From: The Dial, Vol. I, No. II (Oct. 1840)
Author:
Published: Weeks Jordan and Company 1840 Boston
Materialism in Religion; or Religious Forms and Theological Formulas. Three Lectures, delivered at the Chapel in South Place, Finsbury. By Philip Harwood. London.
The title of this pamphlet would lead one to expect somewhat significant in its contents. Such an expectation is not disappointed on the perusal. We find here no stale thoughts repeated till the breath of life is pressed out of them, but the fresh and bold, though now and then crude, expressions of a mind that is clearly in earnest, and wont to look at man and nature, through no veil. The spirit, which ceases not to work through evil report and good report in the midst of our own society, is quick and powerful abroad. It is indeed almost startling to listen to the echoes of familiar voices, as they are borne to us from strange lands. Let them be welcomed from whatever quarter they come, as proofs, pleasing though not needed, of the identity of truth, and its affinity with the human soul.
The author of these Lectures proposes to consider the tendency, more or less observable in all the great religious organizations of mankind, to materialize religion; to clothe the religious idea in a material garb, and confine it in material forms. He pursues this tendency, through the religious history of the world, in three of the most remarkable phases which it has successively assumed,—Judaism, Catholicism, and sectarian Protestantism. The following passage explains his point of view.
“I have no controversy, then, with the tendency to materialize religion. There is truth in it; it is, in a manner, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega of all religion. To read the spiritual in the material, the infinite in the finite, the invisible things of God in the things that he has made, and then to re-embody our spiritual conceptions in new material forms of life and action—this is all the religion that the wisest of us can have. The two principles of spiritualism and materialism are antagonistic in their lower developments only. In their perfected form they coincide: the climax of the one is also the climax of the other. Thus a rude, coarse Christianity is material; clings to the mere personality of Christ; worships Christ; makes a God of him; will hear of nothing but faith in Christ, love to Christ, obedience to Christ. A more refined and spiritual Christianity (as represented, for instance, by the Unitarians of Priestley’s School) leaves the man Christ Jesus rather in the background; and takes his doctrines, his precepts, his religion, and worships these; and says that it does not very much matter what we think of him, or whose son he was, so that we take his religion, and believe that. A yet higher and more spiritual Christianity comes back to the personality of Christ, and sees that he is his own religion; that he is a sort of incarnation of God, a word of God made flesh; that he is the word, the revelation, the text and all the rest mere marginal comment, more or less authentic. In like manner, a rude, coarse Natural Religion clings to material nature; makes graven images, and bows down to worship them. The first step in refinement is to leave the material; to break the images; to seize the conception of the Spirit that made the heavens and the earth, and dwells apart, outside the material world. At the next step the mind reunites the spiritual and the material, and grasps the mighty thought of the all – pervading Intelligence and Power, the all-quickening Love, in whom we live, and move, and have our being; who dwells in us, and we in Him, through whom, and by whom, and to whom are all things.”—pp. 7, 8.
The spirit of life, however, tends always to break through the material forms, with which it is obstructed.
“Yet, after all, strong as the material form may be, the spirit—the living soul is stronger still. Natural, vital growth is mighty even as a mechanical force. The softest seed, if there be but life in it, will burst the hardest shell; and the growing power of a principle will make its way through all the wrappages and encasings of a form. The prophetic administration of religion—free, bold, reaching forth and pressing forward to the future—will ever be too strong for the priestly—mechanical, servile, leaning lazily upon the past. There is Judaism, with all its passovers, and burnt-offerings, and golden candlesticks, down, sunk like lead in the depths of the past: and here is Christianity, up, now this moment at the top of the world, with its divine, everlasting symbols stimulating new thought, and yielding new results of life and action, (like the tree of life in the Apocalypse, that bare her fruit every month) beaming light in life and hope in death, bracing the will of philanthropy and steadying its aims,—a Comforter, a Spirit of Truth and of God, a Holy Spirit, dwelling with us forever, with inspiration as new and fresh, as when Christ had it first in his cottage-home at Nazareth.” —pp. 16, 17.
There is unquestionable truth in the idea of the Catholic Church, which the author thus interprets.
“Undoubtedly there is (or, if not is, might, could, and should be) a Church Universal, a Communion of Saints, a fellowship of good and true minds, reaching through all time and spread over all lands; a union of all minds and hearts in great moral convictions in a faith—faith in one another, faith in truth, and in a true God: we can conceive of such a fellowship, or Church, as this a kingdom of heaven, of heavenly truth and love, upon the earth: we can form the idea; it was the idea in which Christ lived and died:—we may conceive of such a Church (whether with or without what is called ‘ecclesiastical polity’)—a general pervasion of the spirit of humanity with Christ’s spirit, a kingdom of Christ and of God, which, beginning like a grain of mustard seed, should gradually grow up, by the expansive vitality that is in all true and good things, into a tree—a tree of life-giving fruit and shelter to all the kindreds of men. This is the Christian conception of a Church Catholic or Universal. And such a Church would have authority; it would (to borrow the favorite old Jesuit illustration) be a kind of Soul of the World, whose will would be law to the body, guiding and governing all the movements of the body, circulating vitality to every limb, sending the light of faith and the life of love through all social institutions and organizations. Such a Church would be, in a manner, infallible; the united moral conceptions of a community of minds, each of them free, and dealing with reality on its own account—the conscience of the human race—cannot be false. We might almost say of such a Church, that its theological interpretations of Scripture would be infallible; since, if we could but know the general, collective impression which Scripture makes on the collective intellect of mankind—exercised freely, unbribed and unintimidated—we should have, in this united and consentatious experience of myriads of minds, variously endowed and trained what now we have not, and cannot have the natural sense of Scripture, the sense which it is naturally fitted to convey: error would neutralize error, leaving a clear balance of truth; and, after striking out of the account, as accidental and exceptional, all interpretations that have not stood the test of the general intellectual experience of mankind, we should have, in the residual faith of the Church universal, something like a standard Scriptural theology. And such a Church would realize the idea of the Apostolical Succession, the Christian hierarchy, or royal priesthood; would be quickened by the same Holy Spirit, or divine breath, that made fishermen and mechanics kings and priests unto God; a spirit not at all confined to one little territory of some miles square, called ‘ Apostolic See,’ or one solitary dynasty of Italian princes called ‘ Popes’- but filling all things, with an omnipresence as of the God whose spirit it is—There is an essential element of truth, then, in these favorite ideas of Catholicism.”—pp. 25, 26.
Neither are monastic institutions without beauty.
“By its monastic institutions, the Catholic Church materializes the idea of Unworldliness, Heavenly-mindedness. Here, likewise, is truth vital, essential truth – but turned into pernicious falsehood by being hardened into mechanism. There is something grand and beautiful in the principle that prompted the aspiration after a diviner life than man lives here, that gave men strength to renounce earth for heaven, to escape from the world and the evil of the world together, and make a bright green garden spot—an Oasis of God—in the midst of the world’s wilderness, where piety, learning, meditation, kindheartedness should reign sequestered and alone, and the soul rest in God, and serve Him day and night in his temple, with prayer, and vigil, and solemn chant—where a thoughtful philanthropy could tend and trim the sacred fire which, then flickering on the verge of extinguishment, was, in after-days, to burn forth with a brightness as of the sun in his strength; this is, or was, very grand and beautiful: who can read, even now, such a book as that of Thomas à Kempis, without the sympathy of reverence for the earnest, deep-thoughted pietism that it enshrines? All this, or great part of it, was true once; and it is right that the debt which civilization and humanity owe to those gatherings of the gentle and the wise should be paid in a generous and kindly appreciation.”—pp. 29, 30.
We hope the imagination of the author has not thrown a false light around the tendencies of the age.
“Meanwhile there is, and increasingly must be, a mutual approximation of the simply and wisely good, of all churches and of no church. The great tendencies of modern thought and feeling are essentially unsectarianizing; move in the direction of an appreciating sympathy with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, by whatever strange, uncouth nomenclature they may chance to disguise themselves. However it may fare with sects and churches, (which, after all, matters extremely little, ) there is, and must be, a progressive and united approximation of free and true minds from all points, towards that Divine philosophy of the Peasant-Prophet, by whose name the world loves to call itself—a philosophy which lays the foundation of a spiritual theology and rears the superstructure of a spiritual religion—uttered in one of the sublimest sentences that ever fell from the lips of man, and there, from age to age, in the Bible that we all but worship, bringing the Finite Human into communion with the Infinite Divine—’God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’”—pp. 33, 34.
The distinction between the spirit and the letter, which is set forth in the following extract cannot be insisted on too strongly.
“The idea of Divine Inspiration, for instance—breathing of God upon the soul is miserably mechanised, straitened, and shut up in a mechanical form. Instead of a vital moral impulse, touching the springs of thought and affection, a divine spirit of truth leading into truth we have that poor, cold, artificial thing, intellectual infallibility. Thus we say, ‘The Bible is an inspired book’—(which it is, to a degree in which perhaps no other book is inspired, instinct with a life and living power that can only come from the Fountain of life)—’the Bible is an inspired book, a kind of written word of God— therefore prophets and apostles were infallible, could not make mistakes. To say that a prediction has been falsified by history, that a train of reasoning is illogical, that a cosmogony is unphilosophical is to deny inspiration, to disbelieve the word of God.’ Bible- worship has, with us, taken the place of the old Catholic image-worship. It really would seem that the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants. We worship the Book as devoutly as our fathers worshipped the Virgin and the Saints. The faith and reverence which our best human sympathies and profoundest religious convictions cannot but give to this wonderful collection of writings to the divine spirit of beauty, power, love, moral earnestness that breathes through it is hardened into a mere theological homage to the letter; even to the letter of a particular text, of a particular translation; the text being known all the while to be partly fraudulent, and the translation to be considerably erroneous; yet both text and translation zealously maintained, that people’s faith may not be shaken. We worship the Bible. We allow of no religious truth except biblically deduced opinions; no religious education without Bible, whole and unmutilated, for reading and spelling- book; no religious instruction for grown men and women without a Bible-text for motto and preface; no religious worship even, without a Bible-chapter interpolated at the right time and place between prayer and hymn. Morality, religion, theology, must all be biblical. Religion is not in ourselves, but in the book; the sense of which is to be got at by hard reading. Inspiration is a thing that was once; that is now past and distant, external to us, and to be brought near by ‘evidences.’ Christianity is a congeries of opinions to be proved; the materials of the proof lying in the Bible, or in books proving the authenticity and inspiration of the Bible. The end of all which is, that the Bible is not understood, is not appreciated, is precisely the least understood and appreciated book that men read.”—pp. 40-42.
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