The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891

Niedringhaus, St. Louis.

There is one other charge which was freely made against the tariff of 1890, that deserves a brief answer. It was said that the McKinley bill would stop trade with other countries, and that it raised duties “all along the line.”

A plain tale from the “Statement of Foreign Commerce and Immigration,” published by the Treasury Department for June, 1891, puts this accusation down very summarily.

BISMARCK IN THE GERMAN PARLIAMENT

BY EMILIO CASTELAR

I cannot pardon the historian Bancroft, loved and admired by all, for having one day, blinded by the splendors of a certain illustrious person’s career, compared an institution like the new German empire with such an institution as the secular American Republic. The impersonal character of the latter and the personal character of the former place the two governments in radical contrast. In America the nation is supreme—in Germany, the emperor. In the former the saviour of the negroes—redeemer and martyr—perished almost at the beginning of his labors. His death did not delay for one second the emancipation of the slave which had been decreed by the will of the nation, immovable in its determinations, through which its forms and personifications are moved and removed. In America the President in the full exercise of his functions is liable to indictment in a criminal court; he is nevertheless universally obeyed, not on account of his personality and still less on account of his personal prestige, but on account of his impersonal authority, which emanates from the Constitution and the laws. It little matters whether Cleveland favors economic reaction during his government, if the nation, in its assemblies, demands stability. The mechanism of the United States, like that of the universe, reposes on indefectible laws and uncontrollable forces. Germany is in every way the antithesis of America; it worships personal power. To this cause is due the commencement of its organization in Prussia, a country which was necessarily military since it had to defend itself against the Slavs and Danes in the north, and against the German Catholics in the south. Prussia was constituted in such a manner that its territory became an intrenched camp, and its people a nation in arms. Nations, even though they be republican, which find it necessary to organize themselves on a military model, ultimately relinquish their parliamentary institutions and adopt a Cæsarian character and aspect. Greece conquered the East under Alexander; Rome extended her empire throughout the world under Cæsar; France, after her victories over the united kings, and the expedition to Egypt under Bonaparte, forfeited her parliament and the republic to deliver herself over to the emperor and the empire. Consequently the terms emperor and commander-in-chief appear to be the synonyms in all languages. And by virtue of this synonymy of words the Emperor of Germany exercises over his subjects a power very analogous to that which a general exercises over his soldiers. Bismarck should have known this. And knowing this truth—intelligible to far less penetrating minds than his—Bismarck should in his colossal enterprise have given less prominence to the emperor and more to Germany. He did precisely the contrary of what he should have done. The Hohenzollern dynasty has distinguished itself beyond all other German dynasties by its moral nature and material temperament of pure and undisguised autocracy. The Prussian dynasty has become more absolute than the Catholic and imperial dynasties of Germany. A Catholic king always finds his authority limited by the Church, which depends completely on the Pope, whereas a Prussian monarch grounds his authority on two enormous powers, the dignity of head of the State, and that of head of the Church. The autocratic character native to the imperial dynasties of Austria is greatly limited by the diversity of races subjected to their dominion and to the indispensable assemblies of the diet around his imperial majesty.

But a king of Prussia, always on horseback, leader in military times, defender of a frontier greatly disputed by formidable enemies, whose soil looks like a dried-up marsh from which the ancient Slav race had been obliged to drain off the water, is required to direct his subjects as a general does an army. The intellectual, political, and military grandeur of Frederick the Great augmented this power and assured it to his descendants for a long epoch. It has happened to each king of Prussia since that time to perform some colossal task, grounded in an irreducible antinomy. Frederick William II. devoted himself to the reconciliation of Calvinism and Lutheranism as divided in his days as during the thirty years war, which was maintained by the heroism of Gustavus Adolphus, and repressed by the exterminating sword of Wallenstein. Frederick William IV. endeavored to unite Christianity and Pantheism in his philosophical lucubrations; the Protestant churches were deprived of their churchyards and statues by virtue of and in execution of Royal Lutheran mandates, as was also the Catholic Cathedral of Cologne, restored to-day in more brilliant liturgical splendor with the sums paid for pontifical indulgences. Bismarck did as he liked with the empire when it was ruled by William I., and did not foresee what would be the irremissible and natural issue of the system to which he lent his authority and his name. When William I. snatched his crown from the altar, as Charlemagne might have done, and clapped it on his head, repeating formulas suited to Philip II. and Charles V., the minister was silent and submitted to these blasphemies, derived from the ancient doctrine of the divine right of kings, because they increased his own ministerial power, exercised under a presidency and governorship chiefly nominal and honorary. But a thinker of his force, a statesman of his science, a man of his greatness, should have remembered what physiologists have demonstrated with regard to heredity, and should have known that it was his duty and that of the nation and the Germans to guard against some atavistic caprice which would strike at his own power. The predecessor of Frederick the Great was a monomaniac and the predecessor of William the Strong was a madman. Could Bismarck not foresee that by his leap backwards he ran the risk of lending himself to the fatal reproduction of these same circumstances, of transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner’s operas among rocks and lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de Caldéron by his epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing that the double infirmity inherent in the paternal lineage of Charles the Rash and in the maternal line of Joanna the Mad continues in the Austrians; a recent king of Prussia itself shutting himself up in his room as in a gaol, and obliged by fatality to abdicate the throne of his forefathers during his lifetime in favor of the next heir, must prove, as they have done, what is the result of braving the maledictions of the oracle of Delphi, and the catastrophes of the twins of Œdipus with such persistency, in this age, in important and mature communities, which cannot become diseased, much less cease to exist when certain privileged families sicken and die. Not that I would ask people to do what is beyond their power and prohibited by their honor. There was no necessity, as a revolutionist might imagine, to overturn the dynasty. A very simple solution of the problem would have been to take against the probable extravagances of the Fredericks and Williams of Prussia the same precautions that were taken in England against the Georges of Hanover. These last likewise suffered from mental disorders. And so troubled were they by their afflictions that they were haunted by a grave inclination to prefer their native, though unimportant hereditary throne in the Germany of their forefathers to the far more important kingdom conferred on them by the parliamentary decision of England. But the English, to obviate this, showed themselves a powerful nation and respected the dynasty. Bismarck wished to make the king absolute in Prussia; he desired that a Cæsar should reign over Germany; and to-day the king and the Cæsar are embodied in a young man who has set aside the old Chancellor, and believes himself to have received from heaven, together with the right to represent God on this earth, the omnipotence and omniscience of God himself. Can it be doubted any longer that history reveals an inherent providential justice? To-day we see it unfold itself as if to show us that the distant perspectives of the past live in the present and extend throughout futurity.

II

Bismarck was on his guard against Frederick the Good, from whom a progressive policy was expected on account of his philosophical ideas, and a liberal and parliamentary government on account of the domestic influences which surrounded him. Knowing the humanitarian tendencies which sparkled in his disappointed mind, and the ascendency exercised over his diseased heart by the loved Empress Victoria, Bismarck availed himself of the terrible infirmity with which implacable fate afflicted the second Lutheran Emperor of Germany, and retained the imperial power in his own person, as though William I. were not dead. The enormous corpse of the latter, like that of Frederick Barbarossa, made a subject for analogous legends by German tradition, was replaced by another corpse, and in the decomposition consequent to his frightful infirmity, the unfortunate Frederick III. seems to have realized the title of a celebrated Spanish drama, “To Govern After Death” (Reinar Despues de Morir). All that he could do, when already ravaged by cancer, when the microbes of a terrible disease, like the worms of the sepulchre, were attacking and destroying him, was to open up a vista to timid hope, and to publish certain promises animated by an exalted humaneness, in spite of and unknown to the Chancellor who was not consulted in these declarations, which might be said to have descended from heaven on the wings of the angel of death. Bismarck went to and fro among the doctors, who naturally refused to declare the terrible disease mortal, and prepared to vanquish the moribund will of Frederick and the British notions of his widow, fearing that when the last breath of the imperial life had ceased the whole policy of Germany would have to be changed, as a scene in a theatre must be changed if it has been hissed. It was certain that there was as great a difference between the ideas of the Emperor William I. and those of Frederick III., separated by so brief a space, as between those of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and those of the Emperor Frederick II., his successor, after the long period of two hundred years had changed the capital features of the Middle Ages; the first was an unalloyed Catholic, notwithstanding his dissidences with the Guelph cities, and even with the Pope a stern Cæsar, like the good Roman Cæsars in time of war and defence, a veritable orthodox crusader, whose piety was concealed as in a colossal mountain whence he awaited the reconquest of outraged Jerusalem by the Christians; whereas the second was an almost Pantheistic poet and philosopher, whose Catholicity was mingled with Orientalism, who was equally given to the discussion of theological and of scientific questions, who followed the crusades in fulfilment of an hereditary tradition, who penetrated into the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre by virtue of an extraordinary covenant with the infidel, and whose own beliefs were so cosmopolitan that they brought down a sentence of excommunication upon himself and of interdiction upon his kingdom. To Pope Innocent III., the former typified the Catholic emperor of the Middle Ages; Frederick II. appeared to him very much the same as in our days the Lutheran emperor appeared to Prince Bismarck, who took every possible precaution against the humanitarianism and parliamentarism of his dying pupil, and at the same time impelled his eldest son, the next heir to the crown, with all his influence and advice towards absolutist principles and reactionary propensities. No upright mind can ever forget the terrible desecration committed when, a few days before the death of his father, young William spoke of the empire as of a possession which it was to be understood he had already entered upon, and awarded the arm and head of his iron Chancellor the title of arm and head connatural with the Cæsarian institution. I know of no statesman in history who has given, under analogous circumstances, such proof of want of foresight as was given by Bismarck, comprehensible only if the body could assume the authority of the will, as did his, and if the intelligence could disappear, as did his, in an hydropic and unquenchable desire for power. Frederick, holding progressive ideas opposed to those of Bismarck and of William, would have greatly considered public opinion, and on account of that consideration would have perhaps respected, till the hour of his death, the Pilot, who, dejected by the new direction of public government, inferred that irreparable evil must result therefrom. When Maurice of Saxony trod on the heels of Charles V., whom he had defeated at Innsbruck, he was asked why he did not capture so rich a booty, and replied: “Where should I find a cage large enough for such a big bird?” Assuredly the conscience and mind of such a parliamentarian and philosopher as was Frederick III., must have addressed to him a similar question when he inwardly meditated sacrificing the Chancellor’s person and prescinding his power: “Where should I find a place outside the government for such a man, who would struggle under bolts and chains, making the whole state tremble in sympathy with his own agitation?” The experience and talent of Frederick, together with his respect for public opinion, led him to retain Bismarck at his post, subject only to some slight restrictions. But the Chancellor, in his shortsightedness, filled young William’s head with absolutist ideas; spurred and excited him to display impatience with his poor father; and when thus nurtured, his ward opened his mouth to satisfy his appetite, he swallowed up the Chancellor as a wild beast devours a keeper.

It was the hand of Providence!

III

The onus of blame devolves on Bismarck’s native ideas, which persisted in him from his cradle and resisted the revelations of his own personal experience as well as the spirit of our progressive age. In Bismarck there always subsisted the rural fibre of the Pomeranian rustic, in unison with the demon of feudal superstition and intolerance. In politics and religion he was born, like certain of the damned in “Dante’s Inferno,” with his head turned backwards by destiny. A quarrelsome student, a haughty noble, pleased only with his lands and with the privileges ascribed to the land owner, incapable of understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William, in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis of ‘48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools which led him to salute the corpses of his own victims, stretched out on the beds of his own royal palace, and to prostrate himself at the feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and electricity between the tempests, similar to those which flash, and thunder, and fulminate, from the summits of all the Sinais of all histories, to inflame a higher soul in any other more progressive society. The world cannot understand that he should have been perturbed by the external clamor of the revolution, when the idea of Germanic unity had become condensed in the soul of the nation, revealing itself by volcanic eruptions, like an incipient or radiant star; he could not understand how the Congress of Frankfort, cursed by him, foreshadowed the future, as though inspired by tongues of fire; and could not avail himself of all that ether whose comet-like violence, cooled down in the course of time, was to compose the new German nationality, and was to give it a greater fatherland where its inherent genial nature should glow and expand. In his shortsightedness, in his lack of progressive spirit, in his want of the prophetic gift, he imagined the principle of Germanic unity lost at Olmutz, like the principle of Italian unity at Novara, and ridiculed those who, certain of the immortality of such principles, foretold for both a Passover of Resurrection. He never understood the innermost essence and intrinsic substance of the principle, to which it owes its force and glory, sufficiently to adopt it, until he had witnessed its success in Italy, insulted in his speeches during the tempestuous dawn of the new common idea. It is on this account that I am rendered indignant by any comparison of Bismarck and Cavour, as I am rendered equally indignant by a comparison of Washington and Bonaparte. The father of the Saxon fatherland of America, and the father of the Italian fatherland in Europe, alike rendered worship to goodness, and never deviated from right in any degree; whereas the founders of French imperialism and of Germanic imperialism, much addicted to violence and very vain of their conquests, relinquished something as great and as fragile and sinister as the works produced by the genius of evil and outer darkness in all theogony. In the last years of the reign of Napoleon III., during the discussion of a message in the French Legislative Corps, Rouher extolled the public and private virtues of the emperor. My late lamented friend, Jules Favre, replied to him in a speech worthy of Demosthenes: “You may be content to be the minister of such a Marcus Aurelius; to such paltry dignities, I prefer the higher privilege of calling myself a citizen of a free country.” Bismarck preferred to maintain himself in power by the help of his kings—quite the contrary of what Gladstone does, who maintains his sovereign. Whom can he blame but himself? Emperors are accustomed to be ferocious with their favorites when they are weary of them. Just as Tiberius expelled Sejanus, just as Nero killed Seneca, just as John II. hanged D. Alvaro de Luna, just as Philip II. persecuted Antonio Perez till he died, just as Philip III. beheaded D. Rodrigo Caldéron, William II. has morally beheaded Bismarck, without any other motive than his imperial caprice. Sic volo, sic jubeo. So now will the Chancellor venture to present himself in parliament because he has been dismissed from the royal palace like a lackey? Quæ te dementia cæpit? When, after Waterloo, Napoleon, adopting the theatrical style of an Italian artiste, suitable to his tragical disposition, and repeating a few badly learned Plutarchesque phrases, suitable to the classical education of his age, asked the English, his enemies, to accord him hospitality, as in ancient times Themistocles might have petitioned his enemies the Persians, the English replied by sending him to St. Helena. Bismarck in disfavor and disgrace solicits an asylum from his enemies, the commons, whom he has never defeated, yet whom he has always disdained. And as the English condemned their troublesome guest to live on a gloomy little island, the electors condemn their repugnant petitioner to a second ballot. But the Chancellor will be completely undeceived; he possesses no qualifications whatever for the position he has chosen. An orator, a great orator, he one day failed to keep his pledged word, and the apostate word condemns him to never regain the executive power through its intervention. In the sessions of parliament he will resemble the plucked and cackling hen thrown by the Sophists into Socrates’ lecture-room. The admired Heine, so fertile in genial ideas, represented the gods of Phidias and Plato, besides being downfallen and vagabond, selling rabbit skins on the seashore, and being forced to light brushwood fires by which to warm their benumbed bodies during the winter nights. To-day the writers, salaried by Bismarck, known as reptiles, now turn on him, for a similar salary, the venomous fangs which he formerly aimed at his innumerable enemies. And yonder, in the parliament where formerly he strode in with sabre, and belt, and spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm, ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but like a buffoon.

IV

In few statesmen has it been seen so clearly as in the case of the Chancellor that no great man can make himself greater than a great idea. Opposed to the Germanic union in the commencement of its creative period, at the time of the revolution of ‘48, he accepted it much later, not so much of his own initiative and free will as in obedience to the teachings of unpleasant experiences. Between his anti-union and almost feudal speeches which softened the disaster of Olmutz, and his conversion, more than fourteen years ensued, the whole space of time which extended from the dawn of the revolution to the triumph of Italy. In that conversion lay the veritable glory of his life, and he proved therein, by successive and tardy gradations, that he could tenaciously avail himself of his courage, and lead up to the triumph of the newly created and loved project with marvellous art. The policy developed against Austria at Frankfort by its snares, by its traps, by its deceits, and by its tricks, exhibited him to history as a prodigy of cunning and foresight, in whom the enthusiasm of a living sentiment was associated with computations of consummate dexterity. His embassy to Paris and to St. Petersburg, where he united against Austria persons so opposed to concord as Napoleon and Alexander, each for his own part determined to do nothing which might increase the power of Germany, surpassed in cleverness everything ever achieved in celebrated combinations by such diplomats as Talleyrand and Metternich, the two illustrious models of political strategy. The inclusion of Austria in the incidents of the duchies of the River Elbe and the jugglery done with the territory acquired with its direct assent, in addition to the preparation of the final stroke for the presidency of the Germanic federation, by means of a war prepared with cunning stealth and carried out with rapid triumph, are among the greatest feats for which praises and deifications are due to him and which testify to his merit. I cannot forget that to his efforts we owe the ruin of Austrian despotism, and of Napoleonic Cæsarism; the re-establishment of Hungarian independence; the return of Italy’s long lost provinces to her bosom; the end of the Pope’s temporal power, and the fortunate occasion of the new birth of the republic in France. In his schemes Bismarck forwarded a higher ideal of progress and, consciously or unconsciously, he—than whom nobody was ever more inspired by motives and triumphant in his undertakings—has served the universal interests of the democracy. But he has achieved his undeniable victories by means and procedures which have not fitted him for the position of a German deputy, and do not lend him any force, either moral or material, for his new elective office. The whole of his great edifice is founded on a complete oblivion of parliamentary traditions, to-day courted lovingly by its most crafty enemy, whose inconstancy is extraordinary. Reservedness, dissimulation, secrecy, deceit, double meanings in words, what by analogy with the former we call duplicity of character, treaties made by stealth, midnight conspiracies, imposition of taxes not voted by parliament, levies arbitrarily decreed by the executive without authorization and even without consultation as in Asia, the right of conquest practised in the light of reason, violent annexations which dismembered one nation for the glory of another—such is the sum total of fatal traditions which Bismarck now solicits to be allowed to continue by means of free discussion, and in the bosom of open parliament. Palmerston and Gortchakoff cannot hop in the same bag. The minion of a Czar and the representative of a nation cannot be united in one and the same person. What programme can Bismarck develop to his colleagues which will have the moral character of necessary work? Moreover, the divine word called human eloquence descends only on the lips of that apostleship which redeems a nation from slavery and impels it forward. You could not understand Daniel defending the kings of Babylon, Demosthenes defending Philip, Cicero defending Mark Antony, O’Connell defending the landlords of Ireland, and Vergniaud or Mirabeau defending the absolute kings of France. If Bismarck accepts the liberal and tolerant policy of to-day, will he not thereby countenance the emperor who has ridiculed him and Caprivi who has audaciously seated himself in that exalted position from which Bismarck thought never to fall before his death? The great man is a poor appraiser of ideas, accepting them from every quarter whence they blow to him if only they will fill his sails and propel his bark; but he will never understand what mischief he could work to his enemies by opposing a programme of advanced democratic reform to the imperial programme whose fixity resembles the rigidity of death. But what liberty can he invoke—he who has disavowed and injured all liberties? Not personal liberty—abused and trampled on constantly by his menials; not commercial liberty, sold for thirty pieces of silver after the Germanic Zollverein had brought great wealth to Prussia; not religious liberty, placed in grave danger by complacency with anti-Jewish preachers and by the May laws; not scientific liberty, after having persecuted every department of science—even history—and invested the state with full power to enforce the teaching of official doctrines everywhere and by everybody; not industrial liberty, wasted away by the regulation of labor which has transformed the workshops into garrisons, and made of the workmen an army. What remains for him to do? He has absolutely no resource at his disposal with which to undertake a campaign of active opposition. In social questions nothing is more worn out and useless than his pontifical socialism. This species of abortion has lately resulted in advancing the parturition of increased aspirations of the laborers, and as every kind of abortion leaves the womb which bears it, has done so violently. His law for the insurance of workmen, though dating only from ‘82, is already tottering in almost decrepit decay. He even admitted himself that it needed perfecting by means of a law that should establish compulsory corporations, like the ancient guilds, which proposal was objected to by the workmen themselves, more inclined to Saxon individualism and revolutionary co-operation than to his socialism, in which he saw salvation, and which they regarded as pedantic and hybrid. Bismarck’s system had no justification and derogated all laws of ethics and justice. With his Utopian schemes the professors in their lecture-rooms endeavored to excite the Socialists, who, if they had listened and demanded their realization would have been exposed to be shot down in the streets by the soldiery, without anyone being able even to raise a protest against such indignities being possible in the country. Even his foreign policy can scarcely be justified; however skilful may have been the diplomatic and military preparations which led to his first triumph, it has proved a perplexed and confused policy since his final triumph. The Chancellor had no other alternative than to come to an agreement either with France and England against Russia, or else with Russia against France and England. To come to an arrangement with France against Russia necessitated the restitution of Alsace and Lorraine; to come to an understanding with Russia, it was necessary to permit the Russians to enter Constantinople. By these perplexities which shut out all hope of retaliation from France, thus exciting its colonial appetite, and which opened to Russia the path to the Bosphorus in a final eastern war, detaining her for a time in St. Stephens and preparing the two Bulgarias for an Austrian protectorate, Bismarck could have extricated himself from danger from both Russia and France when the bonds of the Triple Alliance were loosened at Rome by the fall of Crispi, and at Vienna by the Treaty of Commerce. We have not spoken of the Chancellor as an argonaut, of the Chancellor as a colonizer. All that he has been able to do, after having given occasion for enormous difficulties with Australia and England, with the United States and Spain, placing himself and placing us in danger of war for the Carolines, has been to break poor unlucky Emin Pasha’s backbone, and to barter the protectorate of Zanzibar for the sponge known as Heligoland. And may thanks be given to William II. and to Caprivi for having, at such small cost, got over the difficulties of the Socialist laws of his home policy, and the colonial entanglements of his foreign policy. Bismarck may believe an old admirer of his personality and of his genius, though an adversary of his policy, and of the government dependent on that policy. Society, like nature, devours everything that it does not need. The death of William I., the Cæsar; the death of Roon, the organizer; the death of Moltke, the strategist, all say to him that the species of men to which he belongs is fading out and becoming extinct. Modern science teaches that extinct species do not re-appear. Bossuet would say that the Eternal has destroyed the instrument of His providential work, because it is already useless. Remain, then, Bismarck, in retirement, and await, without neurotic impatience, the final judgment of God and of history.

THE DOUBTERS AND THE DOGMATISTS

BY PROF. JAMES T. BIXBY, PH.D

An eminent ecclesiastic of the Church of England not long ago characterized the present age as pre-eminently the age of doubt, and lamented that whether he took up book, or magazine, or sermon, he was confronted with some form of it.

This picture of our age is not an unjust one. The modern mind is thoroughly wide awake and has quite thrown off the leading-strings of ancient timidity. It looks all questions in the face and demands to be shown the real facts in every realm. All the traditions of history, the laws of science, the principles of morals are overhauled, and the foundations on which they rest relentlessly probed. And our modern curiosity can see no reason why it should cease its investigations when it comes to the frontiers of religion. It deems no dogma too old to be summoned before its bar; no council nor conclave too sacred to be asked for its credentials; no pope or Scripture too venerable to be put in the witness-box and cross-examined as to its accuracy or authority. In all the churches there is a spirit of inquiry abroad; almost every morning breeze brings us some new report of heresy, or the baying of the sleuth-hounds of orthodoxy, as they scent some new trail of infidelity; and the slogan of dogmatic controversy echoes from shore to shore.

As we look around the ecclesiastical horizon, we find agitation and controversy on all sides. In one denomination, it is the question of the salvation of the heathen; in another, that of the virgin birth of Christ and the apostolic succession; in a third, it is the invasion of doubt as to the eternal torment of the wicked; in a fourth, the evidential value of the miracles; in a fifth, the grand questions included under the higher criticism of the Scriptures and the relative authority of reason and the Bible. In Congregational, Episcopalian, Baptist, Universalist, and Presbyterian folds, it is the same, everywhere some heresy to be disciplined, some doubt to be suppressed, some doctrinal battle hotly waged.

To the greater part of the Church, this epidemic of scepticism is a subject of grave alarm. Unbelief seems to them, as to Mr. Moody, the worst of sins; and they consider the only proper thing to do with it, is to follow the advice of the Bishop of London, some years ago, and fling doubt away as you would a loaded shell. They apparently look upon Christianity as a huge powder magazine, which is likely to explode if a spark of candid inquiry comes near it.

Others, on the contrary, fold their arms indifferently and regard this new spirit of investigation as only an evanescent breeze, which can produce no serious result upon the citadel of faith. A third party hail it with exultation as the first trumpet blast of the theological Götterdæmerung, the downfall of all divine powers and the destruction of the Christian superstition, to give place to the naked facts of scientific materialism.

What estimate, then, shall we put on this tendency?

In the first place we must recognize that it is a serious condition; that it is no momentary eddy, but a permanent turn in the current of the human mind. Humanity is looking religion square in the face, without any band over its eyes, in a way it never has before; and when humanity once gets its eyes open to such questions,—it is in vain to try to close them, before the questions have been thoroughly examined. Certainly, Protestantism cannot call a halt upon this march. For it was Protestantism itself, proclaiming at the beginning of her struggle with Rome the right of private judgment, which started the modern mind upon this high quest; and Protestantism is therefore bound in logic and honor to see it through to the end, whatever that end may be.

And in the next place, I believe that quest will end in good. Why the champions of faith should regard doubt as devil-born, rather than a providential instrument in God’s hand, is something I do not understand. If doubt humbles the Church and acts as a thorn in its flesh, may not such chastening be providential, quite as much as the things which puff it up? As Luther well expressed it, “We say to our Lord, that if he will have his church, he must keep it, for we cannot. And if we could, we should be the proudest asses under heaven.” As Attila was the scourge of God to the Roman world, when God needed to clear that empire out of the way, as he built his new Christendom, so may not doubt be the scourge of God to the easy-going, sleepy, too credulous piety of to-day, which gulps down all the husks of faith so fast that it never gets a taste of the kernel?

Yes, doubt is often the needed preparation for obtaining truth. We must clear out the thorny thicket of superstition before we can begin to raise the sweet fruit of true religion.

There are times when careful investigation is rightly called for. When doubting Thomas demanded to see the print of the nails, and touch and handle the flesh of the risen Christ, before he would believe in the resurrection of his Lord, his demand for the most solid proof of the great marvel was a wise and commendable one; one for which all subsequent generations of Christians are deeply indebted to him. To believe without evidence, or to suppress doubt where it legitimately arises, is both fostering superstition and exposing ourselves to error and danger. What shall we say of the merchant who refuses to entertain any question about the seaworthiness of his vessel, but sends her off across the Atlantic undocked and unexamined, piously trusting her to the Lord? Shall we commend him? or not rather charge him with culpable negligence? And what we say of such a merchant seems to me just what we should say of the Christian who refuses to investigate the seaworthiness of that ship of faith which his ancestors have left him. In astronomy, in politics, in law, we demand what business the dead hand of the past has on our lip, our brain, our purse? Why should the dead hand of an Augustine or Calvin be exempt from giving its authority? Why should these mediæval glimpses of truth be given the right to close our eyes to-day from seeing what we ourselves can see and speaking forth what we can hear of heavenly truth?

In all other departments of knowledge, investigation has brought us up to a higher outlook, where we see the true relations of things better than before. In all other branches, God has given us new light, so that we discern things more as they really are. Science has risen by making a ladder of its earlier errors and by treading them under foot, reaching to higher truths. The Bible itself is the growth of ages; and Christian doctrine and Christian creeds have been the evolution of a still longer period. The dogmas of the churches are most manifold and conflicting. Is it not rather immodest and absurd for each church to claim infallibility for its present creed, and that wisdom died when the book of Revelation closed the Bible, or the Council of Trent or the Westminster Assembly adjourned its sitting? It seems to me that the churches ought, instead, to be willing and anxious to receive whatever new light God may grant them to-day, and with the potent clarifying processes of reason, separate the pure gold of religion from the dross and alloys of olden superstition and misguided judgment.

But to the modern devotees of dogma, any subjection of it to the cleansing of the reason seems shocking. The forefront of Dr. Briggs’ recent offending, for which he is about to be formally tried as a heretic, is that he admits errors in the Bible and gives reason (by which he means, as he explains, not merely the understanding, but also the conscience and the religious instinct in man), a conjoint place with the Bible and the Church in the work of salvation and the attainment of divine truth. To the modern dogmatist, these positions seem sceptical and pernicious. But to the philosopher, who knows the laws of human nature, to every scholar who knows the actual history of the Bible, these positions seem only self-evident. That in the Scriptures there are innumerable errors in science, mistakes in history, prophecies that were never fulfilled, contradictions and inconsistencies between different books and chapters,—these are facts of observation which every Biblical student knows full well. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that the Bible was given originally by infallible divine dictation, yet the men who wrote down the message were fallible; the men who copied it were fallible; the men who translated it (some of it twice over, first from Hebrew to Greek, and then from Greek to English) were fallible; and the editors, who from the scores of manuscripts, by their personal comparison and decisions between the conflicting readings, patched together our present text, were most fallible. And when thus a Bible reader has got his text before him, how can he understand it, except by using his own reason and judgment? Instruments, again, most fallible.

How is it possible, then, to get Bible-truth independently of the reason or in entire exemption from error? The only way would be to say, that not only was the Bible verbally inspired, but all its authors, copyists, editors, and pious readers were also infallibly inspired. As in the old Hindoo account of how the world was supported, the earth was said to be held up on pillars, and the pillars on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and when the defender of the faith was asked what, then, did the tortoise rest on, he sought to save himself in his quandary, by roundly asserting that “it was tortoise all the way down”;—so the defender of the infallibility of the Scripture has to take refuge in “inspiration all the way down.” But if this be so, ought not the modern scripture editors and revisers, translators and Biblical professors also to be inspired, as much as those of King James’ day or the printers at the Bible house? And thus we reach, as the reductio ad absurdum of this argument, this result: that Tischendorff, and Koenen, and the Hebrew professors, among whom Doctor Briggs is a foremost authority, while accused of heresy are really themselves the very channels of infallible inspiration.

The sincere investigators into the character of the Bible and the nature of Christ are charged with exalting human reason above the word of God. But as soon as the subject is investigated and a Professor Swing or a Mr. MacQueary corroborates his interpretation by the Scripture itself, or Doctor Briggs shows his views to be sustained by history, by philosophy, by a profounder study of both nature and the Bible, then the ground is shifted, and it is maintained that it is not a question whether the views are true, but whether they conform to the creed; that the Catechism is not to be judged by the Bible or the facts in the case, but Bible and facts are to be interpreted by the words of the Confession; and if they do not agree with this, then heresy and infidelity are made manifest. The question is not whether the water of truth be found, but whether it is drunk out of an orthodox bottle, with the Church’s label glued firmly upon it. The pretext for the charge of heresy against these eminent Biblical scholars is that they are undermining the Bible; but in conducting the trial, prosecutors themselves refuse to abide by the testimony of the Scriptures to decide the matter and erect above them soul creed or catechism.

But let us stop for a moment and ask whence came these creeds and catechisms themselves? What else was their origin than out of the reason of man; out of the brains of scholars, as they in former years criticised and interpreted the same Scripture, and nature, and laws of God? And these scholars of the past were quite as fallible, quite as partisan, and far less well informed than our scholars to-day. Thus it is the dogmatists themselves who exalt the reason of man above the word of God, forbidding us to listen to the more direct voice of God in our own soul; forbidding us to decipher the revelations which the Divine Hand has written on the rocks, and tree, and animal structure, and even frowning upon that profounder study of the Scripture called the higher criticism, but bidding us accept, in its stead, the man-made substitute of some council or assembly of former generations.

There have undoubtedly been periods when the doubt with which the Church had to deal was mainly frivolous or carnal; a passionate rebellion of the worldly nature, attacking the essential truths of religion. But such is not the nature of the doubt which is at present occupying the public eye; such is not the doubt most characteristic of our generation. It proceeds from serious motives. It is a doubt marked by essential reverence and loyalty to truth. It is a desire for more solid foundations; for the attainment of the naked realities of existence. It is a necessary incident of the great intellectual awakening of our century. As the modern intellect comes back on Sunday from its week-day explorations of the history of Rome, or the myths of Greece, or the religious ideas of Buddha or Zoroaster, it must return to the contemplation of the Christian dogmas under new influences. It will necessarily demand what better evidence the law of Moses or the creed of Nicea has than the law of Mana or the text of the Zendavesta? The scepticism of our age is not so much directed against the great truths of religion as against the man-made dogmas that have usurped the sacred seat. If irreverent, scoffing scepticism were to be found anywhere to-day, it would most likely be found manifested among the throng of young men gathered at our most progressive University,—Harvard. But Dr. Lyman Abbot, after several weeks’ association with the students there, and a careful study of their states of mind, not long ago testified, that “if they are sceptical, it is because they are too serious-minded and too true to accept convictions ready made, traditional creeds for personal beliefs, or church formularies for a life of devotion.” Now to call such a state of mind irreligious or infidel is most unjust. The irreligion lies rather with those who make a fetish of the Bible and substitute a few pet texts from it; that sustain their own private opinions, in place of that divine light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The real infidels are they who reject the revelation which God is making us continually in the widening light of modern knowledge, and by a species of ecclesiastical lynching, condemn, before trial, the sincere, painstaking, and careful scholars and reverent disciples of Christ, who are so earnestly seeking after truth, because the results of their learned researches do not agree with the prejudices of their anathematizers. It is with no less cogency of argument than nobility of feeling that Dr. Briggs replied to his assailants: “If it be heresy to say that rationalists, like Martineau, have found God in the reason, and Roman Catholics, like Newman, have found God in the Church, I rejoice in such heresy, and I do not hesitate to say that I have less doubt of the salvation of Martineau and Newman than I have of the modern Pharisees who would exclude such noble men,—so pure, so grand, the ornaments of Great Britain and the prophets of the age,—from the kingdom of God.”

Scepticism and religious questioning are, then, no sins; they are not irreligious. But surely they do vex the Church. What shall the Church do about them? In the first place, we should not try to suppress them. Nor should we tell religious inquirers to shut their eyes and put the poppy pillow of faith beneath their heads and go to sleep again, and dream. They have got their eyes wide open and they are determined to know whether those sweet visions which they had on faith’s pillow are any more than illusions. Nor will they be satisfied and cease to think, by having a creed of three hundred or fifteen hundred year’s antiquity recited to them. The modern intellects that have taken Homer to pieces, and excavated Agamemnon’s tomb, and unwound the mummy wrappings of the Pharaohs, that have weighed the stars and chained the lightnings, are not to be awed by any old-time sheepskin or any council of bishops. They demand the facts in the case; fresh manna to satisfy their heart hunger; the solid realities of personal experience. No. It is too late to-day for the churchmen to play the part of Mrs. Partington, and sweep back the Atlantic tide of modern thought with their little ecclesiastical broom. The old ramparts are broken through and we must give the flood its course. The only spirit to meet it in is that of frankness and friendliness. Let us not foster in these questioning minds the suspicion that there is any part of religion that we are afraid to have examined. We smile at the bigoted Buddhist who, when the European attempted to prove by the microscope that the monk’s scruples against eating animal food were futile (inasmuch as in every glass of water he drank he swallowed millions of little living creatures), smashed the microscope for answer, as if that altered at all the facts. But are not many of the heresy-hunters in Christendom quite as foolish in their efforts to smash the microscope of higher criticism, or the telescope of evolution, and suppress the testimony which nature, and reason, and scholarship every day present afresh?

Let us, therefore, give liberty, yes, even sympathy, to these perplexed souls who are struggling with the great problems of religion.

And secondly, let us be honest with them, and not claim more certainty for religious doctrines or more precise and absolute knowledge about divine and heavenly things than we have. One of the great causes of modern doubt is, unquestionably, the excessive claims that theology has made. It has not been content with preaching the simple truths necessary to a good life; that we have a Maker to whom we are responsible,—a divine Friend to help us, a divine voice within to teach us right and wrong; that in the life that is to follow this, each shall be judged according to his deeds, and that in the apostles and prophets, especially the spotless life of Jesus, we have the noble patterns of the holy life set up before us for our imitation; a revelation of moral and religious truth all sufficient for salvation. The Church has not been content with these almost self-evident truths; but it must go on, to make most absolute assertions about God’s foreknowledge, and foreordination, and triune personality; and the eternal punishment of the wicked, and the double nature and pre-existence of Christ,—things not only vague and inconsistent, but contradictory to our sense of justice and right. It must go on to make manifold assertions about the inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the Bible and the details of the future life and the fall of human nature, which are utterly incredible to rational minds. And the worst of it is, that all these things are bound up in one great theological system, and poor, anxious inquirers are told that they must either take all or none; and so (soon coming face to face with some palpable inconsistency or incredibility) they not unnaturally give up the whole. Trace out the religious history of the great sceptics,—the Voltaires, the Bradlaughs, the Ingersolls, the Tom Paines,—and you will see that the origin of their scepticism has almost always been in a reaction from the excessive assumptions of the ecclesiastics themselves. It is too fine spun and arrogant orthodoxy that is itself responsible for half of the heterodoxy of which it complains.

Let the Church, then, be honest, and claim no more than it ought. Let it respect and encourage honesty in every man in these sacred matters. The Church itself should say to the inquirer: You are unfaithful to your God if you go not where He, by the candle of the Lord (i. e., the reason and conscience he has placed within you), leads you. And when a man in this reverent and sincere spirit pursues the path of doubt, how often does he find it circling around again toward faith and conducting him to the Mount of Zion! The true remedy for scepticism is deeper investigation. As all sincere doubt is at bottom a cry of the deeper faith that only that which is true and righteous is divine, so all earnest doubt, thought through to the end, pierces the dark cloud and comes out in the light and joy of higher convictions. It lays in the dust our philosophic and materialistic idols and brings us to the one Eternal Power, the ever-living Spirit, manifested in all, that Spirit whose name is truth, whose word is love.

You remember, perhaps, the story of the climber among the Alps, who, having stepped off a precipice, as he thought, frantically grasped, as he fell, a projecting root and held on in an agony of anticipated death, for hours, until, utterly exhausted, he at last resigned himself to destruction, and let go of his support, to fall gently on the grassy ledge beneath, only a few inches below his feet. So when we resign ourselves to God’s hand, our fall, be it little or be it great, lands us gently in the everlasting arms that are ever underneath.

Do not fear, then, to wrestle with doubt, or to follow its leadings. Out of every sincere soul-struggle, your faith shall come forth stronger and calmer. And do not hesitate to proclaim your new convictions when they have become convictions. Such is the encouragement and sympathy that the Church should give the candid questioner.

On the other hand, it may wisely caution him, not to be precipitate in publishing his doubt. Let him wait till it has become more than a doubt; till it has become a settled and well-considered conclusion, before he inflicts it upon his neighbor. The very justification for doubting the accepted opinion, the sacredness of truth, commands caution and firm conviction that our new view is something more than a passing caprice of the mind, before we publish it. But when the doubter is sure of this, then let him no longer silence his highest thoughts.

Again, the Church is justified in cautioning the doubter not to be proud of his doubt as a doubt. There is no more merit, it is well to remember, in disbelieving than in believing; and if your opinions have, as yet, only got to the negative state and you have no new positive faith or philosophy to substitute for the old, you are doing your neighbor a poor service in taking away from him any superstition, however illogical, that sustains his heart and strengthens his virtue.

And further, let me say, I would dislike very much to have you contented with doubt. Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the ground, but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a daily diet. It is a useful, often an indispensable half-way shelter in the journey of life; but a very cold home in which to settle down as the end of that journey.

In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly touched, or our mind satisfied, we believe. It is each soul’s positive faith, however unconventional or perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains its hope, that incites its effort, that supports it through the trials of life. Any doubt, even, that is earnest and to be respected, is really an act of faith, faith in a higher law than that of human creeds; in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our own sense of justice and consistency, than in any manuscript or print.

The very atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim on every human soul.

She is right who sings:—

“There is no unbelief;
And day by day, and night by night, unconsciously
The heart lives by that faith the lips deny,—
God knows the why.”

Finally, and most important of all, let us not worry ourselves so much about the intellectual opinions of men; but look rather to their spiritual condition. The church ought to think less of creed and more of character. The essence of faith lies not in correct conclusions upon doctrinal points; but in righteousness, and love, and trustful submission to God’s will. No scepticism concerning dogmas touches the heart of religion. If that seems at all heretical, let me cite good orthodox authority. I might quote Bishop Thirlwall, of the Church of England, in his judgment concerning Colenso’s attack upon the accuracy of the history of the Exodus in the Pentateuch, that “this story, nay, the whole history of the Jewish people, has no more to do with our faith as Christians, than the extraction of the cube or the rule of three.” Or I might quote Canon Farrar’s weighty words, in a recent article in the Christian World, upon the true test of religion. “The real question,” he declares, “to ask about any form of religious belief, is: Does it kindle the fire of love? Does it make the life stronger, sweeter, purer, nobler? Does it run through the whole society like a cleansing flame, burning up that which is mean and base, selfish and impure? If it stands that test it is no heresy.” That answers the question as aptly as it does manfully. And to the same effect is the noble sermon of Dr. Heber Newton a few weeks ago, in which he subordinated the question of the denominational fold to the higher interests of the Christian flock; and that notable saying of Dr. MacIlvaine’s at the Presbyterian Presbytery the other day, when, quoting the admission of one evangelical minister, that it was the Unitarian Martineau who had saved his soul and kept his Christian faith from shipwreck, he added significantly, “You must first find God in your soul before you can find Him elsewhere.” Yes, the prime and essential thing is to find God in the soul; to worship him in spirit, by a pure conscience, a loyal will, a heart full of devotion to God’s righteousness and love to all our kind. This is to worship God in truth. And what have Calvin’s five points, or the composite origin of the Pentateuch, or the virgin birth of Christ to do with such worship? If a man likes to believe them, very well. But if he cannot honestly credit them, why should we shut the doors of the church against him and threaten him with excommunication? Were these the requirements that Jesus Christ laid on his disciples? Not at all. Look all through the Sermon on the Mount, study the Golden Rule, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions Jesus lays down in his picture of the last judgment as the conditions of approval by the heavenly Judge, and see if you find anything there about the infallibility of Scripture, or the Apostolic succession, or the Deity of Christ, or any other of the dogmas on account of which the ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive out the men whom they are pursuing as heretics. How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian denominations wrought up to a white heat over such dogmas and definitions, while the practical atheism, and pauperism, and immorality of our great metropolis is passed over with indifference.

Sunday after Sunday, the Christian pulpit complains that the great masses of the people keep away from their communion tables and do not even darken their doors.

Does not the fault really lie in the folly—I may almost say sin,—of demanding of men to believe so many things that neither reason nor enlightened moral sense can accept, and making of these dogmas five-barred gates through which alone there is any admission to heaven?