Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

Various

Various

Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

A FAITHLESS WORLD

BY FRANCES POWER COBBE

A little somnolence seems to have overtaken religious controversy of late. We are either weary of it or have grown so tolerant of our differences that we find it scarcely worth while to discuss them. By dint of rubbing against each other in the pages of the Reviews, in the clubs, and at dinner parties, the sharp angles of our opinions have been smoothed down. Ideas remain in a fluid state in this temperate season of sentiment, and do not, as in old days, crystallize into sects. We have become almost as conciliatory respecting our views as the Chinese whom Huc describes as carrying courtesy so far as to praise the religion of their neighbors and depreciate their own. “You, honored sir,” they were wont to say, “are of the noble and lofty religion of Confucius. I am of the poor and insignificant religion of Lao-tze.” Only now and then some fierce controversialist, hailing usually from India or the colonies where London amenities seem not yet to have penetrated, startles us by the desperate earnestness wherewith he disproves what we had almost forgotten that anybody seriously believes.

As a result of the general “laissez croire” of our day, it has come to pass that a question has been mooted which, to our fathers, would have seemed preposterous: “Is it of any consequence what we believe, or whether we believe anything? Suppose that by-and-by we all arrive at the conclusion that Religion has been altogether a mistake, and renounce with one accord the ideas of God and Heaven, having (as M. Comte assures us) outgrown the theological stage of human progress; what then? Will it make any serious difference to anybody?”

Hitherto, thinkers of Mr. Bradlaugh’s type have sung pæans of welcome for the expected golden years of Atheism, when “faiths and empires” will

“Gleam

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.”

Christians and Theists of all schools, on the other hand, have naturally deprecated with horror and dread such a cataclysm of faith as sure to prove a veritable Ragnarok of universal ruin. In either case it has been taken for granted that the change from a world of little faith, like that in which we live, to a world wholly destitute of faith, would be immensely great and far-reaching; and that at the downfall of religion not only would the thrones and temples of the earth, but every homestead in every land, be shaken to its foundation. It is certainly a step beyond any yet taken in the direction of scepticism to question this conclusion, and maintain that such a revolution would be of trivial import, since things would go on with mankind almost as well without a God as with one.

The man who, with characteristic downrightness, has blurted out most openly this last doubt of all – the doubt whether doubt be an evil – is, as my readers will have recognized, Mr. Justice Stephen. In the concluding pages of one of his sledge-hammerings on the heads of his adversaries, in the Nineteenth Century for last June, he rung the changes upon the idea (with some reservations, to be presently noted) as follows: —

“If human life is in the course of being fully described by science, I do not see what materials there are for any religion, or, indeed, what would be the use of one, or why it is wanted. We can get on very well without one, for though the view of life which science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy… The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think that most men find no great difficulty in turning their minds away from its transient character. Love, friendship, ambition, science, literature, art, politics, commerce, professions, trades, and a thousand other matters, will go equally well, as far as I can see