SOCIALISTIC ATHEISM.
TN the remarkable account which the Times published last week of the Atheism of Berlin, one feature was very pro- minent,—the tendency to substitute the vox populi for the vox Dci, —to treat the proletariat as a kind of God. The Saturday Review of last week, in an interesting paper on the subject, suggests that the best analogue for the German Socialism and Atheism is not the Communistic Atheism of France, but the despairing Nihilism of the Russian middle-class. So far, however, as we can judge the signs of the German movement, this opinion seems to us a mistake. The Russian Nihilists wish, as the Saturday Re- viewer pointed out, to get rid of everything in the order they see, but have nothing to propose in the place of that order. Apparently, when they are asked whom they de- sire to rule over them, they reply as the Cyclops, blinded by Ulysses, replied to the question of his brethren as to who was hurting him,—" No man ;" and so replying, they are likely to receive the same amount of assistance which the Cyclops received, from their kindred among the European peoples,—i.e., none at all. But the German Socialists, in the darkness of their poverty, their sufferings, their discontent, and their dreams, make no such ambiguous reply. They are not merely, as one of their speakers vauntingly described them, " good haters,"—though good haters they are,—but eager hopers too. Frau Hahn, who was one of the speakers at the grave of the Socialist printer, promised the people a great future, if they would unite against their various enemies,—i.e., the State, the richer classes, and the Christians. Again, when the Socialist M.P. Herr Fritache pronounced the doge over the departed, he said that the deceased printer, Heinsch, " was now before his judge, i.e., the people now present, not the obsolete divinity of the past," and it is obvious that this, too, was intended as a hint that all the happiness or fame which it is in the power of man to gain, it is in the power of the people to bestow. Both at funerals and at public meetings, if the Berlin Correspondent of the Times may be trusted, the German Socialists are careful to draw this practical inference from their atheism—that the creeds " which refuse and restrain " being false, beer and tobacco should be indulged in at all convenient seasons of human life, and especially should fill the blanks created by the dis- appearance of obsolete social etiquettes and religious super- stitions. The German Socialists are proud of their Atheism, not so much because they think there is no sufficient evidence for Theism, as because Atheism leaves them so much more com- pletely at liberty to measure everything by the standard of the material comfort of the millions. They regard Christianity as a fraud invented to frighten away the people from their own. As one of the speakers at a Socialist meeting incidentally observed, having met two clergymen in her sister's room, "of course she insulted them." It Is the barrier which religious creeds erect between the popular wish and its indulgence, which makes such speakers as these regard hatred to Christianity as a virtue, and insult to Christian ministers as a sign of straightforward- ness and uprightness. If there is no justice in private property, the spiritual injunction against covetousness is a priest's lie, in- vented to keep the people paralysed. If there is no sacredness or purity in marriage, the spiritual injunction against lust is a priest's lie, invented to entangle the people in the meshes of private self-reproach, scruple, and remorse. Socialism can only prosper by making a clean sweep of all these cobwebs of the moral and spiritual nature. There will be no approximation even to a common administration of the earth's wealth for the good of all, and a common administration of its pleasures for the enjoyment of the many, till these black specks of superstition dancing before the eyes of the people are swept away for ever. That at least is
how we interpret the Atheistic Socialism of Germany. It seems to us as distinct as possible from the Nihilistic dreams of the Russian officials and middle-class,—as different as is the savage hunger of a bread-riot from the exhaustion of universal doubt. The rioters for broad believe in bread, and hate those who from any reason .fwhateveristand between them and bread. And just so the German Socialists believe in a plan of distributing wealth which, though indeed it will require them to smother hosts of scruples, and per- haps also to live down most of the religions of the world, will still, when it has done so, in their opinion secure a much higher standard of physical comfort for the ordinary labourer. The Nihilist doubts everything, and only hates the existing order more than any other because it has achieved existence,—while all other possible orders of the universe are in the neutral stage of mere potentiality. German Atheism is very energetic, after its kind. Russian Nihilism is a dream which is not even enough of a dream to undermine military subordination or courage. We do not believe that the two are in any way closely connected. And we do believe that while the Russian Nihilism is certain to disappear with the concession of popular rights and duties to the Russian people, it is at least quite reasonable to fear that the Atheism of the German Socialists may grow with the growth of the democratic spirit.
For the growth of the democratic spirit, even amongst an essentially self-reliant and energetic people like the Germans, may mean so many different things. It may mean that the people are learning to judge their own acts and aims and hopes by the severest standard of a lofty and disinterested morality. Or it may mean that they are learning to covet the flattery of those who call them judges of every one,—of persons, for in- stance, of whose true life they know nothing more than they knew of the Socialist printer, Heinsch, of whom Herr Fritsche told them that they were the only true judges, and that they had pronounced him a good and faithful servant. Hence, of the tendency of this coarser Atheism to pervert the democratic spirit to which it seems to bear so close an affinity, we cannot doubt seriously, for it is surely evident that this idolatry of Society as the true and only Judge' of men, must have the moat pernicious influence over popular character. Certainly those who reject so savagely the belief in a divine government, seem to be quite unable to see that if there were no such government, their own steps would need to be guarded with all the more anxious and scrupulous care. Yet, once rid of what they call the super- stition, they feel, like children out of school, all the more at liberty to take arbitrary power into their own hands, and to pass much falser and foolisher judgments than any they would have dared to pass while they believed in a spiritual Providence within and above them. Frau Hahn told one of her Socialist audiences at Berlin, that what made her reject Religion was that she found that her belief " never gave her anything to eat." So soon, then, as she finds Socialism, instead of giving her anything to eat, diminishing the store she would otherwise have,—and one day, no doubt, she will find it producing this effect,—she will of course reject Socialism ; and if she had believed that the deceased printer whose funeral she attended had contributed in any way to her having less to eat instead of more, she would, we suppose, have declared that instead of being approved by his judge,—the people, —be was by her, at least, condemned. Thus, the mere fact of rejecting belief in God seems to tell at once in favour of coarse, hasty, ignorant judgments, conceived in the interest of what at first sight looks like the popular cause, but so conceived without any strenuous or conscientious examination of its merits. The worship of the people by the people is the one condition, as it seems to us, of inevitable ruin for popular Governments. The best hope of popular Government is a disinterested and conscientious people, —a people willing to be guided, that is, by wise, disinterested, and conscientious leaders. But the one thing which seems to blot out all disinterestedness and all conscience, is the notion that the absolution of the people is valid even for all crimes, and the condemnation of the people valid even against all virtues. And such is the conception to which Socialism always seems to tend,— that there being no invisible spiritual judge, the verdict of the multitude about their flatterers or their accusers is a final one, beyond which it is not possible to go. if you worship Society, you must let Society pronounce judgment on its children ; and as, in point of fact, an atheistic Society, in its hatred of God, always contracts also a hatred to that painstaking and scrutinising morality which is born of the belief in God, such a Society cares to pronounce only the rough judgments of a mob, who do not greatly mind whether they are right or wrong, so long as their judgments obviously tend to encourage the sort of actions they like, and to discourage the sort of actions they dislike. Severe self- judgment is never found in multitudes without the belief in one higher than themselves, of whose judgment severe self-judgment is a faint copy. As soon as such a belief disappears, self-judgment rapidly follows it, and the judgment that takes its place is the sort of thing which Herr Fritache delivered in the mute of,the
beer-drinking crowd round poor Ileinach'a grave,—in other words, the blasphemous absolution given by a mob to one who had pleased the mob, for all the other actions, evil or otherwise, of his life. "If any man bear my words and believe not, I judge him not, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world," said at once the most severe and the most merciful of all judges. " If any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him and condemn him," replies the democratic Socialism of our own day, " for I came not to save the world, but to judge it ;" or as the socialist speakers translated it for the crowds of Berlin, those crowds loudly swearing their approval,—it was their first duty to be "good haters," good "insulters of parsons " and of the rich.
We believe that such Socialism will assuredly be fatal to any democracy which it manages to infect. Democracy that does not purify itself and govern itself by the highest moral standard it can devise, is worse than any other government, because, with nothing better to guide it, it is yet completely emancipated from fear ; just as democracy which does so purify itself, and embodies the highest spiritual standard of a humble insight, will be the highest type of the world's government, because it will be the least selfish, and though the least governed by fear, for that very reason at once the strictest and most merciful government in the world.
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