THE NEEDED COMPLEMENT TO TOLERANCE.
THAT the age is tolerant,—tolerant to a degree which could hardly have been conceived by the largest-minded Englishman fifty years ago,—no witness of Mr. Bradlaugh's triumph of last week in the House of Commons, can for a
moment doubt. There the lifelong representative of the most coarse and forbidding form of what our ancestors would have regarded, almost unanimously, as a blasphemous denial of both natural and revealed religion, scored a great victory over the representative of what they would have called wicked Popery. Yet the champion alike of the one and of the other was listened to with deference, while the decision went for him who claimed to have absolute and total unbelief accorded the same rights even in a Court of Justice, as are accorded to him who thinks that the violation of an oath will, if nnrepented, issue in eternal suffering. The Papist who a few years ago could hardly have got into the House for any English constituency was listened to with the respect due to pious conviction by all except perhaps a few of his brother-Papists from Ireland, who were disposed to interrupt him not because he was a Papist, but because he had committed the horrible offence in their eyes of denouncing Home-rule ; and the avowed atheist was listened to with the esteem due to a manly and frank Parliamentary career which has gained for him, in spite of his atheism, a certain consider- able measure of confidence in the House of Commons. Thus the tolerance of the new age is perfect. The religion which used to be denounced fiercely as the most un-English of base super- stitions, no longer excludes from public recognition ; and the irreligion which would once have been thought of as wilful depravity, cannot now so handicap an able man as to shut him out from a fair share of political honour.
Is there no cause for anything but satisfaction in the result ? On the contrary, we should say that, with all the satisfaction which, on the whole, it ought to fill us, there should be blended a conviction that there is a heavy set-off of consequences any- thing but good. It is impossible to feel perfect tolerance for faiths and repudiations of faith all of which you think per- verted, without running a considerable risk of attaching less importance than you did before to the faith which you think divine. You cannot admit all opinions equally on the subject of religion to a provisional and external equality of treatment, without endangering the importance you have hitherto attached to the differences between false religion and true. If you show the utmost courtesy first outwardly, and then, as unmiti- gated tolerance teaches you to do, inwardly, to men of all creeds, you are very likely to imbibe something of the attitude of the soul which sat "as God, holding no form of creed, but con- templating all." It can hardly be doubted that when men of a considerable number of different creeds are constantly mingling with each other on equal terms, and are subject to the same rules imposing on them mutual considerateness in action, a certain weakness may easily creep into the individual religion. And this is very apt to affect most seriously the religions which are most exacting in their claims on the heart and conscience. It may be said, and more or less it is true, that atheists and un- believers, under this equal treatment, will learn to respect the high and conscientious faith of those with whom they come to be constantly associated. And that is one of the best aspects of an age of tolerance. Undoubtedly it tells in favour of convincing unbelievers that there is something more in the principle of faith than they had thought ; that it gives strength, and disinterestedness, and magnanimity, and self-control, and hope, to those who without it might be weak, and selfish, and sensitive, and passionate, and despairing. But then, in order to have that good effect on the unbeliever, tolerance must not eat away the firm foundations of the faith which finds itself confronted with so many paradoxes of the spiritual life. And the effect of our new tolerance is, very often indeed, to eat away those foundations. For the man who finds a score of different and inconsistent faiths and unbeliefs round him, all perhaps appearing compatible with a fair amount of honourable con- duct, of kindly consideration for others, and of external re- spectability, becomes insensibly more or less disposed to doubt the competence of the human mind to reach a true belief, and therefore continues to hold his own faith with a hesitating and provisional sort of air, as a traditional inheritance rather than with the confidence and joy of personal conviction. Nor can this process go on in relation to religions conviction without affecting also moral conviction. The two are so closely bound up together, that it is impossible for any decay in the one to occur without being followed by a decay in the other. The politician whom you have taught yourself to respect as upright and manly, if he be an absolute unbeliever, is not in all probability simply an unbeliever. He is pretty sure to found on his unbelief a claim for man to regulate his own actions with a com- plete indifference to the moral instincts and anxieties which religions men regard as the witness of God's spirit. He regards these warning instincts solely, perhaps, as the rude remains of some all but extinct superstition, and proceeds to ignore them as completely as a biologist would ignore the vestiges he finds in his own organisation of the lower animal life which man has outgrown. Nor can we wonder at a convinced materialist's treating as mere superstitious scruples all that mysterious reluctance to act upon the guidance of mere earthly prudence, which a religious man, like Socrates, treats as the voice of some higher nature speaking within him. To one who thinks that man is the highest being in creation, his own opinion of the moment, untrustworthy as he must know it to be, may very fairly be regarded as a far safer guide than a scruple the nature of which he can neither justify nor understand, though such a materialist would, if sincere, willingly admit that in every case, the best guide man can have is bad enough, even though it be the best. We can- not doubt, therefore, that if universal tolerance often undermines more or less the confidence of men in their religious principles, it will undermine also, and very seriously, the confidence of men in their moral principles also. That is why we maintain that as a necessary consequence of the universal tolerance which is coming into vogue, there will be a considerable loss of the old firmness of conviction as to the good and evil not only of the various creeds of the day, but even of the various standards of moral principle which compete with each other for our reverence and loyalty.
The needful complement, then, to the tolerance of the day, if the tolerance of the day is not to dissolve all the masculine strength of character which was afforded partly by the pre- judices and prepossessions, partly by the much less fluid prin- ciples of an earlier age, is, in our opinion, a steady limitation of our intimacies, wherever that is possible, to those in whose principles of conduct, in the deepest sense of the term, we can feel perfect confidence ; and we cannot say that, in our opinion, it is possible to feel hearty confidence in any principles of conduct which are not fortified by some definite religious belief. That tolerance, in the sense of a frank and courteous recognition of social and political equality, has now become one of the most genuinely approved rules of English civilisation, cannot be denied. Even the strictest Roman Catholics admit this provisionally, and give up the effort to subject to any sort of public or social disqualifi- cation those who differ from them ill religious opinion only, however deep and wide may be that difference. But a frank and courteous recognition of social and political equality is one thing ; while intimacy of the deeper kind ought to involve much more than this,—namely, real sympathy as to the ideal standard by which life should be measured, and a genuine and unremitting effort on both sides to be faithful to that standard. Here is the only antiseptic, as it seems to us, by which the legitimate tolerance of the day can be prevented from de- teriorating into the easy laisser-faire which involves the rapid decomposition, first of all religious convictions, and next of any- thing like deep moral principle. More and more as political and social equality grows, is it necessary that there should be a very wide practical difference recognised between kindly acquaint. anceship and genuine intimacy,—the kind of difference which would render it easy to maintain one's own principles in their integrity without that terrible struggle which always takes place where the closest bonds are formed, as they often are, and in the case of close kinship and a few other rare cases some- times must be, between persons of totally different and perhaps even opposite spiritual aims. It is obvious that in the first age of the Christian Church, the serious character of the difficulty which has now again cropped up amongst us was deeply felt. The missionary character of the Church compelled the Christian teachers to form relations in some sense cordial with the outside Gentile world ; and when these relations had been formed, the difficulty arose as to how far they ought to be carried while the great chasm between faith and unbelief continued to exist. St. Paul, it is clear, was not at all afraid of cultivating cordial relations with the Gentile world. He trusted, and trusted legitimately, in those days, to the scorn felt by the Greek or Roman for such a superstition as that which he had adopted as the truth, to keep the mutual regard from growing too close, except in cases where he saw his way to effecting the great change he desired in the hearts of his Gentile friends. But the difficulty became much greater when the con- verts themselves began to fall away from the faith, and then we
find St. John warning his disciples against even intimate social relations with such sceptics. "Whosoever," he said, "goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, lath not
God If any one cometh unto you, and bringeth not this teaching, receive him not into your house, and give him no greeting : for he that giveth him greeting partaketh in his evil works." That is a very severe injunction, which was pro- bably justified by the character of the degeneracy showing itself amongst some of the first Christians, but which not the severest teachers of the modern Church would act upon in such a day as the present. Evidently it is a precept not suited to the circumstances of our time, and is one of those the authority of which depends entirely on the particular circumstances of the period in which it was given. Bat we hold that the principle at the bottom of this severe injunction is still good so far as it warns men against the kind of intimacies by which their own deepest and most operative beliefs may be worn insensibly away. This at least is clear,— that the religions and moral standards of conduct in our own day are all the more important for the widely prevailing di& culties and doubts and decomposing influences by which they are threatened ; that men cannot waste their whole career in reviewing again and again the deepest principles by which their life is moulded, and that, therefore, they should cleave to these ultimate moral and spiritual assumptions with some- thing like the obstinate fidelity with which a son cleaves to his parents, or a husband to his wife ; that we cannot do this if we allow ourselves to enter into the closest possible relations with persons who ignore our principles, and act upon a wholly different code ; and therefore that it is of the first importance in our modern society, that the easy and friendly tolerance of our political and social relations should not be allowed to endanger the soundness of that inward circle of deeper principles on which we rely not only to guide our own lives, but to enable us to estimate aright the characters and aims and self-judgments of our nearest and dearest friends.
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