candid explanations,” will assuredly “ be thought
unanswerable because unanswered.”
C. W. REYNELL, printer, little pulteney street, kaymarket, w.
�
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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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The Christian Evidence Society: its professed principles and actual policy
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
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Christianity
Bible
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Bible-Evidences
Christian Evidence Society
Conway Tracts
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HEAVEN & HELL: WHERE SITUATED?
A. SEABCH AFTEIi THE OBJECTS OP
MAN’S FERVENT HOPE & ABIDING TERROR.
BY AUSTIN HOLYOAKE.
Heaven ia the hope of the Christian —Hell is his dread, his fear, his
abiding terror. What would Christianity be—that is, the modern faith
of Europe—without these two ideas, or sentiments, or beliefs, or whatever
they may be called? Simply a mild kind of superstition. The hope of an
eternal reward for doing right, appeals with much force, there can be no
doubt, to the selfish; and the fear of eternal, never-ending torments, will
keep many a wretch in awe. But all who are swayed by such motives
must be inferior morally to those who do good because it is right to do so,
and because it will benefit men individually, and society generally, regard
less of all consideration as to whether the doers of good will receive
advantage themselves. Man’s clear duty is to do right, to speak the truth,
not only without reward, but even at his own cost if need be.
I say at the outset, that I do not believe in the Christian’s Heaven. It
involves too many difficultiss and contradictions for me to comprehend, or
for anyone to explain. To disturb the Christian’s greatest hope, to destroy
his fondest illusion, to rob him of his sole consolation, without giving him
an equivalent in return, is denounced from every pulpit and every religious
tract, as a deadly sin. But if the Christian is trusting to a delusion, if
he is self-deceived, who is to blame? Surely not he who points out the
error—the blame lies rather with those who have deceived him, or, it may
be, with himself, for not having examined more closely the foundations of
his belief. Ministers every day in the year preach about and promise to
their devotees a heaven of bliss, when they have not the minutest particle
of evidence upon the subject to justify their promises. Thus is the world
deluded; and out of the delusion thousands thrive and fatten, while the
bulk of the nation are taxed to uphold the deception.
For many centuries, and in many countries, the idea of a future state,
or world beyond the grave, has existed. How this idea first arose, we have
no clear conception. That it has varied in different countries, according
to the amount of intelligence or civilisation possessed by each, is certain.
The poor savage, whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind,
has pictured to himself the happy hunting grounds of the Great Spirit,
covered with boundless herds of wild buffaloes and other animals dear to
the heart of the child of the prairie, which he will be always chasing and
always catching. The Mahomedan of the East believes in and hopes for
a Paradise where all his sensuous enjoyments will be increased tenfold—
shady groves, refreshing springs, and beautiful houris. The Christian
believes in a future state of spiritual existence, where all his earthly
wants and necessities will leave him, where hunger and thirst, pain and
sorrow, will torment him no more. In short, he expects to live in a state
of ecstatic delirium for ever and ever. We will examine how far this
belief is warranted by facts.
�2
Heaven and Hell.
What is the Christian’s Heaven? Where is it situated? In what part
of the so-called Sacred Writings shall we find a clear and intelligible
description of this abode of bliss—this promised land of never-ending
pleasures, which is to be the reward of all true believers ? It appears to be
situated, by common consent, up above—beyond the clouds—beyond im
measurable space—and yet in the clouds. Whether in the torrid or the
frigid zone, we are not informed. What its climate will be no man
knoweth. Will there be there the severe winter, with its snows and
chilling blasts; the genial and budding spring, giving promise of the
warm and sunny summer, when all nature, in the plenitude of her wealth
and beauty, showers her blessings on mankind; to be followed by the mellow
and glowing autumn, when the seasons, resting as it were from the labours
of production, smile upon the bounties scattered broadcast over the earth?
Men of all climes are to go to Heaven, who believe in the proper number
of orthodox nostrums, but how will the Laplander fare in a climate which
is suitable to the Asiatic ? How will the Englishman live and be happy,
where the African can thrive, or the Russian of the wilds of Siberia will be
at home ? Are all to be dumb there, or are all to speak one language ? If
all are to have the power of articulation, are those only of one country to
talk together, except the happy few who may possess the gift of tongues ?
If so, it will be but a repetition of the educational inequalities of this
world, which the schoolmaster is now making strenuous efforts to rectify.
Will all retain the same intellectual power which they possessed when on
earth ? If so, what gratification will the change bring to the idiots from
birth, who are not capable of comprehending anything ? They cannot be
restored to their senses, seeing that they never possessed any. After death
they would have to be reorganised. Will the cripples be made perfect, and
those who have lost limbs have them restored to them ? These may seem
to the Christian considerations beside the question, but on reflection he
will be bound to admit that they are questions needing an answer.
It is in vain for the Christian to say that man in Heaven will be a
spiritual, and not a material being. In the first place, we have no con
ception, and cannot possibly convey to another, an idea of what a spiritual
being is. There is a contradiction in the very terms, and we have no
analogy by which to judge. This involves the interminable controversy
about spiritual substance, etherealised bodies, and so on. But is it not
manifestly absurd to promise to man eternal happiness in a future state of
existence, when you take away from him all those faculties whereby he
will be alone capable of feeling either pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow? See
the insurmountable difficulties involved in this notion of life after death.
I am promised all this bliss; then, unless I go to that land beyond the
grave as I am—that is, with all my human faculties unimpaired—1 cannot
enjoy it ? I am known from others to all who see me by my outward form,
and by what they hear me say and see me do. I receive pleasure from certain
things, and experience pain in virtue of being what I am. Destroy my
individuality, my body, and where am I ? Ano longer exist. That same
principle of life which animates my body has animated countless millions of
other human beings ; but my form as it now exists has never been pos
sessed by another. What attraction is it to me to be told that when I die
I shall go to another and a better world, if I am not to be I when I get
there ? It is a place clearly intended for a different race of beings or exist
ences, whose happiness will depend, not upon what they may have believed
or disbelieved here, but upon the suitability to their constitution or
organisation of the circumstances surrounding them. No Christian can
imagine himself to be other than he is on this earth. Disguise the fact as
�Heaven and Hell.
3
they may, those who desire a life after death believe it will be one calcu
lated to promote their own special enjoyments.
Some time ago, the Rev. J. C. Ryle, B.A., Vicar of Stradbroke, pub
lished in the Quiver—a publication issued by Cassell & Co.—an essay en
titled “ Shall we know one another?” in which he singularly confirms this
view of the matter. He is a Churchman, and of course quite orthodox.
He quotes three short passages from Thessalonians (1, iv. 13,14), which he
says “ all imply the same great truth, that saints in heaven shall know
one another. They shall have the same body and the same character
that they had on earth—a body perfected and transformed like Christ’s in
his transfiguration, but still the same body—a character perfected and
purified from all sin, but still the same character. But in the moment
that we who are saved shall meet our several friends in heaven, we shall
at once know them, and they will at once know us.” But this declaration
complicates the subject farther than ever. What does he mean by the same
body ? How can it be the same body if it be “ perfected and transformed?”
It is as unintelligible as Daniel’s dreams or St. John’s visions. The rev.
gentleman candidly remarks:—“ I grant freely that there are not many
texts in the Bible which touch the subject at all. I admit fully that pious
and learned divines are not of one mind with me about the matter.”
The best Scriptural description to be found of Heaven, appears to be in
the Revelation of St.John; and as it is put as the grand climax or perora
tion to the sacred writings, we must accept it as the only authoritative
account to be had. St. John “ writeth his revelation to the seven churches
of Asia, signified by the seven golden candlesticks.” What light
does John put into these said candlesticks, which is supposed to
illumine a benighted and ruined world ? This revelation is the most in
coherent jumble that perhaps ever came from the mouth of a sane man.
In fact, it is only equalled by the insane ravings continually heard from
those unfortunate creatures, now too often to be met with, who have been
stricken with the revival mania. We shall be told that some parts are
symbolical, and are not to be taken as written. As they stand, there is
no earthly meaning in them; but where does the symbolical end, and the
literal begin ? There is no internal evidence to guide U3; then who is to
be the sworn interpreter ? The Catholic Church has settled that question
for itself, but in the Protestant Church we go upon the principle, if not the
practice, of each judging for himself. We in England have some thousands
of ordained and self-appointed ministers and expounders of the Gospel, who
do the interpretation business for the multitude, and for such as are too
indolent or too much occupied to think for themselves. What light do we
get from them to guide us through the perilous paths of life which lead
from the cradle to the grave? Too many of them are like St. John’s seven
candlesticks—they are merely sticks, and have no light in them, not even
so much as the glimmer of a rushlight to shed on the dark pages of Gospel
history.
Any one who takes the trouble to search for authentic information
about the locality and nature of the Heaven in which all Christians pro
fess to believe, will find a total absence of any knowledge upon the subject.
Like the alleged existence of God, it is simply a belief, and not a reality.
Yet all the Churches speak of this phantom of the imagination with as
much confidence as though the “ celestial regions ’’ had been surveyed and
mapped like a tract of country, and their boundaries placed beyond the
possibility of dispute. But so long as people will not think, but content
themselves with believing, there will be no lack of traders upon their cre
dulity.
�4
Heaven and Hell.
We now turn to the second part of our subject. What shall we say
about that other place of abode for departed spirits, the climate of which is
so warm that the natives of centraPAfrica will find it uncomfortable ? Where
is it situated ? Ob, down below, of course; all Christians say so, and they
alone know. Did not Christ descend into Hell ? And yet it cannot be far
from Heaven, for did not Dives and Lazarus hold a conversation toge
ther from their respective abodes ? We are not quite sure that Hell is not
in Heaven itself, for in Revelation xiv. 9 and 10, it says, “ If any man
worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in
his hand, the same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is
poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be
tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and
in the presence of the Lamb.” We are not to suppose that a little hell is
kept among the holy angels for special use, or that they often go where
Lucifer alone is King; and yet we cannot tell how men are to be tortured in
their presence unless Hell is in Heaven. However that may be, we are
assured that God himself is in Hell. If you doubt it, you need do no more
than go to that royal prophet, that inspired writer, that man after God’s
own heart, who, in one of those sacred oracles which the Holy Spirit itself
has dictated to him, acknowledges and owns it. “Whither shall I go,”
says David, “ from thy spirit ? or whither shall I flee from thy presence 1
If I ascend up into Heaven, thou art there ; if I make my bed in Hell,
behold thou art there." We have Psalm 139 for our authority, and no
one dare dispute that.
There seems to be no doubt in the minds of Christians, that the brim
stone pit is somewhere within the interior of 7 A is planet, but that the
Abode of Bliss is up in the clouds, or beyond them. Now if the other
planetary bodies are inhabited by human beings—and scientific men are
not aware of any reason why they should not be—if the Maker of all things
punishes his children with burning torments who do not believe in Christ
and Him crucified, where are the inhabitants of other planets to be sent
when their hour comes? Are they sent here, or has each of the other vast
worlds in space a nice little Hell of its own in which to put its erring sub
jects ? If they come here, an enlargement of the premises must be con
stantly taking place. If Heaven is not upon this earth, and is never to be
realised here—I prefer believing that Hell also is far up in the clouds, and
a very long way too, so that the journey thither may take as much time as
possible in its accomplishment.
The warm world beyond the grave is popularly known by many names.
Hell is perhaps the most general term used by Christians; though it is
sometimes designated by the appellations of Infernal Regions, Perdition,
Abode of the Damned, and so on. Most orthodox Christians mean by the
term Hell the everlasting lake of brimstone and fire; though there are still
some in the Church, and we believe they are of the best, who do not believe
at ali in a literal Hell of fire. The Catholics have a place which they call
Purgatory, which is a sort of House of Detention, and not the penal settle
ment our Hell is supposed to be. There sinnerscan be released on tickets-ofleave after certain regulations have been complied with; our religious
convicts are condemned for life (or death, whichever it may be) without the
slightest hope of pardon. The Catholics themselves admit, that once in
Hell, you are in it for ever, Michael Angelo, the celebrated painter,
executed, by command of Pope Julius IT., a splendid picture representing
the Day of Judgment. Now Michael Angelo had placed among his other
figures in his scene of Hell, several cardinals and prelates. They had pro.
bably been guilty, like Bishop Colenso and some of the most intelligent men
�Heaven and Hell.
5
of our Church, of thinking for themselves, and, worst of all, of publishing
the result of their thinkings. And this, we know, has been sufficient in all
Christian ages to render any man quite unfit for the company of saints.
However, some of the dignified and proper churchmen of Julius’s time, who
had probably never been guilty of an original thought in their lives, were
extremely enraged at the picture, and made complaint of it to his Holi
ness, and entreated that he would lay his injunctions on the painter to
efface them. To whom the Pope replied—“ My dear brethren, Heaven
has indeed given me the power of recovering as many souls from Pur
gatory as I think proper; but as to Hell, you know as well as I do, that
my power does not extend so far, and those who once go thither, must
remain there for ever!”
What is Hell? Where is it? Is it really the lake of fire some repre
sent it to be? You will be eternally bewildered and completely con
founded if you try to determine this question from the Bible itself. If
Hell be below, it must be contained within the earth, for wherever you
go en the surface of this globe, you will find the firmament still above and
around you. If within, which is the way to it? Strange that no one has
ever even by accident discovered it. The only entrance one can imagine
to it, is the mouth of Vesuvius. But that cannot be the way, as it is not
a brimstone pit, though sulphurous exhalations arise from it. No devil
that we ever heard of, was seen to emerge from it—not even by the
miracle-working monks who infest the country round about. We know
the right place has a door or grating, and that St. John saw the angel who
kept the key. But it is bottomless, and therefore who knows but that
Vesuvius is the other side—the front door in the rear, out of which the
Devil pops when he wants to go roaring up and down the world ? A
bottomless pit full of liquid must be like a pot without a bottom filled with
water, where all things are not only in a state of solution, but the solution
itself is held in suspension 1
We continually hear pious Christians say that the souls of unbelievers
have gone, or are going, to Perdition. But there is a consolation in know
ing that it is not Hell. Revelation xvii. 8, says that the beast which was
so obliging as to carry the scarlet lady of Babylon, ‘ ‘ shall ascend out of
the bottomless pit and shall go into Perdition.” Perhaps Perdition is the
Catholic’s Purgatory 1 Who knows ? But then there is no mistake that
Hell is Hell, and that the Freethinker will go there 1 Not quite so sure.
Read Revelation xx. 14 —“And Death and Hell were cast into the lake
of fire.” Where does this lead us? We have heard of a house being
turned out of window, but we never heard of a pit being thrown into
itself 1 This is one of those mysteries which “ passeth all understanding.”
We still have the lake of fire, where human beings are to be burnt for
ever and ever, and yet never consumed. Now this is simply an impossi
bility. The human body, if thrown into a large fire, would be utterly
destroyed in a very short time, and nothing could prevent it. “ Men
cannot live in fire. It is the nature of fire to burn up, to destroy, to
decompose any animal or vegetable substance that is cast into it. It would
require the properties of life to be altered before men could live in it for
ever. Some will say, God can work a miracle. But we have no reason
to suppose that he can. We know nothing of what God can do—we only
know what is, and miracles do not take place.” We must discard the
idea of a burning Hell as a fiction conceived by a brutal and revengeful
monster in human form, and afterwards taken up and added to by fanatics,
whose minds had been worked upon by superstition, till they believed as
a reality, that which existed only in their own disordered imaginations.
�6
Heaven and Hell.
The believers in what is called philosophical religion, to the credit of
their better nature, reject the brimstone part of the Bible, but cling to the
fascinating hope of an abode after death of everlasting bliss. But they
occupy a wholly illogical position. They have no more reason for
believing in the existence of the one place than in the other, as both rest on
precisely the same foundation—that of belief anti. not knowledge. They
say that the Heaven of the Bible is real, but that, the Hell is figurative,
and that the suffering will be only spiritual, and not material. But it
is in vain to say that men in Hell will suffer all the torments promised to
the damned, in the spirit, and not in the flesh. This is absurd. Besides,
the Bible, with its usual disregard of probabilities or possibilities, says that
in the regions of the damned will be heard weeping, and wailing, and
gnashing of teeth. These are material operations, and who knows what
are phantom grinders, spiritual molars, or immaterial jaws ?
There are some sects of Christians who reject the brimstone Hell as a
fiction, but they scarcely go so far as to say that all mankind will go to
Heaven. They firmly believe that man is immortal, therefore he must go
somewhere after he leaves this earth. Wherever it may be, it must be a
region inhabited by the choicest spirits the world has produced. By
painters, poets, sculptors, orators, statesmen, warriors, authors, reformers,
philanthropists, beautiful and gifted women, and innocent children, who
died without the redeeming blessing of Baptism. Every man, woman, and
child, without exception, born before the Christian era, must be in this
glorious land. They had no Christ crucified to take them to the Heaven
of St. John, inhabited by angels and beasts. In this new world (assum
ing that men live after death), may be expected to be met with, all the
most grave and gifted personages of antiquity — Aristotle, Socrates,
Plato, Demosthenes, Pythagoras, Epictetus, Seneca, Pliny, Herodotus,
Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, Anaxagoras,
Ptolemy, Cicero, Homer, Pindar, Euripides, Sophocles, Ovid, and
Horace, all assembled in one grand philosophic academy. And what a
glorious phalanx of earth’s mightiest intellects and greatest benefactors
have been sent thither since their day! And only think that of all those
who are alive now, and who adorn the age in which we live, how few will
find their way into the heaven of Revelation. St. John and his beasts
will have none but the saints, the hypocrites, the miserable sinners, the
priests, the criminals, both on the throne and in the hovel. They will
reject John Stuart Mill, and accept Richard Weaver; shut the door in the
face of Bishop Colenso, but open it wide for Wright the converted thief;
receive Louis Napoleon with a flourish of trumpets, but hurl anathemas at
Garibaldi; welcome the Pope with incense, but threaten with brimstone
and fire the noble Joseph Mazzini.
Who, with human sympathies and affections, would like to go to a place
where the nearest and dearest ties are broken? Where the husband is
separated from the wife, the parent from the child, the brother from the
sister ? And not only separated, but where you will know that those you
loved are writhing in agony unutterable. It is a doctrine which requires a
fiend or a saint to believe it. We are told that a certain king of the
Frisons, named Redbord, when on the very point of being baptised, took
it into his head to ask the Bishop, who was preparing to perform the cere
mony, whether in the paradise which had been promised him in conse
quence of his changing his religion, he should find his ancestors and pre
decessors. The Bishop having told him, that as they had all died Pagans,
they could enjoy no portion of the heavenly inheritance, but were all in
Hell, “Nay, then,’’ replied the King, lifting his foot out of the font into
�Heaven and Hell.
7
■which he had already dipped it, ‘ ‘ if that be the case, take back again
your baptism and your paradise; I had much rather go to Hell, and be
there amongst a good and numerous company, with my illustrious ances
tors, and other persons of my own rank, than to your Paradise, from which
you have shut out all these brave people, and filled it up with none but
paupers, miscreants, and people of no note.”
And is not Heaven filled with miscreants, if the Christian theory be
correct ? Who is the most acceptable to Heaven ? Is it not the repentant
sinner? Have not men of the most notoriously abandoned and profligate
lives, who, when they were too ill to sin any more, expressed their sorrow
for what they had done, in the hope of being rewarded with happiness in
another world ? And have not priests in all times assured these monsters
of a sure and certain resurrection to eternal bliss ? How forcibly, how
beautifully has Thomas Moore depicted this hateful doctrine in his en
chanting poem of “ Paradise and the Peri.” A Peri in the East is sup
posed to be one of those beautiful creatures of the air who live upon per
fumes, but still is a kind of fallen angel, who mourns after Paradise—
“ And weeps to think her recreant race
Should ere have lost that glorious place.”
The Peri is represented as hovering about the entrance to heaven, and the
angel who keeps the gates hears her weeping, and taking pity on her, gives
her a chance of re-entering Paradise. The angel imagined by Moore, who
is a much more estimable person than St. Peter, speaks thus:—
“ Nymph of a fair but erring line!”
Gently he said—“ One hope is thine.
’Tis written in the Book of Fate
The Peri yet may be forgiven
Who brings to this eternal gate
The gift that is most dear to heaven!
Go, seek it, and redeem thy sin—
’Tis sweet to let the pardoned in.”
She then starts on her mission, and with a true human instinct, thinks that
the patriot who dies nobly for his country, will be a welcome guest among
the blessed. She goes to the field of carnage, where a battle for freedom
has been raging, but where might and not right has triumphed. She
catches the dying sigh of the patriot, who has fallen in his country’s
cause, and takes that to the celestial gatekeeper:—
“ ‘ Sweet,’ said the Angel, as she gave
The gift into his radiant hand,
‘ Sweet is our welcome of the Brave
Who die thus for their native Land.
But see—alas!—the crystal bar
Of Eden moves not—holier far
Than e’en this drop the boon must be
That opes the gates of Heav’n for thee!’ ”
Oh no! Heaven is no place for patriots. They are disliked there. They
have been meddling people, disturbing the reign of divinely-appointed
rulers — a thing very obnoxious to the ministers of God’s holy word.
Lazarus, as soon as he got to heaven, refused a drop of water to cool the
parching lips of Dives, showing what moral effect that place had upon him.
Now comes the orthodox climax to this tale of injustice. The Peri takes
�8
Heaven and Hell.
her last flight over the vale of Balbec.
from his horse, with a brow—
She there sees a ruffian dismount
“ Sullenly fierce—a mixture dire,
Like thunder-clouds of gloom and fire 1
,
In which the Peri’s eyes could read
Dark tales of many a ruthless deed:
The ruined maid—the shrine profaned—
Oaths broken—and the threshold stain’d
With blood of guests—there written, all,
Black as the damning drops that fall
From the denouncing Angel’s pen,
Ere mercy weeps them out again.”
This guilt-stained wretch sees a child at play, who, when the vesper calls
to prayer, begins to pray. He thought of his own childhood:
‘ * He hung his head—each nobler aim
And hope and feeling which had slept
From boyhood’s hour, that instant came
Fresh o’er him, and he wept—he wept!”
And it is with this crocodile tear that the Peri returns to the Gates of
Light, and instead of its being spurned’with^contempfifit is pronounced
the gift most dear to heaven, and she is rewarded with admission into the
Eden which is made up of such characters as this. Well might Redbord
exclaim, that such a heaven is filled with none but paupers, miscreants,
and people of no note.
This Heaven, for which Christians yearn, and for which they fight, per
secute, and murder, is a creation of the brain, appearing to each what
each desires. There is no line in the Revelation which will warrant the
belief that it is the abode of bliss some would have us believe. There is
no love, no sympathy, no warmth of affection, which can alone make life
endurable. Who would be happy in the presence of angels, who pour out
the vials of the wrath of the Lord upon all mankind? We have had too
much of this wrath from his ministers on earth, who seem never able to
exhaust the vials.
The Bible, or any other book, which teaches the doctrine of Hell tor
ments, is not, cannot be, a revelation from a God of mercy and love. It
is the crude production of an ignorant, a superstitious, a priest-ridden, and
brutal people. The Bible alone, of all books in the world, first promul
gated the monstrous, the fiendish doctrine of eternal, never-ending tor
ments prepared for all men, not one-millionth part of whom ever saw or
heard of it. This doctrine, so far from keeping men good, makes good
men bad, and brutalises all who believe in it. It distracts men’s minds
from the duties of this life, and deludes them into the belief of another
which, when looked at calmly and with reason, will be seen to contain no
element worthy of their acceptance, or capable of promoting their perma
nent happiness.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
London: Printed and Published by Austin & Co., 17, Johnson’s Court,
Fleet Street, 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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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Heaven and hell: where situated? a search after the objects of Man's fervent hope and abiding terror
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Holyoake, Austin [1826-1874]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Presented in Memory of Dr. Moncure D. Conway by his children, July Nineteen hundred & eight.
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Austin & Co.
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[187-?]
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CT18
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Heaven
Hell
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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 (Heaven and hell: where situated? a search after the objects of Man's fervent hope and abiding terror), 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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Christian Doctrine
Conway Tracts
Heaven
Hell
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Text
RATIONAL CHRISTIANITY
ITS
NATURE,
ITS PRESENT RELATION
EXISTING CHURCHES,
AND A
FLEA
FOR ITS
SEPARATE ORGANISATION.
LONDON:
E. CALLOW, 7, SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C.
Price Sixpence.
>
��Rfflfioii TiRJhkistiIJn itiW
ITS NATURE, ITS PRESENT RELATION TO EXISTING
CHURCHES, AND A PLEA FOR ITS SEPARATE
ORGANISATION.
Rational Christianity—considered as a science is
strictly governed by induction. It discards all claims
to the supernatural, as on the one hand wanting in
evidence, and as being on the other plainly con
tradicted by the ever enlarging knowledge of the
dominion of law, which presenting as it everywhere
does, in whatever direction scientific investigation is
extended, an absolutely unbroken continuity, and an
absolutely irresistible supremacy, abundantly warrants
the conclusion of its absolutely undeviating univer
sality. Whatever principles embodied in the teaching
of Christ, or in the current traditions of Christianity,
are, by experience, proved to be beneficial. in their
operation are accepted. Whatever is found to be of
a contrary tendency is rejected.
In this way amongst a heterogeneous admixture of
other and worthless or mischievous elements, there are
discovered in Christianity many, if not most, of the
elements of a perfect religion. Or in other words it
is found that Christianity contains, to a very large
extent, the actual laws of religious life as they exist in
nature; just as chemistry contains, to a large extent,
the actual laws of the elements of matter. Moreover,
in many points, in which Jleficiency exists, there is
found to be, at least, an aptness to coalesce with
what is wanting: even if it is not more correct to say,
there already exists the undeveloped germ of it. If,
for example, some of the sterner virtues are slighted
or discouraged in the teaching of Christ; yet, since
experience proves their value to the well-being of
society, the love of our neighbour prompts their
exercise. These laws of the religious life, thus
extracted from Christianity, supplemented and de
veloped where necessary, constitute the principles of
Rational Christianity.
�Nor is to be thought that in this way the name is
unwarrantably appropriated, or that any violence is
done to the nature of Christianity. Although, as was in
evitable to a'religion originating eighteen hundred years
ago, it has entangled itself with philosophies current
then, and at the different periods through which it has
passed; still the simple and elevated principles upon
which it is based, are, in reality, quite independent of
these, and more in harmony with the results of modern
science, or, at least, not less so than with them. So
that no essential or peculiar feature of Christianity is
.sacrificed by replacing exploded philosophies by those
•of the present day. For example, Christ taught that
the whole of religion was comprehended in love to
God and love to man. And he evidently regarded
the government of God, and his relation to man, as of
a personal character. But the replacing of this per
sonal element, by that of unchanging law, does not
make the character of God less entitled to be loved:
nor does it lessen the elevating influence of loving
God, the fountain of all goodness, with all the heart
and all the mind. It raises indeed our conception of
the infinite greatness and incomprehensibleness of
God, but does not diminish our estimate of his
goodness. And even if science should warrant the
conclusion that God has no personality at all, that
he is but the grand sum total of all goodness, the
first great Christian law would stand with un
diminished authority. The theory of the atheist is
certainly not inconsistent with the universal obligation
to love with all our heart and mind and strength, all
apprehended goodness of every kind. And it is selfevident that man rises in the scale of humanity, just
in proportion as his whole consciousness is alive with
the love of all that is pure, and noble, and true, and
beautiful, and good. But this rational self-commending
obedience to the first great Christian law fulfils all
that is essential and peculiar to Christianity therein.
So with respect to the second great command, “ Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Does modern
�philosophy lead us to the conclusion, that the mind
bears exactly the same relation to the brain that sight
bears to the eye; and that therefore our existence is
limited to the present life ? The value of true Christ
ian benevolence and beneficence is not lessened for
the life which we have; but its purity is rendered
more apparent when all hope of future recompense, for
the sacrifices it here makes is taken away. It is
placed beyond doubt then, that a man “ does good
hoping for nothing again or, in other words, that he
is in very deed, and in the best sense of the word, a
Christian.
When rational Christianity is thus separated from
other elements in the concrete mass, it will be found
that it retains all that is peculiar to Christianity.
While on the other hand there is nothing peculiar to
orthodoxy, as distinguished from rational Christianity,
which is not common jto Judaism, or other less perfect
system of religion, while there is scarcely anything
peculiar to it, as distinguished from rational Christianity,
which can plead the sanction of the master, and
positively nothing that is peculiar or essential to his
teaching. Rational Christianity, therefore, need not
fear any investigation of its, title deeds.
And it is noteworthy that while rational Chris
tianity is thus seen to embody all that is essentially
Christian, it is also true that Christianity did exist in
its infancy apart from a belief in a future state.
There were at Corinth some who said that “there is
no resurrection of the dead”—1 Cor. xv. 12; while
others taught that the resurrection was past already,
2 Tim. ii. 18; and even of the eleven disciples some
doubted the Master’s resurrection, Matt, xxviii. 17,
which would probably carry with it doubts of their
own. The tone of the narrative forbids the idea that
this scepticism, at that day, was regarded as invalida
ting their discipleship. St. Paul, indeed, as was
natural in one who had lived as a pharisee and was
the son of a pharisee, stoutly opposed this feature of
Sadducean philosophy; but even he never once treats
�6
it as a fatal error, nor hints at excommunicating those
who held it. How long this opinion survived, or how
far it may have prevailed in the early church, there
appears to be now no sufficient data to determine;
but clearly, neither in the estimation of its adherents
nor of its opponents, was a belief in a future state of
existence regarded as essential to Christianity.
But Christianity is much more than either a
science or an art. It is a moral and religious force
having a character peculiarly its own, distinguished
from all other religious influences by strongly marked
features, especially, by its intense benevolence and
beneficence.
Principles underlying it there necessarily must be;
but these were never very clearly defined by its founder,
and never attempted to be systematised by him. The
undiscerned law of its own life, in a good degree, gave
it form, and preserved to some extent its symmetry;
even in spite of the injurious effects of erroneous
modes of thought and systems of philosophy, which
too early, too frequently, and too extensively distorted
and disfigured it.
This grand living power of goodness, the purest,
noblest, and best, which has ever been known in the
world, is, by the systematic application of rational
principles, purged of polluting and diluting elements,
brought out into healthful and vigorous exercise,
developed in accordance with the law of its life,
supplemented where necessary, and applied to the
multifarious and complex circumstances of our in
dividual, social, and political relationships, and will
yet be made the salvation of the world. This is
Rational Christianity.
What now is its position in the Christian Church ?
Its avowed disciples are but few, although its
unavowed adherents are, it is believed, to be found in
very many churches, and constitute collectively a
body of no inconsiderable influence in numbers,
intelligence, and piety.
�Up to “he present time, however, so far as is
known to the writer, no single congregation exists
where they can find a congenial home. Everywhere
they are liable, either to be expelled, or treated with
so much disrespect, if they plainly avow their con
victions, that the course of wisdom generally appears
to be, to keep their peculiar opinions to themselves; or
to confide them only to a few bosom friends, and to
labour on so long as they can do so without violating
their consciences: doing what quiet Christian work
their hands find to do, and waiting for the time
when their distinguishing opinions may win for
themselves their rightful place in the church; content
in the meantime to submit to the discomforts of their
position, and often to undeserved suspicion and
ungenerous treatment, brought upon them simply by
their want of sympathy with the feelings, opinions,
and sentiments of the majority.
Should the reason be sought for this intolerant
antipathy to Christian rationalism, which has hitherto
so effectually restrained its open avowal; it is to be
found in the mistake, which has unhappily so uni
versally prevailed, of regarding the belief of the
supernatural as an essential element of Christianity.
The fact, however, remains, that this intense antipathy
is, at present, and is likely to remain, an insuperable
barrier to the healthful development of rational
Christianity, within any of the existing churches.
And, even if it were not vain to hope to overcome
it, there are other insurmountable obstacles to the two
systems working properly together. They are in fact
mutually incompatible. The one makes the well-being
of the future life the basis of its system, and the
other regards solely the interests of this present life.
The one therefore draws its motives mainly from the
future, the other exclusively from this. The one re
gards religion as a service to be rendered to Grod, for his
happiness and well-being. The other esteems it a
matter (so far as man is concerned in it at least) as
alone affecting his own happiness and well-being, and
�8
that of his fellow creatures. The one regards prayer
as intended to produce an effect upon God, and there
fore makes it to consist of actual requests for his
assistance. The other regards it simply as intending
to influence himself and those of his fellow men, who
are connected in some way or other with the act, and
therefore, confines it to aspirations after blessings for
himself and others, which do not involve any
interference with the laws of nature in their accom
plishment, and which in fact are not perhaps properly
addressed to God at all. They with the poet regard
prayer as:—
“ the soul’s sincere desire,
“ Uttered or unexpressed,
“ The motion of a hidden fire,
“ Which trembles in the breast.”
It follows, therefore, that rational Christianity must
look for a home of its own. Whether the time is ripe
for its disciples to make the attempt to provide one,
events must prove. One thing is clear, it cannot
expect to make a home in the churches in which it has
been born, and where it at present merely lives on
sufferance.
Many reasons may be urged why no unnecessary
delay should be incurred in doing so. In the first
place there is the individual comfort of having a home of
our own, where we shall no longer be treated as inferiors
to be tolerated; but where we shall be free citizens in
a free state, enjoying the consciousness of rightful
possession, position, and influence. This is by no
means to be despised. Indeed, this would be a suffi
cient reason in itself to warrant the attempt. Then,
there is the imperative law of our Christian life, which
demands that we should avow all our convictions, at
all events, when there is any reasonable prospect of
the avowal being beneficial to one another, or to others:
a law that we cannot disobey without lowering our
religious vitality. We must not at our peril hide our
light under a bushel. Then there is the advantage to
be gained from church life. It is equally a law of oijr
�religious life, that intercommunion of kindred hearts
and minds is necessary to its healthy development!
But this intercommunion can never exist in any
perfection, where there is such a great discrepancy, as
that which divides the rational Christian from others.
Then there is the sad fact, that thousands upon thou
sands, and among them some of the finest intellects
both of the rising generation, and those of mature
age, are being lost entirely to the Christian church,
and to the cause of Christianity, through failing
to discriminate between the absurdities of exploded
superstitions, which are almost everywhere set forth
as alone constituting the essence of Christianity, and
that which is in reality entitled to be so regarded.
Mere rationalists I do not expect to be greatly
influenced by such considerations. To them, however,
I do not appeal. But to rational Christians, to the
men who have put in practice the beneficent precepts
of Christianity, and who in doing so have felt a hearty
sympathy with Jesus in his blessed and noble work,
I know such appeals will not be in vain. With the
writer they will feel that we must set up a beacon light
(which a church founded on and animated by our
principles would be,) to warn these thousands of the
rocks upon which they make shipwreck.
Closely connected with the last is the value of our
stand-point, for giving prominence to the really
essential motives of the gospel, arising from their
own intrinsic excellence and loveliness. These are
practically greatly obscured, by their association in the
current systems, with the overshadowing supernatural.
Again, no thoughtful observer can fail to notice
that although the supernatural, thus so greatly over
shadows everything else, yet it is, owing to the
increasing light of science, losing its power with
astonishing rapidity, even among those who still
honestly believe it. The future world is fast becoming
everywhere an unrealisied thing. Nowhere are its out
lines drawn now with a clearness, boldness, and dis
tinctness, which formerly characterised them. Instead
�TO
of the vivid spirit-stirring thing it once was, it is
fast fading into nebulous generalities which can no*
longer awaken the powerful emotions which formerly
aroused men from their selfish sloth, or arrested them
in the midst of a reckless career of vice, and guilt,
and crime. Here then is a loud call for rational
Christianity to step in and supply, where motives
appealing to men’s selfishness are needed, those real
and tangible considerations, drawn from the con
sequences of wickedness in this present life, which its
stand-point naturally leads its disciples to give so much
greater attention to, and which its principles prompt
them to supplement and render more effective.
The principles of supernaturalism too often lead to
the conclusion that the evils caused by wicked men,
are a part of the providential dispensations of God
and therefore to be submitted to. And this feeling is
strengthened by the great error in Christ’s teaching,
that we should not resist evil; an error which, not
withstanding the neutralising influence of common
sense, which leads Christians to act more agreeably to
the evident law of right, still paralyses the Christian
Church in grappling with the rascality of the world; and
leaves iniquity, to a very large extent, unchecked. Let
rational Christianity come forth with the high praises
of God, or goodness, in her mouth, and a two-edged
sword in her hand, to execute upon the wicked the
judgment written ; that is to say the judgment which
is dictated by benevolence, not by hatred. Let her
do this, and she will soon find her efforts a potent
check upon the evil-doer. Let her unite her disciples
as a well disciplined force, everywhere making it one
of their leading objects to checkmate the workers of
iniquity: and although she must of course expect to be
hated by wrong-doers, with an intensity almost passing
belief, yet this very intensity of the hatred evoked is
an index to the fear she will inspire, and to the
effectiveness of the work she will be accomplishing.
Nor is it to be imagined that the checking and
arresting evil is the limit of the good she will ac-j
�complish.
This is but the preliminary work in
turning evil-doers to paths of righteousness. Wicked
men, finding themselves foiled in their wickedness, and
fools, just where they had prided themselves upon their
superior wisdom, will begin to suspect themselves to be
fools in preferring to listen to the cravings of mere
selfishness, which is the root of all sin, vice and crime,
and be willing to let the higher feelings of their nature
make their voice heard. In short they may thus be
made willing to listen to the gospel of Christ, and be
brought to learn of Him who was meek and lowly of
heart; and thus, not only find rest to their own souls;
but become blessings to the world, where they had been
curses. Indeed no one can estimate the immense
power which good men could bring to bear for the
regeneration of the world, if it could thus be directed
by the principles of rational Christianity.
Nor, must it be forgotten, that to give full effect to
these principles, church organisation is indispensable.
Their power may be immensely enhanced by virtue of
concerted action. We are all familiar with the fact, that
a bridge may be broken down simply by a regiment of
soldiers passing over it, if they keep step, while their
united weight will produce no injurious effect if they
pass over without this measured tread. So if all the
rational Christian members of any one trade, or any
similar walk in life, meet together in church-fellowship
and take counsel, to attack whatever form of evil is
most prominent in their particular sphere; pledging
themselves to guard against the evil in their own
conduct, and to take all proper means to expose and
punish it in others, and to afford each other mutual
sympathy and support in the work, it may safely
be said that no evil of any magnitude could long
survive.
Moreover it would soon be seen whose
sympathies were on the side of right, and whose on
the side of wrong. This alone would be an immense
advantage, in the holy war which Christianity is ever
waging, against the powers of evil.
The preservation of Christianity in full vigour and
�healthfulness, is another reason for the formation of a
separate church, on the basis of rational Christianity.
We have seen that existing churches cannot afford a
home for it; and yet we are sure that Christianity
must be injured by continuing in intimate association
with superstitious beliefs, for which there is no longer
any excuse, and which therefore cannot long be held
by anyone with perfect honesty. And while we gladly
recognise the abounding vitality of Christianity, which
manages to live even amidst such prostration of in
tellect as is produced in the Roman Church; yet we
cannot for a moment believe that it does not materially
suffer by this deterioration of the mind; and still more,
by the violence done to conscience, which must be
continually increasing, just in proportion to the in
crease of the available light of truth. The painfid
exhibitions of disingenuousness, which are constantly
being made to bolster up exploded beliefs, and to
harmonise the results of modern science with the
claims of Bibliolatry, only too plainly reveal the un
healthy condition of the religious li feA nd the want
of power in the evangelical churches, evinced in their
obviously futile attempts to stem the rising tide of
Romanism, either within or outside of their own pale,
is one of the saddest features of our times; for these
churches have been long the home of healthy, vigorous,
robust Christianity.
Nothing but the establishment of Christianity on
the same basis as that upon which modern sciences
rest, which is the basis of rational Christianity, can
reasonably hope to secure perfect accord between
Christianity and science, or to enlist the disciples of
the latter in the service of the church. And anvthingless than this, must necessarily involve either a cramp
ing and deadening of the intellect, or a tampering
with the conscience, which is fatal to healthful religious
life. And indeed, both these evils must as a rule thus
be involved. On the other, hand instead of decay and
decline of power, Christianity, once firmly established
on a rational basis will, doubtless, exhibit a beauty and
�sheR® never yet displayed? Her prin
ciples, released from the fetters of Bibliolatry, and from
all the restraints of obsolete philosophies, will become
better understood than ever; and being more clearly
defined will be more easily, and therefore, more exten
sively applied. Besides which, as they are better
understood, new applications of them will be made,
and opportunities of developing and supplementing
them will be discovered; and having now as a standard
their own unchanging nature, misconceptions can be,
and will be, corrected by repeated and multiplied observa
tions; and thus Christianity may reasonably be expected
to acquire a unity and consistency greatly supassing
anything she has ever manifested, or could possibly
possess, 'while her standard was an undefined and
incoherent assemblage of old world philosophies and
metaphysics. A theology in short, which having had
its birth with astrology and alchemy, ought to have
been allowed to die with them; possessing as it does
no better foundation, and no better claim to live.
A Christianity thus firmly rooted in the great facts
of religion, will have within it a vitality, that cannot
fail speedily to accomplish results of startling grandeur,
in the redemption of the world from sin and conse
quent suffering. Results which will surpass even what
the supernaturalist looks for by supernatural agency,
in a future world. Results which will realise the
prophetic longings, aspirations, and predictions of the
good in all ages and nations:—the millenial glory:—
the golden age:—the good time coming:—the new
heaven, and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteous
ness.
In order to test the practicabilty of proceeding at
once to (pmmence a church on this footing, the
writer will be pleased to be the medium of intercom
munication between those who share these views,
and who are desirious of doing something to give
practical effect to them. But while he will cordially
welcome the humblest worker, he wishes it to be
distinctly understood that he does not wish to have
�14
his time wasted by mere talkers, or theoretic disputers.
He wishes to co-operate with, and will gladly welcome
communications from, any who are prepared to render
any kind of practical aid.
Communications may be adressed to Eusebius, care
of Publishers.
James & Co., Printers, 12a, Well Street, Crieplegate.
�i
��
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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 Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Rational Christianity: its nature, its present relation to existing churches and a plea for its separate organisation
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Eusebius
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 14 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. "Communications may be addressed to Eusebius, care of publishers." [p. 14]. Tentative date of publication from KVK. Printed by James & Co., Well Street, Cripplegate.
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E. Dallow
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[187-?]
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Rationalism
Christianity
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Christianity-Controversial Literature
Conway Tracts
Rationalism
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Text
ON MORAL EVIL
A LETTER
FROM
A
FRIEND.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Sixpence.
�..
.. -.
�ON MORAL EVIL.
---------- t----------
My dear Friend,—It cannot be disguised that in
this age there is a great amount of atheism, or, what
is nearly akin to it, great distrust of God, arising from
the difficulty of reconciling the phenomena of moral
evil with the attributes of a holy and beneficent God.
For your readers there will be no necessity to enter
into any consideration of those explanations which
orthodox theology has given to account for the exist
ence of moral evil, because those explanations cannot
be reconciled with the most approved conclusions
respecting primitive man, and because the theories of
the remedy for moral evil do violence alike to our
highest instincts and to the honour of God.
I shall, therefore, confine my attention to the purely
rational side of the argument, in the hope of getting
a hearing from those wise and thoughtful men
amongst us who are willing to listen to reason, and tn
accept whatever can be shown to harmonise with the
facts of human nature and the moral instincts.
In dealing with a theme almost exhausted by con
troversy, of stupendous interest, and of very nearly
inscrutable mystery, it is impossible to refrain at the
outset from putting in a plea for indulgence, on the
score of my deeply felt incapacity to handle the sub
ject worthily; and, what is far more important, it is
necessary to caution my readers against any hasty
conclusion unfavourable to moral effort, which might
be- drawn from a sort of outside and comprehensive
�4
On Moral Evil.
view of the whole subject. My sole object in medi
tating on this momentous theme is to strengthen, not
to weaken my own sense of duty, to deepen, and not
to efface the moral obligations engraved upon my own
conscience. In writing therefore for others, my aim
can only be to endeavour, by setting forth the truth,
or what I believe to be the truth, to serve the cause
of pure morality and true religion, to lead my fellow
men by the shortest and most direct road to triumph
over moral evil in themselves, and to make that
triumph easier for others.
I must assume that there is a God—a moral
Governor of mankind—a Being from whom has
emanated all that we are and all that we desire, to
whom can be traced, so to speak, the ultimate respon
sibility of all that happens throughout the universe.
There was a time when I felt disposed to question
this complete and undivided sovereignty, but I per
ceive that it is no longer tenable to conceive of a First
Great Cause of all things, and yet to deny the connec
tion with that cause of any of the visible undisputed
phenomena of the world. God must be all or none;
that is to say, the Almighty power and perfect wis
dom and foreknowledge which we attribute to God,
prevent the possibility of any accidental frustration of
His purpose, or the real rebellion against Him of any
one of His creatures. Of every part of His creation,
we must at all times affirm that it is exactly what the
Creator intended that it should be then and there;
and of every thought, word, and deed, of men, we
must likewise affirm that each one is part of God's
original plan, and is the direct or indirect result of
forces which He himself, foreknowing all, set in oper
ation at the beginning of time. Find me the basest
man you know, and try if you can, to separate him and
his depraved condition, in any single point of his his
tory or antecedents, from the chain of God's order and
providence. Find one gap if you can, where a missing
�On Moral Evil.
5
link betokens an independent set of forces; shew me
but one instance in which his thoughts, words, or
deeds, are his own—independently of his Creator—■
and I will then admit that the Creator is not ulti
mately responsible for what that man is, or for what
he has done.
I know he has done worse when he might have
done better, but how was such a depraved choice
made possible to him ? Whence did he get his evil
bias ? From his companions ? or early training 1 or
from inherited moral weakness ? So far as he is con
cerned, he had no control over two of these corrupting
influences, and, in all probability, as little control over
the lot into which he was cast. As a creature, he is
the victim rather than the criminal, and in the sight
of the Creator he may be an object of pity, but never
of hatred. But his parents were wicked before him,
and transmitted the increased tendency to evil ?
Granted, and the man’s very birth into the world,
may have been the result of an unlawful, perhaps an
adulterous union. At first sight, it might seem as if
the very creation of this bad man had been taken out
of the Creator’s hands, and done in spite of His holy
will. But a moment’s consideration shews that we are
only pushing the difficulty further and further back,
and at last we should have to ask the question regard
ing the first and least corrupted of the man’s ancestors
(if the first were really the least corrupted); Who made
these people, in the first instance, what they were,
knowing what would be their debased offspring after
a thousand generations 1 It was still God at the
beginning who constituted man as he was, liable to
these moral aberrations and corruptions, and having
a certain degree of liberty within which he could do
evil instead of good; it was still God who knew all
the endless and countless variabilities of the human
will and character, and who, foreknowing it all, did
not prevent or provide for the prevention of those
�6
On Moral Evil.
results which we call evil. In the foregoing case you
will observe that I have admitted the worst form in
which moral evil can be imagined to take shape, viz.
—in the steady downward course of moral debase
ment, from slight weakness to actual sin, from bad to
worse, spreading and growing continually more loath
some from generation to generation, giving no hope
of amendment or of arrest in its downward course.
All we know of primitive man teaches us that just
the contrary of this has been the course of mankind,
that mankind began with a far lower moral condition
than we have now, that mankind is continually rising
and advancing (as a whole), and that superior moral
races take the place of those which are inferior. But
I took the other hypothesis, because the greater in
cludes the less. If under the worst aspect of human
depravity we must still trace the ultimate responsi
bility to our Creator, a fortiori, we must surely do so
in considering human depravity under the more
favourable aspect, which is offered to us through
modern researches into the history of primaeval man.
The atheist and the profligate may, however, be
inclined to cry exultingly that I have given them
all they ask. The atheist says, There cannot be a
God, because of all this moral evil in the world. I
admit the facts which are called evil, and I say the
ultimate responsibility of them lies with the Creator.
I cannot deny that God is the cause of all things.
The profligate and the criminal may rejoice to think
that God is to blame for what they do; and that, as
the Creator is responsible, they may as well do as they
like.
Much as one deplores the mis-use of any truth, it
affords no just ground for keeping it back, or for
putting a falsehood in its place. There ever will be
persons who must derive temporary injury from the
announcements of truths, however wholesome for the
mass, or salutary for mankind in the future. We
�On Moral Evil.
7
cannot be silent, and miss our chance; I ought rather
to say, we must not neglect our bounden duty, lest
some evil effects should mingle with the good effects
of what we have to make known. The world would
never have emerged from its primitive barbarism, had
its wise men and seers waited till all possible danger
of the mis-use of truth was past. Like one who said,
** He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” I would
only caution my readers against fastening on any one
isolated fact or truth, to the exclusion of other facts
and truths which we are equally bound to recognize.
If it be true that God is the author of all that happens,
is the ultimate cause of all which we call evil as well
as of all which we call good, there are other truths
and facts of our nature and moral organization quite
as fundamental and important, which we cannot ignore
without perverting the first cardinal truth respecting
our Creator's responsibility.
It has been well said, the use of abstract instead of
concrete terms has given rise to an enormous amount
of error in philosophy in general, and in ethics in par
ticular. The terms “evil” and “sin” when used as
abstract terms are fraught with mischief. There can
be no moral evil apart from some thought, word, or
deed, of man. There can be no sin without a sinner.
In endeavouring to discover what moral evil or sin is,
we shall go astray at the outset, if we begin to define
the abstract term, as theologians vainly do. We must
study men and women, their desires, motives, and
actions; and from that study we may come in time
to be able to generalize, and come to use abstract
terms in safety.
Let us then first consider what are the factors in
ourselves which go to produce an immoral act. We
are certainly conscious of having a body, which is the
subject of certain normal and natural desires. This
body, so far as we can discover, is in one respect
analogous to the individual beings around us, in
�On Moral Evil.
every class of animal life. The body at all times
seeks its own pleasure and satisfaction. It is en
dowed with absolute self-love, and is made dependent
on its own selfishness for its very life and power.
All its functions and its appetites are arranged for its
own good, its own safety, health, enjoyment, and that
without any regard to the safety, health, or enjoyment
of any other body, i.e., whenever such foreign interests
stand in its way.
Just as the different individuals in the vegetable
and animal worlds, each and all, struggle for existence,
if not for supremacy, so the bodies of men and women
are by nature under the same law of self-preservation;
and, but for the moral element in us which has led to
civilization and self-denial, we should differ in nothing
fundamentally from the animals around us. This is
as much God's own doing as all the rest of the Kosmos.
It is quite as necessary to our very existence, and to
the perpetuation of the race, that our bodies should be
organized as they are, as that the world should keep
its mean distance from the sun and revolve diurnally
on its axis. I find, then, all I am in search of to ex
plain the source of our wrong-doing, in the very con
stitution of our bodies and brains ; that is to say, we
are constituted by nature to gratify our bodies as we
please, just according to our several tastes, or the
varying dominance of certain appetites, utterly regard
less of any interests or pleasures but our own. Even
some beautiful instances of happiness shared with
others, do not form exceptions to this rule. I may
delight in cherishing my wife and in feeding my little
ones, but in this I only share the same lovely instinct
of many birds, quadrupeds, and insects. It adds to
my own comfort to contribute to theirs ; and I may
discharge this function all my life, without a spark of
moral goodness entering into a single act of fatherly
devotion. Another man may prefer the gratification
of being constantly drunk; and so he seeks his own
�On Moral Evil.
9
pleasure at the entire sacrifice of his family. In both
cases, the course of conduct pursued may be suggested
by the desires of the flesh, and as natural to the body
as eating when hungry, and drinking when thirsty.
By far the largest number of evil deeds belongs to
the class which we rightly call self-indulgent. And of
the rest, which are predatory, destructive, brutal—
such as the deeds of rapine, cruelty, and murder—we
can only say they are the acts of the indulgence of less
common appetites—such as envy, anger, jealousy,
revenge, and the like—which are more or less excep
tional, but which, equally with other appetites, ori
ginate in the bodily and cerebral frame. Now, it is
manifest, without the necessity for illustration, that
some appetites and natural cravings may be, and are
constantly, gratified without any sin at all; and also
that in some instances it would be a sin not to gratify
them. To these facts we must add a third, viz., all
the natural appetites whatever (and by the term
“natural” I, of course, exclude appetites which are
created or aggravated by cerebral disease) are in
themselves needful, beneficial to the welfare of indi
viduals possessing them, and, subject to certain con
trol, good for the world at large.
The appetite for sexual intercourse, which is gene
rally considered the most fruitful source of moral
evil, I believe to be, on the contrary, one of the
highest and noblest of our physical desires, and mani
festly necessary for the world’s welfare. That it has
been abused, and in many cases unduly stimulated,
is no argument against its intrinsic value. Even that
ambition or envy, which is the spring of robbery, and
the fruitful source of tyranny and injustice, is a neces
sary adjunct to our natural state. Without the desire
to emulate others, and to possess for ourselves what
we perceive has added to their comfort or advantage,
we should be infinitely less active and progressive
than we are, if indeed progress in the arts of civilisaB
�IO
On Moral Evil.
tion were then possible at all. And that very anger
which leads to cruelty and to murder, is an element
in our constitution just as vital to the protection of
the race—to the protection not only of individuals
who are the subjects of anger, but also of others under
their care—as the desire for food and the instinct to
cherish our offspring. I cannot find a single element
in man’s nature, not even the murderous element and
love of cruelty, which has not its rightful place in the
economy of man, as an animal—and I might also add,
of man considered as a moral agent, destined for im
mortality.
I need not enlarge further on this factor of moral
evil. It must be evident to any one who will care
fully examine several instances of sin, that it invari
ably arises on one side from the action of some phy
sical impulse or appetite—that it is always an act
done to gratify the animal part of our nature. I now
proceed to consider the other factor, without which
moral life cannot be produced.
On examining ourselves, we find a principle or
power within us which is more or less in antagonism
to our natural physical impulses. It matters little to
oui* argument whether we call this inward controlling
power by the name of Reason, or Conscience, or Love.
We are considering only the thing itself, the nature
of which we shall discover from the observation of its
mode of action; and we can therefore for the present
waive discussion as to its proper name.
While a very large portion of our life is spent in
the unrestricted indulgence of some of our natural
desires, with which no voice within us interferes,
there are at the same time other natural desires which
are under the control of an inward power, antagonis
tic to their indulgence, either altogether or beyond
certain limits.
The body cannot do as it likes in all cases, without
being brought more or less under the censure of an
�On Moral Evil.
11
inward voice, which either checks the body in its wish
for gratification, or, being disobeyed, punishes the
body by reproaches or remorse. Every one knows
that he is thus under restraint, and that there is no
possibility of his doing just what the appetites and
impulses of his flesh suggest, without being opposed
from within by a power which demands the submis
sion of his will, or bitterly reproaches him when that
power is disobeyed. Illustration is scarcely required
here, but we can all recall instances of the remark
able exercise of this power. Some persons have felt
the tendency to theft or falsehood, and know that this
inward power has held them in check. Some have
had a similar tendency to intoxication, and have felt
the same restraint, whether they have obeyed it or
not. The free indulgence of sexual appetite is subject
to the same control, or punished by loss of self-respect
whenever that control has been defied.
And yet the proper indulgence of appetites has not
been thus interfered with or censured. We find anger
sometimes justified, sometimes forbidden. Love of
wealth, the same. Even strict truthfulness may some
times, and for certain ends, be relaxed. A person in
a very critical state of health may be lawfully screened
by deception from the danger of being killed by a
sudden shock, which some fatal news might cause.
Of course, cases in which deception is justifiable are
extremely rare. I only instance one, to show what I
am aiming to prove—viz., that the inward controlling
power permits, under certain circumstances, those
actions which, under other circumstances, it would
unhesitatingly forbid. There must be a law forbid
ding, an inward power or voice restraining, in order
to evolve sin out of any act of physical impulse. We
see this exemplified in human society. The existence
of law must in every case precede the birth of crime.
Different states have not always the same laws. I
may whistle for my dog in the streets of London on
�12
On Moral Evil.
a Sunday without infringing any statute or municipal
regulation. If I do the same in Glasgow, I am tapped
on the shoulder by a policeman, and reminded of the
law which turns my harmless or benevolent action
into an offence. In England bigamy is a felony. If
I am a Turkish subject, I may have four wives if I
please. Then again, some evil things are not pro
hibited at all. Many forms of fraud and extortion
are perfectly legal. Prostitution, and the use thereof,
are not crimes, nor even misdemeanours. From this
it is evident that states and governments make cer
tain crimes by enacting certain laws. That is, the
law alone is the legal measure of certain acts. Where
no law against them has been passed, the actions are
not recognised as offences.
Now, in precisely the same way, a man can only
sin when he disobeys the inner law which forbids cer
tain thoughts, words, and deeds. A certain act may
present itself to a thousand different persons as an act
which their consciences would forbid, and so they may
come to call that act immoral under all possible cir
cumstances, and no doubt they would be right in nine
hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand. For
this is how the standard of morality has been formed
in all ages, and why it is gradually rising. But we
should fall into a serious mistake if we tried to make
a leap over the one man’s conscience, and, ignoring
that, denounced him as guilty of immorality, simply
because he did what public opinion had condemned.
If the act was sinful at all, it was so only because it
was done in disobedience to the man’s own conscience.
The mere fact that a multitude of men have a common
experience about a certain act does not entitle them
to make the philosophical error of ignoring a principal
factor in the product of sin. It is not necessarily sin
ful—nay, it is sometimes greatly virtuous—to act in
direct violation of public opinion; so this in itself
would not be enough to convict a man of immorality.
�On Moral Evil.
A man does right so long as he exercises that degree
of control over his physical appetites demanded by
his inner moral sense. The moment that he oversteps
that limit, or disobeys the inward voice, he commits
an act of immorality.
Supposing he should outrage public decency in
England, so far as to marry two wives, and supposing
him at the same time to be a trained-up Mormonite,
taught from infancy to believe that polygamy is law
ful in God’s sight, we should do right in punishing
him as a felon for his felony, but we should be wrong
in accusing him of immorality, because his conscience
had sanctioned his conduct. This brings us to per
ceive that merely written laws, whether in the Bible
or in the Statute Book, are not by themselves the
other factor in the product of moral evil. Unless
there is a sense of obligation there can be no sin. There
may be crime against the State, or a violation of Bible
precept, which some may deem irreverent or impious,
but there cannot be sin, without a violation of one’s
own sdhse of moral obligation. Moreover, there may
be some laws of the State which are bad laws, and
some Bible precepts directly opposed to morality, in
which case disobedience would be virtuous, though, in
the one instance, punished by the State, and in the
other by the public opinion of the orthodox; there
may be other cases, too, in which a man might be
a grievous sinner, though he had broken no written
law anywhere.
This may be deemed a dangerous doctrine to teach,
but, in the first place, it is not a doctrine at all, but
a question of fact as to what constitutes guilt—for
guilt can only be the result of previous sense of obli
gation. And men only feel obliged or bound to do
that which they can do. They never really feel
bound to do what is known to be beyond their
power, and therefore they never can feel guilty for
omitting to do what is impossible to them, or for
�14
On Moral Evil.
doing what they really could not help. The previous
sense of obligation which alone can constitute a sub
sequent sense of guilt springs from within, and not
from without; it is a part of ourselves, and is one of
the modes in which the inner voice or conscience acts
upon our lower nature. It cannot be so dangerous to
speak the truth about any matter as to say what is
false—nor can it endanger morality to endeavour to
get a right understanding of the true nature and source
of immorality.
The two factors of moral evil, then, are simply the
whole physical nature on one side, and on the other,
an inward power or law which sometimes opposes
our natural instincts and seeks to control them.
The action of the physical nature by itself is neither
moral nor immoral.
The submission of the physical nature to the moral
sense is virtue. The rebellion of the physical nature
against the moral sense resulting in action is vice
or moral evil. Conscious conformity to the moral
sense is morality. Conscious disobedience to it is
immorality.
From observation and induction, we are enabled to
form moral codes, for the greater facility of education,
i.e., for the cultivation of the moral sense, and for the
welfare of society. But it is putting these cases quite
out of place, to teach that they must be obeyed merely
because they are recognised codes, or to describe the
infringement of them as immorality, upon any lower
ground than that infringement is in every case a vio
lation of individual moral obligation. In a general
way, it is true, that certain acts are immoral, done by
whom they may, and under any circumstances; but
it will only mislead us to suppose that they can ever
be immoral except in one invariable way, viz., in that
they do violence to the moral sense of every individual
who commits them.
It may here be objected : The moral sense gets
�On Moral Evil.
*5
weaker the oftener it is violated, and the appetites of
the flesh get stronger the oftener they are indulged. In
this case it is said, men may go on doing wrong, from
worse to worse, until they cease to feel any sense of
moral obligation, or any sense of guilt in the commis
sion of those acts which were once felt to be immoral;
and at last they become as hardened and indifferent
to right and wrong as the beasts of the field, and yet,
according to my theory, it is alleged, they would not
be immoral, for their conduct would not violate any
inner law or moral sense. Hence, if any one wished
to escape the unpleasantness of being morally con
trolled, and the remorse of a guilty conscience, it is
urged, he would have nothing to do but to be sinful
to the utmost of his power—-doing all he could, and
as fast as he could, to kill all conscience within him.
This would be indeed a formidable objection to the
promulgation of the statement that men are only im
moral, sinful, guilty, in exact proportion to the activity
of their moral sense, unless the objection were based
on a misconception of the possibilities of man’s nature.
The supposed case of a man extinguishing, by repeti
tion of immoral acts, all moral sense whatever, is
purely gratuitous and unwarrantable. We have no
reason for supposing that any man, unless diseased in
body or mind, can by his own act rid himself of a
sense of moral obligation. It is true that it is in our
power to increase and develop that moral sense by
cultivation and strict obedience, but it by no means
follows that it is in our power to destroy it altogether;
even, if for a time we can contrive to weaken and
resist it.* I refuse to believe in the possibility of a
* Granting that this does take place in some instances,
the fact does not overthrow the author’s theory. The de
praved man has ceased to sin by ceasing to be what God
created him. He has fallen lower than a sinner, for he
has forfeited his natural human condition. The myth of
Nebuchadnezzar would seem to have this meaning.—Note
by a Friend.
�16
On Moral Evil.
man thus destroying his moral sense after having
had one in normal exercise, until such a man is pro
duced and exhibited. All my experience goes to
prove that men cannot lose their moral sense, and it
more frequently happens, that the self-reproach and
remorse grow deeper, the more sin has been indulged.
But granted such a case as the objector mentions.
Some few instances of the kind among many millions
would not overturn the overwhelming testimony on
the other side. Exceptions would but prove the rule.
The great mass of mankind are incapable of losing
their moral sense, and they would not be less or more
under its influence for any theories which might be
started to account for its agency in producing moral
evil. Vast numbers are kept as they are, neither
better nor worse, through the chief agency of custom
and public opinion. Their good and their bad actions
are alike the result of moulding circumstances, and
surrounding example, rather than of any conscious
moral effort, or immoral resistance of conscience.
Times and opportunities come to all for virtue and
vice, but the even tenor of many lives is, by compa
rison, seldom disturbed by any great conflict between
the flesh and the moral sense. The usual aspect of
such lives is best described as w-moral, not as moral
or immoral at all. Great drinkers, great profligates,
and great criminals, are as much the exception as
great heroes, great moralists, and great martyrs.
Both classes, both extremes of honour and baseness,
are doubtless the products of much moral conflict, of
which the easy-going world knows little or nothing.
A celebrated preacher, a man of exemplary life and
morals, once said to me, “ If I had not been a saint, I
should have been a devil,” and, really, to look at him
was enough to make one believe his words. There
was tremendous power in his head, and the furrows
of spiritual conflict had been ploughed deep into his
very face. The very good and the very bad are near
�On Moral Evil.
*7
a,kin, depend upon it. And the judgment of God,
who knows all, may be very different from ours, as
to the exact moral status of each one—
Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman ;
Though they may gang a kenning wrang,
To step aside is human.
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it:
And just as lamely can ye mark
How far perhaps they rue it.
Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us ;
He knows each chord—its various tone,
Each spring—its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.*
From the foregoing observations on the source of
moral evil, we cannot but draw some important con
clusions.
(1) . There is no such thing at all as moral evil,
apart from the thoughts, words, and deeds of moral
beings, i.e., of beings endowed with a moral sense, a
power which offers resistance to the physical impulses.
Therefore, there is nothing so absurd as to suppose
that evil has originated in any spiritual being or
devil; or has been imported into man’s nature from
without, or, still less, is the result of God’s defeat, or
of some flaw or defect in His original plan.
(2) . The mere fact of man being able to commit an
immoral act furnishes evidence of his superiority over
other kinds of animal organism. He could not
sin unless he first possessed a moral sense— -a sense of
obligation. It is a mark, if anything, of divine favour,
* Burns’ Address to the Unco Guid.
�i8
On Moral Evil.
rather than of divine anger. It is the token of God’s
blessing rather than of God’s cursing.
(3) . It is an indication of man’s destiny. What
possible benefit could be derived from the endowment
of man with a moral sense, if this life were the only
field for its exercise 1 If this be the only sphere in
which the moral sense will ever be developed, then its
presence in human nature must be admitted to be a
profound mistake, a mere wanton disturbance of
human animal contentment, without any correspond
ing advantage. The moral sense is to some men an
incessant check on the appetites and inclinations of
the flesh, submitted to only for the sake of an eternal
moral progress, which man’s inmost heart desires, and for
which alone he is willing to make the sacrifices of his
fleshly indulgence. To undergo all this in pure delu
sion—a delusion for which no set of priests, or pro
phets, no sacred books or churches are responsible—a
delusion purely originating in the highest and noblest
part of man’s own nature, is to submit to a moral
government based on immorality—to be kept truth
ful and honourable by a lie, and to be the utter dupe
of the Creator. If men can bring themselves to be
lieve that this faith in eternal moral progress after
death is utterly false and without foundation, they
can only do so by denying the goodness of God, and
by affirming that, if there be a Creator at all, he must
be the most treacherous and cruel of fiends.
(4) . As the relative powers of the flesh and the
moral sense are absolutely due to the Creator, partly
by the constitution of each man’s nature, and by the
circumstances in which he is placed, and over which
he has often no control, it follows that the failure of
the moral sense to regulate the body must be regarded
by the Creator in a very different light to what is
generally supposed. It is, of course, right to employ
language which conveys in the most clear and forcible
manner the divine authority of the moral sense, and
�On Moral Evil.
J9
to teach young persons and men of little intellectual
culture how wicked and wrong it is not to control
themselves ; and so we naturally say, “ G-od is angry
with sin.” “ God will punish it.” I say this language
is in use among us from the exigencies of the case, and
is justifiable only so long as we find it the best by
which to convey the incontrovertible truth that it is
man’s duty to control himself, and to act in strict
obedience to the moral sense, and further, that dis
obedience will entail painful consequences in order to
train him back into obedience and virtue.
But if this be kept well in view, and insisted on by
teachers, and preachers, and parents, they will be more
successful in their efforts to promote virtue, and to
diminish moral evil, if they ascertain clearly how all
sin is really punished, and skilfully expose the num
berless fallacies commonly entertained with regard to
punishment; and if to this they add true views of
God’s relation to the world, and of His moral govern
ment, they will get rid of those dreadful notions about
the Creator which make the lives of so many needlessly
sad, and weaken morality by weakening hope. It
is not true that sin is always punished by bodily pain.
Pain administered as punishment can only serve to
discipline the body, just as little children may be
trained into civilized animals by a little wholesome
chastisement in early years, which must on no acconnt
be inflicted after the moral sense is sufficiently de
veloped to make them ashamed of having done wrong.
As a matter of fact, the body gets more punished by
virtue than by vice. Provided a vicious man is
prudent in his self-indulgence, he can secure comfort
and gratification to his body by his very sins; whereas,
in very many cases of true virtue, the body suffers by
the moral conduct of the individual. To use an old
Bible phrase which is very expressive, “ the flesh, with
its affections and lusts, is mortified.” Being called to
a life of moral excellence is, in many instances, really
�20
On Moral Evil.
being called to a life of much physical pain. Loss of
liberty, loss of pleasure, and often positive discomfort,
and even misery, have arisen purely out of the rigid
exercise of moral control. We cannot, therefore,
look for the punishment of moral evil in the region
of physical pain or bodily discomfort. As the only
reward. or compensation for virtue is to be found in
the satisfaction of the moral sense, either on account
of what has been gained by self-conquest in moral
progress, or on account of some manifest benefit which
has been conferred thereby on others; so the only
true punishment for moral evil—that is, pain which
can be felt as punishment—is in shame and remorse.
Our Creator has so ordered it that we must reproach
ourselves for all failure in duty, for all conscious
disobedience to the higher law within us. He
has so constituted us, that we blame ourselves in
exact proportion to our real guilt; that we measure
our own guilt by the previous sense of obligation,
which is, in turn, measured by the power of doing
right of which we were conscious at the time of the
sinful act. Thus a man’s own sense of guilt is the
exact measure of guilt. Of course, that sense of
guilt may not come into exercise all at once. The
better feelings may be overpowered by a delirium of
self-indulgence, which, for a time, makes him as it
were out of his mind ; but when he comes to himself,
and reviews his conduct, the full sense of guilt comes
over him, and he is tortured by shame and selfreproach. There is just this difference between
God’s moral government and ours : we cannot reach
the inner life; we can only deal with the body: and
so the criminal is punished by us in his body. We
take our revenge, just or unjust, for his offences by
various methods of inflicting pain on the cerebral
and physical frame of the offender. But God’s way
of punishing is just the opposite. For the most part
the body is left alone, or only indirectly affected
�On Moral Evil.
21
through the emotions. God makes the sinner to be
his own judge and his own executioner. The stings
of remorse are the only real ministers of divine justice.
Thus we are brought by a single step to question the
accuracy of that common sentiment, “ God is angry
with sin,” “ God will surely punish it.” These common
phrases plainly declare a change of mind or feeling in
God, and a determination on His part to interfere—
to do something—in consequence of our sin. Though
well intended and often practically useful, because
not clearly understood, these phrases are unsound and
untrue. God cannot be made angry by anything
whatever which occurs in the universe which He him
self has planned and built. God cannot be the sub
ject of variable emotions, such as are common to the
finite human being. God cannot be disturbed by any
consequence of those manifold forces which He at
first, foreknowing all, set in operation. It is quite
absurd to talk of God’s anger at all, when one con
templates the complete foreknowledge which must
have ever filled the Creator’s mind. To say that one
is displeased, or angry, is to express that the will of
the angry person has been thwarted, his plans in some
way defeated; and to ascribe such defeat to any part
of God’s plans, is to divest Him either of Infinite
Power or Infinite Wisdom. To say that God is angry
with sin, is only to use a figure of speech whereby we
wish to describe the fact that our own moral sense
has a divine authority for the control of the body in
which it dwells. Beyond that, the phrase is false and
misleading, and has done infinite mischief in the world
by representing sinful man as an object of God’s dis
pleasure, and as an offender doomed to some terrible
fate. So, too, the phrase, “ God will surely punish
sin,” misleads us by carrying away our thoughts from
the present punishment which the Creator has made
man to inflict upon himself. It originates all sorts of
absurd and cruel theories of delayed vengeance, brew
�22
On Moral Evil.
ing wrath, and a future hell of endless torment,
when, all the. while, the only just, and suitable, and
beneficial punishment is being already borne. Besides
this, the punishment of moral evil by shame and re
morse, is in itself remedial and not vindictive. It is
a pure medicine, and not the scourge or axe of an
executioner. It contains the germs of repentance and
amendment of life, and was intended to do so.
We have been too long under this horrid nightmare
of the dread of God, and the sense of His anger. It
is “ high time to awake out of sleep.” Men have been
estranged from their great Friend, who alone knew
how to help them. They have lived all their lives
under a dark cloud, or in the wild endeavour to
lighten up their gloom by the glare of reckless revel
ling. They have sometimes abandoned all efforts at
self-control, and smothered the appeals of conscience,
by trusting to “ atoning blood” or “imputed right
eousness.” They have multiplied schemes on schemes
for escaping from God, though all the while He was
their Father and Friend, and no more angry with
them than the tender mother is angry with her sick
babe.
I am not afraid myself of believing that God is not
angry with sin, and that He will not punish it by
any other method than that already in force—through
the moral sense itself. Though I have long held this
view, it has never made me careless about right and
wrong, or diminished, by the weight of a grain, the
burden of self-reproach whenever I have done amiss.
I don’t know what I might have been, or have done in
the whole range of sins, but for the constant and stedfast assurance of God’s unabated love and friendship.
It has helped and not hindered me in the struggle
between good and evil. So I am not afraid to tell the
truth to my fellowmen, whenever I can tell it wholly,
and not partially. At the same time, God’s own pro
vision for the moral progress of mankind is ample and
�On Moral Evil.
23
unassailable. We can only do temporary harm, if
even that, by our false theories. We cannot unmake
a single man, woman, or child, or wrest from them
the moral sense which God has given.
(5.) It is a relief to turn from the ugly distortions
of man's relation to God, as described by theologians
to those happier views which you have done so much
to make known. In the pamphlets on “The Analogy
of Nature and Religion” and “ Law and the Creeds,”
and others in that series, we breathe an atmosphere
of. calmness and hope, instead of the alarm and despair
fostered by the old theologies.* Moral evil is only
relative ; we create it, so to speak, by our aspirations,
by our widening knowledge, and by our increasing
desire to walk in the will of God. We learn by it
what we have been created for, and what destiny God
has in store for us. We cannot shut our eyes to the
fearful and wicked things which are done in the
world, but we ought to be thankful that we have the
power of seeing them to be wicked and fearful, the
sense of abhorrence of them, and the capacity for
struggling against their commission by ourselves, and
for making a manful attempt to remedy their bitter
consequences, and prevent them in future. We are
apt to forget that there was a time when people who
were accounted holy and saintly, and believed them
selves to be so, practised lying and fraud without a
sense of shame; f when a man fervent in piety,
and full of honest trust in His Maker’s love and
righteousness could turn brigand, and seize other
men’s wives for his own lust, and day by day make
deadly raids upon the property and dependants of the
man who was giving him a shelter and a home, and
all this without any sense of having done amiss, or
broken the law of common humanity4 The very
saint who was called the Father of the Faithful §
* This subject is also treated in “The Sling and the Stone,”
in various sermons on sin.
t Jacob, &c.
I David.
§ Abraham.
�24
On Moral Evil.
could deliberately tell a lie in order that his own wife
might be taken to be ravished in a royal couch, with
out the necessity of his being previously murdered.
What should we say now if such deeds could be done,
as they once were done, without exciting any sense of
shame or calling forth the indignation of a whole
people ?
Times have changed indeed, and morality has made
great strides. True, many fearful crimes are now
perpetrated, but they are no longer committed with
out the abhorrence of the multitude. Terrible inroads
on domestic morality have been lately revealed to us
through our Divorce Courts, but only to meet with
the reproaches and indignation which they deserve.
And to pass from classes to individuals. We have
had living amongst us in the past century, men whose
virtues had never before been reached, much less sur
passed. Such men leave their impress on the age
which follows them, by an improved standard of
morals, and so the whole race is lifted on, step by
step, up the mountain of holiness which leads to the
throne of God.
But each man, as his body falls asleep in death, wakes
up, as we believe, to a new life in the world which we
cannot see, wherein the great work begun here is
carried on more rapidly, with fewer falls and blunders
than we make in our earliest essays at moral progress
here below. There are vast differences between us on
earth, as to the degrees of the strength and develop
ment of the moral sense, but this no more hinders us
from believing that all must take the same blissful
journey upwards to light and goodness, than the fact
of pur children being of different ages prevents our
believing that they will all in succession grow up to
manhood.
Whatever view we take of evil, we can only struggle
against it as we ought when we are assured that the
contest is not hopeless, and that a great and kind
�On Moral Evil.
*5
Friend has subjected us all to it for a purpose which
shall bring infinite good to every one. If our aspira
tions are above our capacities, the result will be a
temporary sense of bitter failure; it need not involve
any sense of guilt for any failure but such as was
clearly within our power to prevent. It need not
involve any regret—still less despair—so long as we
are sensitive to our position, earnestly desiring to im
prove. And while we can take comfort from the
assurance that God cannot be angry with us, we shall
be only more angry with ourselves for not achieving
what we might have achieved, and for failing when we
wight, have prevailed. The love and friendship of
God will thus cast a bright light about us in our
deepest sadness and bitterest repentance, and will
strengthen us more than anything else to amend our
lives, and to conquer the foe that stands still be
fore us.
I have only briefly, and very imperfectly, touched
on this vast subject, but the little I have said may
lead some of your more able readers to correct my
errors and to supplement my defects.
Ever most truly yours,
*****
To Thomas Scott, Esq.,
Mount Pleasant,
Ramsgate.
�26
On Moral Evil.
POSTSCRIPT.
A Review of one of your pamphlets, “ Is Death the
End of all things for man,” in the “Rock ” of June 10th,
leads me to add a few more words, which may help to
correct the erroneous impressions now current amongst
the orthodox, respecting our views of rewards and
punishments. The writer of that Review represents
the author of the above-named pamphlet as being
‘‘shut up to one or other of the only other pos
sible doctrines—the reward of all, or the punishment of all, or haply, a temporary punishment of
some, in order to the ultimate issue of the reward or
blessedness of all.”
I cannot, of course, answer for the author of that
pamphlet, but most Theists are agreed in believing
that all men will be gradually brought to a state of
holiness at last. It is not a question with them of
reward and punishment at all, but one relating to the
good purpose of God in having created us. That, in
this process of becoming holy, the punishment of
remorse will still be used hereafter, as it is in this life,
is, to say the'least, highly probable; but it does not in
volve any notions of Purgatory, such as are referred to
by the Reviewer in the “Rock.” As to reward, the only
reward for which the Theist hopes or seeks to attain
is that of success—of becoming at last what he wishes
and tries to be—of being able to do the perfect will
of God, and to love it entirely. Happiness of any
other sort is out of all consideration, and the hope of
it has been cast away as one of the attractions of our
childhood. The blessedness of being good, of growing
up into perfect sonship to God—this alone is our
aspiration and our well-grounded hope. We do not
pretend to describe, or even to suggest, the details of
�On Moral Evil.
God’s future discipline of us, which must remain hid
den from our knowledge on this side the grave, but
only so far as analogy helps us, we believe that moral
discipline will be carried on with each of us when we
die, and that then, as now, we shall find in the pun
ishment which comes by remorse the best medicine for
faults still incurred. To compare this to the doctrine
of Purgatory is to disclose an entire ignorance of our
standpoint. The Reviewer, after stating, in his own
language, the doctrine that (til will hereafter be
blessed, goes on to say, “ It has no foundation to rest
upon excepting general notions respecting the good
ness of God, and His purpose and His power to make
His creatures happy.”
Now this hope does not rest at all on “general
notions,” many of which are rejected by the Theist,
and none of which are ever accepted by him as authori
tative, but the hope, wherever it exists, rests on the
individual’s firm belief in the goodness of God, and m
His purpose and power to make His children good.
What foundation for our hope, we ask, can possibly
be so strong, or so wide, as this conviction of God s
good purpose, and His boundless power to carry it
out ? No voices from without, no parade of Church
authority, no library full of Bibles and Testaments, no
miracles of raising the dead, no word of Christ Himself,
or of the whole army of martyrs, not even the chorus of
angels or archangels, and all the company of heaven,
could make so certain our blessed hope as this still
small voice in our own hearts, “ God is love.” Those
who cannot feel this are yet unbelievers; they do not
know what real faith is; they do not yet “understand
the loving kindness of the Lord.” From the dark
cloud of orthodox infidelity, the wind moans and the
atmosphere is loaded with profound gloom; the hope
of the final bliss of all is swept away by a scornful
scepticism which reckons on the sympathy of the
“ Christian” multitude. “ Now, with respect to this
doctrine” (i.e., the final good of all) it might be
�28
On Moral Evil.
enough, to say that it has no foundation to rest upon,
excepting general notions respecting the goodness of
God/’ &c. Can infidelity sink lower than this ?
Another fallacy lies near at hand. After errone
ously putting the term “happy” for “good” (a con
fusion which we studiously avoid, although it may
be. true that the only real happiness consists in
being good), the Reviewer asks, “ Why is there any
unhappiness in the universe at all ? God could pre
vent it, but He does not. There must be good reasons
for His refraining, and how can we tell that these rea
sons shall cease to act when men cease to live in this
world? If the existence of suffering in the world
were incompatible with the Divine goodness, the exis
tence of it for a lifetime, or for an hour, were as
incompatible with that goodness as its existence
throughout eternity. This can never be answered.”
We don’t want to answer it; we quite agree with the
Reviewer that unhappiness is in the world, might be
preventible by God, is not prevented by God for certain
good reasons. We further agree in believing that God’s
good reasons will continue to act in the next world as
in this. We accept this life with its present share of
unhappiness only and entirely on the ground that God
is working by this means, amongst others, to certain
ends, of which the chief is that every man under pre
sent discipline shall be made good at last. We do not
rebel against the suffering—nay, we would not wish
one iota of it diminished, if thereby God’s good pur
poses should risk a failure. ; We believe in Him, and
therefore we are willing to bear what He appoints.
We trust Him implicitly, and therefore are willing to
wait, in perfect confidence, in sure and certain hope.
But the Reviewer, to whom I should be sorry to
attribute, even by mistake, any opinions which are not
his, seems evidently to think his closing sentence in
the above paragraph a triumphant argument for the
endless torment in which he believes.
�On Moral Evil.
*9
The fallacy lies in his not distinguishing between
the abstract and the concrete. “ Suffering,” I beg to
remind him, implies a sufferer, or sufferers. Now, it
does make all the difference to Divine goodness
whether a human being suffers for a time, with a
view to his final good, or suffers for all eternity.
This “suffering” which exists in the universe is a
state into which multitudes of individuals are being
born, and out of which they are constantly passing.
The suffering may only be correctly described as
eternal as regards its permanence as a system, and
the unbroken succession of individuals subjected to it
(supposing that this present state of human life is to
continue on the earth for ever). But as regards the
beings who suffer, it is not only not eternal, but tem
porary; as compared with a millennium, even very
temporary, and as compared with eternity, in the lan
guage of the apostle, “ it is but for a moment.”
Were it not temporary, and inflicted for a purpose
beneficent to the sufferer, suffering would be really
incompatible with the Divine goodness; but this just
makes all the difference. The orthodox man believes
in the endless suffering of some human beings whom
God has created, who were actually born morally
weak, and who were perhaps so trained and circum
stanced that moral improvement was hardly possible
to them at all; or, to speak in more orthodox terms,
they “rejected the Saviour,” because they had not
that “faith” which the New Testament affirms “is
not of ourselves, but is the gift of God.”
To remain for ever and ever wicked and unhappy,
incurable by God, even if He had the will to redeem
and reform the poor sinner, would be a standing wit
ness of the triumph of evil over good, of the defeat of
Him whom the very orthodox call “Almighty.”
No ! the existence of suffering in the world, when
once understood, is not incompatible with the Divine
goodness, but rather one of its strongest proofs, lout
�30
On Moral Evil.
only when understood. As a means to an end, as in
flicted for a time on each individual, in order to secure
his everlasting good, it is a mark of God’s fatherlylove for us all; but without this condition it would
convey to us, an irresistible evidence that we were
the sport of a fiend, or the victims of the most gigan
tic blunder.
The Reviewer, of course, after what he hadTsaid,
could not help falling into the error of supposing that
morality would be weakened by the final prospect of
universal happiness. Taught as we teach it, the doc
trine of final good for all can only tend to strengthen
our moral sense ; and to hasten, not to retard, amend
ment. Our belief is, not that God intends us all to
be indiscriminately 1 happy,’ but that He intends to
make us all good, to make us not only obedient to
His will, but to love it, and be drawn towards it by
impulses from within corresponding to His laws with
out. That is our summurn bonum, the only fruition
of our earthly trials for which we have any right to
look to our Creator, and that of itself teaches the
supreme importance of losing no time in beginning,
and relaxing no effort in continuing, the great work
of our moral progress. I cannot do better than re
mind the Reviewer and his readers of the “ Bock,” of
these apostolic words which on this subject express
the mind of the theist so forcibly : “ Work out your
own .salvation, for it is God who is working in you, both to
will and to do of His good pleasure.”
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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On moral evil: a letter from a friend
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Voysey, Charles
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Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 30 p. ; 18 p.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. The letter, published anonymously, is written to Thomas Scott. The author attribution of Charles Voysey taken from Scott's publications list at the end of item catalogued in Conway Tracts 32, no. 13. Date of publication from British Library catalogue.
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[187-?]
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Ethics
Evil
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Conway Tracts
Good and Evil
Morality
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DISCOURSE
Believe olgrnE
and thou shat.t
be saved.—JLcis xvi, 31.
Such was the burden of the first teaching of the Re
ligion upon wh^M^^^^^fe/bjMMisten d om is based.
Its first mi|^H^ appeared, declaring to all men, both
small
thajMMjtedoe^^S. in one Jesus of
Nazareth they would be saved.
What precisely was in
when they thus
talked of being saved, I do not undertake to say. But the
fact that, believing in Jesus, a man was delivered from evil
inclin%tiffl|n^Bb'e|^faB^^^Eel|i|hioned after a new
and high
jSp^ind humane, became conscious!
not only of a sense of safety, but of an ineffable peace of
mind, such as he had never known before,—this fact, I
do venture to say, was a salvation in the fullest meaning
of the word. If
teachySwhad any other mean
ing than thislfflcmM not possibly have been anything
better, nor so good. E®was a salvation worth giving
one’s life for.
It was strikingly illustrated in those first teachers them
selves. From being private, obscure persons, they became
�4
FAITH IN CHRIST
through their faith in Christ men of extraordinary mark,
of indomitable energy, stirring the world with their speech,
Fforming everywhere associations of men that gradually
■’evolutionized empires, and, notwithstanding manifold
(sufferings, conscious all the while of a joy that made the
prisons into which they were thrown ring with their glad
hymns.
The same thing wag shown also in great numbers of
their followers, both men and women, in old men and
tender girls, who, for their faith in Christ, with perfect
composure, nay, with an air of triumph, confronted the
horrors of the Roman theatrAl where they were flung to
be consumed in flames or torn in pieces by wild beasts.
Is it not, then, a matter of great interest to ascertain
how and why it was thatlwith faith in Christ, there came
so vital a change, so great a gaBation ?
And it is the more, interesting because there is still in
these days what bears the same name, Faith in Christ.
Whole nations are professing it. But it is not attended
by anything like the same Effects. Thousands signify
their profession of it bwolemn forms, but, between them
and others, what difference is there to see to, unless it be
that of the two, the latter are oftentimes the more agree
able in their manners^ and the more trustworthy in affairs,
while the former are noted chieflv for a punctilious oblervance of certain forms and a Scrupulous abstinence from
certain social amusements^ Beyond this, what now passes
for Christian Faith shows no remarkable force. It does
not keep the heart pure, nor save it from being eaten out
by pride, and intolerance, and a greed for money, that
�FAITH IN CHRIST
5
leads men to do the meanest things and the hardest. It
is no salvation from an abject deference to the way of the
world, or from the fanatical ambition which is driving so
many to sacrifices self-resp@cteihonor, and conscience to a
brilliant appearance and to social position. Does our
modern faith in Christ inspire any special enthusiasm for
Humanity, or what efforts in that behalf does it prompt,
save in fashionable ways, and- by popular methods, sub
scribing money and the liH3| It neither renders people
more amiable, nor gives them the cheerful air of a great
peace and joy in their believing.
Surely if our faith Md that ancient faith are one and
the same thing, it has undergone in this respect a mighty
change. It no longer saves men in the old-fashioned way.
It is claimed for it that it saves them from future and
eternal torments. I do not know about that. It certainly
does not, what it once did, save them now. Whence this
great difference ? What made the old faith such a power ?
The first thingEl J)
as Helping us to an
answer to thiMueswonT is this : in those early times faith
in Christ was n(ai)O|uSE safe, but very unpopular
and very unsafe. Indeed it was as much as a man’s life!
was worth, so much as to whisper the name of Christ with
respect in the car of his b(j§rm friend. It instantly ex
posed him to be shunned, pointed at, informed against
by his nearest of kin, put in peril of being hooted atJ
mobbed, stoned to death in the street.
What then is the conclusive presumption ? Why that
no one in his senses could then have been found believing
in Christ, unless he had been so mightily moved thereto
�6
FAITH IN CHRIST
that he could not for his life help it, unless there had
entered into him a power sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing to the marrow. Understanding, heart,
conscience, all that was within him, must have wrought
to create in him faith in Christ. What else was there to
induce a man to believe in Christ? Everything else,
every interest in life, wen directly and most powerfully
*
the other way, to drive men off, as they valued their lives,
from so much as looking at his alleged claims. His
bare name was odious in the extreme, a great deal worse
than the name of Abolitionists some few years ago, and
that was bad enough, as you all know. It stood for
everything hateful, for the rankest Atheism, for the turn
ing of the world upside down, for deadly hatred of gods
and men.
The Christian Faith of those days, therefore, must have
been a most intimate personal conviction. It could have
been nothing else. It was not a hearsay, a tradition, nor
a phrase. It was no fancy. There was nothing to catch
the fancy about a man who had suffered the vilest of
deaths, but everything to shock and repel the fancy. It
was not a mere opinion. . Neither was it a faith which a
man might assert that he had, but did not know for cer
tain. It was the genuine thing, Faith, nothing less or
other.
Now we all know that Faith, properly so called, is one
of the greatest forces, if not the very greatest force, in all
known nature. It is the support which upholds the com
merce and prosperity of nations. Steam, electricity, mag
netism, powerful as they are, are its household servants,
�FAITH IN CHRIST
Mountains sink and valleys rise at its bidding.
7
It is
annihilating time and space. It is the men who believe
in the things which they aim at, who turn stumbling
blocks into stepping stones. They are the born rulers
upon whom all things and all men wait. They discover
and conquer new worlds. |gH|was the quality of Faith
in Christ at the first. It was faith ad no mistake.
Being thus a true, ISSg conviction, it could not be
concealed. It could no more be kept to itself, as you
now keeg your sceptical doubts to yourselves, than fire
can be kept to itself in the midst of dry straw. I have
no doubt that most, if not all, of those who, in those
early daysyvi|re ^‘Oju>g^^^^elieve InyTesus were brought
to it, at th e first, with great reluctance. The instant
there flashed upon them
of a favorable
leaning towards him, ^haW gKdEr must have gone
through them! It madp their hearts beat quick, you may
depend, and their cheeks flush and turn white, and the
sweat to stand in great beads upon their foreheads, as
there glared upon them the awful doom to be met, if they
dared to yield to this new and dangerous influence. Thus
they must have shrunk from it with affright, even while,
and even because, they felt themselves drawn towards it.
The inevitable effect oOtheESggfe to keep it off was
to make them think, no| tlfegM but the more, of the
perilous subject that was draSg them to itself with a
force not their own, as .with the clutch of Fate. Was
there anything that could drive it deeper and deeper into
their hearts, like trying to keep it out, trying to forget it ?
The arrow that had pierced them was barbed. The effort
�8
FAITH IN CHRIST
to get away from the object of their faith, forced them
into closer acquaintance with it. And the nearer they ap
proached it, the more powerful grew its attraction, and
the more their interest in it increased, until they were
so helpless to resist it that they had to speak out or die.
They might keep it secret for awhile, so long as their
dread of turning friends into'ifoes and of suffering perse
cution was stronger than their new conviction. But this
conviction, being alive, was sure to grow, as we have just
seen, and to keep growing. The spring of a new life,
opened within them steadily rising, would, sooner or
*
later, float them over all their fears, and bear them right
onward into the very thick of th dangers that menaced
*
them. In fine, the cl^mge%taking place in them, would
be sure to betray itself, if not in one way then in another;
most probably in the first place, by their lukewarmness
in the observance of their old religious customs and by
their neglect of the altars of the gods. A word spoken,
nay, a word unspoked silence, might blab it. Accord
ingly they would be forced,^sooner or later, to confess the
faith that they had embraced, or, rather, that had em
braced them.
Here we see another reason why the primitive faith
had such extraordinary power. The open profession of
it instantly summoned into active service one’s whole man
hood. The best that was in a man had to come right to
the front. There was an immediate necessity for all his
courage and fortitude. Hesitation, fear, had to be trampled
under foot. Do you wonder,—does it seem hard to under
stand,—how a simple faith in Christ, now so easy, should
�FAITH IN CHRIST
3
have had such power, power to work the most difficult km
changes, rarely witnessed,., the change of the persoiSd
character, the salvation of the soul ? The wonder ceases,
the fact is in great part explained, when we consider the
circumstances in which this^aith wiiconceived and con
fessed. It was in the immediate presence of danger, and
of death in the frightfullest shapes, and at the cost of the
tendere&i ties.
So that, wf|»ut>Twference to the person of him in whom
this faith was reposed, or to the power there was in him,
we may readily perceive that the circumstances attending
the public confession of it must have rendered it very
powerful. An occasion, in fact a most urgent necessity,
*
was created for the instant exertion of the utmost reso
lution. Those^mfhj, aunties were put in immediate re
quisition, the possession of which is equivalent to a regen
eration of Ee whole wan.
with salvation.
A man was at once made brave and true; and this he
could ngMfe and be the same man that he was before,
with his low worldly habits and his sins cleaving to him
still. He was shaken all out of them, an'd translated into
a higher co *fSl, wfeer<gieEtfeME^S-e had the ascen
d
dency over the lower, the s#^iltfhver the flesh. Thus he
had at once, on the spot, searching experience of salvation
in the profoundest sense of the word.
Now, in thesf times, it is entirely different. There is
nothing of this kind connected with IS profession of faith
in Christ. It long ago ceased to be dangerous and un
popular. So far from its demanding any strength of
mind now, the weakest man may proclaim it aloud at the
�10
FAITH IN CHRIST
' Street corners, without exerting anymore force than is re
quired to open his lips. Instead of calling for courage, it
appeals to cowardice, to the most worldly motives. To
profess it, we are under the necessity, not of reforming,
but of conforming, a necessity very easily complied with.
Thousands there are who, by upholding certain institu
tions, virtually profess to be Christian believers, when
they have no intelligent personal faith whatever. And
so it has come about that there has been generated the
monstrous delusion that the most superficial, unthinking
formalism of thought and observance is a religion, a
Religion unto salvation!
There are no two things in naturegmore opposite, the
one to the other, than the faith of these our days and the
faith of the first Christians, the modern Profession and the
ancient Confession. The formers is a garment woven by
the world, having no more vital Hinection with the man
himself than his clothes have, nor .so much, for his clothes
keep him warm, while his faith Fworn, not for comfort,
*
but for fashion’s sake, that he may do as everybody else
is doing. But the ancient! Faith !—it was mingled with
the heart’s blood. Every nerve was thrilled by it. It
was a flaming fire, blazing at the very centre of life.
And it was thus vital, because it was no faith of man’s
making. It was kindled by Nature, by God himself.
Faith came to men in those days, attended, not by the
acclamations of their fellow-men, but by their curses, loud
and deep. It came, through fire and blood, girt with
lightnings and thunders, breaking in upon them, not by
their will, but in the first instance, without their will,
�* FAITH IN CHRIST
11
and against their will. They did not choose it. It chose
them, and made them all its own through struggles am
agonies almost breaking their hearts.
Consequently, as they could no more shake their faith
off than they could ‘unesseaace’ themselves, it was imposJ
sible for them to hold it ligh||ys, as a superficial appendag J
worn JnlvJ^rlsnow. Why, it was nothing less than their
very liffl What else had they on earth or in heaven to
sustain them ami^w ho^ror^bhal surrounded them |
What deeper interei^gadHIBy thanjffknow what it was
that they were putting their faith in at the cost of all that
they h elewdear
They could not impose upon
themselves, as we do now-a-days, with mere forms and
phrases. They could not feed upon articulate wind.
With the fierce flaml^ of persecution darting right at
them, they had to plunge in to the very heart of their
faith and wring all the life out of it they could. Once
committed|^thei^iSSBW' aQ face to face with a ter
rible opposition!thSthalO ma!fefy>od to themselves the
fearful position which they had taken. They had to for
tify themseivclj the uttermost. As they could look for
no reinforcement to eom^^ their aid from without, as
the world around them was all iigrms against them, they
were forced back, driven in, into the very citadel, where
sat enthroned the Obj e^| d^heir faith, there to obtain the
strength which wja||needed^ make their resistance effec
tual and to secure the victory. Accordingly they knew
the person in whom they believed.
And here, friends, we come to the last and main source
whence the early Christian Faith derived its power. But
�IS
FAITH IN CHRIST
let me repeat briefly what I have said. It is worth while.
Our subject is of great moment.
The first reason that I have given why Faith in Christ
was so strong at the outset is, that it really was faith, a
genuine conviction of the mind. Such it was of necessity.
There was no earthly inducement to move any sane man
to believe in Jesus, unless his understanding, his consci
ence, his whole soul compelled I aim to believe in him.
There was nothing to lead him to imagine that he believed
when he did not believe. Gfeete was not a loophole for
any self-deception. There was e wry thing to frighten
people away from the thought of Christ, to deter them
jfijpm so much as glancing i# that direction, save with
speechless dread. The faith ithfn of those days was a
real conviction. And a true, conviction is never without
Bower. Indeed, we see e<ery^here that personal faith is
the power of the world.
I In the next place, that earljy faith, being of the true
■quality, could not be hidden, kept to itself, although,
doubtless, they who had it were prompted by the fear of
the alienation of friends and the violence of foes to keep
it as long as they could to themselves. You may rely
Ripon it, they were in no hurry to publish what was sure
to bring swift dishonor and death. The Christian faith
could not, therefore, be confessed without the exertion of
the utmost moral force. Thus the salvation of the be
liever took place, incidentally, undesignedly on his part,
without his being aware of the great change begun in
him. Forced to depend upon himself, he had to dispense
with what is as the breath of our nostrils: human coun-
�FAITH IN CHRIST
13
tenance and sympathy. When that can be done, ther^Q
a new birth. Self-trust is the indispensable condition
of spiritual growth. In relying upon ourselves, we emerge
from our minority. We cease to be children. We standi
upon our feet. We go alone, leaning upon no crutches
of authority, listening to no hutward voice for our law,
but becoming every one a law to himself, or, which is the
same min^ffle sacred Jaw-. |Bfe&>ed to in the heart, ass^^
its supremacy over
power comes to us
from ®iS,in, from the immaterial, (ftifathomable, im
mortal soul within. Thence it w,a| thatWFaith at the firsl
drew its extraordinary strength. There, within, the great
Idea of Christ met tth^aiwi believers and communicate<l
to them such power that one of them exclaimed: “ I can
do allTthings through Christ strengthening me.”
I haveBras indicated two things which made Faith in
Christ, a faith unt^' salvation. The third and the foun
tainhead of its p)w6- wwhida EMey who believed drank
deep, and from which they drew a life, exuberant and
immortal, was, the object of their faith, in one word,
Christ.
Now in order to see #na^SweMthere was in him to
move men so mightily, we must endeavor to conceit
what a wonder, what apurpassin^mirade that phenom-1
enon was Tthe appearancirli^flthe world of such a man as
Jesus of Nazareth, considered simply as a man. I have
no idea that he himself e’verdrearned of claiming to be
anything more.
His name now is representative only of creeds, of
churches, of doctrines, which so far from commanding
; ‘•.'Gr' jA-K
.v. £. 1 • X <.J ’’
�14
FAITH IN CHRIST
the respect of the understanding, fetter and gag the under
standing, and shock the heart and pervert the conscience;
Or, if the name of Christ still represents a person, it is
a person of the Godhead, a vague fiction of the theological
imagination;
Or, if a human person, still only a person of so shadowy
an existence that he is hardly to be descried through the
legends and fables, of which the accounts that we have of
him are supposed to be made up.
It requires no slight effort, therefore, to put out of mind
these present modes of thought and to consider what a
new, strange, wonderful thing the Story of Jesus,—told
so humanly as it is told in swstaifce when the record is
head aright,—must have been in that distant age, long
before our creeds and churches and doctrines of Trinities
and Double Natures, and our critical and sceptical notions
were dreamed of, and when men were everywhere wor
shipping military power, and when^too, with huge tem
ples of stone and thousands of idols, and altars smoking
with the blood of slaughtered animals, and long glittering
processions of priests and countless imposing ceremonies,
—when with such things all that is sacred was identified,
and men hardly knew that there was anything holier or
more venerable.
Just think, friends, what a new thing under the sun
was the story that was told, told in the all-subduing
accents of the sincerest conviction, in the voluptuous cities
of Greece, and in the old warlike Roman empire, of a
lyoung man, of stainless purity, in the bloom of life, only
thirty years of age, of humble origin, put to a most shame-
�FAITH IN CHRIST
15
ful and cruel death for his simple truth’s sake, who, while
living, had gone about doing good, knowing not in t.lW
morning where he should rest his head at night, speaking
such words of wisdom that people came to him in crowds
from far and near, and followed him till they were ready
to drop from hunger and fatigue. He told them stor™
(so went the fervid 'report)-, breathing fraternal love and
the deepest human tenderness. He gave his blessing to
the poor, the sorrowing, the-gentle^tEe merciful, the pure
in heart, the lovers of peace; and so fearless was he withal,
as free as a child, as simple as the light and the air, amidst
savage passions ragfegO^gst- him, going his perilotB
way straight to a foreseen, violent death just as he walked,
just as he breathed, doing and saying the greatest thin J
as the merest m^grlTof course, fef-ppssessed, self-forget-J
ting, with heart open^^^thje while as the day to the
neglected and the outcast, transferring his own claims,
whatever they - werok thef Bwest of his brother-men. JI
malice of foes, no treachery of friends, so it appeared,
could exhaust or embitter the sweetness of his spirit. He
took little
hi^arms^«figessed them. The
wretched flocked »to him ias to a wide open temple of
Mercy. The poor woman, sin-defiled, from whose ton J
the pioujshranj as from ir a, leper, he addressed in words
of brothers kindness. rWhath a^ftene was that! The
poor heart-broken creature bowing fown and kissing his
very feet over and over again, and, as her hot tears fell
upon them like rain, wiping them away with her hair!
Such are only some of the many things which were told
of him, and which gave the world assurance of this new
�16
FAITH IN CHRIST
and most original Man. Could we only read the narra
tive of his last few hours, as we should, if we read it now
[for the first time, Roman Triumphs, Royal Progresses,
Coronation pomps, the Te Deums and Misereres of cathefdrals would all vanish away before the mingled pathos
and majesty of those scenes.
What a story, I reiteratflwas that to be told to a world,
‘[shining all o’er with naked Swords!’ What a sensa
tion must it have made!
What attention, what interest
must it have arrested! What Sympathy ! What adoring
admiration!
Furthermore, and borers the fact of supreme interest,
me Story of the Life and Death of Jesus was a wonder,
the like of which had never before been witnessed on
Earth, why? For what -rcasorif Even because it was
[perfectly simple, thoroughly natural, essentially human.
Being thus natural and human, it went straight into every
open heart as its native homfft, and Jesus was welcomed
there as the nearest of kin, the most intimate relative of
mankind. In fact, that Story, although its apparently
preternatural incidents affecte'd the imagination greatly
and made the world ring again, still was the most deeply
touching in this: that it silently breathed a thoroughly
human spirit, a spirit which was in far closer kinship
to the deepest and best in human nature than any mere
bniracles or any affinity of blood could possibly claim.
On this account it was that men took it in as naturally as
their eyes received the light or their lungs the air.
And all the more deeply did it interest them because
there was scarcely anything then to interest the popular
�FAITH IN CHRIST
mind, that went beyond the eye and the passion of fear and
the love of the marvellous. It was these only that were ad
dressed and excited, nothing deeper. Consequently, when
there went ahroaMan® from lips touched by the fire of
personal faith in its truth, the Story of one, whose whole!
being throbbed with ® »irit^St struck to the very heart,
quickening into full activity its noblest sentiments, people
leaped to embrace him, the most formidable obstructions
notwithslandinglby a sympathy as instinctive as that
which makes the ®hild cling to its mWier’s bosom.
By the way, we^^^-|jQM'St»ied! to speak of Jesus as the
Founded of ferisip^fefc/ Butf as I conceive of him, he
had no Sought of ®O»ly
a religion. He
was and is the foundation of Christianity, but not the
founder. . It had no founder. It founded itself. And it
was for this ver^^eason,he had no scheme of his
own, because, in th^e_ freedom and simplicity of Nature,
there went forth from him an effluence which was one
with the deepest and best in the soul of man,—for this
reason it gagthat a religion sprang from him which has
lasted now »r cBituMeSand fcwillBlfi^ for centuries
come.
But to return. When once we fully apprehend this
fact th® H was a simple human life, as natural as it was
original, the fbaa^ where^il^^O aSo^ on the wings of
faith, we begin to un(figtandFvhv,it was that, notwith
standing the fearful circumstance attending the confes
sion of belief in it, it at once took captive such a host of
men and women. The increase of the first believers was
amazingly rapid. Immediately after the death of Christ
�18
FAITH IN CHRIST
they were numbered, according to the Book of Acts, by
thousands. Thirty years afterwards, in the capital of the
Roman Empire, and Rome was then a great way off from
Judea, there was, as Tacitus informs us, a mighty multi
tude of them, ‘multitude ingens' The Catacombs of
*
Rome are filled with the ashes of the early Christians, and
their number is well nigh incredible.
The fact was, as I have said, the would was occupied
with superficial formalities, altars, and statues, splendid
rituals, sacrificial offerings, and holidays; things that
engrossed attention, and so Sased the conscience with
petty scruples, that, as Plutarch states, on one occasion, a
religious procession to propitiate some god, owing to some
trifling deviation from the prescribed forms, started from
the temple thirty-six times. Hardly,.anything deeper was
appealed to than the love of sight-seeing, and the super
stitious passion for thei marvellous.
And yet, consider, friend^ -those ancient generations
of Jews and Greeks and.4 Romans,—they were human
beings like ourselves, far more like than different. They
had this same human heart bleating all the while in their
bosoms. They were brothers, sisters, sons, daughters,
fathers, mothers, and on daily occasions were perforce
following the kindly dictates of our common humanity.
In the midst of all that externality and child’s play,
there came, in a man, in a young man, the living, breath
ing power of sacred human affection, showing the true
life to be, not a gilded ritual, but one ceaseless office of
self-forgetting human love. Of course it came like the
rain, like the former and the latter rain to the thirsty
�FAITH IN CHRIST
19
earth. It went down, swift and straight, down to the
central core of our human nature, whence it came, melt
ing the hardness which had grown over it, setting its
deepest springs flowing, and causing it to flower out
noble and saintly deeds.
Thus it is apparentnthe one wbduing charm was not
any new truth or doctrine, addressed only to the specula
tive faculty. Far enough Was it from being any system
of theology. Neither was it any miracle, which, at the
utmost, could excite only surprise and wonder. It is no
image of Jesus as a wonder-worker; it is Jesus in the
weakest condition of human nature, as a little child in his
mother’^ arms, or as hagBg dead on the Cross, that has
for ages since takBplgpM^ajl commanded the homage
of Christendom. It is no bewildering Tri-une God, but a
mother, exalted above God, a human mother, to whom the
tenderest worship has been
and widely rendered.
The Madonna andgn^^Kfl^—to what myriads of suf
fering andTlying men have these most human of symbols
spoken of the InfingjBove fl This iff was, the purely
human and humane spirit of Jesus, which through those
who at the first believed in him, ran like quicksilveS
from heart to heart by the irresistible power of the inde
structible syiflpathies of human nature.
So was it at the first. How is it now ? Now that Faith
in Christ is no longer persecuted, no longer unpopular,—
now that all is so changed in this respect, has the object
of Faith lost its vitality ? Can we no longer be saved by
Christ as the men and women of old were saved by him ?
2
�20
FAITH IN CHRIST
Was the saving power of this Man of men exhausted in
those early days ?
It would argue but very feeble sensibility to the great
ness of Jesus, it would indeed be doing him great dishonor,
to forget that it is not possible in such a world as this of
ours that so bright a light should arise and shine without
gradually spreading itself far and wide, and, notwithstand
ing whatever clouds of ignorance and superstition may
arise, should be reflected from unnumbered points, and, in
the course of time, render the whole atmosphere of Life
luminous and impregnate that with its saving efficacy, thus
consecrating all Life to the ministry of human Salvation.
This it is that has taken place in the case of Christ.
His spirit was caught by thos^ in attendance upon him,
and through them by a great host of confessors and mar
tyrs,—a cloud of witnesses; and so there started into ac
tivity countless saving agencies, Christ-like lives and
deaths, inspiring memories, humane institutions, revolu
tions, reformations, emancipations of multitudinous races;
and through these, and through all the freedom and
civilization which have followed' upon his appearance in
the world, Jesus is still carrying on the work of Salva
tion, of the blessings whereof all are, consciously or un
consciously, more or less partakers, even those who deny
his influence, and question his very existence. The his
tory of Europe, for now nearly two thousand years, is the
history of Christ, still far from being finished. At this
hour, as a philosophical writer has remarked, Europe is
struggling onward to realize the Christian ideal.
Is it only, however, in this indirect way, by the spirit
�FAITH IN CHRIST
21
which these reflections of his personal influence propagate,
that he is still the Saviour of men ? Has the full, rich
spring of his personal power, which at the first so flooded
human hearts, run dry, so that he is no longer able to
comman^j faith in himself that shall be unto salvation ?
Ah! dear friends, could he only be seen as he was, in
his natiyg greatness, jhtW earts would .burn with something
of the fire o^sa^tguaMi which
kindled in theirs of
old. But he is
longer visible. His person has been
for longlages hidden in th ^Storting mists generated by
the imaginatio®, wHRJth^unprecedented novelty of such
a life most jywrMBQt^^d. The extravagant and ir
rational representations thal hf^gbeen made of him could |
not reach in to the cenwal springs of our nature. They
can only play u
surface, and noisily agitate that.
To the still de^^^S csgnotfj^getrate.
And now, whf^t^^^tagjysicaljsions that have so
long veiled the human person of Jesus are fading away,
the case is Tiardly
to the blinding mists
of SuperstWon ^a^^iUd^ed^i^h di mists as blinding of
Scepticism • and to nuOW^s p^Bflonly a myth. He is
not known.
I should not presume to mah^ this assertion, were not
the reason plain wny he is not known. The ignorance,
the superstition, the monstrous dogmas, for which his
name has been cWmed, gjaavfl driven even intelligent,
learned, and conscientious men to the extreme of regard
ing with distrust,, one might almost say with contempt,
those artless accounts of Jesus, which have come down to
us, and from which alone we obtain any knowledge of him
�B2
FAITH IN CHRIST
personally. Accordingly, while, on the one hand, these
accounts are studied to find authority for some established
creed, on the other, they are read only to feed the scepti
cism with which they are looked upon. Jesus must needs,
therefore, be unknown when we seek, not for him, but for
the confirmation of some system of faith, or of no faith.
Murmur not, complain not, that you cannot see him.
4 No man,’ he himself is recorded to have said, ‘no man
can come to me unless He who sent me draw him’
Where is the single, earnest eye, to which alone, bent full
and searchingly on the record, its meaning will open, and,
emerging from the dimness of centuries, Jesus will stand
in sunlight clearness befor.e us with arms outstretched to
save us ?
Of all the great personages of History, there is no one
of whom so individual and living an idea may be had as
of Jesus. Such is my conviction. And for this reason,
not only because the accounts of him, as I have found, are
impressed all over and all through .with inimitable marks
of truth, but because, brief and imperfect as they are, they
are, to a singular degree, made.ujTof just such particulars
as always afford the most satisfactory insight into the stuff
and quality of the persons of whom they are related.
Thus persuaded, I believe the time will come when it
will be understood what manner of man Jesus was. As
we learn to know him, and to appreciate his exalted char
acter ; as we thus draw near to him, his spirit will breathe
upon us, and we shall receive the Holy Ghost. We shall
be learning Veneration and Love. Thus will he quicken
into a. new life those best sentiments of our nature by which
�FAITH IN CHRIST
23
it will be delivered from whatever now hardens or depraves
it. In this way, Faith in Christ personally will again
put forth its saving power. ‘The idolatry of dogma!’
says Mr Lecky, ‘will pass away. Christianity, being
rescued from the gitarianism and intolerance that have
defaced it, will shine Mg own Iplgpdor, and, sublimate®
above all the sphere of controversy, will assume its right
ful position as an ideat and not a system, as a person cmd
not a creed.’*
There is, in these times, in one great respect, a special
need of such a Saviour. The grasp of human authorities
and hereditary faiths upon the minds of men is loosened I
they cannot hold the world forever. In the free and pro
gressive M^Mytejd^^o;uishes Christendom, Science
is advancing as never before. Theories of Life, of its
origin and development, are becoming popular, which put
to naught our E&^Hfiogms, anlBtoevolutionizing our
modes ofjFhSght.
there who
earnest men of Science are
me mni^me. and can find no
God. Startled
listen and hear
everything attempted to be accounted for by blind law
and brute Enatter, f we ^ni to be in a boundless desert,
where is no SaOed Presence, where consummate order
reigns, but~nd Infinite Love Ipreathe
.
*
In this state of things, what tongue can tell the worth
of such a Person as Jesus ? When the things told of him
are established as historically true,—when he ceases to be
* History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism
Europe, p. 191. American edition, 1866.
in
�24
FAITH IN CHRIST
a myth, and becomes a Reality, and we accept him as a
Fact in Nature as truly as any fact that Science has dis
covered, or may discover, and in as perfect accord with
Nature, then, as plants spring up under the air and the
light, there will be created in us spontaneously an im
pregnable Trust, and an inextinguishable Hope, which,
to all purposes of guidance and consolation, will be equiva
lent to Faith in God. The Idea of Jesus, enshrined within
us, by the aspirations it will kindle for the Highest, will
be a witness in our inmost consciousness of the Invisible
and Everlasting. Beholding Jesus, we shall behold God
and Immortality. And, moreover, what a testimony shall
we have to the truth of our great Christian Ideas in the
fact, that it was in them that he, in whom the highest
condition of humanity lias Peen shown, lived, and moved,
and had his being! These1 rit was thaQreated him after
so Godlike a fashion.
The great and the good of every age and country have
ministered, and are forever ministering, by the inspiration
which they breathe, to IK salvation of mankind, as well
from the gloom of unbelief, as from the darkness of super
stition. But Jesus stands high, high above them all; not,
it may be granted, in the abstract wisdom of his teachings,
although it may be questioned whether, even in this re
spect alone, any other of the great leaders of the world
have approached him,—have uttered so much of the high
est truth as he; but in the overflowing fulness of his spir
itual being, in the fact that he impresses us with the con
viction that there was a great deal more in him than his
words or even his acts expressed, an unfathomed reserve
�FAITH IN CHRIST
25
of personal power. Who has ever moved the world
like him ? Who is there that, like him, has challenged
centuries to define his position,—to take his measure?
He so stirred the imagination alone, that for ages, poor
peasant as he was, he has heen held to be nothing less
than the Infinite God himself; and this, too, not in
the absence of information concerning him, inviting the
imagination to so extravagant a flight, but in the face
of explicit facts showing him to have been a man, a
tempted,4suffering, dying, all-conquering man. ‘Two
things,’ said the philosopher Kant, 1 fill me with awe I
the starry heavens and the sense of moral responsibility
in man.’ To these two I add a third, filling the soul
with faith and love and hope, as well as awe, the Per
son of
To the Spirit, in him made Flesh of our
flesh, be this fair Church, risen from its ruins, every stone
of it, and th4 living Church within, its pastor, my friend,]
brother,..son, and his flock, dedicated now and forever!
�DEDICATORY HYMN
BY ROBERT COLLYER
0 Lord our God, when storm and flame
Hurled homes and temples into dust,
We gathered here to bless thy name
And on our ruin wrote our trust.
Thy tender pity met ourapain,
Swift through the world the angel ran
And then thy Christ appeared again
Incarnate, in the heart of man.
Thy lightning lent its fuming wing j
To bear his tear-blent sympathy,
And fiery chariots rusIHfflto bring
The offerings of humaniw.
Thy tender pity met our pain,
Thy love has raised us from the dust.
We meet to bless thee, Lord, again,
And in our temple sing our trust.
�
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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
Dublin Core
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Title
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Discourse: faith in Christ
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 25, [1] p. ; 24 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Text of discourse from Acts xvi, 31 - "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved". Final unnumbered page is a dedicatory hymn by Robert Collyer. Includes bibliographical reference.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[187-?]
Identifier
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G5368
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[Unknown]
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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 (Discourse: faith in Christ), 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
Subject
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Sermons
Conway Tracts
Faith
Sermons