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Edward Caldwell Moore by Edward Moore

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Our most profitable mode of procedure would seem to be this. We shall
seek to follow, as we may, those few main movements of thought marking
the nineteenth century which have immediate bearing upon our theme. We
shall try to register the effect which these movements have had upon
religious conceptions. It will not be possible at any point to do more
than to select typical examples. Perhaps the true method is that we
should go back to the beginnings of each one of these movements. We
should mark the emergence of a few great ideas. It is the emergence of
an idea which is dramatically interesting. It is the moment of emergence
in which that which is characteristic appears. Our subject is far too
complicated to permit that the ramifications of these influences should
be followed in detail. Modifications, subtractions, additions, the
reader must make for himself.

These main movements of thought are, as has been said, three in number.
We shall take them in their chronological order. There is first the
philosophical revolution which is commonly associated with the name of
Kant. If we were to seek with arbitrary exactitude to fix a date for the
beginning of this movement, this might be the year of the publication of
his first great work, _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, in 1781.[1] Kant was
indeed himself, both intellectually and spiritually, the product of
tendencies which had long been gathering strength. He was the exponent
of ideas which in fragmentary way had been expressed by others, but he
gathered into himself in amazing fashion the impulses of his age. Out
from some portion of his works lead almost all the paths which
philosophical thinkers since his time have trod. One cannot say even of
his work, _Der Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft_,
1793, that it is the sole source, or even the greatest source, of his
influence upon religious thinking. But from the body of his work as a
whole, there came a new theory of knowledge which has changed completely
the notion of revelation. There came also a view of the universe as an
ideal unity which, especially as elaborated by Fichte, Schelling and
Hegel, has radically altered the traditional ideas of God, of man, of
nature and of their relations, the one to the other.

[Footnote 1: In the text the titles of books which are discussed are
given for the first time in the language in which they are written.
Books which are merely alluded to are mentioned in English.]

We shall have then, secondly, to note the historical and critical
movement. It is the effort to apply consistently and without fear the
maxims of historical and literary criticism to the documents of the Old
and New Testaments. With still greater arbitrariness, and yet with
appreciation of the significance of Strauss' endeavour, we might set as
the date of the full impact of this movement upon cherished religious
convictions, that of the publication of his _Leben Jesu_, 1835. This
movement has supported with abundant evidence the insight of the
philosophers as to the nature of revelation. It has shown that that
which we actually have in the Scriptures is just that which Kant, with
his reverence for the freedom of the human mind, had indicated that we
must have, if revelation is to be believed in at all. With this changed
view has come an altered attitude toward many statements which devout
men had held that they must accept as true, because these were found in
Scripture. With this changed view the whole history, whether of the
Jewish people or of Jesus and the origins of the Christian Church, has
been set in a new light.

In the third place, we shall have to deal with the influence of the
sciences of nature and of society, as these have been developed
throughout the whole course of the nineteenth century. If one must have
a date for an outstanding event in this portion of the history, perhaps
that of the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, 1859, would
serve as well as any other. The principles of these sciences have come
to underlie in a great measure all the reflection of cultivated men in
our time. In amazing degree they have percolated, through elementary
instruction, through popular literature, and through the newspapers, to
the masses of mankind. They are recognised as the basis of a triumphant
material civilisation, which has made everything pertaining to the inner
and spiritual life seem remote. Through the social sciences there has
come an impulse to the transfer of emphasis from the individual to
society, the disposition to see everything in its social bearing, to do
everything in the light of its social antecedents and of its social
consequences. Here again we have to note the profoundest influence upon
religious conceptions. The very notion connected with the words
redemption and salvation appears to have been changed.

In the case of each of these particular movements the church, as the
organ of Christianity, has passed through a period of antagonism to
these influences, of fear of their consequences, of resistance to their
progress. In large portions of the church at the present moment the
protest is renewed. The substance of these modern teachings, which yet
seem to be the very warp and woof of the intellectual life of the modern
man, is repudiated and denounced. It is held to imperil the salvation of
the soul. It is pronounced impossible of combination with belief in a
divinely revealed truth concerning the universe and a saving faith for
men. In other churches, outside the churches, the forms in which men
hold their Christianity have been in large measure adjusted to the
results of these great movements of thought. They have, as these men
themselves believe, been immensely strengthened and made sure by those
very influences which were once considered dangerous.

In connection with this indication of the nature of our materials, we
have sought to say something of the time of emergence of the salient
elements. It may be in point also to give some intimation of the place
of their origins, that is to say, of the participation of the various
nationalities in this common task of the modern Christian world. That
international quality of scholarship which seems to us natural, is a
thing of very recent date. That a discovery should within a reasonable
interval become the property of all educated men, that scholars of one
nation should profit by that which the learned of another land have
done, appears to us a thing to be assumed. It has not always been so,
especially not in matters of religious faith. The Roman Church and the
Latin language gave to medieval Christian thought a certain
international character. Again the Renaissance and Reformation had a
certain world wide quality. The relations of the English Church in the
reigns of the last Tudors to Germany, Switzerland, and France are not to
be forgotten. But the life of the Protestant national churches in the
eighteenth century shows little of this trait. The barriers of language
counted for something. The provincialism of national churches and
denominational predilections counted for more.

In the philosophical movement we must begin with the Germans. The
movement of English thought known as deism was a distinct forerunner of
the rationalist movement, within the particular area of the discussion
of religion. However, it ran into the sand. The rationalist movement,
considered in its other aspects, never attained in England in the
eighteenth century the proportions which it assumed in France and
Germany. In France that movement ran its full course, both among the
learned and, equally, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the
unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it
more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for
years cried, '_Ecrasez l'infame_,' and Rousseau preached that the youth
would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had
had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many
minds no alternative between clericalism and atheism. Quite logically,
therefore, after the downfall of the Republic and of the Empire there
set in a great reaction. Still it was simply a reversion to the absolute
religion of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth by the Jesuit party.
There was no real transcending of the rationalist movement in France in
the interest of religion. There has been no great constructive movement
in religious thought in France in the nineteenth century. There is
relatively little literature of our subject in the French language until
recent years.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rationalist movement had always had
over against it the great foil and counterpoise of the pietist movement.
Rationalism ran a much soberer course than in France. It was never a
revolutionary and destructive movement as in France. It was not a
dilettante and aristocratic movement as deism had been in England. It
was far more creative and constructive than elsewhere. Here also before
the end of the century it had run its course. Yet here the men who
transcended the rationalist movement and shaped the spiritual revival in
the beginning of the nineteenth century were men who had themselves been
trained in the bosom of the rationalist movement. They had appropriated
the benefits of it. They did not represent a violent reaction against
it, but a natural and inevitable progress within and beyond it. This it
was which gave to the Germans their leadership at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in the sphere of the intellectual life. It is worthy
of note that the great heroes of the intellectual life in Germany, in
the period of which we speak, were most of them deeply interested in the
problem of religion. The first man to bring to England the leaven of
this new spirit, and therewith to transcend the old philosophical
standpoint of Locke and Hume, was Coleridge with his _Aids to
Reflection_, published in 1825. But even after this impulse of Coleridge
the movement remained in England a sporadic and uncertain one. It had
nothing of the volume and conservativeness which belonged to it in
Germany.

Coleridge left among his literary remains a work published in 1840 under
the title of _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_. What is here written
is largely upon the basis of intuition and forecast like that of Remarus
and Lessing a half-century earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were
already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke
and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, and
destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's
maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss'
first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly
appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first
radical and subversive in the extreme. They were fiercely repudiated in
Strauss' own country. Yet in the main there was acknowledgement of the
correctness of the principle for which Strauss had stood. Hardly before
the decade of the sixties was that method accepted in England in any
wider way, and hardly before the decade of the seventies in America.
Ronan was the first to set forth, in 1863, the historical and critical
problem in the new spirit, in a way that the wide public which read
French understood.

When we come to speak of the scientific movement it is not easy to say
where the leadership lay. Many Englishmen were in the first rank of
investigators and accumulators of material. The first attempt at a
systematisation of the results of the modern sciences was that of
Auguste Comte in his _Philosophie Positive_. This philosophy, however,
under its name of Positivism, exerted a far greater influence, both in
Comte's time and subsequently, in England than it did in France. Herbert
Spencer, after the middle of the decade of the sixties, essayed to do
something of the sort which Comte had attempted. He had far greater
advantages for the solution of the problem. Comte's foil in all of his
discussions of religion was the Catholicism of the south of France. None
the less, the religion which in his later years he created, bears
striking resemblance to that which in his earlier years he had sought to
destroy. Spencer's attitude toward religion was in his earlier work one
of more pronounced antagonism or, at least, of more complete agnosticism
than in later days he found requisite to the maintenance of his
scientific freedom and conscientiousness. Both of these men represent
the effort to construe the world, including man, from the point of view
of the natural and also of the social sciences, and to define the place
of religion in that view of the world which is thus set forth. The fact
that there had been no such philosophical readjustment in Great Britain
as in Germany, made the acceptance of the evolutionary theory of the
universe, which more and more the sciences enforced, slower and more
difficult. The period of resistance on the part of those interested in
religion extended far into the decade of the seventies.

A word may be added concerning America. The early settlers had been
proud of their connection with the English universities. An
extraordinary number of them, in Massachusetts at least, had been
Cambridge men. Yet a tradition of learning was later developed, which
was not without the traits of isolation natural in the circumstances.
The residence, for a time, even of a man like Berkeley in this country,
altered that but little. The clergy remained in singular degree the
educated and highly influential class. The churches had developed, in
consonance with their Puritan character, a theology and philosophy so
portentous in their conclusions, that we can without difficulty
understand the reaction which was brought about. Wesleyanism had
modified it in some portions of the country, but intensified it in
others. Deism apparently had had no great influence. When the
rationalist movement of the old world began to make itself felt, it was
at first largely through the influence of France. The religious life of
the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century was at a low ebb.
Men like Belaham and Priestley were known as apostles of a freer spirit
in the treatment of the problem of religion. Priestley came to
Pennsylvania in his exile. In the large, however, one may say that the
New England liberal movement, which came by and by to be called
Unitarian, was as truly American as was the orthodoxy to which it was
opposed. Channing reminds one often of Schleiermacher. There is no
evidence that he had learned from Schleiermacher. The liberal movement
by its very impetuosity gave a new lease of life to an orthodoxy which,
without that antagonism, would sooner have waned. The great revivals,
which were a benediction to the life of the country, were thought to
have closer relation to the theology of those who participated in them
than they had. The breach between the liberal and conservative
tendencies of religious thought in this country came at a time when the
philosophical reconstruction was already well under way in Europe. The
debate continued until long after the biblical-critical movement was in
progress. The controversy was conducted upon both sides in practically
total ignorance of these facts. There are traces upon both sides of that
insight which makes the mystic a discoverer in religion, before the
logic known to him will sustain the conclusion which he draws. There
will always be interest in the literature of a discussion conducted by
reverent and, in their own way, learned and original men. Yet there is a
pathos about the sturdy originality of good men expended upon a problem
which had been already solved. The men in either camp proceeded from
assumptions which are now impossible to the men of both. It was not
until after the Civil War that American students of theology began in
numbers to study in Germany. It is a much more recent thing that one may
assume the immediate reading of foreign books, or boast of current
contribution from American scholars to the labour of the world's thought
upon these themes.

We should make a great mistake if we supposed that the progress has been
an unceasing forward movement. Quite the contrary, in every aspect of it
the life of the early part of the nineteenth century presents the
spectacle of a great reaction. The resurgence of old ideas and forces
seems almost incredible. In the political world we are wont to attribute
this fact to the disillusionment which the French Revolution had
wrought, and the suffering which the Napoleonic Empire had entailed. The
reaction in the world of thought, and particularly of religious thought,
was, moreover, as marked as that in the world of deeds. The Roman Church
profited by this swing of the pendulum in the minds of men as much as
did the absolute State. Almost the first act of Pius VII. after his
return to Rome in 1814, was the revival of the Society of Jesus, which
had been after long agony in 1773 dissolved by the papacy itself. 'Altar
and throne' became the watchword of an ardent attempt at restoration of
all of that which millions had given their lives to do away. All too
easily, one who writes in sympathy with that which is conventionally
called progress may give the impression that our period is one in which
movement has been all in one direction. That is far from being true. One
whose very ideal of progress is that of movement in directions opposite
to those we have described may well say that the nineteenth century has
had its gifts for him as well. The life of mankind is too complex that
one should write of it with one exclusive standard as to loss and gain.
And whatever be one's standard the facts cannot be ignored.

The France of the thirties and the forties saw a liberal movement within
the Roman Church. The names of Lamennais, of Lacordaire, of Montalembert
and Ozanam, the title _l'Avenir_ occur to men's minds at once. Perhaps
there has never been in France a party more truly Catholic, more devout,
refined and tolerant, more fitted to heal the breach between the
cultivated and the Church. However, before the Second Empire, an end had
been made of that. It cannot be said that the French Church exactly
favoured the infallibility. It certainly did not stand against the
decree as in the old days it would have done. The decree of
infallibility is itself the greatest witness of the steady progress of
reaction in the Roman Church. That action, theoretically at least, does
away with even that measure of popular constitution in the Church to
which the end of the Middle Age had held fast without wavering, which
the mightiest of popes had not been able to abolish and the council of
Trent had not dared earnestly to debate. Whether the decree of 1870 is
viewed in the light of the _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, and again of
the _Encyclical_ of 1907, or whether the encyclicals are viewed in the
light of the decree, the fact remains that a power has been given to the
Curia against what has come to be called Modernism such as Innocent
never wielded against the heresies of his day. Meantime, so hostile are
exactly those peoples among whom Roman Catholicism has had full sway,
that it would almost appear that the hope of the Roman Church is in
those countries in which, in the sequence of the Reformation, a
religious tolerance obtains, which the Roman Church would have done
everything in its power to prevent.

Again, we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that the reaction had
been felt only in Roman Catholic lands. A minister of Prussia forbade
Kant to speak concerning religion. The Prussia of Frederick William III.
and of Frederick William IV. was almost as reactionary as if Metternich
had ruled in Berlin as well as in Vienna. The history of the censorship
of the press and of the repression of free thought in Germany until the
year 1848 is a sad chapter. The ruling influences in the Lutheran Church
in that era, practically throughout Germany, were reactionary. The
universities did indeed in large measure retain their ancient freedom.
But the church in which Hengstenberg could be a leader, and in which
staunch seventeenth-century Lutheranism could be effectively sustained,
was almost doomed to further that alienation between the life of piety
and the life of learning which is so much to be deplored. In the Church
the conservatives have to this moment largely triumphed. In the
theological faculties of the universities the liberals in the main have
held their own. The fact that both Church and faculties are
functionaries of the State is often cited as sure in the end to bring
about a solution of this unhappy state of things. For such a solution,
it must be owned, we wait.

The England of the period after 1815 had indeed no such cause for
reaction as obtained in France or even in Germany. The nation having had
its Revolution in the seventeenth century escaped that of the
eighteenth. Still the country was exhausted in the conflict against
Napoleon. Commercial, industrial and social problems agitated it. The
Church slumbered. For a time the liberal thought of England found
utterance mainly through the poets. By the decade of the thirties
movement had begun. The opinions of the Noetics in Oriel College,
Oxford, now seem distinctly mild. They were sufficient to awaken Newman
and Pusey, Froude, Keble, and the rest. Then followed the most
significant ecclesiastical movement which the Church of England in the
nineteenth century has seen, the Oxford or Tractarian movement, as it
has been called. There was conscious recurrence of a mind like that of
Newman to the Catholic position. He had never been able to conceive
religion in any other terms than those of dogma, or the Christian
assurance on any other basis than that of external authority. Nothing
could be franker than the antagonism of the movement, from its
inception, to the liberal spirit of the age. By inner logic Newman found
himself at last in the Roman Church. Yet the Anglo-Catholic movement is
to-day overwhelmingly in the ascendant in the English Church. The Broad
Churchmen of the middle of the century have had few successors. It is
the High Church which stands over against the great mass of the
dissenting churches which, taken in the large, can hardly be said to be
theologically more liberal than itself. It is the High Church which has
showed Franciscanlike devotion in the problems of social readjustment
which England to-day presents. It has shown in some part of its
constituency a power of assimilation of new philosophical, critical and
scientific views, which makes all comparison of it with the Roman Church
misleading. And yet it remains in its own consciousness Catholic to the
core.

In America also the vigour of onset of the liberalising forces at the
beginning of this century tended to provoke reaction. The alarm with
which the defection of so considerable a portion of the Puritan Church
was viewed gave coherence to the opposition. There were those who
devoutly held that the hope of religion lay in its further
liberalisation. Equally there were those who deeply felt that the
deliverance lay in resistance to liberalisation. One of the concrete
effects of the division of the churches was the separation of the
education of the clergy from the universities, the entrusting it to
isolated theological schools under denominational control. The system
has done less harm than might have been expected. Yet at present there
would appear to be a general movement of recurrence to the elder
tradition. The maintenance of the religious life is to some extent a
matter of nurture and observances, of religious habit and practice. This
truth is one which liberals, in their emphasis upon liberty and the
individual, are always in danger of overlooking. The great revivals of
religion in this century, like those of the century previous, have been
connected with a form of religious thought pronouncedly pietistic. The
building up of religious institutions in the new regions of the West,
and the participation of the churches of the country in missions, wear
predominantly this cast. Antecedently, one might have said that the lack
of ecclesiastical cohesion among the Christians of the land, the ease
with which a small group might split off for the furtherance of its own
particular view, would tend to liberalisation. It is doubtful whether
this is true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The
emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their
permanence. The middle of the nineteenth century in the United States
was a period of intense denominationalism. That is synonymous with a
period of the stagnation of Christian thought. The religion of a people
absorbed in the practical is likely to be one which they at least
suppose to be a practical religion. In one age the most practical thing
will appear to men to be to escape hell, in another to further
socialism. The need of adjustment of religion to the great intellectual
life of the world comes with contact with that life. What strikes one in
the survey of the religious thought of the country, by and large, for a
century and a quarter, is not so much that it has been reactionary, as
that it has been stationary. Almost every other aspect of the life of
our country, including even that of religious life as distinguished from
religious thought, has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. This it is which
in a measure has created the tension which we feel.

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