R. W. Boodle

“ Yes! these laws are divine—not because we can see the legislator, not because they were supported in the past by supernaturalism; but because they rest upon our subjective consciousness, supported by science, by poetry, and the history of the life of man upon the earth; because they are vouched for by voices, of the wise in all ages, and because they have become part of ourselves. ”

“ The author of 'Ecce Homo' seems to us content to find a natural religion in that which is neither natural nor religious—not natural, because, in spite of the paradox, it is in the highest sense natural to man to lean on something beyond Nature; not religious, because religion means something which is binding, something which we can not in our hearts defy, and we can in our hearts defy any power which only threatens us with extinction, and does not threaten us with inextinguishable remorse. ”

“ There is no end of 'natural religion' in the mere discovery of human free-will, for that is the discovery that the adamantine chain of physical necessity has been and is interrupted by the will of man itself—a discovery utterly inconsistent with the favorite scientific view. ”

“ In one word, is life worth having, and the Universe a habitable place for one in whom the sense of duty has been awakened?" (p. 61) . On the other hand, natural religion is "worship of whatever in the known Universe appears worthy of worship," it "is no mere dull morality, for in the first place it is far wider than any morality, being as wide as modern culture, and in the second place, so far as it is moral and bears fruit in morality, even here it is no mere morality, but an historic religion of humanity" (p. 172) . ”

“ It is therefore ridiculously wide of the truth to boast, as the clerical mind is inclined to do, that Christianity has weathered the storm, that she will pass into the twentieth century unaltered in essentials. This is fully recognized by the author of "Natural Religion." "The Church," he writes, "has now entered upon that phase when minds of the higher order are seldom found to receive its ancient dogmas with complete conviction, when they do not altogether belong to it, even when they most admire it, and most appreciate the service it has rendered to mankind. ”

“ The religion of men in the middle ages was their poetry, their science, their consolation for the ills of life; it made mankind better, but did not consciously aim at making the world a better place to dwell in; their eyes were turned to a resting-place above, for which life on earth was at best a school of discipline. The supposition upon which these beliefs rested, "that our living nature will continue after death," [8] we can rest upon with confidence no longer—it is at best but an aspiration ”

“ Therefore, the human race at its best depends on the unity which is in will. But this can not be unless there be one will to be the single mistress and regulating influence of all the rest. And this can not be unless there is one prince over all, whose will shall be the mistress and regulating influence of all the others. But if all these conclusions be true, as they are, it is necessary for the highest welfare of the human race that there should be a Monarch in the world; and, therefore, Monarchy is necessary for the good of the world. ”

“ Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. ”

“ He begins by stating the problem before us: "Two opposite theories of the universe are in conflict. On the one side is the greatest of all affirmations, on the other the most fatal of all negations. There never yet was a controversy which was not trivial in comparison with this. It is cruel trifling to speak of compromise, it is waste of time to draw verbal distinctions." And then, after two hundred pages of verbal distinctions, many of which are really no better, a compromise is effected upon the basis of natural religion, which is also natural Christianity without its supernaturalism. ”

“ For just as the earliest scientific psychology cheerfully recognized the two sides of the human mind the—rational and the irrational—as equally necessary, equally human, so in an altered sense we may say that the religion of humanity, as it springs from the human heart, must not only take cognizance of its justifiable aspirations, but of those hopes and fears also which in a strict sense of the word we might be tempted to call irrational, as in no sense founded on reason, if not in direct antagonism with it. ”

“ When the supernatural does not come in to overwhelm the natural and turn life upside down, when it is admitted that religion deals in the first instance with the known and the natural, then we may well begin to doubt whether the known and the natural can suffice for human life. ”

“ Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasms, or the 'enthusiasm of humanity.' Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. ”

“ Undoubtedly much less of love and goodness can be discovered in Nature than Christians see in God. But when it is said that there are no such qualities in Nature, that Nature consists of relentless and ruthless laws, that Nature knows nothing of forgiveness, and inexorably exacts the utmost penalty for every transgression, a confusion is made between two different meanings which may be given to the word Nature. We are concerned here with Nature as opposed to that which is above Nature, not with Nature as opposed to man. ”

“ We do not differ from this able writer in thinking that there is such a thing as 'natural religion,' but we do differ from him when he asserts there is such a thing for one who declines, or is unable, to discover in the universe traces of a superphysical, we would rather say, than a supernatural, Power—that is, traces of a power to mold and modify that in nature which is physical, in the direction and for the purposes of that in nature which is not physical, but mental and moral. ”

“ The impression one gets from such a poem is one of despair; the agnostic tone is quite as pronounced as that of any writer at the present day; but there is much less hope, no outlook into the future, no talk of the future destiny of humanity, which, however vague and dreamy, is better than the dead level of an agnostic introspection. And yet this poem was written by one whose contemporary writings are quite free from this despairing tone, who has faith in a tendency not ourselves, and believes that we can learn something of it from the Bible and the best literature of all ages. ”

“ Art and science not only claim to be completely free from the power of Church dictation; they have set up, so to speak, an opposition Church. Science was emancipated in 1874, it has since turned its attention to the construction of a scientific morality. The "Data of Ethics" appeared in 1879, but long before this science had shown itself capable of rising to the enthusiasm of a religion, and we have to thank the author of "The New Paul and Virginia" for laboriously collecting the utterances of men of science upon this point in the notes appended to that work. ”

“ The real secret of the persistence of the supernatural in an age of science is the tacit allowance that "what can not be demonstrated by observation not to exist may be taken as existing for purposes of edification." ”

“ The sparrow flies in at one door, and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other vanishes into the wintry dankness whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of man in our sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not. ”

“ These arguments, I thought, in the "Be Monarchia," are exactly the arguments we hear urged every day in favor of the existence of a personal will in the government of the universe. Yet it may be possible that, as society has managed to exist and to improve without the existence of the former, so our moral and religious life will continue practically unaltered without the conscious recognition of the latter. ”

“ Since the whole heaven is regulated with one motion, to wit, that of the primum mobile, and by one mover, who is God, in all its parts, movements, and movers (and this human reason readily seizes from science) ; therefore, if our argument be correct, the human race is at its best state when, both in its movements and in regard to those who move it, it is regulated by a single Prince, as by the single movement of heaven, and by one law, as by a single motion. ”

“ We use it as a name comprehending all the uniform laws of the Universe as known in our experience, and excluding such laws as are inferred from experiences so exceptional and isolated as to be difficult of verification. In this sense Nature is not heartless or unrelenting; to say so would be equivalent to saying that pity and forgiveness are in all cases supernatural. It may be true that the law of gravitation is quite pitiless, that it will destroy the most innocent and amiable person with as little hesitation as the wrong-doer. ”

“ And what would Natural Religion avail then?" We have, then, to remember that this attempt to establish a harmony between orthodoxy and the votaries of art and science, upon the minimum basis of a faith without a personal God and without miracles, is a compromise honestly offered by one who himself apparently still cherishes these beliefs. It is a fair attempt to arrive at some understanding by sinking out of sight the points upon which people differ, and by bringing into prominence their points of agreement. ”

“ With this school also we may class Max Müller's "Lectures on the Science of Language," which appeared in 1861, as tending to widen the conception of evolution. Of the effects of this new view of life upon religious thought it is not too much to say that, if it cut the ground from under the intuitionalist theory of right and wrong, and of the origin of conscience, to the skeptic in regard to supernaturalism it gave a prospect and a future glorious with hope. To many minds the ascent of man serves a more glorious conception than his fall. ”

“ These disbeliefs may be as serious in their way as atheism, but they are different. Atheism is a disbelief in the existence of God—that is, a disbelief in any regularity in the Universe to which a man must conform himself under penalties." The religion of the future must combine all three worships. In the individual the results will be practically equivalent to culture, in the aggregate to civilization. ”

“ Whether they say God, or prefer to say Nature, the important thing is that their minds are filled with the sense of a Power to all appearances infinite and eternal, a Power to which their own being is inseparably connected, in the knowledge of whose ways alone are safety and well-being, in the contemplation of which they find a beatific vision. ”

“ Our author begins by pointing to the divinity of nature as the common ground between Christianity and science. The real issue is not between theism and atheism, for science is in a very real sense a theology, and believers in nature have many of the feelings of Christians for their deity. ”

“ We shall better understand the nature of the epoch in which we are living, and be able to appreciate how far the author of "Natural Religion" is justified in offering what appears at first sight a one-sided eirenicon. In my review I will begin from the year 1850, not only because it is a convenient starting-point as the half-century, but because it is marked by the publication of Tennyson's "In Memoriam," a poem which, in its own day, appeared to many people, like Pope's "Essay on Man" a century before, a convincing answer to the cavils of free-thinkers. ”

“ Yet, we are not, for all that, obliged to postulate an essence above and beyond human reason, as the cause of these emotions and sentiments. Rather, they are the gropings of the human spirit in its efforts—efforts ever to be renewed and ever baffled—to comprehend the Unknowable. ”

“ And to those who have faith in the future of humanity, in the eventual evolution of a verifiable and complete science of life, such a mixture of the strands of religious consciousness will cause no uneasiness. ”

“ Such a temporary depression of tone was a natural result of the conflict through which the age had been passing.
But other and more important results followed. It is unequivocally recognized, by most writers of eminence, that Christianity can no longer look to its supernatural elements for support—nay, more, that the excellence of some parts of its morality can not even receive credence for their inferential elements; at least they have to be definitely discarded as a necessary part of faith, if Christianity intends to bid for the allegiance of the intellectual portion of mankind. ”

“ Each is, to some individuals, a faith in itself, because it lifts them above mere materialism, above conventionalism, above the ordinary run of men; in short, above what our author calls, boldly, atheism. "An atheist, in the proper sense of the word," he writes, "is not a man who disbelieves in the goodness of God, or in His distinctness from Nature, or in His personality. ”

“ We now come to the two celebrated years 1873 and 1874—years of open utterance on all sides, and which we may look upon as the crisis of the revolution of thought. In these years appeared the first two volumes of "Supernatural Religion," an elaborate investigation from two points of view into the foundations of Christianity, and Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Dogma," an attempt to rehabilitate Christianity, while openly recognizing the futility of all attempts to base it upon miracles or the supernatural. Christianity was to remain in force, but without a personal God. ”