Note 24 — ESSAY III. PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM.

A clever book, exhibiting great acquaintance with current phases of opinion, appeared a few years ago, offering by its title some promise of dealing with the case of the Christian Theists of whom I am speaking. The author proposes to discuss “Natural Religion,” but he shortly proceeds to describe a great many things which, in the common language of mankind, are not religious at all,—scientific ardor, artistic taste, or mere recognition of the physical order of the universe,—and to urge that these, or nothing, must constitute the religion of the future. The Israelites who had gazed up in awe and wonder at the rolling clouds on Sinai, from whence came the thunders and voices, and the stern and holy Law, and were immediately afterwards called on to worship a miserable little image of a calf, and told, “These be Thy Gods, O Israel!” might, one would think, have felt the same sense of bathos which we experience when we are solemnly assured that these sciences and arts are henceforth our “Religion.” A drowning man proverbially catches at straws, and people who feel themselves sinking in the ocean of Atheism seize on every spar which comes under their hands, and cry, “We may float yet awhile by this.” No one can blame them for trying to do so; but it is rather hard to expect all the world to recognize as an ironclad the hencoop on which they sit astride.

Among the “Natural Religions,” as he is pleased to call them, of which he has brought us intelligence (some of which are not natural, and none of which are properly Religions), the author of this book has disdained to mention that ancient but ever new form of opinion which in former days went by the name of Natural Religion. The words were not happily selected, and belong indeed to an archaic theological terminology. But they were understood by everybody to mean, not the recognition of the virtues of physical science, nor admiration of fine scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recognition of natural laws; for all these things had names of their own. But it was understood to mean the recognition and worship of a super-mundane, intelligent, and righteous Person,—in other words, of GOD. It contemplated God “mainly above Nature,” not, as the author of this book says must henceforward be done, “mainly in Nature” (“Natural Religion,” p. 160). For admirable pictures, however, of the modern Artist, who would rather have painted a good picture than have done his duty, and of the modern Man of Science who, “consumed by the passion of research,” finds “right and wrong become meaningless words,” see p. 120.