Theism. Flint Robert

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СКАЧАТЬ like theirs is never more than the highest degree of perfection which prevails widely around it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No such single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear." What the historian has thus said as to art is equally true of all other forms of thinking and doing. It is certainly true of religious thought, which has never risen without much help to the sublime conception of one God. It is, in fact, an indisputable historical truth that we owe our theism in great part to our Christianity, – that natural religion has had no real existence prior to or apart from what has claimed to be revealed religion – and that the independence which it now assumes is that of one who has grown ashamed of his origin.

      It does not in the least follow that we are to regard theism as merely or even mainly a tradition – as a doctrine received simply on authority, and transmitted from age to age, from generation to generation, without investigation, without reflection. It does not follow that it is not a truth the evidence of which has been seen in some measure by every generation which has accepted it, and into the depth and comprehensiveness and reasonableness of which humanity has obtained a constantly-growing insight. There have, it is true, been a considerable number of theologians who have traced all religious beliefs to revelation, and who have assigned to reason merely the function of passively accepting, retaining, and transmitting them. They have conceived of the first man as receiving the knowledge of God by sensible converse with Him, and of the knowledge thus received as transmitted, with the confirmation of successive manifestations, to the early ancestors of all nations. The various notions of God and a future state to be found in heathen countries are, according to them, broken and scattered rays of these revelations; and all the religious rites of prayer, purification, and sacrifice which prevail among savage peoples, are faint and feeble relics of a primitive worship due to divine institution. This view was natural enough in the early ages of the Christian Church and in medieval times, when the New World was undiscovered and a very small part of either Asia or Africa was known. It was consonant also to the general estimate of tradition as a means of transmitting truth, entertained by the Roman Catholic Church; but it is not consistent with the Protestant rejection of tradition, and it is wholly untenable in the light of modern science, the geography, ethnology, comparative mythology, &c., of the present day. A man who should thus account for the phenomena of the religious history of heathen humanity must be now as far behind the scientific knowledge of his age regarding the subject on which he theorises, as a man who should still ascribe, despite all geological proofs to the contrary, the occurrence of fossils in the Silurian beds to the action of the Noachian deluge.5

      Theism has come to us mainly through Christianity. But Christianity itself rests on theism; it presupposes theism. It could only manifest, establish, and diffuse itself in so far as theism was apprehended. The belief that there is one God, infinite in power, wisdom, and goodness, has certainly not been wrought out by each one of us for himself, but has been passed on from man to man, from parent to child: tradition, education, common consent, the social medium, have exerted great influence in determining its acceptance and prevalence; but we have no right to conceive of them as excluding the exercise of reason and reflection. We know historically that reason and reflection have not been excluded from the development of theistic belief, but have been constantly present and active therein; that by the use of his reason man has in some countries gradually risen to a belief in one God; and that where this belief existed, he has, by the use of his reason, been continuously altering, and, it may be hoped, extending and improving his views of God's nature and operations. We know that in Greece, for example, the history of religion was not a merely passive and traditional process. We know as a historical fact that reason there undermined the polytheism which flourished when Homer sang; that it discovered the chief theistic proofs still employed, and attained in many minds nearly the same belief in God which now prevails. The experience of the ancient classical world is insufficient to prove that a purely rational philosophy can establish theism as the creed of a nation; but it is amply sufficient to prove that it can destroy polytheism, and find out all the principal arguments for theism. We know, further, that in no age of the history of the Christian Church has reason entirely neglected to occupy itself in seeking the grounds on which the belief of God can be rested. We know that reason is certainly not declining that labour in the present day. The theistic belief, although common to the whole Christian world, is one which every individual mind may study for itself, which no one is asked to accept without proof, and which multitudes have doubtless accepted only after careful consideration. It comes to us so far traditionally, but not nearly so much so as belief in the law of gravitation. For every one who has examined the evidences for belief in the law of gravitation, thousands on thousands have examined the evidences for the existence of God.

      Tradition, then, does not necessarily exclude private judgment, and private judgment does not necessarily imply the rejection of tradition – that is, of transmitted belief. The one does not even necessarily confine or restrict the activity of the other. They are so far from being essentially antagonistic, that they may co-operate, may support and help each other; nay, they must do, if religious development is to be natural, easy, peaceful, and regular. This is but saying in another form that religious development, when true and normal, must combine and harmonise conservatism and progress. All development must do that, or it will be of an imperfect and injurious kind. In nature the rule of development is neither revolution nor reaction, but evolution– a process which is at once conservative and progressive, which brings the new out of the old by the continuous growth and elaboration of the germs of life into organic completeness. All that is essential in the old is retained and perfected, while the form is altered to accord with new circumstances and to respond to new wants. It should not be otherwise in the moral and social worlds. The only true progress there, also, is that continuous and consistent development which can only be secured through true conservatism – through retaining, applying, and utilising whatever truth and goodness the past has brought down to the present; and the only true conservatism is that which secures against stagnation and death by continuous progress. Therefore it is that, alike in matters of civil polity, of scientific research, and of religious life, wisdom lies in combining the conservative with the progressive spirit, the principle of authority with the principle of liberty, due respect to the collective reason in history with due respect to the rights of the individual reason. The man who has not humility enough to feel that he is but one among the living millions of men, and that his whole generation is but a single link in the great chain of the human race – who is arrogant enough to fancy that wisdom on any great human interest has begun with himself, and that he may consequently begin history for himself, – the man who is not conservative to the extent of possessing this humility, and shrinking from this arrogance, is no truly free man, but the slave of his own vanity, and the inheritance which his fathers have left him will be little increased by him. The man, on the other hand, who always accepts what is as what ought to be; who identifies the actual with the reasonable; who would have to-morrow exactly like to-day; who would hold fast what Providence is most clearly showing ought to pass away, or to pass into something better, – the man, in a word, who would lay an arrest on the germs of life and truth, and prevent them from sprouting and ripening – is the very opposite of genuinely conservative – is the most dangerous of destructives. There is nothing so conservative against decay and dissolution as natural growth, orderly progress.

      The truth just stated is, as I have said, of universal application. But it is nowhere more applicable than in the inquiry on which we are engaged. The great idea of God – the sublimest and most important of all ideas – has come to us in a wondrous manner through the minds and hearts of countless generations which it has exercised and sustained, which it has guided in darkness, strengthened in danger, and consoled in affliction. It has come to us by a long, unbroken tradition; and had it not come to us, we should of a certainty not have found it out for ourselves. We should have had to supply its place, to fill "the aching void" within us caused by its absence, with some far lower idea, perhaps with some wild fiction, some foul idol. Probably we cannot estimate too humbly the amount or worth of the religious knowledge which we should have acquired, supposing we acquired any, if we had been left wholly to our own unaided exertions – if we had been cut off from the general reason of our race, and from the Divine Reason, which has never ceased to speak СКАЧАТЬ