Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885. Various

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      I confess, at starting on this inquiry, that the problem “Is religion of use, or can we do as well without it?” seems to me almost as grotesque as the old story of the woman who said that we owe vast obligation to the Moon, which affords us light on dark nights, whereas we are under no such debt to the Sun, who only shines by day, when there is always light. Religion has been to us so diffused a light that it is quite possible to forget how we came by the general illumination, save when now and then it has blazed out with special brightness. On the other hand, all the moon-like things which are proposed to us as substitutes for Religion, – friendship, science, art, commerce, and politics, – have a very limited area wherein they shine at all, and leave the darkness around much as they found it. It is the special and unique character of Religion to deal with the whole of human nature all our pleasures and pains and duties and affections and hopes and fears, here and hereafter. It offers to the Intellect an explanation of the universe (true or false we need not now consider); and, pointing to Heaven, it responds to the most eager of its questions. It offers to the Conscience a law claiming authority to regulate every act and every word. And it offers to the Heart an absolutely love-worthy Being as the object of its adoration. Whether these immense offers of Religion are all genuine, or all accepted by us individually, they are quite unmatched by anything which science, or art, or politics, or commerce, or even friendship, has to bestow. The relation of religion to us is not one-sided like theirs, but universal, ubiquitous; not moon-like, appearing at intervals, but sun-like, forming the source, seen or unseen, of all our light and heat, even of the warmth of our household fires. Strong or weak as may be its influence on us as individuals, it is the greatest thing with which we have to do, from the cradle to the grave. And this holds good whether we give ourselves up to it or reject it. It is the one great acceptance, or “il gran rifiuto.” Nothing equally great can come in our way again.

      In an estimate of the consequences which would follow a general rejection of religion, we are bound to take into view the two classes of men – those who are devout and those who are not so – who would, of course, be diversely affected by such a revolution of opinion. As regards the first, every one will concede that the loss of so important a factor in their lives would alter those lives radically. As regards the second, after noting the orderly and estimable conduct of many of them, the observer might, per contra, not unfairly surmise that they would continue to act just as they do at present were religion universally exploded. But ere such a conclusion could be legitimately drawn from the meritorious lives of non-religious men in the present order of society, we should be allowed (it is a familiar remark) to see the behavior of a whole nation of Atheists. Our contemporaries are no more fair samples of the outcome of Atheism than a little party of English youths who had lived for a few years in Central Africa would be samples of Negroes. It would take several thousand years to make a full-blooded Atheist out of the scion of forty generations of Christians. Our whole mental constitutions have been built up on food of religious ideas. A man on a mountain top, might as well resolve not to breathe the ozone in the air, as to live in the intellectual atmosphere of England and inhale no Christianity.

      As, then, it is impossible to forecast what would be the consequences of universal Atheism hereafter by observing the conduct of individual Atheists to-day, all that can be done is to study bit by bit the changes which must take place should this planet ever become, as is threatened, a Faithless World. In pursuing this line of inquiry it will be well to remember that every ill result of loss of faith and hope which we may now observe will be cumulative as a larger and yet larger number of persons, and at last the whole community, reject religion together. Atheists have been hitherto like children playing at the mouth of a cavern of unknown depth. They have run in and out, and explored it a little way, but always within sight of the daylight outside, where have stood their parents and friends calling on them to return. Not till the way back to the sunshine has been lost will the darkness of that cave be fully revealed.

      I shall now register very briefly the more obvious and tangible changes which would follow the downfall of religion in Europe and America, and then devote my available space to a rather closer examination of those which are less manifest; the drying up of those hidden rills which now irrigate the whole subsoil of our civilization.

      The first visible change in the Faithless World, of course, would be the suppression of Public and Private Worship and of Preaching; the secularization or destruction everywhere of Cathedrals, Churches, and Chapels; and the extinction of the Clerical Profession. A considerable hiatus would undoubtedly be thus made in the present order of things. Public Worship and Preaching, however much weariness of the flesh has proverbially attended them, have, to say the least, done much to calm, to purify, and to elevate the minds of millions; nor does it seem that any multiplication of scientific Lectures or Penny Readings would form a substitute for them. The effacement from each landscape of the towers and spires of the churches would be a somewhat painful symbol of the simultaneous disappearance from human life of heavenly hope and aspiration. The extinction of the Ministry of Religion, though it would be hailed even now by many as a great reformation, would be found practically, I apprehend, to reduce by many perceptible degrees the common moral level; and to suppress many highly-aimed activities with which we could ill dispense. The severity of the strictures always passed on the faults of clergymen testifies to the general expectation, not wholly disappointed, that they should exhibit a loftier standard of life than other men; and the hortative and philanthropic work accomplished by the forty or fifty thousand ministers of the various sects and churches in England alone, must form, after all deductions, a sum of beneficence which it would sorely tax any conceivable secular organization to replace in the interests of public morality.

      Probably the Seventh Day Rest would survive every other religious institution in virtue of its popularity among the working classes, soon to be everywhere masters of legislation. The failure of the Tenth Day holiday in the first French Revolution would also forestall any further experiments in varying the hebdomadal interval so marvellously adapted to our mental and physical constitution. As, however, all religious meaning of the day would be lost, and all church-going stopped, nothing would hinder the employment of its hours from morning to night as Easter Monday and Whit Monday are now employed by the millions in our great cities. The nation would, therefore, enjoy the somewhat doubtful privilege of keeping fifty-six Bank Holidays instead of four in the year. Judicial and official oaths of all sorts, and Marriage and Burial rites, would, of course, be entirely abolished. A gentleman pronouncing the Oraison Funèbre outside the crematorium would replace the old white-robed parson telling the mourners; —

      Another change more important than any of these, in Protestant countries, would be the reduction of the Bible to the rank of an historical and literary curiosity. Nothing (as we all recognize) but the supreme religious importance attached to the Hebrew Scriptures could have forced any book into the unique position which the Bible has now held for three centuries in English and Scottish education. Even that held by the Koran throughout Islam is far less remarkable, inasmuch as the latter (immeasurably inferior though it be) is the supreme work of the national literature, whereas we have adopted the literature of an alien race. All the golden fruit which the English intellect has borne from Shakespeare downwards may be said to have grown on this priceless Semitic graft upon the Aryan stem.

      But as nothing but its religious interest, over and above its historical and poetical value, could have given the Bible its present place amongst us, so the rejection of religion must quickly lower its popularity by a hundred degrees. Notwithstanding anything which the Matthew Arnolds of the future may plead on behalf of its glorious poetry and mines of wisdom, the youth of the future “Faithless World” will spare very little time from their scientific studies to read a book brimming over with religious sentiments which to them will be nauseous. Could everything else remain unchanged after the extinction of religion in England, it seems to me that the unravelling of this Syrian thread from the very tissue of our minds will altogether alter their texture.

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