I.

The ancient conflict between religion and science is now, at the close of the nineteenth century, more animated than ever before. This conflict has formed the intellectual pivot of civilisation ever since Christianity first afforded the western peoples of Europe the inconsistent spectacle of a religion which made abundant use in its dogmatic constructions of the theories of contemporary science, and yet assumed a hostile attitude towards the fundamental principle of all science, the spirit of research and unbiassed judgment generally. Rightly has one of the acutest modern critics of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach,[59] maintained, that the Christian sophistic philosophy is the necessary outcome of this inconsistency, which proclaims as absolute truth a definite, historical revelation, such as is found in the Bible, and simply assigns to the reason the subordinate and improper office of harmonising and defending what is there laid down.

There are, it is true, a great number of people, who are not disposed to see the bitterness of the conflict now raging. It has become customary for us to look upon the nineteenth century as an age of the comprehension of religion, and to distinguish it from the eighteenth century, which is regarded as a period of mere religious criticism. We boast of having rediscovered religion, and of having secured to it a permanent province in the dominion of the mind. But the facts of our public life stand in curious contradiction to these assertions. In all civilised nations, in literature, in parliamentary procedures, in all questions that relate to religious and moral life or to education, the attentive observer will find that a profound chasm divides humanity. Every one feels the desirableness of bridging over this chasm, that the members of society may be united in common labor; but again and again we are made to experience how irreconcilable the respective claims of the opposed parties are. He who has studied the bulls and encyclical letters of the last two popes, Pius IX. and Leo XIII., and the commentaries on these utterances in the _Civiltà Cattolica_, the official organ of the curia; he who is acquainted with the polemical diatribes of the French Catholics against the positivists and freethinkers, and against the school and church legislation of the third republic; he who has any knowledge of that mass of controversial literature, which the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility in the year 1870 evoked; he who has followed the eventful and varied history of the so-called “Culturkampf” in the German Empire, from the era of the minister Falk, down to the recent bill for a new School-law in Prussia, defeated amidst the greatest excitement in all parts of Germany; he who is the least bit at home in the literary feuds which are being fought out in the domain of historical theology concerning the validity and credibility of the original sources of Christianity; he, finally, who will place the writings of Cardinal Newman or of the Jesuits Pesch and Cathrein by the side of those of Huxley and Spencer, by the side of those of Du Bois-Reymond, Strauss, and Dühring: he, I say, who has gone through with a critical spirit all that I have cited in the preceding sentences, will surely not be apt to contradict this assertion of mine that civilised humanity to-day is separated into two groups which no longer understand each other, which do not speak the same language, and which live in totally different worlds of thought and sentiment—at least so far as this one critical point is concerned of man’s relation to religion.

“_Wie Ja und Nein sind sie,_ _Wie Sturm und Regenbogen._”

Have we, then, learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the days of rationalism? The tremendous labors which our own century has devoted to the investigation of religion in all its forms, to the unfolding of its connection with racial mind and sentiment, and of its relation to civilisation generally, and finally to the elucidation of the origin and development of the great forms of religion: has all this had no other result than that we, after a century of the most laborious research, again find ourselves in the same attitude of unintelligent hostility towards religion and Christianity in which the eighteenth century revelled, and out of which we have only fought our way by the united efforts of a host of profoundly enlightened minds?

This argument has been advanced in opposition to the leaders of the rationalistic movement and to the work of the eighteenth century in varying forms, by the party which seeks to ally the science of the present and the religion of the past. It is seriously said and enjoined that only they who are far behind the science of the times and hold aloof from the true spirit of the age can still assume the repugnant attitude toward religion which was characteristic of the mind of the eighteenth century.

It is high time to point out the crude confusion of ideas which lies at the basis of this argument. It confounds the historical understanding of a thing with the philosophical approval of it. But these are two totally distinct things. We understand a phenomenon historically, when we are clear in our minds concerning the external conditions and habits of thought of humanity from which it sprung; when its main-springs of action and its purposes, as well as the effects which have proceeded from it, are distinctly traceable. The more closely our mental pictures of these things correspond to the facts as they actually were at the origin, and the more they conduct us from the mere surface of phenomena into the secrets of their psychological and sociological connection, and teach us to understand these things as products of mind and of society, the higher will our historical knowledge of them be rated. In this sense the knowledge which the eighteenth century had of religious phenomena was undoubtedly very imperfect. True, even here great advances beyond the age which preceded, are noticeable. People had ceased to regard the origin of the Jewish and Christian religion as a supernatural event and as the immediate work of God; all religions were placed upon the same footing, as species of the same kind; and efforts were made to discover their common characteristics and the law of their origin. But the people of that period were not yet able to arrive at the true essence of religious ideas and sentiments. They were hardly in a position to describe them properly, let alone to explain them. Of the hypotheses devised to throw some light into the darkness that hung over the beginnings of religions, not one proved itself competent to supply what was hoped for. All that they could derive from these fictions was that notable caricature of religion which their age had directly before its eyes, and to free themselves from which they strained every nerve. With the keen vision of hate they uncovered all the infirmities of religion, all the terrors and iniquities which have followed in its train, all the injurious effects to civilisation which have proceeded from it. They created a negative picture of religion, which has lost nothing of its partial historical truth by the fact that many of its features are farther withdrawn from our immediate experience than they were from that of the times in question.

But it was the nineteenth century that first worked out the true psychology of religious man, and again came into possession of that spirit of congeniality which is absolutely necessary to our entering into the mental life of far-distant times. To the men of the rationalistic age the history of religion was simply the history of the obscuration of the pure, natural religion, which was supposed to be constituted of a rational idea of God and a system of humane ethics, and which was indistinctly conceived at times as the logical, and at times as the historical, antecedent of the concrete religions. The latter appeared as the corruption of the natural and simple order of things—a corruption produced by superstition, by the wily exploitation of human credulity and human needs, by the scheming machinations of the founders of religions and of priests, by human delight in the marvellous, by the falsification of the natural moral sentiments, and by the stirring into life of fanatical passions. We know to-day that this so-called natural religion is nothing more than a product of late abstraction and reflection; that the motives and selfish interests above cited have been abundantly at work in religious history, but are nevertheless unable to explain the internal motive force and tremendous vitality of these spiritual products. We know to-day that religions spring with the same necessity and in conformity with similar laws from the depths of the human mind as language and art, and that they form an integral constituent part of the structure of civilisation and an important weapon of humanity in the struggle for existence. In symbolical form they embody the highest treasures and highest ideals of national existence; in its gods humanity beholds the imaginative perfection and explanation of its view of the world; and in its religious practices, in its worship, in prayer, it strives to realise the wishes and aspirations which seem to lie beyond the reach of its powers.

Many a riddle still remains to be solved, as is natural in a domain that extends into the most hidden recesses of the human soul, and whose obscurity is augmented by the fact that in the majority of cases the most important and significant elements must be collected with infinite pains from the rubbish of fantastic traditions. But upon the whole the active labors of a century which calls itself with pride “the historical century,” have borne their fruits. With respect to the intrinsic character and the significance of religion for civilisation, there is now every reason why a unity of opinion should prevail among all who take their stand on the common ground of modern scientific research, whether they be friends or opponents of religion.

But how does a knowledge of what religion has been in the past affect our estimate of it in the present? Do we approve of an institution or phenomenon, because we understand how it was once possible, nay, must have existed, and what it signified? We understand to-day the Roman law, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the scholastic philosophy, feudalism, and absolute monarchy, thoroughly; we know the conditions which gave rise to them, the necessity of their appearance, and the measure of their performances; but does it occur to us, for these reasons, to perpetuate and make them immortal because they had once an historical significance? What an institution in its essence is, what in past times it has accomplished, is an inquiry that must be conducted with quite different means from that whether it is applicable to a definite present set of relations and necessities. The historian can render this task more easy by teaching us to understand the general laws and necessities of national life from the analogies of the past; but as a prophet he will always be one that looks backwards, and it is ever to be feared that he, too, will see the present in the light of the past. For to him alone does the past lift its obscuring veil, who, forgetful of self and unmindful of sacrifices, can listen to the voices of remote times and peoples, who with a mind of Protean cast has the power to transform his intellectual being into that to which, solely by description, he seeks to give new life and form. The past becomes a part of him; he loves it, he admires it. And from the reanimation of the past in historical pictures to the attempt of a renewal of it in life is but a single step.

Innumerable are those who have succumbed to this temptation. The entire religious tendency of the nineteenth century exhibits this process on a grand scale. This tendency is based on profound antiquarian studies of the past—on that newly awakened historical interest, which aims not only to criticise but to understand religion and ecclesiastical institutions. Much that in the previous century seemed dead or destined to perish, had been restored to life by it. The whole historical structure of the Christian religion, which at the close of the age of rationalism only existed, it would seem, as an artificially preserved ruin, has received, through the instrumentality of these methods of thought, new supports, and has again been made habitable for the human mind. Unmindful of the complaints of churchmen, the future historian of civilisation will have to characterise the second half of the nineteenth century as a period of religious renaissance. And it is no accident, but a symptom of deep import, that this century has completed almost all the great cathedrals which were left unfinished and in partial ruins by the middle ages, and placed them in their colossal grandeur before the world as lasting monuments of its habits and tendencies of thought.

Yet the spirit of science has also not been inactive. Political progress has freed it from the despotic police supervision which even in the eighteenth century heavily oppressed it. In principle at least, freedom of thought and inquiry are to-day acknowledged by all governments, with the single exception of the Roman curia, although in practice there are by no means few efforts made, by influencing its representatives, to have that proclaimed which it is desired should be proclaimed. Infinitely great has the number of workers grown, the instruments of inquiry, the confidence of the human mind in itself, and our power generally. And if formerly people could conceive of no other science than such as stood in the service of the church, to-day science claims it most emphatically and confidently as its privilege and duty to search and test the logical truth of the most sacred traditions, and thus to base the thought of future generations, not on the naïve faith of their fathers, but on the demonstrable truths of actual present knowledge.