Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/29

Rh  "There is more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds."

The change which has come over modern thought can not be better exemplified than by taking the instance of three great writers whose works have produced a powerful influence—Carlyle, Renan, and George Eliot. They were all three born and brought up in the very heart of different phases of the old beliefs—Carlyle, in a family which might be taken as a type of the best qualities of Scottish Presbyterianism, bred in a west country farmhouse, under the eye of a father and mother whom he loved and revered, who might have been the originals of Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night," or the descendants of the martyrs of Claverhouse. His own temperament strongly inclined to a stern Puritanical piety; his favorite heroes were Cromwell and John Knox; his whole nature was antipathetic to science. As his biographer, Froude, reports of him, "He liked ill men like Humboldt, Laplace, and the author of the 'Vestiges.' He refused Darwin's transmutation of species as unproved; he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded that it might turn out true." And yet the deliberate conclusion at which he arrived was that "he did not think it possible that educated honest men could even profess much longer to believe in historical Christianity."

The case of Renan was equally remarkable. He was born in the cottage of Breton peasants of the purest type of simple, pious. Catholic faith. Their one idea of rising above the life of a peasant was to become a priest, and their great ambition for their boy was that he might be so far honored as one day to become a country curé. Young Renan, accordingly, from the first day he showed cleverness, and got to the top of his class in the village school, was destined for the priesthood. He was taken in hand by priests, and found in them his kindest friends; they sent him to college, and in due time to the Central Seminary where young men were trained for orders. All his traditions, all his affections, all his interests, led in that direction, and yet he gave up everything rather than subscribe to what he no longer believed to be true. His conversion was brought about in this way: Having been appointed assistant to a professor of Hebrew, he became a profound scholar in Oriental languages; this led to his studying the Scriptures carefully in the original, and the conclusion forced itself upon him that the miraculous part of the narrative had no historical foundation. Like Carlyle, the turn of his mind was not scientific, and while denying miracles he remained keenly appreciative of all that was beautiful and poetical in the life and teaching of Jesus, which he has brought more vividly before the world in his writings than had ever been done by orthodox commentators.

George Eliot, again, was brought up in yet another phase of orthodox Christianity—that of middle-class nonconformist Evangelicalism. She embraced this creed fervently, and, as we see in her "Dinah,"