Note 255.2 — CHRISTIANITY.

It remains now only shortly to indicate how Christian ethics has suffered from the admixture of adulterating elements. These are notably three: Intellectualism, Ritualism, and Secularism. “There is a strange fascination,” says a living distinguished theologian, “in reasoning about mysteries.”[255.2] Every religion of course has its mysteries—for a man reverences that only which he has reason to respect, while he cannot fully comprehend it; but the faculty of reverence when exercised on sacred mysteries should rather deter men from presumptuous dogmatism than invite them to its exhibition. But it has not always proved so in the Church. The unsophisticated intellect of the laity might possibly have been content without the vain attempt to define what is in its nature undefinable. It is not the business of man to define God at all; our finite work in reference to all forms of the Infinite is to acknowledge, to worship, and to obey. But the meddling intellect of professional theologians would not allow matters to rest here; they proceeded to construct certain curious formulæ of doctrinal orthodoxy, an intellectual belief in which was substituted for the living ethical faith by which the heathen world had been regenerated. Men were now taught to entertain the thoroughly unchristian idea that the acceptance by the cognitive faculty of an array of nicely-worded propositions concerning the Divine Nature and the plan of redemption was somehow or other essential to their salvation; was certainly not the least important element in Christian faith, and the non-acceptance of which was held as justly excluding the recusant from the communion of the saints. This was a sad mistake. The fiery denunciations which St. Peter (2 Pet. ii. 1) and the other apostles uttered against those who “privily bring in damnable heresies,” were launched not against intellectual heterodoxies, but against the lusts of the flesh and all sorts of sensualism; but now the hated name of heresy was transferred to the imaginary sin of not being able to believe what a conclave of foolish or presumptuous Churchmen chose to lay down, and artificial creeds were forged and fulminated, and flung with stern anathemas and boastful defiance against every honest thinker who could not be brought to believe that faith must show its efficacy principally by its power of blinding reason and smothering common sense. This gigantic dogmatism of the shallow understanding making an alliance with the fervid religious zeal which has been already mentioned, led consistently to a system of the most organized social selfishness that the history of the world knows,—selfishness only the more horrible that it was dignified by the most venerable names, and consecrated by the most sacred ceremonial The office-bearers of the originally free moral community called the Church now declared themselves infallible, and lorded it insolently over the consciences of those within the Church, and over both soul and body of those without its pale. To think on any of the subjects most interesting to a thinking man was now a sin; men who had the misfortune not to think exactly according to the formulæ prescribed by the Church were prosecuted as criminals, condemned as malefactors, burnt at the stake as monsters, and refused the humanities of common burial. A compact was made with the civil power that no situation of honour, emolument, or trust should be given to any one who was not ready to swear to the established orthodoxy; and thus, as human nature is constituted, not only was thinking forbidden and absurdity enthroned, but a bribe was held out to public hypocrisy; the conscience of young persons was systematically debauched; and the love of truth and the independent searching of the Christian Scriptures in many Christian churches became utterly unknown. Such were the fruits of Intellectualism. But these portentous results were not produced by the impertinence of the meddling intellect alone. Such a hideous domination over the liberties of the individual conscience could not have been achieved by one unassisted evil power. During the same period of Christian corruption the other evil influences of Ritualism and Secularism were both equally active. Of these the first, though with a distinctively religious feature, was in essential character anti-Christian. Christianity is a religion of inward motives, Ritualism a religion of outward forms. It was not enough that the hand should shrink from offending; that the eye should cease from lustful wandering; the fountains of evil desire had to be stopped in their first wellings; the lawyer and the police might concern themselves with the completed act and its consequences; with the evil thought, which is the germ of all evil deeds, Christianity commenced and finished its purifying action. Occupied with this radical regeneration, the preachers of the Gospel never dreamt of prescribing minute regulations about attitudes, gestures and postures, crosses, crosiers, candlesticks and change of dresses, decorations with banners, flags, festoons, gilded shrines, jewelled images, and other appurtenances of flaunting ceremonial. These might be matters of decency and taste very proper to be attended to; but to have made them the subject of special prescription would have been to assign them an importance which they did not deserve; nay, would have manifestly run counter to the liberty of that religion which they taught, and confounded it with the bondage of that Judaism—a bondage of meats and drinks, new-moons and sabbaths, and other externalities—which neither they nor their fathers had been able to bear. And this leads us to remark, that the oppressive puerilities of Ritualism in themselves, perhaps more ridiculous than pernicious, were, in the case of the Jews, and are indeed naturally everywhere, closely combined with another evil no less foreign to the genius of Christianity, which we may call Sacerdotalism. The Jews and the Egyptians had a closely banded hereditary priesthood culminating in a theocracy; the Greeks and Romans had a sporadic priesthood of special sacred persons, colleges and places; of these a ritual, often cumbrous, seldom graceful, sometimes shameful, generally ridiculous, was the legitimate exponent. Christianity with the performance abolished the performers; prayers were declared to be the only incense, a holy life the only offering, and a people zealous of good works the only priesthood. But this was too good a doctrine for poor human nature to hold by, or at least for the then stage of civilisation permanently to maintain. People were only too glad to get theologians to think for them, and ceremonies to dress up their devout feelings in an imposing though it might be often a tasteless garb. These ceremonies, originally indifferent, by the sacred character belonging to the men by whom they were performed, soon became sacrosanct, and the performing priest naturally attributed a special efficacy to those rites of which he was the instrument. Whatever virtue they possessed was derived originally, no doubt, like everything else, from God, but specially and exclusively through him. He was the conducting rod, the chosen medium of bringing down the spiritual electricity from heaven to earth. Thus he became a wonder-worker more potent than the rainmakers of African superstition. He had but to open his mouth and wine became blood, and bread flesh at the magic mutter of his lips. In a religion thus made essentially sacerdotal, where thaumaturgic rites received such prominence, it was impossible that the ethics of common life should be able to maintain their original place in the idea of its founder. Judaism, in fact, and Heathenism, had been smuggled back into the Church; religion was one thing, moral character another; brigands might rob and kill, and, at the same time, keep up a converse with Heaven by the kissing of crosses, the telling of beads, and the tramping of pilgrimages; the poles of right and wrong might be positively inverted, while piety remained. But a still greater triumph for the evil principle was in store. In the evangelic history of the Temptation, it is narrated that the devil, after trying other methods of seduction, carried our Lord up into an exceeding high mountain, where there was a survey of all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, and pointing out these the tempter said,—“All this I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” This argument, as we know, did not succeed with our Lord; but it succeeded only too well with those who came after Him. The marriage of worldly power and glory, to an essentially spiritual and unworldly religion, gave birth to that last and most potent adulteration which we have called Secularism. There is no necessity, of course, that a modern bishop should be a poor man, any more than an ancient patriarch; Christian ethics do not forbid a man to have a fat purse any more than a full stomach; but as a Christian may not live an epicure mainly for the sake of his stomach, so neither may he live for the sake of his purse. And then there is a great difference between the effect of worldly prosperity in individuals and in institutions. An individual may be a man of exceptional virtue, and in the face of many temptations may become more virtuous the more he is exposed; but institutions are composed of the majority, and οἱ πολλοὶ κακοί, the majority are not heroes. It was natural, therefore, to expect, that as the Christian Church in its first epoch possessed a principal element of purity in the poverty and the social insignificance of its members, so one great occasion of its corruption would emerge as soon as the profession of the once despised faith became the high-road to wealth, the badge of social worth, and the guarantee of political power, whether, “as at Constantinople, the attempt was made to imperialize the Church, or, as at Rome, the Church waxed into the dimensions of an empire.”[261.1] But it was not at Rome or Constantinople only that the Church was thus secularized. Wherever official position in a prosperous and popular church presents an open career to persons desirous of making a respectable livelihood, there must always be a class of people, more or less numerous, who are ready to say in their hearts, though they may not dare everywhere to say it openly,—“Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests’ offices, that I may eat a bit of bread.” Only the means by which this bit of bread may be obtained depends always to a great extent on the character of the patrons; and the corruption of the church office-bearers will always be greater where the appointment to valuable benefices is a mere civil right, belonging to private individuals, than where it remains with its original depositaries, the congregations of the Christian people. No doubt where popular election exists in a church there will always be a danger of divisions, and a sort of ecclesiastical demagogy or mean subserviency to the passions and prejudices of the majority can scarcely be avoided; but this is a less evil than open simony, and the usurpation of apostolic functions by men who do not, like St. Paul, work with their own hands that they may preach without fear, but preach that they may feed themselves, and dress themselves, and amuse themselves, and bring up their sons to play billiards, and their daughters to dance quadrilles with the aristocracy of the land. This thorough secularisation of religion is one of the most revolting spectacles that the moral history of the world presents; and to its existence in any country, along with the other two adulterations mentioned, must be attributed its full share of guilt in creating that reaction in favour of a morality without religion, and a State divorced from Church, which is one of the favourite ideas of the democratic age in which we live. For while Intellectualism and Ritualism expose an ethical religion to attack, the one by planting faith in an attitude of hostility to reason, the other, by making its worship puerile and ridiculous, the secular corruption cuts deeper and proves suicidal to the very essence and soul of Christianity. For by this infection a religion of the most chivalrous love, the purest unselfishness, and the profoundest humility, is worked up into a monstrous combination of selfishness, pride, and hypocrisy, which tears up the very notion of public virtue by the roots; and so in point of fact it came to pass that, in the lives of some of the most conspicuous of Christian pontiffs, there was exhibited to the world a march of scarlet sins, unsurpassed by the bestialities of Roman or the ferocities of Byzantine autocrats. In the holiest courts of the most holy all was rankness, loathsomeness, putrescence; only a theatric show of sanctitude was kept up scarcely with decency, to deceive those who might be deceived by the good fortune of not living too near the actors. And thus was realized the most sorrowful example of the truth of the ancient adage—corruptio optimi pessima; the corruption of the best things is the worst.