§ 3 Conclusion and Prognosis
It follows from the foregoing history and survey that Christianity, regarded by its adherents as either the one progressive and civilizing religion or the one most helpful to progress and civilization, is in no way vitally different from the others which have a theistic basis, and is in itself neither more nor less a force of amelioration than any other founding on sacred books and supernaturalist dogmas. Enlightened Christians with progressive instincts have justified them in terms of Christian doctrine, even as enlightened Moslems, Brahmans, and Buddhists have justified their higher ideals in terms of their doctrine; and the special fortune of Christianity has lain in this, that after nearly a thousand years in which it was relatively retrograde as compared with Islam, which during a large part of the time was progressive, both being what they were in virtue of institutions and environment, the environment was so far politically changed that the Christian countries gradually progressed, while the Moslem countries lost ground. To-day it is becoming clear to instructed eyes that the faiths were not the causal forces; and in Asia the rapid development of Japan in the past generation has vividly demonstrated the fallacy of the Christian view. As there was great progress under ancient paganism, under each one of the great creeds or cults of Asia, under Islam, and under Christianity, so there may be much greater progress in the absence of them all, in virtue of a wider knowledge, a more scientific polity, and a more diffused culture.
The ultimate problem is to forecast the future. A confident faith in continual progress is one of the commonest states of mind of the present, the consciously scientific age; and in view of the unmistakable decadence of the creeds as such, it is natural to rationalists to expect an early reduction of Christianity to the status now held by “folk-lore,” a species of survival dependent on ignorance upon the one hand and antiquarian curiosity on the other. But while this may be called probable, there can be no scientific certainty in the matter. For one thing, the process must for economic reasons be much slower than used to be thought likely, for instance, in the time of Voltaire, who allowed a century for the extinction of the Christian creed. Voltaire was so far right that a century has seen Christianity abandoned, after a reaction, by a large part of the best intelligence of our age, as it was by that of his. But there may be more reactions; and there is always a conceivable possibility of a total decadence, such as overtook the civilization of the old Mediterranean world.
The question is at bottom one of political science. Greek and Roman civilization failed primarily through the incapacity of the ancient States to set up a polity of international peace, secondarily through the effects of the military despotism which that failure superinduced. As the problem is all of a piece, avoidance of the old error will presumably mean avoidance of the old doom. A similar political failure in the modern world would in all likelihood mean the same sequence of military imperialism, possibly with better economic management, but with the same phenomena of intellectual decline and reversion to fanaticism and superstition among populations debarred from political activity and free speech. It is indeed dimly conceivable that, as has been suggested by way of fiction, the mere warfare of capital and labour may end in the degradation of the people, and the consequent reduction of upper-class life to the plane of mere sensuous gratification and “practical” science. In either event, a religion now seen by instructed men to be incredible may be preserved by a community neither instructed nor religious.
The hope of the cause of reason then lies with the political ideals and movements which best promise to save democracy and to elevate the mass. It is hopefully significant that, as we have seen, the most systematic and scientific of these movements are pronouncedly rationalistic; and it is safe to say that their ultimate success depends on their rationalism. All past movements for the social salvation of the mass have failed for lack of social science; and dogmatic Christianity in its most humane and sympathetic forms remains the negation of such science. What is called “Christianity without dogma” is merely humane sentiment misnamed.
It is essential to a durable advance, however, that it should be pure of violence, and utterly tolerant. When popular education has emptied all or any of the churches, as it has already gone some way towards doing, the spontaneous revenue of those which are voluntary bodies will in the main have ceased; and by that time the majority will be in a position to dispose of national funds in the social interest. Such a course will be facile to a society which provides work for all and sustains all; and when the bribe of sectarian endowment is thus made void, the more factitious life of ancient error will be at an end. But the most speculative construction of the future provides for the widest individual and psychological freedom; and there will have been no true triumph of reason if philosophic and historic error, recognized as such, have not a free field. The Utopia of rationalism will be reached when supernaturalism in the present sense of the term shall have passed away as the belief in witchcraft has done, without pressure of pains and penalties. And that Utopia will be the rendezvous, belike, of more than one social ideal—of all, indeed, which trust to reason for the attainment of righteousness.
Notes
1 I.e., the South African War, in 1901.
2 A beginning has since been made.