Kitabı oku: «Satires and Profanities», sayfa 13

PRINCIPAL TULLOCH ON PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

[two excerpts.]

(1877.)

Dr. Tulloch has the sense to perceive and the candor to acknowledge that even to those who have not any faith in God or Immortality, death need not be terrible, and often is not; that they may be resigned or peaceful, and meet the inevitable with a calm front; that they may be even glad to be done with the struggle of existence. Of course this is no news to us who have stood at the bedside of dying Materialists and Atheists, or are familiar with trustworthy well-authenticated accounts of the last hours of such persons. Still it is encouraging to find a distinguished and influential minister openly recognising the facts, instead of distorting them with the old contemptible pious fictions, again and again repeated after being again and again refuted. But Dr. Tulloch considers that only the light of the higher life in Christ can glorify death. It would have been well had he been more specific as to this higher life and the glory it casts on death. If they are as described at length in the only authoritative Christian Scripture on the subject, the Book of Revelation, it seems to me that the life is anything but high, and radiates anything but glory. However, tastes differ, and man is a queer fellow; and there may actually exist many people who would prefer to annihilation a sort of everlasting Moody and Sankey meeting, and would even regard this as celestial beatitude. Concerning such I will only say with Goethe, I hope I shan’t go to heaven with that lot! Yet these are not quite the lowest of the low in our civilised Christendom; or are there not many who look forward with complacency and even enthusiasm to a life beyond death, wherein they shall be largely employed in rapping tables, jogging arms and scrawling illiterate nonsense? Dr. Tulloch, in quoting St. Paul, seems to forget that he was writing of himself and his fellow Christians, to whom his words were thoroughly applicable; not of mankind in general, to whom they were not, and by the construction of the sentence could not be. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most miserable;” we, the Christians. And why would they be of all men the most miserable? Clearly because, in obedience to the injunctions of their Master, they had cut themselves off from this world that they might secure the next; had renounced wealth, honor, society, enjoyment, all interest in art, science, literature, all political and national aspirations, and had courted obloquy and persecution; so that if the next life should turn out to be a mockery, a delusion and a snare, they were of all men the most miserable, being the most miserably deluded. Those poor simple early Christians (on the showing, true or false, of the books all Christians revere as sacred and divine), having only Jesus and his apostles to instruct them, had not reached that lofty mercantile wisdom which made the late Mr. Binney one of the most popular preachers in our pious and mercantile country, when he solved the problem of How to Make the Best of Both Worlds. Of other-worldliness they indeed had enough and to spare; but they lacked the large modern grasp which combines and intermingles it with an equal measure of this worldliness. “They didn’t know everything down in Judee;” and St. Paul, though fairly intelligent and cultivated for his benighted time, was in a deplorable need of some lessons from Weigh-house Chapel.

When the worthy Principal says that men cannot find strength or comfort in what has been called the Religion of Humanity, and that they crave a personal life, is he aware that he has descended from the highlands of morality and truth to the lowest lowlands of Paley and Binney expediency? Is he aware that he is moreover begging the question, making the monstrous assumption that men must get what they crave? I call this the childish lollipop attraction of religion, so absurd as to be really beneath the contempt of full-grown men and women. Just as young ones would look forward to having the free range as long as they liked (which they would interpret for ever and ever) of shops full of sweeties, so those big babies, our dear simple Christian brethren, look forward to their Lubberland of eternal bliss, in singing Glory! Glory! Glory! Their claim to it is purely the infant’s, because they would like it. Their mouths water, they lick their lips, they gurgle luxuriously with the foretaste: “Oh, we shall be so ’ap-’ap-’appy! Canaan is a happy place; we’ll go to the land of Canaan!” And usually these beatific adult babies are creatures such as an intelligent man would be ashamed to bring into the world, much more a God. You can’t endure an hour of their society here, and they pester you to come and spend eternity with them! I am really sorry to find Dr. Tulloch in such company.

In conclusion, I ask the reader to note especially the preacher’s avowal that his faith in personal immortality has no warrant from Nature, no warrant from Science; nay, more, that the suggestions of scientific analysis “mockingly sift the sources of life only to hint our mortality.” There is indeed no temper of mockery in Science, but its soberest deductions may well seem to mock with a terrible derision the inordinate greed and self-conceit of men, who, because they profess an unscientific and unnatural faith, have lost all sense of proportion between their infinitesimal selves and the infinite Universe.

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH

Its Real As Distinguished From Its Apparent Strength

(1862.)

In discussions with “Infidels,” Churchmen are very ready with the taunt, “You are but a handful of’ fanatics. Nearly the whole intellect of the nation is for us and against you.” In general the taunt is merely parried by a “What matter, if we are right?” whereas it should also be retorted by a counter-thrust of denial. For, in truth, but a very small part of the intellect of the nation —i. e., intellect in the only sense in which it is of importance —active intellect, is devoted to the Establishment or even to the Establishment and the so-called Dissenters combined. If they only are the true soldiers of the Church militant whom she spiritually feeds and equips for the warfare of life, and who are loyal to her with their whole heart and mind, how many legions must be deducted from the armies gathered round her banners before we can fairly estimate her actual power in the field! Should Jesus come to eliminate his true followers from the multitudes of professing Christians, as Gideon selected his, three hundred from the two and thirty thousand Israelites, let us consider whom he would reject.

First, all the cowards and hypocrites who simply cling to what appears the dominant party, and who would therefore call themselves Atheists were Atheism in the ascendant; a vile brood, the incumbrance and disgrace of every cause they adopt; “hateful to God and to the enemies of God”; of whom even to write is not pleasant.

Secondly, the indifferent through lack of vitality; men of tepid heart and inert brain, who are incapable of any strong sane affection. I use the word sane because these creatures have intense self-love, which in its essence is insane; and because also they may be frenzied by the drunkenness of fanaticism, in which state they can die as devotedly as they can murder atrociously. The adhesion of these also I count no gain to any cause.

Thirdly, the indifferent through excess of vitality, including the most eminent “practical” men, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, engineers, statesmen. These, applying their whole energies to their several professions, rarely trouble themselves with theological any more than with other extraneous matters, but passively acquiesce in whatever creed may be prevalent around them. Their real church is the world; their real worship is labor; and they no more add to the strength of their nominal church than did the savants to that of Napoleon’s army in Egypt – those savants whom the wise Napoleon always ordered (with the donkeys) to the centre whenever an attack was expected. To these must be added all the men whom we call fine animals, who enjoy such a red-blooded life in this world that they are not subject to bilious forebodings of another. Some classes of the most famous men – the poets, philosophers, doctors, physicists, mathematicians – are commanded by their very vocations to think seriously on some of the great theological questions, and therefore, whether ranged for or against the Church, count for something. The reader must ask his memory whether their weight in the balance has preponderated for orthodoxy or for heterodoxy. The statesmen I have counted among the indifferent, because their support of religion, in whatever form, has been almost universally no more than political.

Fourthly, the supersubtle, including laymen and divines of first-rate talent; who cannot help delighting in the exercise of their skill of fence, and who instinctively feel that it is much harder to champion any existing institution than to attack it, and naturally (like all unconquerable knights-errant) prefer the most difficult devoir. Their adhesion to the Church, therefore, though seeming to strengthen it, really proclaims its weakness. Macaulay tells us how Halifax, the Trimmer, always joined the losing side.

Fifthly, the supremely reverential, including the very best of the laymen and divines; men whose lofty reason is drowned in a yet deeper faith, as mountain-peaks high as the highest in air are said to be submerged in the abysses of the Atlantic. In many cases these might be ranked in the preceding class; for it is a general rule that the more reverence, the more subtlety. They see – how clearly! – the flaws and imperfections of their Church, they even realise the danger of its total fall; but they cannot tear themselves away from the venerable building wherein all their forefathers worshipped, in whose consecrated precincts all their forefathers were buried in hopes of a happy resurrection; whose chants were the rapturous music and whose windows were the heavenly glories of their pure childhood; whose prayers they repeated night after night and morning after morning at their mother’s knee. Can they leave this, with all its treasured holiness of antiquity for some new bold glaring erection, wherein men certainly congregate ta talk about God, but which might just as well be used as a warehouse or a manufactory? No; rather than leave it they will believe, they will force themselves to believe, that some miraculous renovation is at hand, or that (as the structure was certainly raised by God) God will uphold it in spite of the law of gravitation. These are the men who keep the Church from falling into insignificance, but they are not essentially hers. It is not she alone whom they could thus worship. Had they been brought up idolators, idolatry must have retained almost the same influence over spirits so reverentially humble, so loving and pure.

And here it may be remarked that one can scarcely conceive a Church so frail and gloomy and even vile, but that a fervent soul and a strong intellect could fortify it with argument, adorn it with the gold and jewels of imagination, illustrate its dark altars and vivify its dead idols with the burning fire of spirituality, until it should be far more noble and mighty and splendid than ever was aspired to by the majority of men. But mark, such men as these of whom I speak do not derive their religiousness from, but really bestow it upon the Church in which they pray. She is subject and indebted to them, not they to her. She does not nourish them, they nourish her. She is the statue, they are Pygmalion. And they are indeed idolators, for they worship a creation of their own souls. Perhaps Pygmalion himself fell down and adored his flushed and breathing statue, thinking her, with artist-reverence, nothing less than a transformation of Venus Urania. When one thinks of certain noble men and women – as Maurice and Kingsley, Ruskin and the Browning – devoting themselves in spite of themselves to an effete faith, one is sadly reminded of poor Abishag the Shunammite wasting and withering her healthful youth to cherish old worn-out David, “who knew her not,” who could fill her with no new life, and who was, despite her cherishing, so certainly near death. He had been a great king in his time, but now his time was past, and as it was now the maiden’s spring-time, he should have left her to live her proper life.

But when all these are separated from the host, who are left to whom we may point in answer to Emerson’s question, “In Christendom, where is the Christian?” Strictly speaking there has never been but one Christian – the man Christ Jesus. But I would give the title to those who thoroughly believe the Bible after having investigated it to the best of their power, who find its doctrines completely satisfy them, and who sincerely endeavor to act up to those doctrines. How many of such are there? I have known perhaps half a dozen. Has any reader known many more? Will any one dare assert that they are more numerous in England than the equally sincere Secularists or Atheists? I scarcely think any honest and thoughtful person will.

FINIS.