MR. JOHN MORLEY ON RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 71HE new chapter of
Mr. John Morley's Essay on "Compromise," to be found in the present number of the Fortnightly, is as wholesome in doctrine as it is able and thoughtful in expression. Of course it is written from a point of view intellectually and religiously almost the opposite of our own, bat we are not ashamed to feel far more sympathy with the nobler aspects of unbelief, than we can with the ignobler and shiftier aspects of so-called faith. A diplomatic Churchman, who has borrowed hardly anything from the Christian spirit except St. Paul's boast that he had been all things to all men, is a phenomenon which seems to us far more threatening to the Christian faith of our own day than the sturdy and, as far at least as this essay goes, the charitable 'I believe not' of such men as Mr. John Morley. To those who apply our Lord's universal test, By their fruits ye shall know them,' a religion which has not made a man religious must. in the form it has taken in his mind at least, be inferior to the want of religion, or if you please, even irreligion, of the man who shows as high a morale and as earnest a sense of duty as Mr. John Morley. What the explanations may be of the appearance of so keen a sense of obligation and so frank a tenderness for what Mr. Morley, not, we think, in intellectual pride, but apparently in downright conviction, calls Christianity,—" that sovereign legend of Pity,"—in combination with so sharp a denial of what seems to us the transparent personal background of the moral law, is no doubt puzzle enough, a puzzle which we are not at the present moment attempting to resolve. But this, at all events, is true ; it is quite easy to confess God and Christ in a spirit much more pernicious and fatal to the growth of faith in God and Christ, than that in which others deny them. False visions may be much worse than no visions. The babble of imaginary voices may be much more perverting to the mind than the aching of an intense silence. Mr. Morley's present essay is a grave and earnest protest against the conventional conformity of men fo creeds they sincerely and thoroughly disbelieve, and for our own parts, we not only heartily agree with Mr. Morley, but we think that true Christianity has much more to lose by the falsity which Mr. Morley attacks than has unbelief. A conformity which makes the inner life of the most intimate affections a hollow and conventional affair, is a conformity which is destructive of religion, not conservative of it. Directly we begin to act a part, we leave the region in which faith is possible, and what is worse, we infect all those for whose sake we act the part we do, indeed all who are con- cerned with us in the histrionic affair, with something of our own utter unreality. Therefore we have nothing to say to the sub- stance of Mr. Morley's essay except to echo its teaching, with all our hearts, from the opposite point of view. We should indeed refuse to acquiesce in Mr. Morley's exceptions to his doctrine of the duty of social frankness on the subject of any firmly rooted and fixed denial. Mr. Morley seems to think that because children have not had anything to do with the selection of their own parents, they may owe it to their affection for those parents not to confess their rejection of the faith in which they have been brought up, though a similar reticence cannot be justifiable to wives, with whom men's relation is a voluntary one. "If parents are not wise," he says, "if they cannot endure to hear of any religious opinions except their own, if it would give them sincere and deep pain to hear a son or daughter avow dis- belief in the inspiration of the Bible, and so forth, then it seems that the younger person is warranted in refraining from saying that he or she does not accept such and such doctrines. This, of course, only where the son or daughter feels a tender and genuine attachment to the parent. Where the parent has not earned this attachment, has been selfish, indifferent, or cruel, the title to the special kind of forbearance of which we are speaking can hardly have any existence. In an ordinary way, however, a parent has a claim on us which no other person in the world can have, and a man's self-respect ought scarcely to be injured, if he finds himself shrinking from playing the apostle to his own father and mother." It shows how oddly other differences of opinion are connected with differences of moral theory, that we should just have inverted Mr. Morley's qualification. He seems to think that to the parents you love you may fairly shrink from giving pain. We should have thought that from the parents you love you should shrink from withholding your true confidence on a subject that goes very near to their hearts, and that your obligation to let them know your true heart on such a subject, whether it give pain or not, is far more imperative than your obligation to spare them pain. No doubt this difference of view is one of the results of a difference of moral creed. To the utili- tarian,—and Mr. Morley is, we believe, a utilitarian in Mr. Mill's sense,—the giving of pain must always assume what seems to us to be a thoroughly factitious importance in the moral conduct of human life.
But while we concur with Mr. Morley's doctrine without con- curring in the exceptions by which he here qualifies it, we do not at all accept one leading view of his essay, by which ap- parently he hopes to minimise the social shocks and jars likely to result from the candour in relation to fundamental denials recommended by that essay. That view is that the Positivism (which means, of course, Negativism) of Mr. Morley's creed is to be the heir of Christianity, in the same sense in which Christianity was the heir of Judaism. "Whatever form," says Mr. Morley, "may be ultimately imposed on our vague religious aspirations by some prophet to come, uniting sublime depth of feeling and lofty purity of life with strong intellectual grasp and the gift of a noble eloquence, we may, at least, be sure of this, that it will stand as closely related to Christianity, as Christianity stood to the old Judaic dispensation. It is commonly understood that the rejectors of the popular religion stand in face of it, as the Christians stood in face of the pagan belief and rites in the Empire. The analogy is inexact. The modern denier, if he is anything better than that, or entertains hopes of a creed to come, is nearer to the position of the Christianising Jew. Science, when she has accomplished all her triumphs in her own order, will have to go back, when the time comes, to generate a new creed, by which man can live ; will have to find material in the purified and sublimated ideas of which the confessions and rites of the Christian Churches have been the grosser expression. Just as what was once the new dispensation was preached a Tudxis ad Askew apud Judmos, so must the new, that is to be, find a Christian teacher and Christian hearers. It can hardly be other than an expansion, a development, a readaptation of all the moral and spiritual truth that lay hidden under the worn-out forms. It must be such a harmonising of truth with an intellectual conception as shall fit it to be an active guide to conduct. In a world 'where men sit and hear each other groan where but to think is to be full of sorrow,' it is hard to imagine a time when we shall be indifferent to that sovereign legend of Pity. We have to in- corporate it in some wider Gospel of Justice and Progress." Mr. Morley writes with feeling, and with not more of benignant con- descension to the moral and intellectual weakness of Christians than is perhaps inevitable from his point of view, but he will not be easily able to persuade any one who enters in the least into the drift and meaning of the Gospel, to see anything but an amiable,
yet groundless dream in his hope that the_ new religion of humanity without God, can succeed in establishing any sort of historical heirship to the gospel of the divine humanity. A new religion which should stand in the same relation to historical Christianity as that in which historical Christianity stood to Judaism, can hardly be even imagined, just because historical Christianity claims to find its perfect and ideal life in Christ, while Judaism confessedly looked forward into the future, and was but anticipating that completion and fulfilment of which Christ's gospel declared itself the harbinger. But even if that point be waived, how is any religion to bear the same relation to Christi- anity which Christianity bore to Judaism, if it begins with denying the common root of both, the fact of a divine revelation to man ? nay, more, if it denies, as Mr. Morley expressly affirms that it must, even the possibility of such a revelation. The essential life and form of Judaism was belief in the call of God to men, and the personal rule of God over men. That belief, so far from being dilated or softened down by Christ in the direction of "a religion of humanity," was made by him indefinitely more explicit and absolute. The belief that man was nothing apart from God, that his whole good and his whole happiness lay in union with God, was of the very substance of the Jewish faith, but by Christ it was vivified with a totally new principle of emotion such as it never had before. That which dropped off from Judaism was forms and ceremonies, which were originally in- tended, but which had latterly quite failed, to express the sense of the perpetual penitence, obedience, and self-sacrifice due from man to God. But everything that expressed the depth of the personal relation, the passion of loving humility, of unquench- able trust, of exulting hope towards God, was not only retained and developed in Christianity, but exalted and glorified by the light of the new revelation. To talk of " developing " suck a faith as that into a faith whose great boast it is that its root is in man, and in man alone, which begins by terming revelation a legend, and Goi a power at once unknown and unknowable, which brings as its special indictment against the Christian faith that "it tends to divert and misdirect the most energetic faculties of human nature," and which, if it could, would concentrate on man all the life of affection now wasted, as it holds, on God,—is to talk of developing a tree into a lichen, or the language of Shakespeare into the starved speech of a tribe of Esquimaux. Judaism had its knowledge and fear of God, where Christianity has its love of God ; Judaism had its foreahadowings of a man who should be "as a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land," where Christianity has its Christ and redeemer; Judaism had its hope that there should be a satisfying awakening after the likeness of God, that when "the flesh and the heart failed, God should be the strength of the heart and its portion for ever," where Christianity has its sure and certain hope of "the life that is bid with Christ in God ; "—but how all these developments are to be further developed into the purely "agnostic "state of mind towards the Cause of the Universe, into active disbelief in all mediating love, and into the gospel of an altruistic immortality to consist in the tiny driblet of conse- quences contributed by each human life to the future of the race,—so long as the race may happen to last,—it would puzzle even the conjuring of the Hegelian logic to suggest. It is said of Mr. J. S. Mill, that when assured by some physicist that the sun must burn itself out, and that long before that happens the earth must pass into the sterile condition of our moon, and become perfectly lifeless, he turned pale at the mere thought, for in that prediction sentence was passed on the "religion of humanity" and the gospel of earthly "Progress" which Mr. John Morley preaches. And surely Mr. Mill was right, from his point of view. A religion which depends on the eternity of astronomical conditions now existing, is not a religion at all, and most certainly is not a "development" of any form of faith in an eternal God and an immortal life for man. Development at least demands the preservation of the seminal idea, and even the most negative of the students of comparative theology would admit that the seminal idea of Judaism and Christianity is the idea of a divine descent into humanity, of light and love, from above, seeking out humility and faith beneath. Give tip that idea, and it z about as wise to talk of the prophet of the new religion developing its teachings out of the heart of his own Christianity, as it would be to talk of Copernicus and Newton det4loping ' the Ptolemaic astronomy, or Bishop Butler ' developing ' the ethics of Hobbes. We suppose that wbat Mr. Morley means is, that there ought to be some vestige of the sublime disinterestedness of the Christian ethics in the new 'religion of humanity.' But if so, it will be apparently disinterestedness of the utilitarian sort, ignoring with
holy horror any mystery of origin,—disinterestedness which feeds itself on a totally different claw of reflections, and which aims at a widely different class of ends, from those of the faiths which it aspires to supersede. If Mr. Morley and his friends could succeed, they would not diminish the jar or shock of their new ideas even in the very least degree, by their kindly considera- tion for " the sovereign legend of Pity" which they propose to dissipate. It is something, no doubt, to be able to say of each other, as Mr. Morley admits that he can of believers such as we are, and as we can of unbelievers like Mr. Morley, that mutual moral respect is easy, even while fundamental belief is so pro- foundly different. But beyond that it seems to us childish to attempt to go. To try to develop a humanitarian religion out of one grounded in God, is to attempt an intellectual juggle, not a philosophical reconciliation. After all, the jars and shocks which Mr. Morley wishes to minimise may be wholesome things. We may get far more truth out of them than out of the tentative ad- justment of radically incompatible convictions. Indeed we had hardly expected such mere wistfulness of sentiment, such im- practicable though kindly endeavour at the impossible conciliation of mutually destructive creeds, as this new chapter shows, from so robust a thinker as Mr. John Morley.
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