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Thomas Henry Huxley - Lectures and Essays

T >> Thomas Henry Huxley >> Lectures and Essays




The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the Reformation
of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason; but it may be
doubted if their contention has any solid ground; while there is a good
deal of evidence to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom
had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the
Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself,
when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of
meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval
Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann,
and John of Leyden, I fail to find a trace of any desire to set reason
free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters.
From being the slave of the Papacy the intellect was to become the serf
of the Bible; or, to speak more accurately, of somebody's interpretation
of the Bible, which, rapidly shifting its attitude from the humility of
a private judgment to the arrogant Caesaro-papistry of a state-enforced
creed had no more hesitation about forcibly extinguishing opponent
private judgments and judges, than had the old-fashioned
Pontiff-papistry.

It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal system
that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was,
essentially, an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain
practical deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in
principle, acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of
abolishing transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences,
ecclesiastical infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal presence
mystifications, the bibliolatry, the "inner-light" pretensions, and the
demonology, which are fruits of the same supernaturalistic tree,
remained in enjoyment of the spiritual and temporal support of a new
infallibility? One does not free a prisoner by merely scraping away the
rust from his shackles.

It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products
of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under
the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten,
Beza, were they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus,
fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely
deserted it?

From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they
often forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means
convertible terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous
reformers, before, during, and after the birth and growth of
Protestantism, who would have nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the
rejuvenescence of science and of art; the widening of the field of
Nature by geographical and astronomical discovery; the revelation of the
noble ideals of antique literature by the revival of classical learning;
the stir of thought, throughout all classes of society, by the printers'
work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened the hold of mediaeval
Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture and of national
welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to anything which
tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the monks, and they
willingly supported every movement in the direction of weakening
ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of a common
enemy was the only real tie between the humanist and the protestant;
their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and, sooner or later,
to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of the humanists,
whether they were aware of it or not, was the attainment of the complete
intellectual freedom of the antique philosopher, than which nothing
could be more abhorrent to a Luther, a Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli.

The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to
lie in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many
weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and
professed himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory
movement which he originally contemplated; and it was impossible he
should have deserted the specifically Protestant reformation in which he
never took part. He was essentially a theological whig, to whom
radicalism was as hateful as it is to all whigs; or to borrow a still
more appropriate comparison from modern times, a broad churchman who
refused to enlist with either the High Church or the Low Church zealots,
and paid the penalty of being called coward, time-server and traitor, by
both. Yet really there is a good deal in his pathetic remonstrance that
he does not see why he is bound to become a martyr for that in which he
does not believe; and a fair consideration of the circumstances and the
consequences of the Protestant reformation seems to me to go a long way
towards justifying the course he adopted.

Few men had better means of being acquainted with the condition of
Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual
shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of
Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond
imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to
rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard,
whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and
princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware of
the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from the
profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than from the
anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their oppression.
The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in England, in Italy,
and who counted many of the best and most influential men in each
country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly the
enormous forces which were still at the command of the Papacy. Bad as
the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse; and a person of far
more sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the
future, except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the
Church from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it
from being as beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the
scholar and man of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism,
however genial, of one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow
fanaticism, however learned and logical, of others, and to a cautious
thinker, by whom, whatever his short-comings, the ethical ideal of the
Christian evangel was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question
whether it was worth while to bring about a political and social deluge,
the end of which no mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up
Lutheran, Zwinglian, and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual
claimant to the reversion of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean
fisherman.

Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian
movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to
Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of
Anabaptist communism which opened the apocalypse had succeeded, in
shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England,
with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter
tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long
agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated
France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the
spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead
Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry
triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its
train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his friends
sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought this a
somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more especially,
since no one was in a better position than himself to know how little
the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to bear the
light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw
upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at
heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian";
and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the
precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century
"enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his
"Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism.

In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left
Protestanism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:
while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later. By
this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate
became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked Supernaturalism
in its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with
equal zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism,
and Calvinism were merely three persons of the one "Infame" which it
was the object of his life to crush. If he hated one more than another,
it was probably the last; while D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the
free-thinking best, were disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and
Pantheism.

The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific
noise and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but cool
judges might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later
rebels were no more likely than those of the earlier, to furnish
permanent resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry. However
worthy of admiration may be the acuteness, the common sense, the wit,
the broad humanity, which abound in the writings of the best of the
free-thinkers; there is rarely much to be said for their work as an
example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult
investigation. I do not think any impartial judge will assert that, from
this point of view, they are much better than their adversaries. It must
be admitted that they share to the full the fatal weakness of _a priori_
philosophising, no less than the moral frivolity common to their age;
while a singular want of appreciation of history, as the record of the
moral and social evolution of the human race, permitted them to resort
to preposterous theories of imposture, in order to account for the
religious phenomena which are natural products of that evolution.

For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the
free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and with
vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one great
Christian Apologist fairly captured the guns of the free-thinking array,
and turned their batteries upon themselves. Speculative "infidelity" of
the eighteenth century type was mortally wounded by the _Analogy_; while
the progress of the historical and psychological sciences brought to
light the important part played by the mythopoeic faculty; and, by
demonstrating the extreme readiness of men to impose upon themselves,
rendered the calling in of sacerdotal co-operation, in most cases, a
superfluity.

Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and
political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_,
who objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as
they did to _L'Infame_, were credited with the responsibility for all
the evil deeds of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much
justification as Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt,
or Luther for the _Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our _ancien regime_
was not altogether lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad
way as in France; it was still capable of being repaired; and our
forefathers, very wisely, preferred to wait until that operation could
be safely performed, rather than pull it all down about their ears, in
order to build a philosophically planned house on brand-new speculative
foundations. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in
this country, practical men preferred the Gospel of Wesley and Whitfield
to that of Jean Jacques; while enough of the old leaven of Puritanism
remained to ensure the favour and support of a large number of religious
men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the
free-thinking, or the indifference, prevalent among us in the first half
of the eighteenth century, was replaced by a strong supernaturalistic
reaction, which submerged the work of the free-thinkers; and even
seemed, for a time, to have arrested the naturalistic movement of which
that work was an imperfect indication. Yet, like Lollardry, four
centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to running underground,
safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface.

My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and
the tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the
neighbourhood of Oxford; but when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was
rampant; when church and chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God,
the crude assumptions of the worst informed and, in natural sequence,
the most presumptuously bigoted, of all theological schools.

In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my
authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar
tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher,
ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of
theology, outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured
forth, from the safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against
those who deviated from his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to
"sceptics" and "infidels," I became aware of the existence of people who
trusted in carnal reason; who audaciously doubted that the world was
made in six natural days, or that the deluge was universal; perhaps even
went so far as to question the literal accuracy of the story of Eve's
temptation, or of Balaam's ass; and, from the horror of the tones in
which they were mentioned, I should have been justified in drawing the
conclusion that these rash men belonged to the criminal classes. At the
same time, those who were more directly responsible for providing me
with the knowledge essential to the right guidance of life (and who
sincerely desired to do so), imagined they were discharging that most
sacred duty by impressing upon my childish mind the necessity, on pain
of reprobation in this world and damnation in the next, of accepting, in
the strict and literal sense, every statement contained in the
Protestant Bible. I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt
about any of them was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict.
I suppose that, out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at
least, had their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name
of the God of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of
years later, those who ventured to question the exact historical
accuracy of any part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the
Gospels, had to expect a pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say
nothing of the other disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in
any way, run counter to that chaos of prejudices called public opinion.

My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal
of a remarkable document,[8] signed by as many as thirty-eight out of
the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It does not
appear that the signatories are officially accredited spokesmen of the
ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but I feel bound to
take their word for it that they are "stewards of the Lord who have
received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept this memorial as
evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early days may be deposed
from its place of power, though so many of the colleagues of the
thirty-eight even repudiate the title of Protestants, yet the green bay
tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it did sixty years ago. And, as in
those good old times, whoso refuses to offer incense to the idol is held
to be guilty of "a dishonour to God," imperilling his salvation.

It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they
discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They
are awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been
discovered "not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the
supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate
myself upon such weighty confirmation of opinion in which I have had the
fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the credit of the
courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight that they should
go on to proclaim that the canonical scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all
records, both of past events and of the delivery of predictions to be
thereafter fulfilled," must be left to the coming generation to decide.

The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think, be
based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which
it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a
counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on
the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who
therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare themselves
"stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the
stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I have
briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even the
Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to swing
at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican establishment, I
venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are as many
thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as there were timid
questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago. Commentaries,
sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual historical
truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives. University
professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical decision that
the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as
author or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might
be; highly placed Divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture
narratives may be ignored; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a
patriotic romance of the second century B.C.; that the words of the
writer of the fourth Gospel are not always to be distinguished from
those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus. Conservative, but
conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages, some of dogmatic and
some of ethical importance, are interpolations. An uneasy sense of the
weakness of the dogma of Biblical infallibility seems to be at the
bottom of a prevailing tendency once more to substitute the authority of
the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my old age, it has happened to me
to be taken to task for regarding Christianity as a "religion of a book"
as gravely as, in my youth, I should have been reprehended for doubting
that proposition. It is a no less interesting symptom that the State
Church seems more and more anxious to repudiate all complicity with the
principles of the Protestant Reformation and to call itself
"Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old intelligible sense,
is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures are, indeed,
inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable "human
element"; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of
biblical whipping-boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical
or physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the
blame: while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their
nature are out of reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all
the vigour inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal
to treat the Bible "like any other book" which caused so much scandal,
forty years ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop
Colenso's criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban,
yet the Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the
scientific tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will ne'er
consent," has consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism
which the memorialists renounce and denounce.

A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to
assume even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may well
find this conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities
perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to
either, until the question of precedence between them is settled. And
this course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely
the fundamental position of the memorialists is examined.

"No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on
literary criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical,
criticism] of the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere
with the traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once
ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." [9]

Grant that it is "the traditionary testimony of the Church" which
guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and
New Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet,
according to the thirty-eight, this "traditionary testimony" has to be
"ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity". But "ascertainment
and verification" are purely intellectual processes, which must be
conducted according to the strict rules of scientific investigation, or
be self-convicted of worthlessness. Moreover, before we can set about
the appeal to "antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully vague term
must be defined by similar means. "Antiquity" may include any number of
centuries, great or small; and whether "antiquity" is to comprise the
Council of Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of Nicaea, or to come
to an end in the time of Irenaeus, or in that of Justin Martyr, are
knotty questions which can be decided, if at all, only by those critical
methods which the signatories treat so cavalierly. And yet the decision
of these questions is fundamental, for as the limits of the canonical
scriptures vary, so may the dogmas deduced from them require
modification. Christianity is one thing, if the fourth Gospel, the
Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles, and the Apocalypse are
canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly true; and another thing, if
they are not. As I have already said, whoso defines the canon defines
the creed.

Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as the
Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and the
Western Church differed in opinion for centuries; and yet neither the
one branch nor the other can have considered its judgment infallible,
since they eventually agreed to a transaction by which each gave up its
objection to the book patronised by the other. Moreover, the "fathers"
argue (in a more or less rational manner) about the canonicity of this
or that book, and are by no means above producing evidence, internal and
external, in favour of the opinions they advocate. In fact, imperfect as
their conceptions of scientific method may be, they not unfrequently
used it to the best of their ability. Thus it would appear that though
science, like Nature, may be driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or
other, yet she surely comes back again. The appeal to "antiquity" is, in
fact, an appeal to science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly,
to determine what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity;
thirdly, to prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science,
largely in the shape of the abhorred "criticism," has answered this
appeal, and has shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however
clumsily and imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants,
and demands that they should show cause why, in these days, science
should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry it
out efficiently.

But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius,
Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, to argue for the reception of this book
into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds,
"antiquity" admitted the whole principal of modern criticism. If Irenaeus
produces ridiculous reasons for limiting the Gospels to four, it was
open to any one else to produce good reasons (if he had them) for
cutting them down to three, or increasing them to five. If the Eastern
branch of the Church had a right to reject the Apocalypse and accept the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Western an equal right to accept the
Apocalypse and reject the Epistle, down to the fourth century, any other
branch would have an equal right, on cause shown, to reject both, or as
the Catholic Church afterwards actually did, to accept both.

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