AIAZZINI'S CONFESSION OF FAITH.
IN a remarkable letter to the members of the CEntmenical Council which the old prophet of Italian unity and liberty has published in the new number of the Fortnightly Magazine, ISignor Mazziui contrasts, not so much with the Roman Catholic dogma, as with the popular view of the Christian dogma, his own confession of religious faith, and, as we suppose, that of a certain number of disciples,—for he speaks in the name of others, "few as yet, but earnestly believing." This exposition, though not with- out eloquence and containing a noble protest against the prevalent materialism as a certain poison for all manly political life and a final bar to human progress, is in many parts disappointingly vague and dimly outlined ; but it is possible, we think, to gather from it pretty distinctly what the main ground of Signor Mazzini's quarrel with Christianity, as a religion for the present day, is. He tries to do it full justice as a single phase of the religion of humanity, or in his own phrase, " as a beacon kindled eighteen hundred years ago to illuminate our journey across a single epoch ;" but nothing can adequately express his indignation at the attempt of Roman Christianity to transform Jesus Christ, as he asserts, "in despite of His sublimest presentiments, into an eternal and vulgar tyrant of souls." Now, without touching any of Signor Mazzini's special quarrels with the Rotnan Church, with which we have nothing to do, it may be really profitable to apprehend as clearly as we can the nature of his chief accusations against the faith in Christ as a modern religion, and of his proposed substitute.
We have already intimated that the great Italian agitator
looks at religion, we do not say by any means exclusively, but still mainly, as the spring of political virtue. Ho tells us emphatically that the faith in human " progress" is the equiva- lent which history has provided as for the old faith in the person of a perfect Son of God, and the cardinal article of the religious creed of the future. "The word Progress," he says, "represents to us not a mere scientific or historic fact, limited, it may be, to one epoch, one fraction, or one series of the acts of humanity, having neither root in the past nor pledge of duration in the future. It represents a religious conception of life radically different from yours, a divine Law, a supreme formula of the eternal, omnipotent, creative force, universal as itself." And the second distinctive word in his confession of faith, by which he seeks to discriminate it from the Christian creed, is the word "Association." "Association," lie says, "the sole method of progress is,—substituted for charity,—the religious word of the epoch." Christianity "was the religion of individual man. It did not, it could not, at its origin, contemplate collective humanity." Here, then, are the two articles of Mazzini's creed, by which chiefly he discriminates it from the Christian faith. He holds that God reveals His very essence in the gradual opening of wider and noblerdestinies to the human race; that to believe in God means, for an open mind of to-day, as much believing steadfastly and from the heart in human Progress, as it meant for the Jew believing in the Providence which had directed Jewish history, or for the Christian believing in the Father of Christ. Again, he holds that God reveals His very essence in the law gradually be- coming clearer to modern nations, that individual progress is im- possible without collective progress, that "you can only save your- self by saving others," that "God asks not,—what have you done for your soul? but,—what have you done for the brother souls I gave you ?" And he holds Christianity vitally defective on both these heads. The idea of infinite and incessant progress it had never grasped ; it contemplated instead speedy spiritual escape from an earthly condition of things too bad for progress, into a celestial world where progress would neither be needful nor pos- sible. The idea of universal co-operation, of a collective life which could not be broken up into its elements without being lost alto- gether, was completely alien from it ; the Christian doctrine was, Mazzini appears to think, save your own soul at all hazards, "for no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement with God for him," so that the trust in the heart of a nation, and still more in the inspirations of universal humanity, was impossible to the Christian as such. Note, too, that Mazzini not only elevates this law of progress, and of collective progress, into a most conspicuous and lofty place in his confession of faith, but, quite logically, in order to make more of them and especially in order to make more of them as primary expres- sions of the nature of God, lie makes comparatively light of what Christian feeling has always laid enormous stress upon, the in- exhaustible spring of self-reproach which wilful sin opens in the soul, and the sense it produces of meriting the intolerable pain through which alone it can be washed away. Mazzini, on the contrary, if he admits the fact of 'sin,' as we suppose he does, for he insists on free-will, makes as light of it as possible. He sails the original disorder of nature which is the source of temptation,—what the theologians call original sin,'—by the very inadequate word 'imperfection.' Indeed, he goes so far in his fanatical belief in human Progress as a reflection of the very essence of God, that we understand him to deny the possibility that any man can go backwards, and die a lower moral creature than he was at birth. "We believe," he says, "in an indefinite series of re-incarnations of the soul, from life to life, from world to world, each of which represents an advance from the anterior; and we reject the possibility of irrevocable perdition as a blasphemy against God, who cannot commit self-destruction in the person of the creature issued from Himself; as a negation of the law prefixed to life, and as a violation of the idea of love which is identical with God. It may be that we shall re-traverse the stage over which we have already passed, if we have not deserved to ascend beyond it, but we cannot spiritually either retrogress or perish." We need hardly remark that there is in this passage a great confusion of philosophies. If the argument that "God cannot commit self- destruction in the person of the creature issued from Himself" has any force, it is pure pantheism, and denies the human free-will for which Mazzini so zealously battles. Indeed, the argument, if sound at all, is just as sound against a single sin as against the final suicide of the soul. If you may substitute God for His crea- tures in order to prove the impossibility of perdition, you may equally make the same substitution in order to prove the impos- sibility of a single act of falsehood or impurity. "God cannot commit an insincerity or impurity in the person of the creatures issued from Himself," is just as good and just as bad reasoning as that which proves, from the nature of God, that human free-will cannot abuse itself to the point of bringing about the final extinction of the soul. And the assertion that no man can ever "retrogress," i.e., become a lower and worse being, with fewer capabilities of good and more realities of evil, than he was on entering life, is an assertion so utterly improbable in relation to experience, and so utterly inconsistent with any theory of real free-will, that Mazzini can only have got at it deductively from his notion that human progress is a positive law deeply rooted in the very essence of God. One might have supposed that a creed which admits so much to human free will that that free will may stand still (morally) against God's will, where it ought to advance, would hardly have vetoed so arbitrarily the possibility of positive retrogression. To our minds every real and therefore, of course, voluntary sin, is retrogression, retrogres- sion in the truest sense,—the lowering of the mind to a moral level below that at which it stood while the freedom to do right remained.
But the truth is that Mazzini's whole confession of faith is, to our minds, something of an afterthought drawn up to suit his political theory, which is imbedded deeper in his heart than his moral or religious theory. He asserts human free-will, for that is essential in order to present political despotism, and every kind of slavery, in its full natural blackness. The strength of the claim for free political self-government can only be felt by those who admit in man a free moral self-government, and regard it as his highest prerogative. Again, he asserts,—to our minds greatly overstates,—the "divine law" of human progress as if it were a direct revelation of God, and, moreover, a direct revelation superseding all necessity for a human incarnation of the divine character,—but it is clear that his political hatred to conservative Governments is at the root of this article of his creed. " 1Ve," he says, "who at the present day believe in the continuous revelation of God throughout the collective life of humanity, have no need of a sole immediate Revealer to teach us either to adore His power or to feel His love. The divine incarna- tion of both these attributes is perennial in the great facts which bear witness to the collectivity of life ; in the great intellects sanctified by virtue who prophesy or interpret the universal life, and in the grand aspirations of the individual conscience which foretell or accept truth." That is, infinite power and infinite love are perfectly expressed in the progress of collective humanity, and in the scattered individual minds of great men able to inter- pret its democratic law ! Now, it seems to us that such a principle may be a very useful political maxim to turn against reactionary priests and kings,—amounting, as it does, simply to saying, "Pro- vidence is always advancing, while you are for going back ;" but if presented as the true key of revelation, and the key of a revelation, moreover, which dispenses with the necessity for any individual expression of God's character, it is hardly easy to understand that Mazzini can be serious. In what has our moral progress chiefly con- sisted, except in very faintly leavening the masses with the leaven of Christ's character ? If that be not a true type of the divine, if our revelation be independent of any individual Revealer, the very gradual and slow progress towards making mankind like Him can hardly be a revelation. Mazzini confesses that no individual has ever yet in 2,000 years attained to the love of Christ for man, —in other words, that not only "collective humanity," but its highest modern specimens, are still infinitely below Christ in the highest of all human qualities. If, then, Christ himself be not the great Revealer, how is it conceivable that history, which has not yet brought the noblest specimens of collective humanity near to the level of Christ, can be a continuous revelation ? Perhaps Mazzini would admit that, morally, history does not reveal God with half the fulness with which Christ reveals Him, but would point to intellectual progress, to scientific discovery, and the growth of the arts as the continuous revelation to which he alludes. Well, no doubtscience and literature and the arts are most powerful foes to political tyranny, and they may prove that God has decreed a steady advance in the amount of human liberty; but that means a steady advance in the liberty of collective humanity to do evil as well as liberty to do good, and does not in the least dispense with the neceassity of a direct revelation of what evil and good are,—in other words, of the inner secrets of the- divine character. The freer men are, the worse as well as the better they may be.
Mazzini's confession of faith has disappointed la. Even on the points on which he criticizes Christianity as in his opinion neces- sarily imperfect, it seems to us that the Christian faith mounts. far beyond his own. Admit that the first followers of Christ expected rather to escape from earth than to renovate it, to find a spiritual country in which all human interests and earthly ties would soon become obsolete :—yet it did renovate the earth ; it did renew family life ; it did refresh the sources of political life ; it did transplant into the North of Europe the old passion of Jewish patriotism ; it did nourish the life of nations. And as to Mazzini's doctrine that Christianity is a religion for individuals, and not a faith for "collective humanity," nothing ever seemed to us more grotesque. What is St. Paul's doctrine of "the head and the members," if not the strongest conceivable faith in organic union? What is Christ's teaching as to the vine and the- branches, if not a deliberate assertion of organic union ? "The light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world" is surely no light for individuals as individuals. The Church gave a lesson of the " collectivity " of human life,—to use Mazzini's barbarous word,—such as not even Greece in its best day had ever given before ; and we cannot but think that Mazzini's reli- gious creed, noble as many of its articles are, is but a faint reflex in his moral and spiritual life of political maxims to which he clings with an enthusiasm so passionate, that he seems to find them written with letters of fire on the heavens as the last and
revelation of God,—whereas they are but secondary infer- ences from a revelation far deeper in the heart.
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