WHY WE ARE APPARENTLY BECOMING LESS RELIGIOUS.

It has happened to me on more than one occasion to have to examine papers left by ladies belonging to the last generation, who had lived in the manner most esteemed and respected by the general opinion of their time, and who might, without much risk of error, be taken for almost perfect models of English gentlewomen as they existed before the present scientific age. The papers left by these ladies consisted either of memoranda of their private thoughts, or of thoughts by others which seemed to have had an especial interest for them. I found that all these papers arranged themselves naturally and inevitably under two heads: either they concerned family interests and affections, or they were distinctly religious in character, like the religious meditations we find in books of devotion.

There may be nothing extraordinary in this. Thousands of other ladies may have left religious memoranda; but consider what a preponderance of religious ideas is implied when written thoughts are entirely confined to them! The ladies in question lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period of great intellectual ferment, of the most important political and social changes, and of wonderful material progress; but they did not seem to have taken any real interest in these movements. The Bible and the commentaries of the clergy satisfied not only their spiritual but also their intellectual needs. They seem to have desired no knowledge of the universe, or of the probable origin and future of the human race, which the Bible did not supply. They seem to have cared for no example of human character and conduct other than the scriptural examples.

This restfulness in Biblical history and philosophy, this substitution of the Bible for the world as a subject of study and contemplation, this absence of desire to penetrate the secrets of the world itself, this want of aspiration after any ideal more recent than the earlier ages of Christianity, permitted a much more constant and uninterrupted dwelling with what are considered to be religious ideas than is possible to any active and inquiring mind of the present day. Let it be supposed, for example, that a person to whom the Bible was everything desired information about the origin of the globe, and of life upon it; he would refer to the Book of Genesis as the only authority, and this reference would have the character of a religious act, and he would get credit for piety on account of it; whilst a modern scientific student would refer to some great modern paleontologist, and his reference would not have the character of a religious act, nor bring him any credit for piety; yet the prompting curiosity, the desire to know about the remote past, would be exactly the same in both cases. And I think it may be easily shown that if the modern scientific student appears to be less religious than others think he ought to be, it is often because he possesses and uses more abundant sources of information than those which were accessible to the ancient Jews. It is not his fault if knowledge has increased; he cannot be blamed if he goes where information is most copious and most exact; yet his preference for such information gives an unsanctified aspect to his studies. The study of the most ancient knowledge wears a religious aspect, but the study of modern knowledge appears to be non-religious.

Again, when we come to the cultivation of the idealizing faculties, of the faculties which do not seek information merely, but some kind of perfection, we find that the very complexity of modern life, and the diversity of the ideal pleasures and perfections that we modern men desire, have a constant tendency to take us outside of strictly religious ideals. As long as the writings which are held to be sacred supply all that our idealizing faculties need, so long will our imaginative powers exercise themselves in what is considered to be a religious manner, and we shall get credit for piety; but when our minds imagine what the sacred writers could not or did not conceive, and when we seek help for our imaginative faculty in profane writers, we appear to be less religious. So it is with the desire to study and imitate high examples of conduct and character. There is no nobler or more fruitful instinct in man than a desire like this, which is possible only to those who are at once humble and aspiring. An ancient Jew who had this noble instinct could satisfy it by reading the sacred books of the Hebrews, and so his aspiration appeared to be wholly religious. It is not so with an active-minded young Englishman of the present day. He cannot find the most inspiriting models amongst the ancient Hebrews, for the reason that their life was altogether so much simpler and more primitive than ours. They had nothing that can seriously be called science; they had not any organized industry; they had little art, and hardly any secular literature, so that in these directions they offer us no examples to follow. Our great inspiriting examples in these directions are to be found either in the Renaissance or in recent times, and therefore in profane biography. From this it follows that an active modern mind seems to study and follow non-religious examples, and so to differ widely, and for the worse, from the simpler minds of old time, who were satisfied with the examples they found in their Bibles. This appearance is misleading; it is merely on the surface; for if we go deeper and do not let ourselves be deceived by the words “sacred” and “profane,” we shall find that when a simple mind chooses a model from a primitive people, and a cultivated one chooses a model from an advanced people, and from the most advanced class in it, they are both really doing the same thing, namely, seeking ideal help of the kind which is best for each. Both of them are pursuing the same object,—a mental discipline and elevation which may be comprised under the general term virtue; the only difference being that one is studying examples of virtue in the history of the ancient Jews, whilst the other finds examples of virtue more to his own special purpose in the lives of energetic Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans.A hundred such examples might be mentioned, for every occupation worth following has its own saints and heroes; but I will confine myself to two. The first shall be a French gentleman of the eighteenth century, to whom life offered in the richest profusion everything that can tempt a man to what is considered an excusable and even a respectable form of idleness. He had an independent fortune, excellent health, a good social position, and easy access to the most lively, the most entertaining, the most amiable society that ever was, namely, that of the intelligent French nobility before the Revolution. There is no merit in renouncing what we do not enjoy; but he enjoyed all pleasant things, and yet renounced them for a higher and a harder life. At the age of thirty-two he retired to the country, made a rule of early rising and kept it, sallied forth from his house every morning at five, went and shut himself up in an old tower with a piece of bread and a glass of water for his breakfast, worked altogether eleven or twelve hours a day in two sittings, and went to bed at nine. This for eight months in the year, regularly, the remaining four being employed in scientific and administrative work at the Jardin des Plantes. He went on working in this way for forty years, and in the whole course of that time never let pass an ill-considered page or an ill-constructed sentence, but always did his best, and tried to make himself able to do better.

Such was the great life of Buffon; and in our own time another great life has come to its close, inferior to that of Buffon only in this, that as it did not begin in luxury, the first renunciation was not so difficult to make. Yet, however austere his beginnings, it is not a light or easy thing for a man to become the greatest intellectual worker of his time, so that one of his days (including eight hours of steady nocturnal labor) was equivalent to two or more of our days. No man of his time in Europe had so vast a knowledge of literature and science in combination; yet this knowledge was accompanied by perfect modesty and by a complete indifference to vulgar distinctions and vain successes. For many years he was the butt of coarse and malignant misrepresentation on the part of enemies who easily made him odious to a shallow society; but he bore it with perfect dignity, and retained unimpaired the tolerance and charity of his nature. His way of living was plain and frugal; he even contented himself with narrow dwellings, though the want of space must have occasioned frequent inconvenience to a man of his pursuits. He scrupulously fulfilled his domestic duties, and made use of his medical education in ministering gratuitously to the poor. Such was his courage that when already advanced in life he undertook a gigantic task, requiring twenty years of incessant labor; and such were his industry and perseverance that he brought it to a splendidly successful issue. At length, after a long life of duty and patience, after bearing calumny and ridicule, he was called to endure another kind of suffering,—that of incessant physical pain. This he bore with perfect fortitude, retaining to the last his mental serenity, his interest in learning, and a high-minded patriotic thoughtfulness for his country and its future, finding means in the midst of suffering to dictate long letters to his fellow-citizens on political subjects, which, in their calm wisdom, stood in the strongest possible contrast to the violent party writing of the hour.

Such was the great life of LittrÉ; and now consider whether he who studies lives like these, and wins virtue from their austere example, does not occupy his thoughts with what would have been considered religious aspirations, if these two men, instead of being Frenchmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had happened to be ancient Jews. If it had been possible for so primitive a nation as the Jewish to produce men of such steady industry and so large a culture, we should have read the story of their lives in the Jewish sacred books, and then it would have been a part of the popular religion to study them, whereas now the study of such biography is held to be non-religious, if not (at least in the case of LittrÉ) positively irreligious. Yet surely when we think of the virtues which made these lives so fruitful, our minds are occupied in a kind of religious thought; for are we not thinking of temperance, self-discipline, diligence, perseverance, patience, charity, courage, hope? Were not these men distinguished by their aspiration after higher perfection, by a constant desire to use their talents well, and by a vigilant care in the employment of their time? And are not these virtues and these aspirations held to be parts of a civilized man’s religion, and the best parts?

The necessity for an intellectual expansion beyond the limits of the Bible was felt very strongly at the time of the Renaissance, and found ample satisfaction in the study of the Greek and Latin classics. There are many reasons why women appear to be more religious than men; and one of them is because women study only one collection of ancient writings, whilst men have been accustomed to study three; consequently that which women study (if such a word is applicable to devotional, uncritical reading) occupies their minds far more exclusively than it occupies the mind of a classical scholar. But, though the intellectual energies of men were for a time satisfied with classical literature, they came at length to look outside of that as their fathers had looked outside of the Bible. Classical literature was itself a kind of religion, having its own sacred books; and it had also its heretics,—the students of nature,—who found nature more interesting than the opinions of the Greeks and Romans. Then came the second great expansion of the human mind, in the midst of which we ourselves are living. The Renaissance opened for it a world of mental activity which had the inappreciable intellectual advantage of lying well outside of the popular beliefs and ideas, so that cultivated men found in it an escape from the pressure of the uneducated; but the new scientific expansion offers us a region governed by laws of a kind peculiar to itself, which protect those who conform to them against every assailant. It is a region in which authority is unknown, for, however illustrious any great man may appear in it, every statement that he makes is subject to verification. Here the knowledge of ancient writers is continually superseded by the better and more accurate knowledge of their successors; so that whereas in religion and learning the most ancient writings are the most esteemed, in science it is often the most recent, and even these have no authority which may not be called in question freely by any student. The new scientific culture is thus encouraging a habit of mind different from old habits, and which in our time has caused such a degree of separation that the most important and the most interesting of all topics are those upon which we scarcely dare to venture for fear of being misunderstood.

If I had to condense in a short space the various reasons why we are apparently becoming less religious, I should say that it is because knowledge and feeling, embodied or expressed in the sciences and arts, are now too fully and too variously developed to remain within the limits of what is considered sacred knowledge or religious emotion. It was possible for them to remain well within those limits in ancient times, and it is still possible for a mind of very limited activity and range to dwell almost entirely in what was known or felt at the time of Christ; but this is not possible for an energetic and inquiring mind, and the consequence is that the energetic mind will seem to the other, by contrast, to be negligent of holy things, and too much occupied with purely secular interests and concerns. A great misunderstanding arises from this, which has often had a lamentable effect on intercourse between relations and friends. Pious ladies, to whom theological writings appear to contain almost everything that it is desirable to know, often look with secret misgiving or suspicion on young men of vigorous intellect who cannot rest satisfied with the old knowledge, and what such ladies vaguely hear of the speculations of the famous scientific leaders inspires them with profound alarm. They think that we are becoming less religious because theological writings do not occupy the same space in our time and thoughts as they do in theirs; whereas, if such a matter could be put to any kind of positive test, it would probably be found that we know more, even of their own theology, than they do, and that, instead of being indifferent to the great problems of the universe, we have given to such problems an amount of careful thought far surpassing, in mental effort, their own simple acquiescence. The opinions of a thoughtful and studious man in the present day have never been lightly come by; and if he is supposed to be less religious than his father or his grandfather it may be that his religion is different from theirs, without being either less earnest or less enlightened. There is, however, one point of immense importance on which I believe that we really are becoming less religious, indeed on that point we seem to be rapidly abandoning the religious principle altogether; but the subject is of too much consequence to be treated at the end of an Essay.