THE RELIGION AND MORALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
We reproduce the following well written and truthful sentiments, from an article which appeared in No. 8, Volume 17, of the “Southern Literary Messenger,” intitled “The Nineteenth Century.” The writer seems well convinced of the fact, in regard to popular religion and morals, that “all is not gold that glitters.” He sees many dark spots on the disc of “the glorious Nineteenth Century.” He has not been struck by the sun of “gospel light now shining;” therefore he retains his senses, and can see things very much as they are—a mere travesty of the truth. We do not remember that we wish to alter a sentence; but would earnestly commend it to the attentive perusal of the reader, that seeing “the corruption that is in the world through lust,” he may repent and turn to God, and obtain forgiveness, and eternal life and glory in his kingdom, which is destined to rule over all. The following is the extract:
“Estimated by their immediate and material results, the arts and sciences were probably never in a more flourishing or brilliant condition than they are at present. They subserve all the purposes of Aladdin’s lamp and have proved the magic instruments of the wonderful development of our material resources. The augmentation of wealth by their aid, and its rapid diffusion through all the viaducts of national production, have been such as might have amazed even the wildest credulity. We may well speak in terms of high laudation of the present intellectual condition of the world, and deem that a boundless heritage of good is before us, if we are content to judge of intellectual achievements by the beggarly and false canon of a monetary scale, and to estimate science with the spirit of Mammon. If a man was designed to be a mere money-making machine, then great is Diana of the Ephesians, and greatest of all her worshippers is Demetrius, the silversmith. But if human destiny points to other aims, the Nineteenth Century must be judged by other standards. All may be gilding and glitter without, but when we look more closely, and with less sordid vision, at the condition of the world, what is the fruit of the aggregate operation of all our arts and sciences, and systems, and intellectual schemes? What is the harvest which we have reaped from our alleged intellectual greatness in Religion and in Morals, in Politics, in Society, and in Private Life?
“Growing discords and dissensions in Religion: —the abandonment of old doctrines and the substitution of new ones in accordance with the dictates of a vague, unreasoning fantasy: —a fretful restlessness and a feverish lust of change: understanding subordinated to inconsiderate zeal, and the meek performance of duty exchanged for an ignorant and verbose faith—a general indifference to every thing but the lifeless shell of the various creeds—the soulless formulae which do not so much serve to embody truth, as they suffice for a mystic incantation, by which to recognise the initiated: * —the severance of religious prescription from any controlling influence over our ordinary avocations: —the impotence of such Christianity as is current in the world to check the lust of gold, or to direct to ends sincerely, not ostentatiously, charitable the employment of our means; —its utter isolation from all practical authority over our relations to our neighbours in life; —and its almost meaningless restriction to ascetic, splenetic, individual, dreams and fancies. We greedily grasp at the rewards which religion offers in the promise of heaven, and we enter into the service of God with the same spirit with which we seek the mines of California. We avail ourselves eagerly of the threatened condemnations off the wicked, in order to assign them to our adversaries, and thus pour, in no scriptural sense, coals of fire on the heads of our enemies. We liken the Courts of heaven to a Bankrupt Court on earth, and recur to both with scarcely dissimilar hopes, when our own efforts or follies have threatened us with temporal ruin. These things, and things like these, comprise nearly the whole extent of the power of Christianity over the mass of our modern societies, and with the blind recognition of some inherited or accidentally acquired ritual, constitute the body and soul of our religion. Whither have fled those strong bonds of sympathy, charity, and mutual attraction, by which it was to unite all the sheep of one shepherd into one fold? What weight do we attach to its denunciation against avarice? or what significance do we practically recognise in the solemn declaration that we cannot serve two masters—God and Mammon?
* “Formularia,” says Leibnitz, “sunt quaedam umbrae veritatis, ac plus minusve ad puram mentis lucem accedunt. * * Sed pluris contingent ut devotio ritibus suffocetur, lumenque divinum humanis obscuretur opinionibus.” Praef. Theod. Leibnitzii Opera. Ed. Dutcris. Tom. I., p. 36.
“When the ordinary apprehensions of men, religious in their professions and self-estimation, attach so little real importance to religion, it is not to be wondered at that the spirit off the age should be marked by wide-spreading infidelity; nor that the arrogance of Science and Philosophy should endeavour to reconcile the popular practice with the conclusions of reason, by explaining away the divine nature and supernatural significance of Christianity, as has been done by Strauss and the German Rationalists; or by overwhelming, after the fashion of Hippo and Epicurus, all divine agency under the play of phenomena, and the functions of secondary laws, as has been attempted by Comte. The human mind yearns for obedience to the supremacy of a law: the heart of man pines for submission to the authority of a God: —these are necessities of our nature: —and the law will be recognised and the God adored, although, through our blindness, we fancy the dream of a fevered imagination to be the one, and discover the other in the calf made with our own hands. But, when the aspect of religion in the world is such as has been represented; —oscillating as it is through all the shades and degrees of infidelity, indifferentism, mysticism, ignorant zeal, adhesive credulity, and ascetic formalism; —assuredly it is as bad as the blind boasting off their sight, when we lend our voices to swell the noisy chorus of those who laud and magnify the intellectual glories of the present time.
“Does the world fare better in point of Morals than it does in respect of Religion? Is the age of implicitly believed Illuminism entitled to all its own praises on the score of its sublimated morality? When our Religion is so impotent and inoperative in regulating and determining the procedure of our daily actions, it could hardly be anticipated that men would yield a permanent obedience to the feebler dictates of the unsanctified conscience. It is true that the distinction has been widely drawn even by Christian philosophers between Religion and Moral Prudence, and between religious practice and moral propriety of conduct. It is a distinction which we are reluctant to admit; for we think that, if permitted to be drawn, it concedes the argument to all the infidel casuists, and that it has tended more than any thing else to ostracise Religion from the ordinary avocations of life. It is reverting in principle, if not in terms, to the difference conceived by Sulpicius and Varro between the religion appropriate to the philosophers and that which is requisite for the vulgar. Moreover, even in the hands of those who have established the distinction, it has left morals a purely negative virtue, comprising little more than abstinence from those open vices and flagrant crimes which are punished by the secular laws. But, conceding the distinction, what is the moral condition of this enlightened and purified generation? We may be referred to Penitentiary Reports and Statistical returns, which furnish only the anatomy of crime, inasmuch as it may be a violation of the municipal law: —yet even they bear but feeble testimony to the supposed excellence of the age. But when we look more carefully into the phenomena of the civilised world around us, do we find that any obligation is habitually regarded as sacred in private practice; or is any duty habitually enforced by the strong coercion of public sentiment, or the stronger influence of the conscientious observance of the right? There is none. The ideas of obligation and duty have given place to considerations of gain and expediency: immutable right and unchangeable wrong are measured and tested by the surplus or deficit of their aggregate money returns. Our lives are guided over the vast ocean of existence, without compass and without rudder, at the mercy of the shifting gales of interest, passion and caprice: impulse has usurped the functions of principle, and calculation is substituted for conscience. Rare indeed are those who are actually governed by the noble maxim: Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra. (Mde. De Stael. De l’Allemagne. Ptie. iii., chap. xiii.) Not merely our systems of Moral Science, but still more our ordinary practices, are desecrated by beggarly notions of Benthamite expediency. Both are controlled by the wretched fallacy of the greatest happiness-principle, which transferred from the Benthamee Cabala into what Touchstone calls “the vulgar,” means not the truest happiness of the greatest number, but the immediate gratification of the most important number—Number One. Thus all action is introverted, and turned from the contemplation of duty and of God to the isolating, debasing, corrupting consideration of self. The bounds of society are thus rotted and broken asunder; communities are no longer held together by the latent, because deep-seated ties of dutiful correlation among its members: they exist by the mere force of outward pressure, by temporary interest, or by the pure apathy to every thing but money, which prevents their internal disorganisation from producing actual severance. Of those great principles of duty, which are the foundations of all domestic, individual and public morals—family rights and obligations—which one has not been publicly scorned and is not habitually disregarded? The reverential obedience of children to parents is a dim recollection of a less enlightened age: —the sanctity of the marriage tie is obliterated in the advocacy of the freedom of divorce, and the assertion of the chimerical rights of women. Respect for age, and veneration for the dead, promise no returns for our outlays, and are therefore cashiered as sentiments unworthy of our intellectual advancement. These cankers of our domestic tranquillity have eaten their way into the very heart of society, which is thus left without the regulating influence of the vital principle within: —without the moral restraint of unquestioned obligations: —and is wholly given up to the fluctuating and factitious guidance of transient expediencies. How the hollowness and corruption of the age are illustrated by the demoralisation off the vicious eras which have preceded it! The pages of Aristophanes and Thucydides, off Machiavelli and Guicciardini, portray the rottenness of our present social system as clearly and not less truthfully than the philosophic expositions of Comte, or the wild declamations of Carlyle.
“When private morals are so loose and unstable, whence should we expect any fertilising dews to descend upon public virtues? All our political organization is effete and corrupt: Cabinets held together by the private interests or the peculation of their members: —governments sustaining themselves by plunder and systematised bribery: —parties united by the greed of appropriating the spoils of office, and warring with each other for their possession: —catchwords usurping the place of principles of statesmanlike policy—public men staking the interests off their country, often even of humanity, with their consciences and votes, on the hazard of a die, which is more important as settling their own temporal prospects, or as deciding the loss or gain of a bet, than as determining the procedure of great nations, or as affecting the welfare or misery of a large portion of mankind. Such are the phenomena of politics here and in Europe: and to this depravity of the leaders is united the uncertainty of nearly every rule of law, and of every maxim of political wisdom. Everywhere the highest and most permanent interests of the human species are shuffled about and ultimately sacrificed to the diabolical rivalries of personal avarice. As if any thing were wanting to complete the confusion of this moral chaos, a specious but deceptive Philanthropy steps in, with sanctimonious unction, glorifies its own silly and ineffectual labours, and proclaims the wreck to be the glory of advancing civilisation achieved by the mighty intellect of the Nineteenth Century.”
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