In the dozen years that have passed since this book was written there has probably been some change in the outlook of the more critical of the readers to whom it might be said to be addressed. It challenges criticism on two main issues: that of Christian origins, and that of the sociological interpretation of Christian history. Twelve years ago, the thesis of the non-historicity of the gospel story in respect of its “natural” no less than of its supernatural matter found few serious listeners, even among Rationalists; while the strictly naturalistic study of Christian history incurred a good deal of resentment. To-day, perhaps, the thesis as to origins may receive more attention; while the historic narrative may arouse less impatience. On both issues, critical thought appears to be at work.

The primary problem may be left to the fortunes of discussion: the question as to how Christian history is fitly to be presented in summary is perhaps worth some introductory treatment.

An attentive reading of the reviews of the first edition left the author impressed by the fact that censure was generally passed without any attempt to prove error of statement. Error there may well have been; but it was not pointed out or founded on in the hostile judgments passed by religious reviewers. One German Catholic ecclesiastic was ironical at great length on the account given of the history of the Catholic Church; but he did not seem to impugn any particular historical statement. More serious reviewers made nothing clear save that they resented the selection made of facts and the summing-up from these. So far as the author could gather, they claimed that another set of data should have been given, and another general impression set up. If he understood them aright, they held that the way to write Christian history is to look for all the utterances of good feeling, all the instances of humane action, all the items of political, social, and intellectual betterment that have occurred in the Christian era, and to call the general statement of these—with, of course, a sympathetic account of doctrinal evolution—a history of Christianity. The things on the other side of the shield—the religious wars, the consecration of error, the strangling of truth, the persecutions, the propagandist massacres, the countless cruelties wrought in the name and on the sanction of the faith—are from this point of view external to its history: things to be set down to the perversity of men. All the good that has happened is to be credited to Christianity; all the bad to human nature.

It seems necessary to explain that this is a wholly puerile conception of historical science, and that the notion of historical causation so reached is profoundly false. Impartially applied, the method would yield equivalent panegyric for all religions alike. All that is beautiful and heroic in pre-Christian and non-Christian history would be shown to be due to the creeds of the different times and races; all the harm would be set down, as before, to human nature. The rational statement is that human nature evolved all the religions in turn; that creeds, once established, become special factors; that their varying fortunes are due to the reciprocal reactions of creed and environment; and that to write the history of any one religion it is necessary to consider narrowly how it specifically reacts on conduct in given circumstances of culture and socio-political structure. If it can be shown specifically to promote right action on any line, let that be duly credited to the religion in question as the determinant. If, on the other hand, it can be shown to promote wrong action, the fact must on the same principle be put to its discredit. But no Christian historian, broadly speaking, ever thinks of crediting to Greek polytheism the fairer aspects of Greek life, or to Islam the virtues of veracity and courage sometimes ascribed to Turks and Arabs; though professedly Christian historians have been known to contrast the comparative decency of the execution of Sokrates with the savage horrors of political executions in Christendom down to recent times.

Aristotle and Plato are still founded on for the purposes of higher education in Christian countries; but no Christian writer suggests that what is good or true in their thought is ascribable to paganism qua paganism; though modern ethical development is constantly set down to the score of Christianity. In the same fashion, hospitals in Christian countries are constantly credited to the Christian account, without a thought of admitting that Moslem hospitals are the product of the Koran, or that the mutual helpfulness of Eskimos is a specific result of their heathenism. Paganism is made to figure in general as promoting vice and human sacrifices and slavery; Christianity as putting these things down. The impartial historian pronounces that it has indeed beneficently availed for the suppression of human sacrifice in general, in virtue of its primary dogma; but that qua religion it has no more told against slavery than has Islam; that the slavery maintained till last century under Christian sanctions and auspices has been as cruel as any seen in human history; that the persistence of vice within the sphere of Christianity is the despair of its devotees; and that even in the matter of human sacrifice the hideous massacre wrought on that pretext by the crusaders at Jerusalem tells of a terrible per contra to the account of the faith. To claim for Christianity the latter-day curtailment of slavery, finally, would be to ignore alike the potent economic and the political causation, and to overlook the fact that the strongest defence ever made of slavery as an institution was founded on the Christian sacred books. These facts belong to the “history of Christianity,” like the facts of missionary enterprise and the establishment of universities by the Papacy in the Middle Ages: a mere recital of all the forms of progress made in the Christian era has no claim to such a title.

Doubtless it is difficult to trace all the reactions of creed upon society and polity; and it is not to be pretended that a general sketch can even establish the main critical principles to be applied, any more than it can complete the outline of the facts. But inasmuch as the popular fashion of doing both is wholly fallacious, a concise statement which aims at both is necessary, and may lead to fuller and better elucidations. In the preface to the first edition, a hope was expressed that such a conspectus might do an occasional service even to an opponent by bringing out a clear issue; and one hostile German critic was good enough to say that this service had been done.

If there has been more repudiation of the main historic statement than the author expected, it may not unfairly be attributed to the temper of dislike of all innovating judgment which has always marked religious discussion. Spontaneous resentment operates in advance of critical reflection; and blame is so much more simple than refutation. Even men who have made concessions to one line of reasoned objection are often slow to listen to another; and the practice of “the higher criticism” leaves many at an uncritical standpoint in regard to sociological problems. To readers who may be under the sway of such prepossession, the author can but offer the reminder that this history proceeds upon a definite view of historical science. It is not an attempt to indicate all the good or all the evil wrought by Christians, any more than a work of “natural history” so-called is an attempt to summarize the lives of myriads of plants or animals. It is an attempt, in terms of the data, to establish principles of causation, to trace broadly the reactions of a given creed on polity, conduct, and thought, and to summarize the reactions of those on the formation and fortunes of the creed itself. To the adherents of the creed it will naturally figure as “an attack” insofar as it gives an unflattering or subversive account of the historical process. It is none the less a work of scientific investigation, written with the object, first and last, of getting at the historic truth.

This, it must be observed, is a different thing from the purpose of what is called “edification,” so often acted on, and even professed, by professional theologians. Recently, for instance, the Dean of Durham preached a special sermon to miners, in which he urged, not that the Christian religion is true and the disregard of it fatal to future salvation, but that “we are so fashioned that a religion we must have.” All the while, the confessed motive for the declaration was that so many actually feel no such need; and the “You can’t do without it” thus approximated to the advertisement of a new typewriter. Men who assert and claim to prove that the given religion is “not true” were at the same time represented by Dr. Henson as merely urging their fellows to “give no thought to religion.” Here we have not merely a negative but a positive indifference to truth.

Unfortunately such indifference—at least the negative—is countenanced in the name of science by some “men of science” whose qualifications, however high, are gained in the physical and not in the “human” sciences, and who apply to the latter critical standards of a laxity which they would refuse to recognize in their own province. By such propagandists, ultimate questions of historic truth are never subjected to scientific examination at all, and tradition is at many points accepted more uncritically than by many of the more scrupulous theological scholars. At the same time the expediency of cultivating “religious fervour” is taken for granted without any ostensible inquiry as to how religious fervour has affected society in the past. In the following survey, the historical and the sociological problems are alike sought to be treated as scientific issues, calling for strictly scientific examination. The only relevant answer, therefore, from the author’s point of view, will be one which shows either that the historical statement is false or that the sociological inferences are fallacious.

Yet another phase of the professional defence of the faith calls for notice. At the close of a very comprehensive and catholic survey of the religions of the world, Professor J. E. Carpenter writes:—

We have here two typical assumptions: first, that religion always did, and always will, “embody man’s highest thought” and “express his finest attitude to life”; second, that it is “the most effective agent for the slow elevation of the race.” No pretence is made of proving the latter proposition; it is taken for granted, like the other. And the writer has previously declared (p. 34) that “Theologies may be many, but religion is one”: all religions, therefore, are included in the closing panegyric. We are thus presented with the profoundly pessimistic proposition that the welfare of humanity has always depended mainly upon the acceptance of illusory beliefs; for neither the writer nor anyone else pretends to believe that the mass of credences in question are aught else. Yet he brings them all within his generalization. Of the old Aztec religion he writes (p. 57) that “out of the fusion of nationalities in Mexico rose a developed polytheism in which lofty religious sentiment seems strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual.”

It becomes necessary to challenge emphatically the moral and sociological science which thus certificates as “lofty” beliefs admittedly bound up with systematic atrocity of action, and sees an elevating force in creeds directly productive of immeasurable evil. The religion last referred to was destroying the Aztec State, morally and economically, when both alike were destroyed by Christian invaders. Lay moral sense, now as so often in the past, must correct the sacerdotal; and a false sociological generalization must be confronted with the historic facts.

The chapters which follow challenge, by simple historic representation, both the ethical and the sociological judgments under notice. If the reader is disposed, in deference to “authority,” to assent to either, let him turn to another volume in the same series with that of Professor Carpenter, the History of Freedom of Thought, by Professor Bury; and he will see presented, from a strictly historical point of view, the negation of the doctrine that religion has been “the most effective agent for the slow elevation of the race.” The sociological verdict of the specialist in history is presumably as weighty as that of the specialist in religion on the question of the causation of progress.

But I am far from suggesting that the question is to be settled by “authority” of any kind. The prime necessity is detached, independent, self-consistent thinking upon a broad scrutiny of the facts. If these pages in any degree promote that process, they will have justified their production.

September, 1913.