Читать книгу Modern Substitutes for Christianity - Pearson M'Adam Muir - Страница 17

A curious illustration of the fact that Morality, to be permanent, needs the inspiration of Religion, that Morality, at its best and purest, tends to become Religion, is afforded in such a work as Dr. Stanton Coit's National Idealism and a State Church. Dr. Coit has for twenty years been engaged in founding ethical societies, and his high and disinterested aims need not be called in question. But the book is evidence that in order to support the lofty principles which he so earnestly expounds, he is obliged to call in the aid of principles which he imagined himself to have discarded. He begins by denying the Supernatural in every shape and form. He will have none of a personal God, or of a personal immortality. There is no higher being than Man. All trust must be shifted from supernatural to human agencies. 'Combined human foresight, the general will of organised society, assumes the rôle of Creative Providence.' 'This is, then, the presupposition of all moral judgment in harmony with which I would reconstruct the religions of the world: that no crime and no good deed that happens in this world shall ever be traced to any other moral agencies than those actually inhabiting living human bodies and recognised by other human beings as fit subjects of human rights and privileges.' In other words, Morality, Morality alone, Morality without any sanction from Above, or any hope from Beyond, is the all-sufficient strength and ennoblement of man.

But what is the superstructure which Dr. Stanton Coit proceeds to build upon this foundation? One would naturally expect that Prayer and Churches and Sacraments would have no place. But these are exactly what he insists on retaining; these will apparently be more important, more necessary, in the future than in the past. 'We should appropriate and adapt the materials furnished us by the rites and ceremonies of the historic Church. As the woodbird, bent on building her nest, in lieu of better materials makes it of leaves and of feathers from her breast, so may we use what is familiar, old, and close at hand. It is all ours; and the homelike beauty of the Church of the future will be enhanced by the ancient materials wrought into its new forms.' So much enhanced, indeed, that most people will be inclined to tolerate the new forms simply because of the ancient materials which are allowed to remain. Among the ancient materials which Dr. Coit appropriates or adapts, prayer occupies a prominent place. And he is severe upon those, e.g., Comte and Dr. Congreve, who would banish petition from the sphere of worship. He delights in pointing out that, in despite of themselves, they include requests for personal blessings. Nor is prayer to be a mere aspiration or inarticulate longing of the soul. 'No mental activity can become definite, coherent, and systematic, and remain so, except it be embodied and repeated in words. … A petition that does not, or cannot, or will not, formulate itself in words, and let the lips move to shape them, and the voice to sound them, and the eye to visualise them on the written or printed page, becomes soon a mere torpor of the mind, or a meaningless movement of blind unrest, or a trick of pretending to pray. Perfected prayer is always spoken.'

To whom, or to what, this prayer, uttered or unexpressed, is to be offered, may be difficult of comprehension. It is not to God, as we have hitherto employed that sacred name; but Dr. Coit insists that the word 'God' shall be retained, and that we have no right to deny to this God the attribute of Personality. 'Any one who worships either a concrete social group or an abstract moral quality may justly protest against the charge that his God is impersonal: he may insist that it is either superpersonal or interpersonal, or both.' The worship of Nature appears to be discouraged, and to be considered as of comparatively little worth. 'We dare never forget that moral qualities stand to us in a different dynamic relation from the grass and the stars and the sea—no effects upon us or upon these will result from petitions even of a most righteous man to them. But no one can deny that prayers to Purity, Serenity, Faith, Humanity, England, Man, Woman, to Milton, to Jesus, do create a new moral heaven and a new earth for him who thirsts after righteousness.' Leaving the name of our Lord out of the discussion, why should a prayer to Serenity have more moral influence than a prayer to the Sea? Why should a prayer to the Stars be less efficacious than a prayer to Milton, whose soul was like a star and dwelt apart? We have only to invest the stars and the sea with certain qualities evolved from our own imagination to make them as worthy of worship as either Milton or Serenity. Dr. Coit is scathing in his criticism of the Positivist prayers, whether of Comte or of Dr. Congreve: they are 'screamingly funny': 'the most monstrous absurdity ever perpetrated by a really good and great man.' The epithets are possibly justified; but are they quite inapplicable to one who supposes that an invocation of the Living and Eternal God means no more than an invocation of England, or Faith, or Woman? It is only when God has become to us an abstraction that an abstraction can take the place of God.

A manual of services fitted to a nation's present needs is what, according to Dr. Coit, is required to ensure the progress and triumph of the ethical movement. 'Until the new idealism possesses its own manual of religious ritual, it cannot communicate effectively its deeper thought and purpose. The moment, however, it has invented such a means of communication, it would seem inevitable that a rapid moral and intellectual advancement of man must at last take place, equal in speed and in beneficence to the material advancement which followed during the last century in the wake of scientific inventions.' The ritual of ethical societies will not outwardly differ much from the ritual to be found in existing religions. Its details have yet to be arranged or 'invented.' The only things certain are that a book of prayers ought to be provided at once, and that in Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise may be found an 'anthology of prayer suitable for use in the Church of Humanity,' prayers 'as sublime and quickening in melody and passion as anything in the Hebrew prophets or the Litany of the Church.'

Dr. Coit does not denounce theology as theology, he even insists on being himself ranked among theologians. His readers may be surprised to learn on what doctrines he dwells with particular fondness. He laments that belief in the existence and power of the devil should be waning. 'We may not believe in a personal devil, but we must believe in a devil who acts very like a person.' He predicts that teachers will more and more teach a doctrine of hell-fire. Out of kindness they will terrify by presenting the evil effects, indirect and remote, of selfish thoughts and dispositions. 'We must frighten people away from the edge of the abyss which begins this side of death.' Finally, though, of course, the word is not used in the ordinary sense, the necessity of the doctrine of the Incarnation is upheld. 'The Incarnation must for ever remain a fundamental conception of religion. Until all men are incarnations of the principle of constructive moral beneficence, and to a higher degree, Jesus will remain pre-eminent; and it is quite possible that in proportion as he is approached, gratitude to him will increase rather than diminish.' 'Even should any one ever in the future transcend him, still it will only be by him and in glad acknowledgment of the debt to him. There never can in the future be a dividing of the world into Christianity and not Christianity. It will only be a new and more Christian Christianity, compatible with liberty and reason.'

Thus the drift and tendency of this book bring us back, however unintentionally, to the Faith of which it appears, at first sight, to be the renunciation. It establishes irresistibly that Morality, to be living and permanent, must have religious sanction and inspiration, that we need to be delivered from the awful thraldom of evil, that the supreme realities are the things which are unseen; that prayer is the life of the soul; that public worship is a necessity; that in Christ the greatest redemptive power has been embodied, and the purest vision of the Eternal has been granted; and that, in its adaptation to human needs, its fostering of human aspirations, its ministering to human sorrows, its renewal of human penitence, its consecration of life and its hope in death, no Ethical Society yet devised gives any symptom of being able to supplant the Church of Him Who said, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.'