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    yntthlh.

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    Yntthlh.

    yntthlh .

    Untitled Article

    THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHRISTIANITY . A mossrose-bud hiding her face among the leaves one hot summer morning , for fear the sun should injure her complexion , happened to let fall a glance towards her roots , and to seethe bed in which she ¦ was growing . What a filthy place ! she cried . What a home they have chosen for me ! I , the most beautiful of flowers , fastened down into so detestable a neighbourhood ! She threw her face into the air ; thrust herself into the hands of the first passer-by who stopped to look at her , and escaped in triumph , as she thought , into the centre of a nosegay . But her triumph was short-lived : in a few hours she withered and died .

    I was reminded of this story when hearing a living thinker of some eminence once say that Christianity had been a misfortune . Intellectually it was absurd , and practically an offence , over which he stumbled ; and it would have been far better for mankind , he thought , if they could have kept clear of superstition , and followed on upon the track of the Grecian philosophy , solitcle do men care to understand the conditions which have made them what they are , and which has created for them that very wisdom in which

    they themselves are bo contented . But it is strange , indeed , that a person who could deliberately adopt such a conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth . If a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee , and spread through the whole civilized world ; if men are so pitiably silly , that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly , should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of

    heroism , of devotion , self sacrifice , and moral nobleness there was among them ; surely there were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time , and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it , sheltering himself in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their opinions . For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men ' s acceptance of it ; and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon , what right have we to hope that with the same natures ,

    the same passions , the same understandings , no better proof against deception , we , like they , are not entangled in what , at the close of another era , shall seem again ridiculous . The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres ( bread and wine ) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant ; and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed , the modern sceptic returns upon their own . Of what use is it to destroy an idol when another , or the same in another form takes immediate possession of the vacant pedestal ?

    But it is not so . Ptolemy was not perfect , but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at Ptolemy-Newton could not have been without Ptolemy , nor Ptolemy without the Chaldees ; and as it is with the minor sciences , so far more is it with the science of sciences—the science of life , which has grown through all the ages from the beginning of time . We speak of the errors of the past . We , with thin glorious present which is opening on us , we shall never enter on it , we shall never understand it , till we have learnt to see in that past , not error but

    instalment of truth , hard fougbt-for truth , wrung out with painful and heroic effort . The promised land is smiling before ] us , but we may not pass over into possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the wilderness lie bleaching on the sands , or a prey to the unclean birds ; we muBt gather them and bury them , and sum up their labours , and inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs an an honourable epitaph . If

    Christianity really is patting away , if it has done its work , and if what is left of it is now holding us buck ¦ from better things , it is not lor our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment , not for our heaping contempt on what it is , but for our reverent and patient examination of what it lias been , that it will be content to bid us farewell , and give us God "pe . ed on our further journey . In the Natural History of Religions certain broad phenomena perpetually repeat themselves ; they rise

    in the highest thought extant at the time of their origin ; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed ; art ornaments it , devotion consecrates it , time elaborates it . It grows through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the people ; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes , or so long as the idea at the centre of i t survives ; a healthy , vigorous , natural life shoots beautifully up out of it . But at last the idea becomes obsolete ; the numbing influence 6 f habit petrifies the spirit in the outside ceremonial , while quite new questions rise

    among the thinkers , and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations . The old formula will not serve ; but new formulae are tardy in appearing ; and habit and superstition cling to the past , and policy vindicates it , and statecraft upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order , till , from the combined action of folly , and worldliness , and ignorance , the once beautiful symbolism becomes at last no better than " a

    whited sepulchre full of dead men s bones and all uncleanness . " So it is now . So it was in the era of the Cfesars , out of which . Christianity arose ; and Christianity , in the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy , was the deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could offer of the questions which had grown out with the growth of mankind , and on which . Paganism had suffered shipwreck .

    Paganism , as a creed , was entirely physical . When Paganism ! rose men had not begun to reflect upon themselves , or the infirmities of their own nature . The bad man was a bad man—the coward a cowardthe liar a liar—individually hateful and despicable . But in hating and despising such unfortunates , the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that was necessary about them ; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came to exist in this world , they scarcely cared to inquire . There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods . There is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies ; a Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal

    tortures . But Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes , to which the small wickedness of common men offers no analog }' . Moreover , these and other such stories are but curiously ornamented myths , representing physical phenomena . But with Socrates a change came over philosophy ; a sign—perhaps a cause—of the decline of the existing religion . The study of man superseded the study of nature : a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal oVperfection , and sin and depravity at once assumod an importance the intensity

    of which made every other question insignificant . How man could know the good and yet choose the evil ; how God could be all pure and almighty , nnd yet evil have broken into his creation , these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity of every thinker . . . . Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be , the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the scat of itwhether matter was eternal , as Aristotle thought , or created , as Plato thought , both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the

    shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection , reluctancy , or inherent groaaness of this impracticable substance . God would have everything perfect , but the nature of the element in which lie worked in some way defeated His purpose . Death , disease , decay , clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it ; and pain , and want , and hunger , and suffering . Worse than all , the spirit in itB material body was opposed and borne down , its aspirations crushed , its purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion , the fleshly lusts which

    waged perpetual war against it . . . Matter was the cause of evil , and thenceforth the question was how to conquer it , or at least how to set free tho spirit from its control . . . The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of Alexander : but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent by largely accepting the Eastern manner , so philosophy could only make good its ground by becoming itself Orientalized . . . The one pure and holy God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himBclf had existed from immemorial

    time in the traditions of the Jews , while the Persians who had before taught tho Jews at Babylon tho existence of an independent evil being now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of tho difficulties which had perplexed Socrates . Seven centuries of struggle , and many hundred thousand folios were tho results of the remarkable fusion which followed . Out of those

    elements , uniting in various proportions , rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy , the Hellenist * the Therapeute , those strange Essene communists * the innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics . Finally , the battle was limited to the two great rivals , under one or other of which the best of the remainder had ranged themselves—Manicheism and Catholic Christianity : Manicheism in which the Persian , Catholicism in which the Jewish element most preponderated . It did not end till the close of the fifth century , and it ended then rather by arbitration than

    by a decided victory which either side could claim . The Church has yet to acknowledge how large a portion of its enemy ' s doctrines it incorporated through the mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it . Let us trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world ' s oriental history , which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over words and straws . Facts witnessing 6 O clearly that the especial strength of evil lay , as the philosophers had seen , in matter , so far it was a conclusion which

    both Jew and Persian were ready to accept . The naked Aristotelic view of it being most acceptable to the Persian , the Platonic to the Hellenistic Jew . But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution of the question which Plato had left doubtful , and to explain how evil crept into matter . He could not allow that what God had created could be of its own nature imperfect . God made it very good ; some other cause had broken in to spoil it . Accordingly , as before he had reduced the independent Arimanes , whose existence he

    had learnt at Babylon , into a subordinate spirit ; so now , not questioning the facts of disease , of death , of pain , of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural strength of the spirit was unable to resist , he accounted for them under the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned , and by his sin had brought a curse upon the "whole material earth , and upon all which was fashioned out of it . The earth was created pure and lovely—a garden of delight of its own free accord , loading itself with fruit and flower , and everything most exquisite and beautiful .

    No bird or beast of prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable " surface . In calm and quiet intercourse , the leopard lay down by the kid , the lion browsed beside the ox , nnd the corporeal frame of man , knowing neither decay , nor death , nor unruly appetite , nor any change or infirmity , was pure as the pure immortal substance of the unfallen angels . But with the fatal apple nil , this fair scene

    passed away , and creation as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined . Adam sinnedno matter how—he sinned ; the sin was the one terrible fact : moral evil was brought into the world by tho only creature who was capable of committing it . £ in entered in , nnd death !> y sin ; death and disease , storm nnd pestilence , earthquake and famine . The imprisoned passions of the wild animals were let loose , and earth arid air became full of carnage ;

    worst of all , man s animal nature came out in gigantic strength , the carnal lusts , unruly appetites , jealousies , hatred , rapine , and murder ; and then the law , and with it , of course , breaches of the lnw , and sin on sin . The seed of Adam was infected in the animnl change wliich had passed over his person , and every child , therefore , thenceforth { naturally engendered in his posterity , was infected with the curse which he had incurred . Every material organization thenceforward contained in itself the elements of its own destruction , and the philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by theology . Already , in the popular historic * , those who were infected by disease were said to bo bound by Satan ; madness was a " possession" by his spirit , and the whole creation from Adam till Christ groaned and travailed under Satan ' s power . The nobler nature in man ^ til 1 made itself felt ; but it was a slave when it ought to command . It might will to obey the higher law , but the law in the members was over strong for it and bore it down . This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could not explain , and from which Christianity now came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance . The carnal doctrine of the sacraments which they are compelled to acknowledge to have 1 > : en taught as fully in the early Church as it is now tiuij > ht by the Roman Catholics , has long been the Mumbling block to l ' rot « tit » iit » . It win the very OHHrnce of ChriHtiitnitv itself . Unless the body could be puri-

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    "We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful , for the Useful encourages itself . —Gobthe .

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    I June 14 , 1851 . ] ( Eft * & * && *?* 563

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), June 14, 1851, page 563, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1887/page/15/