The Age of Faith
MY friend and I were watching the graceful undulations of a Blériot monoplane as it lazily circled the aviation field after the mad swoops and spiral climbings which had caught our breath with fear and wonder. ‘Ah,’ said my friend, with a touch of reverence in his voice, ‘the age of miracles is n’t over.’
He is no mystic, this friend of mine; the grotto of Lourdes and the Christian Science temple interest him, if at all, only as curious instances of abnormal psychology; but his soul craved a miracle, it seems, and he found it at the aviation meet. A moment later he added, ‘In a few years we shall all be flying, I suppose.’ Although I knew, of course, that his words had no reference to the strong angelic pinions of a beatific hereafter, his second platitude led me to reflect that the ‘age of faith ’ might not be over either; and when at breakfast next morning I read of one more aviator whose name had been added to the long death-roll, I caught myself muttering something about the ‘age of martyrs.’
We are very fond of these vague phrases — the age of this and the age of that. It is so convenient to dispose of a whole century, or a group of centuries, by affixing a neat descriptive label and filing it away methodically in the card-catalogue of one’s historical memory. The label seems somehow to clothe the nakedness of our essential ignorance; we feel that we have not only identified but have understood. We denominate certain prehistoric centuries the ‘Stone Age,’ and instantly the mists of our all but total ignorance seem to lighten. I suspect that Adam gave names to all the beasts of the field mainly that he might dispel the unfamiliar strangeness of them. Particularly convenient is it when the label has a certain philosophical tinge to it, so that we may seem to have caught and fixed the very soul and guiding principle of an ‘Age of Reason,’ or an ‘Age of Faith.’
The Middle Ages, but little understood and vaguely realized, have been most frequently and continuously disposed of by this process of the descriptive label. Not many years ago the approved label read, ‘The Dark Ages.’ The kindly poet Cowper could refer to the ‘tedious years of Gothic darkness,’ and Shelley could speak of ‘enormities which gleam like comets through the darkness of Gothic and superstitious ages.’ Barbarism, violence, ignorance, and gross superstition — these ideas all lurk within the shadows of the word ‘dark.’ One had but to affix the label, and the heart of many centuries was presented on a charger. But this modern blackening of the mediæval kettle has gone out of fashion. The term ‘dark ages’ is now confined, by thoughtful people at least, to the two or three centuries immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire; the Middle Ages proper we now sentimentalize as an ‘age of chivalry’ or an ‘age of faith.’
The Age of Faith, of child-like trust in the evidence of things not seen, of superstition, if you will; but how touching in its naive simplicity! With a strain of patronizing condescension, no doubt, but none the less with genuine weariness of heart, we turn back to the blessed days when the sea of faith was at the full, and listen with sadness to its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’
But is faith withdrawing or withdrawn? Is not faith, nay, even credulity, too intimately woven into the texture of the human heart ever to be unraveled and cast aside? Mankind does not abandon faith, but merely transfers it through the ages from one set of objects to another. The Middle Age was doubtless an ‘age of faith’; so is our own ago; so have been all the ages about which we have any knowledge. The eighteenth century, labeled by Carlyle the ‘skeptical century,’ and by its admirers the ‘age of reason,’ exhibits the most child-like trust in the efficacy and saving grace of Reason, Humanity, Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, and a whole pantheon of splendid abstractions visible only to the eye of faith, which were to save and remake the world. The French Revolution, with its militant gospel of liberty, with its proclamation of a new heaven and a new earth, wherein does it differ, save in externals, from the passionately preached crusades of old? Rousseau is its Peter the Hermit, Mirabeau its Godfrey. Like the Crusades it sought through violence and cruelty to realize its burning faith.
To-day the faith of man has turned to the discoveries and achievements of science. I, for example, am not more credulous than my neighbors; but I believe firmly that, contrary to the evidence of my senses, the sun’s rising and setting are due, not to the motion of the sun, but to the spinning of this so solid-seeming earth. I have no proof save the assertion of the astronomers — it is a believing where I cannot prove. By a similar act of faith I let my imagination expatiate in the infinite regions of interstellar space and gaze reverently at the ray of starlight which was kindled at its source a hundred years ago. Quia impossibile, ergo credo.
My friend the geologist speaks casually of the Eocene and of the Carboniferous Era; in his talk a thousand years are but as yesterday. I think somewhat wistfully of the tidy little six-days’ creation of my fathers; but my faith triumphs and I trust the geologist, even when he tells me of floods which make those of Deucalion and old Noah seem but poor affairs at best. He tells me of vast ice-fields covering half a continent, and by way of proof shows me on an afternoon’s walk sundry scratches in the rocks. I gaze reverently upon the scratches and assent. To these marvels and to many like them I have no choice but to assent. To reject them would be heresy to the faith of the age, and punishable as heresy. Were I, for example, to exercise my ‘right of private judgment’ by asserting openly that the sun and stars revolve about the earth, I should find my friends estranged, my opinions on all other subjects discredited, and my position in the university speedily vacant.
The central dogma of the new religion is the doctrine of evolution. The modern man accepts it as a matter of course, though probably not one in a hundred of those who accept can give a satisfactory statement of it, much less appraise the evidence on which it rests. Believers of the baser sort suppose that it asserts their descent from monkeys, and rather glory, it would seem, in the lineage. Those of finer nature suppose that it assures us of ultimate attainment to a more than angelic perfection. I am credibly informed that neither of these supposings corresponds very accurately to the esoteric teachings on the subject. But what of that? The older dogmas of the Trinity or the Atonement have been vaguely or crudely understood of the many. Faith is fortunately not dependent on the power of grasping intellectually the finer subtleties either of metaphysical or of scientific thought.
Like all great truths, the doctrine of evolution has been widely fruitful. From its original application to matters biological it has spread to this region and to that until it has become, as the cardinal tenets of a living faith must always become, the central principle of all human thought and activity. It has rewritten our history; it has transformed our theories of society and politics; it has revolutionized literary criticism. Our sophists and modern schoolmen find in this doctrine both source and criticism for all distinctions of right and wrong. The tables of stone have been exchanged for the shifting sands of a ‘ pragmatic ’ sanction. One wonders whether, some centuries hence, when our present-day religion shall have faded and the inexpugnable faith of mankind shall have transferred itself to newer dogmas, one wonders whether the historian of that future age may not laugh at us for our evolution-madness, as we laugh to-day at the spiritual allcgorizings with which the mediæval mind interpreted all nature and all art.
This modern religion of the scientific spirit demands and wins our assent not only to its speculative dogmas in the realm of cosmogony and metaphysics; it touches our daily life and issues in a new ethic. To its vita contemplativa it adds a vita activa. There is a heaven to be won by right living, and a hell to terrify the erring; a heaven of health and efficiency, a hell of disease and failure. Our life is girt about by a myriad of unseen essences, malignant and beneficent, demons and ministers of grace. That these essences are called bacteria rather than spirits is but an unimportant difference in terminology.
Poor Tom cowered before Frateretto and Smulkin and Hopdance; the foul fiends of to-day are the various schizomycetes and trypanosomes of disease, with names as uncouth as any in the old demonology. The first petition and the last of our modern pater noster is, ‘Deliver us from infection.’ Our charms and exorcisms are antitoxins and disinfectants. We have our ceremonial washings. We bind our brows with prophylacteries. Our incense we have renamed fumigation, with some loss the while in its sweet savor. Our confessions are made to the family doctor. Full and without reserve they must be, if his shriving is to avail. His kind but searching questions bring home to us the conviction of sin in matters where our blindness had recognized no wrong. We are bidden to forsake our evil ways with true penitence. But penitence is not enough: the wise confessor imposes also a fitting penance — the austere fasting of his dietary, the abstention for a season from pleasures and distractions ordinarily innocent. If our sin is very grievous, he may even relegate us to retreat in the wilderness, or to the rigorous observances of a sanitarium.
The firm belief of the people in the very existence of the disease-germ is a touching instance of the power of faith. Which of us has seen the germ of tuberculosis at any time? Certain holy men in our laboratories declare that they have seen it through the eye of the microscope, as holy men of old reported their visions of devils and of angels. We accept the reports of our seers as did our fathers in the so-called ‘Age of Faith.’ Woe to us if through skepticism or callous indifference we neglect the ceremonial purifications which they have established. If my house has been possessed by the foul devils of scarlet fever, it is at peril of active persecution by the law that I fail to burn my sulphur incense. By force of public opinion, and by law as well, I should be compelled, did not my abounding faith lead me of my own accord to purchase indulgence against the purgatorial pains of the smallpox through the rite of vaccination. The penance imposed is but the discomfort of a sore arm and some pence paid to the ministrant.
Faith is ever near akin to superstition; and in this modern Age of Faith, as in the mediæval, there are discredited hangers-on of the hierarchy, or it may be quack priests, who are ready, like the pardoners of the later Middle Ages, to coin human credulity to their own profit by the sale of lying absolution and indulgence. What else are the countless tonics and elixirs, the blood-purifiers and pain-killers and liver-pills which fill the newspapers and crowd the hoardings with their strident capitals? Every new revelation of the faith becomes a cure-all for the credulous and has its passing vogue. Liquid air and the X-ray have already lost their therapeutic prestige before the mysterious properties of magic radium.
For these abuses of the faith the hierarchs and true priesthood of science are not, of course, responsible. The established and recognized ritual of purification they indeed support, but with the clear recognition which has always accompanied true holiness and pure religion that outward forms and ceremonies, although useful as means of grace, are comparatively idle unless with them there go a right inward state.
Here is the more spiritual teaching of salvation as set forth in a recent book by one of the high priests of the science of bacteriology, Professor E. Ray Lankester: —
‘For a long time the ideal of hygienists has been to preserve man from all contact with the germs of infection, to destroy them and destroy the animals conveying them, such as rats, mosquitoes, and other flies. But it has been borne in upon us, that useful as such attempts are, and great as is the improvement in human conditions which can be thus effected, yet we cannot hope for any really complete or satisfactory realization of the ideal of escape from contact with infective germs. The task is beyond human powers. The conviction has now been arrived at that, whilst we must take every precaution to diminish infection, yet our ultimate safety must come from within — namely, from the activity, the trained, stimulated, and carefully guarded activity of those wonderful colorless amœba-like corpuscles, whose use was so long unrecognized, named “phagocytes.”’
The millenium, when Satan and his host shall be bound, is a fair and noble ideal, but the task of its accomplishment is ‘beyond human powers.’ It is well to make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but the kingdom of health is within us, and our salvation is nearer to us than we believed. The gracious phagocytes are of our very tissues and blood; while we slumber they watch for our safety, and war continually against the devil and his infecting angels, if we will but cherish their activity within us. Our prayer to science must be not only, ‘ Lead us not into infection,’ but, ‘Create new phagocytes within us.’
In Dr. Lankester’s book there is a picture of a phagocyte slaying a disease-germ. It is hardly so inspiring as the old picture of St. George and the dragon; but, I need not say, my faith accepts the phagocyte unquestioningly and entertains considerable doubt as to the historicity of St. George’s great adventure. My forefathers of the Middle Ages, having heard no word of St. Phagocytus, believed as firmly in St. George and in his archangelic prototype. Did they not read of him and see him pictured in their books, even as St. Phagocytus is portrayed to me in mine?
I trust that the reader, if he has borne with me thus far, does not suppose that I am seeking presumptuously to discredit the revealed truth of modern science. Not at all. Like him, like all my fellows, I believe that on the lip of a common drinking-cup disease-germs lie thicker than the autumnal leaves of Vallombrosa, as thick as the angels whom the mediæval schoolman saw crowded on the point of a needle. I avoid the common drinkingcup, and shun all infection where I can. When it cannot be shunned, and that must happen daily, nay, hourly, I put my faith in my phagocytes and play the man, fearing not overmuch the pestilence that walketh in darkness or the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday. I believe, and my belief issues in conduct. I am merely maintaining that my belief, and that of most men, is as completely an act of faith as any that the Middle Age can boast.
I can hear my good friend, the Professor of Biology, rather impatiently retorting that his science asks assent only to what it can demonstrate. ’Come with me to my laboratory, and I will give you the proofs. You shall look through my microscope and see both germ and phagocyte.’ But how am I, quite untrained in his science, to weigh his arguments or interpret what his miscroscope may show? This, he may tell me, as he adjusts the focus, is the germ of typhoid or tuberculosis. So may a devout monk reverently declare that the splinter of wood which he treasures is a very fragment of the true cross. So did Boccaccio’s preaching friar exhibit a vari-colored feather which, as he declared, had been dropped by the angel Gabriel on his visit of annunciation.
Were I to look through my friend’s miscroscope, I should at most exchange my general faith in his assertions for a more particular faith in his demonstration. I am content to rest in my general faith in him as a man of clear vision and upright mind, a scientist already canonized by the acclaim of his fellow hierarchs in the biological mystery. What he tells me is indeed marvelous, but it sounds reasonable, and my faith assents. Doubtless were I to enter his laboratory, receive his discipline, keep his vigils with him, in the course of years I might share his vision, and my faith vanish into sight. In much this spirit, I fancy, the faithful of the Middle Ages received the words of saint and hermit and doctor. These men had, by holy life and works, by fasting and watching, by instancy of prayer, penetrated into the mystery and beheld it face to face. These men knew; the many were content to believe. For every man there was the opportunity to enter a monastery or inhabit a hermit’s cell, to adopt the life and rule, and ultimately to share the vision. The alternative, then as now, was faith in the vision of others.
The modern monastery is the laboratory. Here, vowed to obedience and poverty, and often to celibacy, the brothers meditate and labor. If laborare est orare, why should not the oratory be called the laboratory? Has not each its altar and sacred vessels? As I look across the campus from my college rooms, at any hour of the night I can see the lights burning in some chapel window of the great Gothic structure with the low square towers which the munificence of a pious donor has devoted to the study of life.
My friend, the Professor of Biology, was engaged not long ago in studying the problem of sex-determination in one of the lower forms of animal life. The nature of the investigation was such that particular stages in the process of gestation had to be observed at particular hours of the day and night. For a week he left his bed nightly at two o’clock and watched with an assistant acolyte before his laboratory altar; during the next week his vigil began at three; during the next at four; and so on about the horologe. Did ever mediæval monk observe his canonical hours with more devotion? Another of my friends was driven by ascetic zeal to withdraw last spring to a new monastery recently established on the drear, desolate, wind-swept rocks of the Dry Tortugas. The very name is a penance.
We have our shrines and holy relics also. In our museums are exposed to the gaze of the faithful the skulls and bones of great dinosaurs whose feet (if they had feet) trod this earth in I have forgotten which of the geologic æons. I have looked with proper awe upon the fossil bones preserved in the great shrine, visited of many pilgrims, on the western slope of Central Park. I have also looked upon the reliquary in the great cathedral of Cologne said to contain the bones of the Royal Magi, and in the near-by Ursulakirche I have seen the bones of the eleven thousand virgins who were the blessed Ursula’s companions in her martyrdom. My faith in the authenticity of the dinosaur relics is, of course, complete; in Cologne I was, alas, skeptical. And yet, and yet! How much more worth while could I believe, as men once believed, in the Three Kings of Cologne! Them I should so gladly meet with in this world or the next. I should run away at top speed from a living dinosaur in either world.
It was once my fortune to be in Rouen on the feast day of St. Ouen, when the relics of the saint were exposed in his splendid church mid clouds of sweet incense and the chanting of Gregorians. I watched the vast throng of men and women and children as they pressed forward toward the altar to kiss the holy relics which the priests extended. I have never seen even a devoted scientist kiss the bones of a dinosaur.
Our modern world has not lost its faith, or even the blind faith we call superstition. Faith has merely changed its direction, and exercises itself on the temporal rather than the eternal, on the body rather than the soul. Perhaps there is some loss after all.
The Blériot monoplane, though it be lifted up never so high from the earth, cannot draw all men unto it.