The Churches and Modern Thought

But the noble army is not altogether a historical fact. The truth is that martyr-making became an ecclesiastical industry. The historian Gibbon estimates that at most about two thousand Christians fell in the Diocletian persecution—which was the only general persecution—and this estimate is now commonly accepted. “Since,” says Gibbon, “it cannot be doubted that the Christians were more numerous, and their enemies more exasperated, in the time of Diocletian than they had ever been in any former persecution, this probable and moderate computation may teach us to estimate the number of primitive saints and martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the important purpose of introducing Christianity into the world.”274 Compare these figures with the numbers who have suffered death in modern times for the sake of introducing a non-Christian faith. The Bab Abbas Effendi suffered martyrdom for his zeal in 1850, and between that date and now the most conservative opinion on the Babi martyrdoms puts them at ten thousand. (N.B.—No hopes of wealth and honours, no imperial edicts, have assisted the really remarkable spread of Babism.) As a matter of fact, a considerable portion of the history of man is a history of his martyrdom. “Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past.”275 If religious ladies could spare the time (from the absorbing occupation of reading the very latest works of fiction or the lives of the “grandes amoureuses”) to read Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, a book none the less interesting because it treats of historical facts, they would begin to realise that martyrs are not a Christian monopoly.

§ 6. The Universality of the Religious Instinct

THE HYPOTHESIS STATED

The fact that a large proportion of the human race, including some of the greatest276 in thought and action, continue, or appear to continue, to believe in God and immortality, is considered by many to furnish the best proof for the truth of the belief. The Church naturally encourages this opinion, and proceeds to strengthen it further by asserting that the religious instinct is, and always has been, universal. This assertion must now be examined, and, to avoid any misconceptions, it will be advisable in the first place to have some specimens of it before us.

Canon Liddon informs us that “man is ever feeling after God,” and that “the thought of God is always latent in the mind of man.” “Cicero’s statement that there is no nation so barbarous and wild as not to have believed in some divinity is still, notwithstanding certain apparent exceptions, true. A nation of pure Atheists has yet to be discovered.”277 Dr. Flint devotes the seventh of his Lectures on Anti-Theistic theories to the discussion of the question, “Are there tribes of Atheists?” and he comes to the conclusion that “an impartial examination of the relevant facts shows that religion is virtually universal.”278 The Bishop of London is of opinion that “man is a praying animal. He always has prayed throughout his history. It is a human instinct. This instinct of prayer points to the existence of God.”279 Dr. Warschauer affirms that the spiritual faculty—a consciousness of “the existence of spiritual realities, of a world beyond the senses”—“constitutes a universal human endowment.”280 Bishop Diggle bids us remember that “human nature is ineradicably religious.”281

THE RATIONALIST’S CONTENTION

The Rationalist asks: What grounds have we for assuming that the existence of religious belief points to the existence of a religious instinct? Is not a man’s religion determined by the geographical accident of his birth? Has not his religion to be diligently instilled into him from the cradle? How, then, can it be said that man is by nature religious? How can it be said that the craving for a deity is instinctive? To this the Christian apologist may reply that, however much the precise form of the religious belief may be due to education, no belief of any kind could be engendered without a predisposition to accept it. Have we not seen, however, that primitive beliefs were the natural offspring of fear and wonder? Inability to account for phenomena, ignorance of the laws of nature, and those abnormal psychical experiences concerning which science has but now commenced to furnish natural explanations, all combined to turn primitive men into staunch supernaturalists. For the same reasons, children in years as well as children in knowledge have always been predisposed to belief in the supernatural. This predisposition (it can hardly be called an instinct) may be universal, but it does not lead necessarily to belief in a deity. For that there must be education. If it be an instinct, it is not a religious instinct, although a soil eminently suitable for the sowing of supernatural dogmas.

Admitting, for the sake of argument, that the origin of religious beliefs and the process by which ancestral beliefs have been assimilated can be left out of consideration—in other words, that the ethnologist’s theories of the evolution of the idea of God and the educational factor may be disregarded—the supposition that there is a universal religious instinct must be relinquished if, as the Rationalist contends, religious belief itself is not universal. Is such a contention warranted by acknowledged facts? Into this we shall now inquire.

THE APOLOGIST’S VIEWS CONCERNING SUPERSTITION AND THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT

At the outset of the inquiry we at once experience a difficulty. It is not at all clear what the apologist includes under the category of religious beliefs. If it be taken as an axiom that the grossest superstition, the mere belief in the supernatural, is the germ of a religious belief, and therefore that all ignorant or superstitious persons have the religious instinct, then the proposition will be true for practically the whole of mankind in the remote past, and for a very large proportion in the present. Whether it be primeval man who frequently believed only in magic, usually in devils, and rarely in divinities, or whether it be the twentieth-century lady of fashion who wears a white elephant amulet to bring her luck at “Bridge,” both are imbued with the religious instinct. The absurdity of the supposition is fully apparent if we only carry it far enough.

It is by no means easy to understand where the apologist draws the line. He may not say so, but his contention really does seem to point to the absurdity that almost any crude superstition springs from a divine spark. The neo-apologist, however, will do well to reflect that the establishment of any connection between superstition and religion only plays into the hands of the Rationalist, who maintains that there is certainly the closest connection between the two. I am compelled to enter into these details, for, among the facts which I am about to bring forward in contradiction of the assertion of universality, some relate to instances of pure superstitions which might nevertheless be construed into signs of the religious instinct. If the apologist does not go quite so far as this, my task will be rendered much easier. Perhaps, as Dr. Flint is recognised as one of the most eminent of the Christian apologists, the conclusions to which he comes will represent the unspoken opinion of others. He says that, “if savage tribes have some sort of superstitious belief, it would only be in accord with modern theories regarding the evolution of the idea of God.... The presence of false religion is as good evidence of the existence of religion as the presence of true religion.... Perhaps, if we may say that religion is man’s belief in a being or beings mightier than himself and inaccessible to his senses, but not indifferent to his sentiment and actions, with the feelings and practices which flow from such belief, we have a definition of the kind required, one excluding nothing which can be called religion, and including nothing which is only partially present in religion.”282 This definition would not, one may presume, include mere belief in magic, but might be taken to include a man’s belief in devils. As there are many who would not agree that devil-worship and the like can have any connection with god-worship, I shall follow the ethnologist in citing examples of the absence of god-worship as evidence of the absence of the religious instinct; but I shall also give examples in which there is no appearance of worship either of god or devil. These will chiefly be drawn from present-day beliefs and customs, because now, if ever, the contention of the religionist should hold good, and also because it has been incidentally examined with reference to ancient beliefs in a previous chapter.

BELIEFS OF SAVAGE MAN

Among the concluding remarks of Darwin’s Descent of Man we read: “The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete, of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is, however, impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand, a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal, and apparently follows from a considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity, and wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence; but this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, possessing only a little more power than man; for the belief in them is far more general than the belief in a beneficent Deity.”283

Again, in Huxley’s essay on “The Evolution of Theology” we read: “In its simplest condition, such as may be met with among the Australian savages, theology is a mere belief in the existence, powers, and disposition (usually malignant) of ghost-like entities who may be propitiated or scared away; but no cult can properly be said to exist. And in this stage theology is wholly independent of ethics.”

Sir John Lubbock, now Lord Avebury, states the argument against the universality of religion in his Prehistoric Times. He asks: “How can a people who are unable to count their own fingers possibly raise their minds so far as to admit even the rudiments of religion?” And he sums up his observations on various tribes by saying: “Indeed, the first idea of God is almost always an evil spirit.”284

“The idea that the northern tribes [of America] venerated one supreme and all-powerful ‘great spirit,’ by whom man and the world were created, is based on erroneous interpretation; Wakanda of the Dakotas, and Manito of the Algonquins, in no wise coming under such a designation.”285 “These terms,” writes Mr. W. J. McGee, “cannot justly be rendered into Spirit, much less into Great Spirit.”286 “Their religion,” writes another well-known ethnologist, Mr. G. Mooney, “is zootheism, or animal-worship, with the survival of a still earlier stage, which included the worship of all tangible objects, combined with the beginnings of a higher system in which the elements and the great powers of nature are deified.”287 Zootheism, the religion that has survived, does not embrace a belief in a Mightier Being, nor does this deterioration in “religion” suit the theory of a progressive revelation. We may also note that the belief of the North American in witchcraft has led to terrible slaughter, human life being sacrificed on an enormous and frightful scale.

Andrew Lang (in the third chapter of his book, Magic and Religion) instances Australian tribes, and says: “Nobody dreams of propitiating gods or spirits by prayer [compare Bishop Ingram’s statement that man is a praying animal!] while magic is universally practised.” There is, as Mr. Lang observes, “no room for a God, nor for an idea of a future life, except the life of successive re-incarnations.” “I do not think,” writes288 Professor Baldwin Spencer, “that there is really any direct evidence of any Australian native belief in a ‘Supreme Being’ in our sense of the term.”

Similarly among the Fuegians (another of the lowest races of mankind) “almost every old man is a magician, who is supposed to have the power of life and death, and to be able to control the weather. But the members of the French scientific expedition to Cape Horn could detect nothing worthy of the name of religion among these savages.”289 Here, then, even if we adopt Dr. Flint’s broad definition, we surely have examples of the absence of the religious instinct. There is a fundamental distinction, and even opposition of principle, between magic and religion, as we shall see by a study of the opinions of those best qualified to offer them.

MAGIC AND RELIGION

“Wherever sympathetic magic occurs,” says Dr. Frazer, “in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency”290 (the italics are mine). “The magician supplicates no higher power; he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward being; he abases himself before no awful deity.”291 “I have,” says Dr. Frazer,292 “come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. F. B. Jevons in recognising a fundamental distinction, and even opposition, of principle between magic and religion.” This opinion must be shared by every unbiassed mind, and it is curious, and not without importance, to observe, with Dr. Frazer, that the “fundamental conception” of sympathetic magic “is identical with that of modern science.”293 “Underlying the whole system is a faith—implicit, but real and firm—in the order and uniformity of nature.”294

The belief in the efficacy of magic, it should be remembered, is exceedingly widespread, even at the present time. According to Mr. Haddon295 (citing Dr. Jevons), “four-fifths of mankind, probably, believe in sympathetic magic.” Dr. Frazer, too, reminds us that among the ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world. “If the test of truth,” exclaims Dr. Frazer, “lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, ‘Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus,’ as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility.”296

Not only is there an opposition of principle between magic and religion, not only is belief in the former a universal faith, a truly catholic creed, but it is now generally recognised by ethnologists that “in the evolution of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has [as ‘has been plainly suggested, if not definitely formulated, by Professor H. Oldenberg in his able book, Die Religion des Veda’] probably everywhere preceded religion.”297

The popular notion that the religious instinct is universal is perhaps natural enough, but it is not borne out by these significant facts and conclusions. Indeed, it would be far more correct to say that an instinct, the very antithesis of what the Church would mean by the religious instinct, was at one time, and even now is, well-nigh universal.

RELIGION IN MODERN CHINA

So far we have seen that the opponents of the “Universal” theory presume in their argument that devil-worship has no relation to true god-worship, and we may note that it never even entered the heads of such men as Darwin and Lubbock that it would ever be held that these are essentially identical. Nor is this peculiar opinion held by clerics who have studied devil-worship on the spot. Thus the Rev. Arthur H. Smith, D.D., twenty-two years a missionary in China, describes298 the fear of goblins and devils which figures so largely in Taoism; but, far from suggesting the presence of the religious instinct, he laments its total absence. Among his many pertinent observations I commend the following to the serious consideration of those who believe in a universal religious instinct and in a progressive revelation: “If the Chinese ever did recognise the true God, that knowledge has certainly been most effectually lost, like an inscription on an ancient coin now covered with the accumulated rust of millenniums.299… Sir Thomas Wade, whose long familiarity with China and the Chinese might be supposed to entitle him to speak with authority on so plain a question as whether the Chinese have or have not a religion, has recently published his opinion as follows: ‘If religion is held to mean more than mere ethics, I deny that the Chinese have a religion.’”300

Speaking of Chinese nature-worship, Dr. Smith says: “No prayer is uttered.... What is it that at such times the people worship? Sometimes they affirm that the object of worship is heaven and earth. Sometimes they say that it is heaven, and again they call it ‘the old man of the sky.’ The latter term often leads to an impression that the Chinese do have a real perception of a personal Deity. But when it is ascertained that this supposed person is frequently matched by another called ‘grandmother earth,’ the value of the inference is open to serious question.”301

As to there being no such thing as an atheistic people, are we to take no account of the cultured classes? Mark the following: “The polytheism and pantheism of the lower classes of Chinese are matched in the upper classes by what appears to be pure atheism.... There never was on this earth a body of educated and cultured men so thoroughly agnostic and atheistic as the mass of Confucian scholars.302… Its absolute indifference to the profoundest spiritual truths in the nature of man is the most melancholy characteristic of the Chinese mind—its ready acceptance of a body without a soul, of a soul without a spirit, of a spirit without life, of a cosmos without a cause, a universe without a God.”303

Alluding to the mixture of Confucianism with Taoism and Buddhism, he remarks: “Any kind of a divinity which seems adapted to exert a favourable influence in any given direction will be patronised, just as a man who happens to need a new umbrella goes to some shop where they keep such goods for sale. To inquire into the antecedents of the divinity who is thus worshipped no more occurs to a Chinese than it would occur to an Englishman who wanted the umbrella to satisfy himself as to the origin of umbrellas, and when they first came into general use.... The Chinaman has carried ‘intellectual hospitality’ to the point of logical suicide, but he does not know it, and cannot be made to understand it when he is told.”304

Three questions suggest themselves. If the pious lady who contributes towards mission work in China only knew of this, would she be pleased?305 Are there not many English people strangely like the Chinese in an umbrella-patronage of Christianity? Finally, does not the modern apologist (with his theory of Progressive Revelation and his idea that Christianity has yet much to learn from, and will be improved by contact with, the faiths of the East) carry “intellectual hospitality” to the point of logical suicide?

The advice of Confucius was to reverence the gods as if they existed,306 but in any case to keep them at a distance, and have as little to do with them as possible; and his advice has been followed. Dr. Smith tells us that the popular instinct has taken at its true value the uncertainty conveyed in the words “as if,” and has embodied them in current sayings which accurately express the state of mind of the mass of the people. Thus:—

Call on the gods as if they came;But, if you don’t, it’s all the same.

And again:—

Worship the gods as if the gods were there;But, if you worship not, the gods don’t care.307

The absence of the instinct of reverence may be judged by the following episode related by Dr. Smith: “A District Magistrate tried a case which involved a priest, and, by implication, the Buddha which was the occupant of the temple. This god was summoned to appear before the magistrate and told to kneel, which he failed to do, whereupon the magistrate ordered him to be given five hundred blows, by which time the god was reduced to a heap of dust, and judgment was pronounced against him by default.”308 (Of their manner of treating devils I had, not long ago, a personal experience. Standing on the quay at Shanghai, I was deafened by the bang, bang, bang of ear-splitting bombs exploded by a crowd of Chinamen. However crude their method, their intentions were excellent. They wished to scare away the devils who might have elected to accompany their friends on the voyage to England.)

Finally, as a commentary on the oft-repeated assertion that the great difference between the sacred books of the East and of the Bible is the low plane of morality in the former, the following words quoted by Dr. Smith are of considerable interest: “No people,” says Mr. Meadows, “whether of ancient or modern times, has possessed a sacred literature so completely exempt as the Chinese from licentious descriptions, and from every offensive expression. There is not a single sentence in the whole of the Sacred Books and their annotations that may not be read aloud in any family circle in England.”309 Can this be said of our Bible?

APOSTATES IN CHRISTENDOM

If I have given the religious attitude of the modern Chinese the largest share of attention, it must be remembered that they far outnumber any other nation in the world. Also I think the fallacies regarding the religious instinct will perhaps stand out more clearly if we consider the present twentieth century, instead of millenniums B.C. I have said nothing as yet of the apostates in Christendom—the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the Spencers—who declare that they are without the religious instinct. We must consider them ruled out of court, for are we not told310 that “there are men with faculties of insight amounting to genius in other regions of mental activity who have never developed the spiritual faculty, and are thus debarred the privileges of spiritual geniuses—geniuses in the region in which man holds communion with God”?

Lately much capital has been made out of the following statement appearing in Darwin’s Autobiography: “Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry such as Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, etc., gave me great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have lost my taste for pictures and music. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” This loss of certain tastes indicated—so the pulpit would have the pew suppose—that that portion of Darwin’s mind which was competent to understand spiritual things had atrophied. Does God reveal Himself, then, only or especially to the æsthetic? The artist—and here I include the poet, painter, sculptor, musician, artistic novelist, and also the man who has created nothing, but who has the artistic temperament—will, if he has a religion, have one of a sort harmonising with his artist soul. It must be a religion which allows scope for the cultivation of the beautiful, without being necessarily too closely associated with a rigid code of ethics. Is the æsthetic mind always perfectly balanced? How does it compare on an average with that of the moral philosopher guiding his life by the light of reason and living up to the standard of his professions? Darwin has assisted in establishing a great truth concerning the development of the world. He has been, according to the Christian evolutionist, the chosen instrument for a fresh revelation of God’s majesty. Yet, in spiritual endowments, every pious Christian, however ignorant and unintellectual, ranks before him! Strange, passing strange. The very qualifications necessary for accomplishing God’s purpose debarred Darwin from fellowship with Him! For such an argument to be worth a moment’s consideration it should at least apply generally. This it most distinctly does not. Preachers, who find Darwin’s candid remark about himself a convenient one upon which to base a homily, have neglected to acquaint themselves with the statements of other agnostic scientists—of Huxley, for instance. “I have yet,” he declared, “to meet with any form of art in which it has not been possible for me to take as acute a pleasure as, I believe, it is possible for men to take.”311

RELIGION IN MODERN JAPAN

At the risk of increasing the citation of examples ad nauseam, I cannot omit a passing reference to the Japanese. I shall reserve for the last chapter my remarks on the “phenomenon” of their non-theological moral training, and confine myself to the present condition of their faith as given by a clergyman, the Rev. Herbert Moore, who was for some years a missionary in Japan. Mr. Moore tells us: “We are all Shintoists to a certain extent, for Shinto is the non-Christian version of the Communion of Saints. And we recognise the truth that Buddhism contains when we read Ecclesiastes in church.... But these old faiths are fast perishing from the hearts of the Japanese, leaving behind them blank godlessness, indifference, and materialism.... Out of 942 students in Tokyo who recently gave an account of their religious position, 555 declared themselves unbelievers in any religion, 68 were Christians, 18 Shintoists, and most of the remaining 319 Buddhists.”312