Reflections and Comments 1865 1895 by Edwin Lawrence Godkin
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Edwin Lawrence Godkin >> Reflections and Comments 1865 1895
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Of course, if we take the facts of a great many branches of physical
science by themselves, it would be easy enough to show that a good
Catholic might safely accept them. But no man can reach these facts
by investigations of his own, or hold to them intelligently and
fruitfully, without acquiring intellectual habits and making use of
tests which the church considers signs of a rebellious and therefore
sinful temper. Moreover, nobody who has attained the limits of our
present knowledge in chemistry, geology, comparative anatomy,
ethnography, philology, and mythology can stand there with closed
eyes. He must inevitably peer into the void beyond, and would be
more than human if he did not indulge in speculations as to the
history of the universe and its destiny which the church must treat
as endangering his salvation. This is so well known that one reads
the lamentations of these Catholic laymen with considerable
surprise. They may be fairly supposed to know something of church
history, and, even if they do not, they must profess some knowledge
of the teaching given by the church in those universities of other
countries which she controls. She does not encourage the study of
natural science anywhere. Mathematics and astronomy she looks on
with some favor, though we do not know how the spectroscope may have
affected her toward the latter; and we venture to assert that these
are the only fields of science in which any Catholic layman attains
distinction without forfeiting his standing in the eyes of the
clergy. We do not now speak of the French, Italian, and German
Catholic laymen who go on with their investigations without caring
whether the clergy like them or not, and without taking the trouble
to make any formal repudiation of the church's authority over their
intellects. We simply say there are no pious Catholic scientific men
of any note, and never will be if the Catholic clergy can help it,
and the lamentations of Catholics over the fact are logically
absurd.
The legislation which Prussia is now putting into force on the
subject of clerical education is founded on a candid recognition of
the church's position on this matter. Prince Bismarck is well aware
that in no seminary or college controlled by priests is there any
chance that a young man will receive the best instruction of the day
on the subjects in which the modern world is most interested, and by
which the affairs of the State are most influenced. He has,
therefore, wisely decided that it is the duty of the State to see
that men who still exert as much power over popular thought as
priests do, and are to receive State pay as popular instructors,
shall also receive the best obtainable secular education before
being subjected to purely professional training in the theological
seminaries. The desperation of the fight made against him by the
clergy is due to their well-grounded belief that in order to get a
young man in our time to swallow a fair amount of Catholic theology,
he must be caught early and kept close. The warfare which is raging
in Prussia is one which has broken out in every country in which the
government has formal relations with the church.
The appearance of a mutinous spirit among the Irish laity, and this
not on political but scientific subjects, shows that the poison has
sunk very deep and is very virulent; for the Irish laity have been
until now the foremost Catholics in the world in silence and
submissiveness, and there is nothing in ecclesiastical history which
can equal in absurdity a request, addressed to Cardinal Cullen, that
he would supply them with the kind of teaching which other men get
from Tyndall and Huxley. With ecclesiastical insubordination arising
out of differences on matters of doctrine or discipline, such as
that manifested by the Old Catholics, it is comparatively easy to
deal. Schismatics can be excommunicated by an authority which they
have themselves venerated, and from an organization in which they
loved to live and would fain have died. But over wanderers into the
fields of science the church loses all hold. Her weapons are the
jest of the museum and the laboratory, and her lore the babbling of
the ignorant or blind.
THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT
The Episcopal Church, at the late Triennial Convention, took up and
determined to make a more vigorous effort to deal with the problem
presented by the irreligion of the poor and the dishonesty of
church-members. It is an unfortunate and, at first sight, somewhat
puzzling circumstance, that so many of the culprits in the late
cases of fraud and defalcation should have been professing
Christians, and in some cases persons of unusual ecclesiastical
activity, and that this activity should apparently have furnished no
check whatever to the moral descent. It is proposed to meet the
difficulty by more preaching, more prayer, and greater use of lay
assistance in church-work. There is nothing very new, however,
about the difficulty. There is hardly a year in which it is not
deplored at meetings of church organizations, and in which solemn
promises are not made to devise some mode of keeping church-members
up to their professions, and gathering more of the church-less
working-classes into the fold; but somehow there is not much
visible progress to be recorded. The church scandals multiply in
spite of pastors and people, and the workingmen decline to show
themselves at places of worship, although the number of places of
worship and of church-members steadily increases.
We are sorry not to notice in any of the discussions on the subject
a more frank and searching examination of the reason why religion
does not act more powerfully as a rule of conduct. Until such an
examination is made, and its certain results boldly faced by church
reformers, the church cannot become any more of a help to right
living than it is now, be this little or much. The first thing which
such an examination would reveal is a thing which is in everybody's
mind and on everybody's tongue in private, but which is apt to be
evaded or only slightly alluded to at ecclesiastical synods and
conventions--we mean the loss of faith in the dogmatic part of
Christianity. People do not believe in the fall, the atonement, the
resurrection, and a future state of reward and punishment at all, or
do not believe in them with the certainty and vividness which are
needed to make faith a constant influence on man's daily life. They
do not believe they will be damned for sin with the assurance they
once did, and they are consequently indifferent to most of what is
said to them of the need of repentance. They do not believe the
story of Christ's life and the theory of his character and
attributes given in the New Testament, or they regard them as merely
a picturesque background to his moral teachings, about which a
Christian may avoid coming to any positive conclusion.
No man who keeps himself familiar with the intellectual and
scientific movements of the day, however devout a Christian he may
be, likes to question himself as to his beliefs about these matters,
or would like to have to define accurately where his faith ended and
his doubts began. If he is assailed in discussion by a sceptic and
his combativeness roused, he will probably proclaim himself an
implicit and literal acceptor of the gospel narratives; but he will
not be able to maintain this mental attitude alone in his own room.
The effort that has been made by Unitarians and others to meet this
difficulty by making Christ's influence and authority rest on his
moral teachings and example, without the support of a divine nature
or mission or sacrifice, has failed. The Christian Church cannot be
held together as a great social force by his teaching or example as
a moral philosopher. A church organized on this theory speedily
becomes a lecture association or a philanthropic club, of about as
much aid to conduct as Freemasonry. Christ's sermons need the touch
of supernatural authority to make them impressive enough for the
work of social regeneration, and his life was too uneventful and the
society in which he lived too simple, to give his example real power
over the imagination of a modern man who regards him simply as a
social reformer.
This decline of faith in Christian dogma and history has not,
however, produced by any means a decline in religious sentiment, but
it has deprived religion of a good deal of its power as a means of
moral discipline. Moral discipline is acquired mainly by the
practice of doing what one does not like to do, under the influence
of mastering fear or hope. The conquest of one's self, of which
Christian moralists speak so much, is simply the acquisition of the
power of doing easily things to which one's natural inclinations
are opposed; and in this work the mass of mankind are powerfully
aided--indeed, we may say, have to be aided--by the prospect of
reward or punishment. The wonderful results which are achieved in
the army, by military authority, in inspiring coarse and common
natures with a spirit of the loftiest devotion, are simply due to
the steady application by day and by night of a punishing and
rewarding authority. The loss of this, or its great enfeeblement,
undoubtedly has deprived the church of a large portion of its means
of discipline, and reduced it more nearly to the __role_ of a
stimulater and gratifier of certain tender emotions. It contains a
large body of persons whose religious life consists simply of a
succession of sensations not far removed from one's enjoyment of
music and poetry; and another large body, to whom it furnishes
refuge and consolation of a vague and ill-defined sort in times of
sorrow and disappointment. To these persons the church prayers and
hymns are not trumpet-calls to the battle-field, but soothing
melodies, which give additional zest to home comforts and luxuries,
and make the sharper demands of a life of the highest integrity less
unbearable. Nay, the case is rather worse than this. We have little
doubt that this sentimental religion, as we may call it, in many
cases deceives a man as to his own moral condition, and hides from
him the true character and direction of the road he is travelling,
and furnishes his conscience with a false bottom. The revelations of
the last few years as to its value as a guide in the conduct of life
have certainly been plain and deplorable.
The evil in some degree suggests the remedy, though we do not mean
to say that we know of any complete remedy. Church-membership ought
to involve discipline of some kind in order to furnish moral aid. It
ought, that is to say, to impose some restraint on people's
inclinations, the operation of which will be visible, and enforced
by some external sanction. If, in short, Christians are to be
regarded as more trustworthy and as living on a higher moral plane
than the rest of the world, they must furnish stronger evidence of
their sincerity than is now exacted from them, in the shape of plain
and open self-denial. The church, in short, must be an organization
held together by some stronger ties than enjoyment of weekly music
and oratory in a pretty building, and alms-giving which entails no
sacrifice and is often only a tickler of social vanity. There is in
monasticism a suggestion of the way in which it must retain its
power over men's lives, and be enabled to furnish them with a
certificate of character. Its members will have to have a good deal
of the ascetic about them, but without any withdrawal from the
world.
How to attain this without sacrificing the claims of art, and
denying the legitimacy of honestly acquired material power, and, in
fact, restricting individual freedom to a degree which the habits
and social theories of the day would make very odious, is the
problem to be solved, and, it is, no doubt, a very tough one.
General inculcation of "plain living" will not solve it, as long as
"plain living" is not defined and the "self-made man" who has made a
great fortune and spends it lavishly is held up to the admiration of
every school-boy. The church has been making of late years a gallant
effort to provide accommodation for the successful, and enable them
to be good Christians without sacrificing any of the good things of
this life, and, in fact, without surrendering anything they enjoy,
or favoring the outside public with any recognizable proof of their
sincerity. We do not say that this is reprehensible, but it is easy
to see that it has the seeds of a great crop of scandals in it.
Donations in an age of great munificence, and horror of far-off or
unattractive sins, like the slaveholding of Southerners and the
intemperance of the miserable poor, are not, and ought not to be,
accepted as signs of inward and spiritual grace, and of readiness to
scale "the toppling crags of duty."
The conversion of the working-classes, too, it is safe to say, will
never be accomplished by any ecclesiastical organization which sells
cushioned pews at auction, or rents them at high rates, and builds
million-dollar churches for the accommodation of one thousand
worshippers. The passion for equality has taken too strong hold of
the workingman to make it possible to catch him with cheap chapels
and assistant pastors. He will not seek salvation _in forma
pauperis_, and thinks the best talent in the ministerial market not
a whit too good for him. He not unnaturally doubts the sincerity of
Christians who are not willing to kneel beside badly dressed persons
in prayer on the one day of the week when prayer is public. In fact,
to fit the Protestant Church in this country to lay hold of the
laboring population a great process of reconstruction would be
necessary. The congregational system would have to be abandoned or
greatly modified, the common fund made larger and administered in a
different way. There would have, in short, to be a close approach to
the Roman Catholic organization, and the churches would have to lose
the character of social clubs, which now makes them so comfortable
and attractive. Well-to-do Christians would have to sacrifice their
tastes in a dozen ways, and give up the expectation of aesthetic
pleasure in public worship. There cannot be a vast Gothic cathedral
for the multitude in every city. The practice of the church would
have to be forced up to its own theory of its character and mission,
which would involve serious collision with some of the most deeply
rooted habits and ideas of modern social and political life. That
there is any immediate probability of this we do not believe. Until
it is brought about, its members must make up their minds to have
religious professions treated by some as but slight guarantees of
character, and by others as but cloaks of wrong-doing, hard as this
may be for that large majority to whom they are an honest expression
of sure hopes and noble aims.
ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS
Mr. Galton, in his work on "Hereditary Genius," has drawn attention
in a striking chapter to the effect which the systematic destruction
and expatriation, by the Inquisition or the religious intolerance of
the government, of the leading men of the nation--its boldest
thinkers, most ardent investigators, most prudent and careful and
ingenious workers, in generation after generation--had in bringing
about the moral and political decline of the three great Latin
countries, France, Spain, and Italy--a decline of which, in the case
of the two former at least, we have probably not seen the end. The
persons killed or banished amounted only to a few thousands every
year, but they were--no matter from what rank they came--the flower
of the population: the men whose labor and whose influence enabled
the State to keep its place in the march of civilization. The
picture is very valuable (particularly just now, when there is so
great a disposition to revel in the consciousness of vast numbers),
as calling attention to the smallness of the area within which,
after all, the sources of national greatness and progress are to be
sought. The mind which keeps the mass in motion, which saves and
glorifies it, would most probably, if we could lay bare the secret
of national life, be found in the possession of a very small
proportion of the people, though not in any class in particular--
neither among the rich nor the poor, the learned nor simple,
capitalists nor laborers; but the abstraction of these few from the
sum of national existence, though it would hardly be noticed in the
census, would produce a fatal languor, were the nation not
constantly receiving fresh blood from other countries.
This element was singled out with considerable accuracy in France
and Spain by religious persecution. It would happily be impossible
to devise any process of selection one-quarter as efficient in our
age or in this country. The one we have been using for the last
twenty years, and on which a good deal of popular reliance has been
placed, is the accumulation of wealth; and under this "the self-made
man"--that is, the man who, starting in life ignorant and poor, has
made a large fortune, and got control of a great many railroads and
mines and factories--has risen into the front rank of eminence. The
events of the last five years, however, have had a damaging effect
on his reputation, and he now stands as low as his worst enemies
could desire. As he declines, the man of some kind of training
naturally rises; and it would be running no great risk to affirm
that the popular mind inclines more than it has usually done to the
belief that trained men--that is, men who have been prepared for
their work by teaching on approved methods--are after all the most
valuable possession a country can have, and that a country is well
or ill off in proportion as they are numerous or the reverse. One
does not need to travel very far from this position to reach the
conclusion that there is probably no way in which we could strike so
deadly a blow at the happiness and progress of the United States as
by sweeping away, by some process of proscription kept up during a
few generations, the graduates of the principal colleges. In no
other way could we make so great a drain on the reserved force of
character, ambition, and mental culture which constitutes so large a
portion of the national vitality. They would not be missed at the
polls, it is true, and if they were to run a candidate for the
Presidency to-morrow their vote would excite great merriment among
the politicians; but if they were got rid of regularly for forty or
fifty years in the manner we have suggested, and nothing came in
from the outside to supply their places, the politicians would
somehow find that they themselves had less public money to vote or
steal, less national aspiration to trade upon, less national force
to direct, less national dignity to maintain or lose, and that, in
fact, by some mysterious process, they were getting to be of no more
account in the world than their fellows in Guatemala or Costa Rica.
There will come to the colleges of the United States during the next
fifty years a larger and larger number of men who either strongly
desire training for themselves or are the sons of men who are deeply
sensible of its advantages, and therefore are at the head of
families which possess and appreciate the traditions of high
civilization, and would like to live in them and contribute their
share to perpetuating them--and they will not come from any one
portion of the country. There are, unhappily, "universities" in all
parts of the Union, but there is hardly a doubt that as the means of
communication are improved and cheapened, and as the real nature and
value of the university education become better understood, the
tendency to use the small local institutions passing by this name
as, what they really are, high schools, and resort to the half-dozen
colleges which can honestly call themselves universities, will
increase. The demands which modern culture, owing to the advance of
science and research in every field, now makes on a university, in
the shape of professors, books, apparatus, are so great that only
the largest and wealthiest institutions can pretend to meet them,
and in fact there is something very like false pretence in the
promise to do so held out to poor students by many of the smaller
colleges. These colleges doubtless do a certain amount of work very
creditably; but they are uncandid in saying that they give a
university education, and in issuing diplomas purporting to be
certificates that any such education has either been sought or
received. The idea of maintaining a university for the sake of the
local glory of it is a form of folly which ought not to be
associated with education in any stage. These considerations are now
felt to be so powerful in other countries that they threaten the
destruction of a whole batch of universities in Italy which have
come down famous and honored from the Middle Ages and have sent out
twenty generations of students, and they are causing even the very
best of the smaller universities in Germany, great and efficient as
many of them are, to tremble for their existence.
There is no interest of learning, therefore, which would not be
served by the greater concentration of the resources of the country
as regards university education, still less is there any interest of
society or politics. It is of the last importance that the class of
men from all parts of the country whom the universities send out
into the world should as far as possible be educated together, and
start on their careers with a common stock of traditions, tastes,
and associations. Much as steam and the telegraph have done, and
will do, to diminish for administrative purposes the size of the
Republic, and to simplify the work of government, they cannot
prevent the creation of a certain diversity of interests, and even
of temperament and manners, through differences of climate and soil
and productions. There will never come a time when we shall not have
more or less of such folly as the notion that the South and West
need more money than the East, because they have less capital, or
the struggle of some parts of the country for a close market against
other parts which seek an open one. Nothing but a reign of knowledge
and wisdom, such as centuries will not bring, will prevent States on
the Gulf or on the Pacific from fancying that their interests are
not identical with those of the Northern Atlantic, and nothing but
profound modifications in the human constitution will ever bring the
California wheat-raiser into complete sympathy with the New England
shoemaker.
The work of our political system for ages to come will consist
largely in keeping these differences in check; and in doing it, it
will need all the help it can get from social and educational
influences. It ought to be the aim, therefore, of the larger
institutions of learning to offer every inducement in their power to
students from all parts of the Union, and more especially from the
South, as the region which is most seriously threatened by
barbarism, and in which the sense of national unity and the hold of
national traditions on the popular mind are now feeblest. We at the
North owe to the civilized men at the South who are now, no matter
what their past faults or delusions may have been, struggling to
save a large portion of the Union from descent into heathen darkness
and disorder, the utmost help and consideration. We owe them above
all a free and generous welcome to a share in whatever means of
culture we have at our disposal, and ought to offer it, as far as is
consistent with our self-respect, in a shape that will not wound
theirs.
The question of the manner of doing this came up incidentally at
Harvard the other day, at the dedication of the great hall erected
in memory of the graduates of the university who died in the war.
The hall is to be used for general college purposes, for
examinations, and some of the ceremonial of commencement, as well as
for dinner, and a portion of the walls is covered with tablets
bearing the names of those to whose memory it is dedicated. The
question whether the building would keep alive the remembrance of
the civil war in any way in which it is inexpedient to keep it
alive, or in any way which would tend to keep Southern students away
from the university, has been often asked, and by some answered in
the affirmative. General Devens, who presided at the alumni dinner,
gave full and sufficient answer to those who find fault with the
rendering of honor on the Northern side to those who fell in its
cause; but General Bartlett--who perhaps more than any man living is
qualified to speak for those who died in the war--uttered, in a
burst of unpremeditated eloquence, at the close of the proceedings,
the real reason why no Southern man need, and we hope will never,
feel hurt by Northern memorials of the valor and constancy of
Northern soldiers. It is not altogether the cause which ennobles
fighting; it is the spirit in which men fight; and no horror of the
objects of the Southern insurrection need prevent anybody from
admiring or lamenting the gallant men who honestly, loyally, and
from a sense of duty perished in its service. It is not given to the
wisest and best man to choose the right side; but the simplest and
humblest knows whether it is his conscience which bids him lay down
his life. And this test may be applied by each side to all the
victims of the late conflict without diminishing by one particle its
faith in the justice of its own cause. Moreover, as General Bartlett
suggested, the view of the nature of the struggle which is sure to
gain ground all over the country as the years roll on is that it was
a fierce and passionate but inevitable attempt to settle at any cost
a controversy which could be settled in no other way; and that all
who shared in it, victors or vanquished, helped to save the country
and establish its government on sure and lasting foundations. This
feeling cannot grow without bringing forcibly to mind the fact that
the country was saved through the war that virtue might increase,
that freedom might spread and endure, and that knowledge might rule,
and not that politicians might have a treasury to plunder and marble
halls to exchange their vituperation in; thus uniting the best
elements of Northern and Southern society by the bonds of honest
indignation as well as of noble hopes.
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