THE NEW ENGLANDER. No. CXIX. APRIL, 1872. ARTICLE I-THE ANTAGONISM OF RELIGION AND CULTURE. Culture and Religion in some of their Relations. By J. C. SHAIRP, Principal of the United College of St. Salvator and St. Leonard, St. Andrews. New York: Hurd & Houghton. THE attention of the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic has been recently called to the relations of culture to religion, by a book of rare merit, characterized by comprehensive thought, rare beauty of style, and purity and elevation of devout feeling. We see not how any devout man can read this book without a feeling of deep sympathy with the spirit and aim of the author, or without accepting his statement of the fundamental relation of religion to culture. If religion is anything it is everything. If it has any authority at all it has authority over the entire man. It rightfully claims to propound to every man the highest aim of human life, and to furnish the highest motives to all human endeavor. If this is so, no man can ever attain as high and noble a culture without the influ ence of religion as he might have attained with it. The culture. of the man whose thinking and living are without religion must necessarily lack the very highest and noblest elements to which it might have attained. We should be far enough indeed from asserting that all men who are under the proper influence of religion are of course men of high culture. Such an assertion would be contradictory, not only to experience, but to common sense. Culture implies the development of the social, esthetic, and intellectual, as well as of the moral nature; and there are many persons whose lives and characters are in a high degree influenced by religious considerations, who are deprived of all time and opportunity for such cultivation. The hard necessity of incessant toil for the means of subsistence deprives them, for the most part, of social pleasures, of the enjoyment of the beautiful, and of all time and opportunity for the cultivation of the intellect. And yet one of the strongest proofs of the tendency of religion to produce culture is derived from its influence on men whose lives are spent under these hard conditions. A truly religious man who has always been shut out from the pleasures which are proper to his intellectual and esthetic nature often exhibits a gentleness, a sweetness, a tenderness, a benignity of character, not only not attained by his class without religion, but not even by those who have had free access to all the fountains of culture, religion alone excepted. We often find in the humblest walks of life, in the children of poverty and toil, under the influence of religion, that ornament of a meek and quiet spirit which is closely akin to the highest culture, and which no improvement of the intellect and no combination of favorable influences, without religion, can ever impart. There have been men in every Christian generation nobly endowed with all the native gifts of mind and heart, "But knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Chill penury repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul;" and yet, under the influence of religion, they became truly wise men, and those who had trodden all the paths of secular learning might well sit at their feet and receive the lessons of wisdom which dropped from their lips. The existence of such examples is undeniable; and they prove beyond controversy that religion has a powerful tendency toward the noblest culture of which man is capable. It can and often does produce, in the most unfriendly and forbidding circumstances, developments of character higher, nobler, and better than the best which the schools, without its aid, have ever produced. It cannot, however, be denied that in this age, and in, ages that have preceded the present, many of the most highly cultivated minds have rejected the religion of Christ with aversion and even disgust, and that at the present time there is much to impress one with the belief, that high culture is antagonistic to religious faith. Certainly not a few narrow-minded religious men regard culture, especially scientific culture, with dread, as tending to unbelief; and not a few men of the highest intellectual refinement (though it is a fair question whether after all they are not as narrow-minded as their religious antagonists) believe themselves too wise to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ of God. There are not a few religious men who fear, and not a few scientific men who hope, that the forces of science are too strong for the forces of faith, and that what is revered by devout men as the very ark of God is about to fall into the hands of the uncircumcised Philistines. It is, therefore, highly proper to inquire what are the causes of this unnatural antagonism, and by what means it may be terminated, and harmony restored between the intellectual and the moral world. One cause of the aversion of men of taste and culture to religion is the fact, that the religion which actually prevails is partial, inadequate, and therefore to a certain extent untrue. It may be asserted, without any fear of exaggeration, that the last and highest attainment of the human soul in this world will be, fully to comprehend the lessons which Jesus Christ taught, and fully to apply them to man's individual life and his social relations. In every age, perhaps in every sect, there are those who discern some truths of the Christian religion. But to a great extent they are truths wrenched away from those relations to all truth which they sustained in the conception of the Great Teacher, and are therefore divested of their full and proper influence in the formation of character; or they are cumbered with misconceptions and falsehoods so gross, as to rob them of a part or all of their saving power. For example, the divine Author of Christianity taught the doctrine of self-denial, and illustrated it in forms of speech and action the most striking and impressive, and his teachings and life have made a powerful impression on his followers through every age for a period of more than eighteen centuries. And yet to what a fearful extent have men misunderstood and perverted the lesson! The critic of keenest sight may safely be challenged to show any asceticism in the life or teachings of the founder of Christianity. But age after age men have misunderstood him. The notion that God may be pleased by suffering self-inflicted, and endured without any providential necessity, has flowed down the stream of Christian history for ages, and imposed upon millions of believers in Christ a yoke grievous to be borne, and infinitely degraded the doctrine of self-sacrifice from that exalted position on which the divine Master placed it. Even as late as the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal could vie with Torricelli, Galileo, and Newton in discovering the hidden laws of nature, but he could not disentangle the Christian law of self-sacrifice from the rubbish with which in his age it was overlaid; and therefore wore an iron collar next his flesh as a means of religious discipline and edification. So long as the religion of Christ is thus distorted by wrenching away its greatest truth from its true position in the system, we have no occasion to wonder that thoughtful, cultivated men are tempted to regard it with disgust and aversion. Who in that age could imagine that so enlightened a man as Pascal-so gifted above ordinary mortals-did not understand that religion of which he was, with all his follies, so illustrious an ornament? And who that had been emancipated from the then ruling spiritual despotism, and trained to free thought, could help regarding such a doctrine of self-sacrifice with aversion? In like manner every distortion of the doctrines of religion must tend powerfully to array men of liberal culture and free thought against religion itself. Matthew Arnold has made the supposition that Virgil and Shakespeare had made the voyage to America with the Puritan Pilgrim Fathers, and suggested the question whether they would not have found their company intolerable. There are other reasons why they would have found the company of those God-fearing men intolerable besides superiority in culture, which it is our purpose to suggest under a subsequent head. But the character of the Puritans was faulty in respect to the very matter of which we have just been speaking. Macaulay's hard saying, that "the Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators," is neither in strictness true, nor worthy of the grave historian of the English Revolution. The Puritans of those times had a high and just abhorrence of that and many other demoralizing public amusements; and the writer who has represented them as purely and simply malignant hypocrites has not only violated Christian charity, but degraded himself from the position of an impartial historian. And yet this saying contains a half-truth. There was an element of asceticism in the Puritan character. They were too ready to suspect sinfulness in anything that afforded amusement and pleasure. They were too much disposed to make war on whatever ornamented the person, or gratified the taste. And if on this account the Pilgrim Fathers would not have been agreeable companions to such men as Virgil and Shakespeare, it was not because they were sincerely and grandly religious men, but because their religion was on one side partial, distorted, and inadequate. Principal Shairp asks whether Virgil and Shakespeare would have fared better in the company of Paul the Apostle or John the Evangelist. We answer that we see no reason to suppose the same repelling force existed in these ancient representatives of Christianity which certainly is found in English Puritanism. If the two poets mentioned could not have enjoyed Paul's speech on Mars' hill, that fact would certainly afford no proof of their high culture. There are few fields of thought more worthy of the best powers of the Christian thinker than the inquiry, how far and wherein the peculiar aspects and teachings, the creeds, the governments, the ceremonies, of the religion of the present age are repulsive to men of thought and cultivation on account of their failure adequately to represent the great conception of the Founder of our religion. So long as we persist in our present |