No Refuge but in Truth | Page 7

orthodoxy with which I am gently reproached goes
not beyond a conviction, drawn from the study not of theology but of
history, that of all the types of character hitherto produced the Christian
type, founded on a belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man, appears to be the happiest and the best. At its birth it
encountered alien and hostile influences; Alexandrian theosophy,
Oriental asceticism, Byzantine imperialism. Later it encountered the
worst influence of all, that of theocracy engendered by the ambition of
the monk Hildebrand. Theocracy, not Catholicism or anything spiritual,
has been the source of the crimes of the Papacy; of the Norman raids
upon England and Ireland; the civil wars kindled by Papal intrigue in
Germany; the extermination of the Albigenses; the Inquisition; Alva's
tribunal of blood in the Netherlands; the massacre of St. Bartholomew;
the persecution of the Huguenots; Jesuitism and the evils, moral and
political, as well as religious, which Jesuitism has wrought. Through all
this, and in spite of it all, Christian character has preserved itself, and it
is still the basis of the world's best civilization. Much that is far outside
the Christian creed is still Christian in character and traceable to a

Christian source.
II. I fully admit that society can be regulated by a law framed for
mutual protection and general well-being without the religious
conscience or other support than temporal interest. But if individual
interest or passion can break this law with impunity, as often they can,
what is there to withhold them from doing it? What is the value of a
clean breast?
III. The fatherhood of God seems to be implied in the Christian belief
in the brotherhood of man. By that phrase I meant to characterise
Christianity, not to embark upon the question of Theism. It does not
seem possible that we should ever have direct proof through human
observation and reasoning of the existence of Deity or of the divine aim
and will. To some power, and apparently to some moral power, we
must owe our being. We can hardly believe that creation planned itself
or that the germ endowed itself with life and provision for development.
But what can have been the aim of creation? What can have led to the
production of humanity, with all the evil and suffering which
Omniscience must have foreseen? What was there which without such
a process mere fiat, so far as we can see, could not produce? The only
thing that presents itself is character, which apparently must be
self-formed and developed by resistance to evil. We have had plenty of
"evidences" in the manner of Paley or the Bridgewater Treatises, met
by sceptical argument on the other side; but has inquiry yet tried to
fathom the mystery of human existence?
IV. One thing for which I have earnestly pleaded is the abolition of
clerical tests, which are in fact renunciations of absolute loyalty to truth.
Would this involve the dissolution of the Churches? Nothing surely can
put an end to the need of spiritual association or to the usefulness of the
pastorate so long as we believe in spiritual life. I think I have seen the
most gifted minds, such as might have done us the highest service in
the quest of truth, condemned to silence by the tests.
May 5th, 1907.

VI.
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
There appeared the other day in the Washington Herald a notable letter
by Mr. Paul Chamberlain on Immortality. It took the same line as an
essay on the same question by Mr. Chamberlain's late father, which I
had read in manuscript. Both the letter and the essay are on the negative
side of the question, which, in the essay at least, is pronounced the
happier and better view, as conducive to unselfishness. Unselfishness,
it must surely be, of a supreme kind. Annihilation is not a cheerful
word. Bacon has a highly rhetorical passage flouting the fear of death.
His was probably not a very loving nature, nor does he seem to have
thought of the parting from those we love.
The life of the late Mr. Chamberlain was evidently happy as well as
good. That of his son, I have no doubt, is the same. But of the lot of the
myriads whose lives, through no fault of their own, are, or in the course
of history have been, unhappy, often most miserable, what is to be said?
If for them there is no compensation, can we believe that benevolence
and justice rule the world? If the world is not ruled by benevolence and
justice, what is our ground of hope?
The negative conclusion rids us, it is true, of the Dantean Hell, which
paints the Deity as incomparably worse than the worst Italian tyrant,
and, as