1. WRITING about the year 1890, Dr. John Clifford spoke of the craving for certainty in religion as one of the most outstanding “notes” of our time. We rebel, he says, against the teaching which acquiesces in the fate expressed in the words “We have faith; we cannot know,” and are satisfied only when we not merely know, but are sure that we know the thing as it is, the fact in itself, and the whole fact in its contour and its contents.
Everything shapes itself as a question. Nothing escapes. God, Duty, and Immortality are the irremovable rocks on which the whole superstructure of religion rests; but men feel and speak as if gazing on a “seeming void” and ask, Are there any rocks beneath? Is there a God? Is duty a reality? Is eternity more than a wish, a dream, a vain, egoistic fancy? If God is, how can we be sure of His character, aims, will and disposition toward us? What is His attitude toward sin? Does He pardon it? If so, how? May we be sure of forgiveness, and that He and we are at peace? Has He spoken to us? Have we His actual words in our Testaments, Old and New? Is the whole content of the Testaments His “word”? If so, in what sense? Does God speak now? What is His part in the troubled, perplexed, mysterious, and awful life of today? Who will tell us and, telling us, make us sure that he tells us the fact as it is? [Note: J. Clifford, The Christian Certainties, 11.]
2. Thirty years earlier this craving was much less felt, because assurance was a secure possession of the follower of Christ. “Fifty years ago,” says Dr. Reuen Thomas (writing in 1904), “people used to know what the word meant. They knew it experimentally. They had conquered their doubts and had put their fears to sleep. They had quiet faces and sunny hearts. There were quite a few of this order. I have played all sorts of wicked experiments on them, but I could never ruffle their quietude.”
Sir Humphry Davy was no religious fanatic, and yet he said: “If I could choose what would be the most delightful and, I believe, the most useful thing to me, I prefer a firm religious belief to any other blessing; for it makes discipline of good, creates new hopes when earthly hopes vanish, and throws over the decay, the destruction of existence, the most gorgeous of all lights, awakens life in death, and from corruption and decay calls up beauty and divinity; makes an instrument of misfortune and of shame a ladder of ascent to Paradise; and far above all combinations of earthly hopes, calls up the most delightful visions of palms and of amaranth, the gardens of the blest and the security of everlasting joys, where the sensualist and the skeptic view only gloom, annihilation and despair.” [Note: T. T. Eaton, Faith and the Faith, 29.]
3. What had happened to disturb the sense of assurance was the progress of scientific exploration, and the notion, made familiar by Professor Huxley and others, that the scientific observer must be an agnostic in religion. “Science,” says Dr. Clifford, “has entered life through every door, and broken up our peace in any conclusion that is not error-proof, and in any rules of life that have not borne the strain of all possible experience. The draughty houses of delusion, in which we have long dwelt, are pulled down, and most of us are hurrying to lodge ourselves in the soundly-built edifices of truth, if only we can find them.”
Mighty confidence!
One pulse of Time makes the base hollow—sends
The towering certainty we build so high
Toppling in fragments meaningless. [Note: George Eliot, The Spanish Gipsy]
There is nothing which is more resented and condemned in our time than an excess of certitude in religious belief. Society will readily forgive any measure of doubt or unbelief, but it will not forgive a measure of belief which exceeds its own. Men are angered not so much by the subject of your faith, as by its disproportionate degree. Whatever faith is stronger than their own is credulity, or bigotry, or presumption, or ignorant boldness. Whatever faith is less strong than their own is scepticism, or infidelity. There is nothing more firmly insisted on than that you ought to believe in the same things, and in about the same degree, that Society or the Church believes. And Society in our time believes very little in anything above sense. Suspense of judgment, open profession of ignorance, or of indifference, in religious matters especially, are reckoned by many the marks of knowledge and capacity. Life, it is said, can be carried on in its leading interests by sense perceptions; men’s financial credit can be fixed by an easy rule of observation, or at least by an average of guesses, inquiries, and risks. And what more is needful? If you are in the dark—say so—and wait for death to end all doubts, by extinction, or admission into light beyond. Here the position that becomes us is that of the white marble effigy, in Pere La Chaise,—of the man who lies on his tomb, with the shroud for his garment, and his forefinger placed upon his lips. We nothing know, the dead do not return to teach us—we must wait for death to solve the mystery. [Note: Edward White, On Certainty in Religion, 19.]
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill’d;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose tomorrow the ground won today—
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too? [Note: Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar Gipsy.”]
4. Has the recognition of the limitations of science restored men’s confidence in religion? Not altogether, and not directly. Writing some thirty years later than Dr. John Clifford, Dr. P. T. Forsyth says: “There are many people prepared to speak readily of Christian preaching, Christian personality, Christian work, Christian influence, or the Christian Church, for one who can or will speak freely of Christian certainty. Sympathy has taken the place of certainty. Many can say they love, or they labour, for one who can say ‘I am sure.’ Amid all our energy there is a deep aversion to asking what we really believe, where we really are with a creed which makes any love Divine, or anything worth doing at last. Which is as if a man of business refused to face the stock-taking, and never balanced his books.” [Note: P. T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, 38.]
Thus a theological task of incalculable importance is that of bringing to light the latent religious values of those aspects of modern life which hold us so strongly in their grasp, but which we have not been accustomed to interpret in a religious fashion. If this task is to be prosecuted in such a way as to construct a vital theology, primary attention must- be given to the basis of religious assurance. For, as has been said, a theology which does not embody an appeal to the moral conscience of men is impotent.
From science itself we are likely to receive assistance in the recovery of religious assurance. It is to the assurance of faith that a modern writer on the psychology of religion would give the name of faith par excellence. “When the sense of estrangement,” writes Professor Leuba, “fencing man about in a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individual finds himself ‘at one with all creation.’ He lives in the universal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one. That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of moral unity, is the Faith-state. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant. But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith-state is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions. On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities.”
Tolstoy’s case was a good comment on those words. There was almost no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense come back that life was infinite in its moral significance. [Note: W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 247.]
