Our Superiority in Religion

PROGRESS is a wonderful thing, and not the least wonderful thing about it is its inevitableness. The world evolves, we must progress. However much we deprecate the fact, we cannot help it; we are better than our forefathers. Compare King Edward’s automobile with the chariot of Khaemhat, Togo’s cannon with the bow of Rameses, the Dreadnought with a Roman galley, the Eiffel Tower with the Pyramids! Hammurabi never so much as heard of sociology, Homer of a literature seminar, Aristotle of Pragmatism, the Pompeians of chromo-lithography. Even “ that wonderful thirteenth century ” knew nothing of movable types, the Italian Renascence nothing of the colored Sunday supplement, the Reformation nothing of steam or electricity. A million copies of a New York journal in a single day would have been inconceivable to Tacitus! We humbly anticipate being outstripped in turn by posterity, but we are, up to date, the best thing on record, towering as far above the mental stature of our nomad ancestors as a forty-four-story sky-scraper above their tents.

Nowhere, perhaps, is our superiority more marked than in the matter of religion. Three recent contributions have brought this out clearly. “ An American Woman,” in the American Magazine for last August, shows our astonishing progress in general; Dr. Williston Walker, in the Congregationalist, shows the leaps and bounds that we have taken in the last twenty-five years; and our hopes for the religion of the future have been set forth by President Eliot in the October number of the Harvard Theological Review.

“An American Woman” points out that men have learned “ in the last few centuries ” that religion is born and waxes strong independent of churches; that they need no church; that religion, to be a living thing, must be accompanied by works; and many other things unknown to “oldtime religion.” They have learned, it seems, that the oldtime religion was a “hard, cold, humorless, merciless, selfish thing . . . everybody absorbed in a rush for individual salvation; ‘ God save my soul and the Devil take the hindmost ’ . . . its motto.” Having learned all this, we have quit the churches, not because we have got beyond religion, but simply because our religion has got beyond the churchgoers. There is, as “ An American Woman ” acutely says, “ plenty of trouble with the churches, but no real trouble with the times. Men have deserted the churches but religion has not deserted men.” — We have not got beyond religion; on the contrary, it would seem, we have progressed; pure religion, free from all the cold, hard, humorless, merciless, selfish elements of the oldtime religion, has come to take up its abode with us. We have “ less of the fear of God ” and more of the love of man.

Dr. Walker’s article, in the Congregationalist, on our progress in the last twenty-five years, is, as might be expected, very different in its tone. He is scholarly, his statement of the doctrinal position then and now, fair and lucid; he inspires conviction, at points, that there has been real progress, and his whole attitude is not only not contemptuous of the old, but seems quite free from any sense of personal superiority. He does not even call it progress, but “changes” and “ contrasts.” The article does, however, give a certain aid to those who love to dwell on our superiority to our ancestors in religion, for Dr. Walker brings out the fact of the “ obliteration of the line, once so sharply drawn, between the natural and the supernatural ” by the modern doctrine of divine immanence, and implies that “ to-day, no conception of God’s character which does not justify itself by the test of what is highest in man ” can be entertained. In the “ altered view of to-day ” Jesus Christ is not perfect God joined with perfect man, the divine nature “ practically more important ” than the human, but “the perfect revelation of what God is and man may be.” God is no longer alienated from man, but only man from God. The Bible is no longer miraculous, but the work of conscientious, if erring, men. Redemption is no longer chiefly individual, but chiefly social: “not merely to fit some men for Heaven,” but to right ancient wrongs and make this world what it is not now, a reign of righteousness.

It is perhaps a reasonable paraphrase of these temperate statements into the language of progress to say that we have got beyond thinking of the Creator as overlapping in any degree in his being the boundaries of his creation, or overtopping in any way in character “ what is highest in man”; beyond the idea that God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts or his ways than our ways; beyond the idea that where divine and human coexist in one person, the divine is “ practically more important ” than the human — or indeed that they do coexist; beyond the idea of God’s alienation from man to the idea that man is simply alienated from God; beyond a miraculous Bible; beyond the idea of individual redemption to the idea of social redemption. These are the changes and contrasts which others call evolution, progress, and superiority. Hell and the Devil are not considered; since, it may be supposed, they have been dead for more than twenty-five years.

From President Eliot’s Religion of the Future it appears that the “ progress of the nineteenth century far outstripped that of similar periods ” — as far perhaps as that of the last twenty-five years has in turn outstripped it. The “new ideas of God” which it has produced give the basis for a new twentieth-century religion superior to all others. Some of these new ideas are: monotheism, immanence, God’s love, the adoration (dulia not latria) of all righteous persons, and the “ tendency towards progress.” It rejects polytheism, apotheosis, tribal religion, sudden change of character, mediation, dogma, mystery, sacraments, the fall of man, alienation from God, and the condemnation of the majority. It abjures the Devil and will attack all his works quickly; it will teach that he is best who loves best and serves best, and the greatest service will be to increase the stock of good-will. It will comprehend only the civilized. As with the other two modern versions of religion, the primary object of the religion of the future will not be the safety of the individual : it will be the common good; its priests will strive to ameliorate social conditions. The religion of the future will moreover not perpetuate “ the Hebrew anthropomorphic representations of God,”but will substitute an up-to-date, New England, East-Central Massachusetts anthropomorphism.

It will occur to every one, as it does to their author, that some of these ideas are not so new as they are true. The newness of this religion (save for the hyper-Calvinistic doctrine of the election of the civilized only, and the doctrine of the adoration of all superior persons) lies in the fact that it is to do rather than to profess, and its progress will consist in its doing better than earlier and inferior religions. Its votaries are, therefore, superior rather in being better than in being different.

It will be noticed that, whatever differences there may be between these three noteworthy utterances on modern religion, they are agreed that our religion is superior to the “ oldtime religion ” in three respects: (1) in that it “ does not afford safety primarily to the individual,” is not a “ rush for individual salvation.” (2) It is superior also in the fact that it “ thinks first of the common good"; its priests strive to ameliorate social and industrial conditions. It realizes that “ this very earth ” is the Hell of our horror, and has the desire to make the world a “ fit abiding-place for spirit and body.” (3) Above all it is agreed that we have made progress; are wiser or better than our ancestors, or both, and since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and especially during the last twenty-five years, we have been progressing in geometrical ratio. We not only have less of the fear of God and more of the love of man, but very much less and very much more than apostles, Church fathers, scholastics, and reformers, and especially than our Puritan forefathers — not even to mention prophets, now quite discredited by the Higher Criticism and hardly to be admitted into the society of “ civilized ” saints.

Now one of the maxims of superior religion is that it is healthy to doubt. One may therefore venture to doubt, not that we are superior but that our ancestors were as bad as they are made out to be by these three versions of modern progress.

Far be it from us to deny that there is progress. Heaven forefend that we should throw ourselves into the jaws of the modern Inquisition by failing to make quite clear our subscription to this cardinal doctrine of progress — our progress. We shall need all our address to escape the confiscation of our goods if we merely suggest that our ancestors were not so bad as they are painted, and that the most tangible progress suggested by recent utterances is a progress from the old “ unhumorous” religion to one of unconscious humor, and from the idea of individual to the idea of corporate redemption. Of course the Newer Inquisition would not take our purse. In the place of death, we now have pillory in the daily press; in the place of the old excommunication, we have the cold, stern punishment of the denial of publicity; and in place of financial mulcting, we have evolved a subtler pain. No, it would not take our purse, but it would take our good name as “scholar”; we should indeed be ” no scholar,” and one would be rash enough who would neglect safeguarding himself here by restrained and ingenious phrase. And yet the world does move! Some day perhaps one may freely say from every housetop that the old religion not merely had its humor, but that, in those very days when the selfish friars were embracing poverty and celibacy, preaching and developing the Inquisition with all their might to save man from alleged damnation, they quite generally allowed themselves a range of humor in their sermons which is apt to shock the taste of our more humorous age. But for the nonce enough.

With doubting it is different: to doubt is virtue. We doubt, therefore, if our ancestors were so hard, cold, merciless, selfish, as Dr. Eliot implies and “ An American Woman ” asserts. Having a certain modest degree of acquaintance at first hand with a few of these oldtime religionists, especially of the earlier centuries including the thirteenth, we shall try to suggest that we have found most of them less selfish than ourselves, many of them in a mad rush for the salvation of others, and a few of them with a rather nice sense of humor.

The cold, hard, and merciless doctrine of our friends Saint Francis and Tauler, Saint Dominic and Varagine, even if it had prevented proper interest in social welfare and the making of this world a fit abiding-place (and we shall venture to more than doubt that it did prevent such interest), at least did not prevent a most passionate concern for the welfare of other men in the other world, as Dante testifies.

The gentle institution of the Inquisition also was not established to secure the personal salvation of the inquisitors, but was, on the contrary, most obnoxious to the beneficiaries, for the very reason that it interfered with the right of others to be damned if they pleased. The inquisitors tried to save the heretics willy-nilly, or, failing that, to save others whose eternal welfare might be endangered through heresies, by plucking them, like tares from a field of wheat, and burning them. A drastic effort, a “ rush,” if you like, a mad rush for social betterment or social redemption, but not an absorbed rush for self-salvation. And further, we ask again, were the orders of preaching friars founded to promote their own salvation by preaching? Granted that the great Dominican apostles of the thirteenth century, like the great Irish missionaries of Germany before them and the great Jesuit missionaries to Canada after them, as well as the oldtime New England missionaries to India, and China, and Africa, really did hope to promote their own salvation at the same time with that of the “ uncivilized ” men for whose salvation they yearned, suffered, and died, what of it? If most of these men did not have their hearts set passionately on not letting the Devil take even the hindmost of those savages who showed them the most ill-will, then there are no standards by which we may judge whether anybody ever has, or ever will, in any new religion, have, any concern save for his own individual welfare.

Of all those who have suffered under this ancient libel, perhaps none have suffered more than the hermits. There were doubtless selfish men among them, but for many the hermit’s life was not selfish: it was an agonizing for worldsalvation. To understand the hermits, one thing must be understood clearly. Granted that it was childish and un-Highercritical and all wrong, nevertheless these people really believed what the New Testament says about prayer — really believed it, remember. They thought that faith was the main thing, that the exercise of faith was itself works, and that God could do more than they could. Call it a ridiculous idea if you like, but they really thought that God wanted them to do their most strenuous work praying, and that whatever they prayed out clearly, especially the things which they had themselves tried to do and had been baffled in, he could put through with ease. Like Hartman von Aue, they thought that

So they went into the wilderness and devoted themselves to prayer as the highest and most effective work that could be imagined. While, however, they did go far from the madding crowd, they were not always far from its interests. Whoever, for example, exhibited a more intense desire for the root-and-branch extermination of the Arians than Saint Anthony himself? and did he fear that they endangered his personal salvation? Not a whit! It was for the sake of the weak brother that he sought the extermination of these heretics — meddling again, like the Inquisition, with men’s free will, instead of minding his own business, as he should have done; but suggesting that, on occasion, these oldtime religionists, so far from showing too little anxiety for their fellow men, showed too much.

The real ground, therefore, of our superiority to our ancestors is not so much that they were all selfish while only a few of us are, or even that they lacked zeal for human welfare, as that their altruism was misdirected, first to loving individuals rather than the mass, and then to laboring for their salvation from imaginary dangers in the next world, rather than from real trouble in this. We have learned, first to confine our efforts to this world, and second to work at wholesale rather than at retail.

There are, to be sure, some incongruities, not to say contradictions, about this whole matter of our religious superiority. Here is “ An American Woman ” abjuring the “rush for individual salvation,” but declaring in another paragraph that a part of our superiority, nay the very kernel of it, is that man has learned that “ religion is an individual thing—secret and sacred between him and God.”

And then again, how contradictory to labor so to make the world an “ abiding-place,” when to abide here is the one thing which, without respect of persons, every one who comes into the world is inexorably forbidden to do!

But in spite of incongruities we are in the main agreed. The oldtimers thought that the point of chief concern was to get stray individuals into the fold, and that Heaven actually had more time to rejoice over individuals, under some circumstances, than over large groups of ninety-and-nine, more or less. We, on the contrary, now know that it is far more important that the ninety-and-nine should be well watered and tended than to spend anxious time hunting the lost one, since we have learned that roaring lions are as extinct as hobgoblins, and that there is no more any pit for sheep to fall into.

That there is a subtle danger of a new selfishness in this substitution of the passion for social redemption in the place of the passion for souls, nobody will deny, as every effort for the salvation of “ society ” is necessarily an effort for our own salvation.

The foundation and root of this modern progress of ours was doubtless the passing of Hell. The radical mistake of the old religionists was in supposing that not all men were fit for Heaven, and that those who were not had a suitable place prepared for them. With the destruction of Hell, some few years since, there was naturally a great lessening of the frenzy for personal salvation as well as of the frenzy for saving others, and a certain increase in zeal for social betterment. Very calm, very patient, and very loving we are, but with no yawning pit to save our fellow men from, there is naturally no zeal; action must correspond to stimulus.

The change results even in a certain increase of love. It was hard for the oldtimers to love those whom they regarded as emissaries of the Devil, dragging their loved ones down to Hell; but now that we know that the worst that a man can do is to destroy the property or the body, it is easier to love one’s enemy.

Please understand explicitly that we are not ourselves denying or even doubting the annihilation of Hell or the death of the Devil. It has not been our privilege, but that of the discoverers of the newest religion, to rediscover Hell, and it may be that they will succeed in resurrecting the Devil as well. This newest religion has discovered that Hell was not destroyed or lost after all — it was only mislaid. It has now been relocated on this earth. The old religionist did not realize that “this very earth was the Hell of his horror.” Now that we understand this, “ in the place of the old selfishness has come the desire to make the world an abiding-place fit for the spirit as well as for the body of man.” Now “ the world itself is an object of redemption. ... It is the duty of the Church to labor for aredeemed social order in this present world . . . not merely to fit some men for Heaven but to make this world a reign of righteousness.”

But if we heartily agree to all this, is it quite fair to say that our ancestors, because they thought more of Heaven, had no love for the mass, no social ideals, put forth no organized efforts for social redemption, and to make this world a reign of righteousness? So far as theory is concerned, it must be remembered that they looked ultimately for a social order in which death and Hell should be trampled under foot, and all surviving or risen men united in one social unit in a world wherein righteousness reigns — but this was of course a new earth, not this one. Hell was to be destroyed, not reformed.

And then they did work as well as theorize, in a rudimentary helter-skelter way compared with ours, to be sure, and perhaps more as individuals and for individuals than by corporations and for masses, as we would to-day, but yet not always without systematic method and organized forces. We do things better now; but even the earliest ages had charity organizations, with deacons for officers, and the charity organizations of Macedonia sent funds to the charity organization of Jerusalem for systematic distribution. The later Church indeed pushed organized effort for organized social betterment to an extreme, as it had been pushed to an extreme ages before by Moses. When individual is dealing with individual, it is of course hard to make a man good in spite of himself — he might prove the stronger; but where two organize against one, or many against few, it is quite possible to rescue a man in spite of himself. Hence arises the State. Carrying out the logic of their convictions, Constantine and Hildebrand, Calvin, Cromwell, and John Cotton took hold of the matter of social betterment with a will, and organized a work for the masses thorough in its way, if not reaching the height of modern social ideals. It is true that their organized effort was often directed too much to the future rather than to present welfare, and was too little prone to the exercise of superChristian love by cherishing in their bosoms those who looked to them like vipers; and that they now and then treated alleged vipers to a rather summary shaking-off into the fire; but at least they aimed at the social betterment of the whole mass of the people. both in this world and in the world to come.

We do not know precisely what our coreligionists are driving at in particular. Corporate effort for corporate good is of course the State. If the new religion is to usurp the State tasks for social betterment, it must sooner or later become the State or come in conflict with it. But, up to date, we have held that progress is away from the union of Church and State. The State had its task: the physical, mental, and moral well-being of the mass, the making of this world a home of righteousness. The Church had its tasks: first, the fitting of individuals for earthly citizenship, so that, as individual and corporate members of the State, they may help in its task of righting wrongs (law) and social betterment (education and charity); and, second, the fitting of them for heavenly citizenship. Now we have changed all that, and plan to have religion do the work of the State. Old and new alike look for a time when earthly and heavenly citizenship shall be one, but the old Christians thought that Jesus Christ would first come to be king of this heavenon-earth State.

A splendid dream this kingdom of righteousness on earth is: the pagan dreamed it, but held that the golden age had long gone by; the early Christian dreamed it, and erred in expecting it too soon; the Neochristian does not dream — he acts: he is tired of waiting and fitting individuals: he proposes to organize the kingdom at once, without waiting for a king.

When we come to consider what social redemption is, as contrasted with individual, we are in some trouble. The new psychology talks of social consciousness, and the new sociology of the union of society through the likemindedness of its members, but there has never been any tangible theory of social unity, save the old Christian notion of likemindedness in Jesus Christ, or of a social unit save the Church of Jesus Christ. The dream of a worldempire was a theory of unity in a head, but not unity with one another. All other theories deal with masses of individuals, and the nearest that we can get to the social soul is public opinion. We Neochristians, therefore, try to convert public opinion instead of individuals; and when one thinks of all the reform magazines with their hundreds of thousands of copies, and of the New York journals with their millions of copies, how insignificant seems the work for social redemption of Church fathers or of Biblical writers!

Still, again, it is not quite fair to speak of prophets, apostles, and fathers of the Church as if they had made no effort at all to convert public opinion and reform social consciousness. We have learned from the magazines that the way of social betterment is denunciation and education. We rouse the social consciousness by revelations of evil, denunciation, and telling how it can be done better. Granted that the magazines do more real good to the social consciousness than Neocongregationalism and the new religion combined, and granted also, for the sake of argument, that they reach a higher level than all the prophets and apostles and fathers and reformers, is it fair to say that there were no denunciators among the prophets and no educators among the Church fathers and schoolmen? Was it the author of The Jungle who, when asked as to the sincerity of some social contributor to the denunciatory magazines, declared that if we doubted we should hear this apostle curse the capitalists? What denunciation of the rich and insolent that is fit to print can equal the prophecies of Ezekiel and Isaiah, or the contempt of Jeremiah for the “ partridge which sitteth on eggs which she hath not laid.” What denunciations of smug churchgoers, even, have equaled those of Jesus Christ? Even the private curses of modern contributors can hardly surpass the ringing of Woe! Woe! of both Old and New Testament; and Isaiah at least is curiously up to date in the denunciatory magazine’s specialties (Isaiah x, 1-2). “ Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and to the writers that write perverseness; to turn aside the needy from justice, and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be their spoil, and that they may make the fatherless their prey! ” To be sure, that second clause is somewhat ambiguous; but as for progress it suggests that we have made little progress either in the art of robbing or tire art of exposing robbery since Isaiah.

And as for educating example, we of course do it better now. They had no social laboratories in those days to teach them better; and often, in their ill-judged efforts for social betterment, they gave to individuals rather than to charity organizations, and so freely that they were like to create a race of tramps and beggars. They often sold all that they had and gave to the poor! Even up to the thirteenth century this was frequent among our friends the friars, and it is said that our special friend Varagine, in the time of famine, notonly despoiled himself of all his personal goods, but even sold Church property for their relief! There are few records of such gross improvidence nowadays. Even Mr. Carnegie has not yet sold all. Put imprudent and improvident as it was, it would argue a certain zeal for social betterment and the righting of ancient wrongs, however misdirected.

It is a puzzling thing, this matter of superiority, and bound to be so. Progress there is, for it is the ability to progress which makes a man, in matters of religion at least, as some say (Goldwin Smith); but just where our progress lies — ay! there’s the rub.

Two things about human evolution seem to be fairly sure: first, that it has ceased to be individual and has become social; and, second, that it is not so much a general advance, as a thin line of progress shooting up out of a great mass of branches which never reach its level.

There is much reason to think that recent evolution has become wholly social. On the one hand, the individual man seems to have reached the full stature long ago. As a molecule is complete in itself and progresses only as a unit in a complex, as a cell is likewise complete in itself, so the individual man seems to be a closed organism. His future lies as a unit in societies. So far as individual power is concerned, it is with mental as with physical power: it took as keen a human mind to invent fire as to invent the steam engine, to invent bronze as to invent steel, to invent the arch as to invent reinforced concrete construction. The individual modern mind is provided with more complex machinery, more complex raw material, but it is no more certain that I am greater than Aristotle than it is that Jeffries is greater than Samson or Ajax. We have not succeeded in adding one cubit to physical stature in ten thousand years, and why should we fancy that we have added to individual mental stature?

Moreover, looking at the same thing from another point of view, it appears that all “general ” progress is social rather than individual, in the sense that, while the human race may be advancing, not all races or all individuals do progress. “ We ” build electrical engines, but I cannot; nor can I paint better than Velasquez, or think better than Aristotle, or legislate better than Hammurabi. The human race advances, but how much have the Tibetans or Patagonians advanced in two thousand years? There is, indeed, even a degeneration of races and individuals on all sides of that slender line of survival which is evolution.

In actual humanity it is hard to predict what line progress will take. IndoIranians have left behind the Semitic, the African, and the Far Eastern nations. The Indo-Europeans left behind the Indians, the Persians, and the Armenians; the Germanic races seem now to be leaving behind the Latin and perhaps, but not so surely, the Slavonic.

The British race has so far dominated the evolution of a new Anglo-German-Latin-and-everything-else race in America, and a bold prophet might venture that the next step would be a union of the Neoamerican with Japanese and Chinese civilization; but who knows? So in religion the Jewish outgrew the Egyptian and the Assyrian, the Christian outgrew the Jewish, the Western, the Eastern Church. What next? Will it be a New-Christianity or HyperChristianity? Shall we in our progress get beyond the old Christianity to Neocongregationalism? beyond the supernatural in religion to Mr. Eliot’s new religion? beyond religion itself to that blessed Nirvana, the ne plus ultra, where by the nature of things we may rest secure, serene, satisfied, superior to the most superior? above the oldtime religion, above the new school religion, above the non-church-going religion, above supernatural religion, above religion? Who knows?—but we may guess that progress of man and religion alike will find its next step the production of a social unit in place of the individual man; above atoms and groups of atoms, above molecules and groups of molecules, above cells and groups of cells, above individual man, will be an organized social group. Whether this idea is, in religion, progress beyond the oldtime theory of the Church of Jesus Christ, is a matter for experts to judge.

To take up again the question with which we started, is it progress to go to church or not to go to church? What is almost the last word that can be spoken on universal progress at the present stage of affairs was once spoken by that most gracious and polished author of the most scholarly Life of Our Lord, Dr. Samuel J. Andrews, à propos of this very matter. An enthusiastic apostle of Christian Endeavor, in a quiet library reading-room, was holding forth, in noisy conversation, on the wonderful progress of the Church in these later times. “ Why just think of it,” he cried, “ there are twelve hundred churches [if it was twelve hundred] in the city of Philadelphia alone to-day; twelve hundred churches, just think of it! ” Dr. Andrews looked up from his book at the strenuous declaimer and remarked quietly, “And there were eight hundred synagogues [if it was eight hundred] in Jerusalem at the time when Jesus Christ was crucified.”