Page:From Rome to Rationalism (1896).djvu/13

Rh cry. And yet in bitter irony the Church of Rome was teaching, with characteristic feeling, that the existence of God was so evident that it could not honestly be called into question. Its theologians spend half their time in destroying each other’s arguments; its priests are, to an alarming extent, utterly unable to render a reason of the faith that is in them; but its unity must be preserved; and so the world is described as a mirror reflecting so brightly a divine power and wisdom that a man must deliberately close his eyes not to confess them. Its fires have been extinguished, or, as it fondly hopes, slumber for a time until the sceptre of power is restored to its hands; but persecution is still the weapon with which it wards off the “wolves” from its flock. It may be said that the impossibility of honest agnosticism is not an article of faith defined by the Church of Rome, but it is practically equivalent to one; it is a point on which there is a clear consensus of its theologians, and its manuals of theology emphatically promulgate it. The heretic may be piously trusted to be in good faith, but the Agnostic bears the mark of reprobation on his brow, more surely than the painted face under the street-lamp.

The expectation of a positive revelation, which prepares the way to a large extent for its reception on indifferent evidence, is based upon two fundamental propositions of natural religion—the existence of God, and the spirituality and immortality of the soul. Once the material world comes to be regarded as a translucent veil that hangs for a time between a personal God and a human spirit vaguely conscious of a high destiny, the search for some positive message from behind the veil is natural and hopeful. If, however, these beliefs are themselves found to have little or no rational justification, the study of positive religions no longer presents itself as a matter of such vital importance and of so promising an issue. Consequently the ingenuity of the religious philosopher has exerted itself in every age in accumulating motives for clinging to this world-wide belief. But if in the preceding case the arguments for the traditional belief have undergone many changes in the progress of thought, the same may be said with much more obvious truth in the present instance. The motives found in the eloquent pages of Plato appeal to few minds of our generation; the arguments of Aristotle and his scholastic commentators are discarded even by most of their own modern followers. New arguments of the most approved and invulnerable type have been invented to meet the critical mind of this rapidly maturing race, and even science—the phantom that has scared so many religious souls during the present century—has been pressed into the service of spiritualist philosophers.

But, if there is one point on which science has shaken the confidence of men in traditional teaching, it is on this question of the