



Produced by Al Haines










_THE EXPOSITOR'S LIBRARY_



MODERN SUBSTITUTES

FOR CHRISTIANITY



BY THE VERY REV.

PEARSON McADAM MUIR D.D.


MINISTER OF GLASGOW CATHEDRAL

CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE KING




_Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat_



HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON -- NEW YORK -- TORONTO




First Published... December 1909

Second Edition ... October 1912




IN MEMORIAM

S. A. M.

JUNE 3, 1847.  OCTOBER 5, 1871

FEBRUARY 12, 1907




{vii}

CONTENTS


I                                              PAGE

POPULAR IMPEACHMENTS OF CHRISTIANITY.....    1


II

MORALITY WITHOUT RELIGION ..........   31


III

THE RELIGION OF THE UNIVERSE.........   63


IV

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY...........   91


{viii}


V

THEISM WITHOUT CHRIST ............  125


VI

THE TRIBUTE OF CRITICISM TO CHRIST......  171


APPENDICES..................  219

AUTHORITIES CONSULTED ............  257

INDEX ....................  265




{2}

I

POPULAR IMPEACHMENTS OF CHRISTIANITY



'Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?'--S.
LUKE vi. 46.

'The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you.'--ROMANS
ii. 24.

'What if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of
God without effect?'--ROMANS iii. 3.

'By reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.'--2 S.
PETER ii. 1.

'So is the will of God, that with well-doing ye may put to silence the
ignorance of foolish men.'--1 S. PETER ii. 15.



{3}

I

POPULAR IMPEACHMENTS OF CHRISTIANITY

That there is at present a widespread alienation from the Christian
Faith can hardly be denied.  Sometimes by violent invective, sometimes
by quiet assumption, the conclusion is conveyed that Christianity is
obsolete.  Whatever benefits it may have conferred in rude,
unenlightened ages, it is now outgrown, it is not in keeping with the
science and discovery of modern times.  'The good Lord Jesus has had
His day,'[1] is murmured in pitying condescension towards those who
still suffer themselves to be deceived by the antiquated superstition.
The statements in which our forefathers embodied the relations {4}
between God and man are no longer, except by a very few, considered
adequate; and there is everywhere a demand that those statements should
be recast.  Is not all this an irresistible proof that the beliefs of
the Church have been abandoned, that the old notions of the Divine
care, the spiritual world, the everlasting life, cannot be maintained,
must be relegated to the realm of imagination?  The blessings with
which Christianity is commonly credited spring from other sources: the
evils with which society is infected are its result, direct or indirect.


I

Such accusations, it may occur to us, cannot be made seriously: they
bear their refutation in the very making; they cannot be propounded
with any expectation of being accepted.  This may seem self-evident to
us: it is not self-evident to multitudes of eager, {5} earnest men.
The accusations are persistently made by vigorous writers and
impassioned speakers, and are received as incontrovertible
propositions.  However astonishing, however painful, it may be for us
to hear, it is well that we should know, what, in largely circulated
books and periodicals, and in mass meetings of the people, is said
about the Faith which we profess, and about us who profess it.

Listen to some of the terms in which Christianity is impeached.

'I undertake,' says Mr. Winwood Reade, 'I undertake to show that the
destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of
civilisation; and also that man will never attain his full powers as a
moral being, until he has ceased to believe in a personal God, and in
the immortality of the soul.  Christianity must be destroyed.'[2]

'The hostile evidence,' says Mr. Philip {6} Vivian, 'appears to be
overwhelming.  Christianity cannot be true.  Provided that we see
things as they really are, and not as we wish them to be, we cannot but
come to this conclusion.  We cannot get away from facts.  Modern
knowledge forces us to admit that the Christian Faith cannot be
true.'[3]

'I want,' exclaims Mr. Vivian Carey, who has apparently, like Lord
Herbert of Cherbury, received a revelation to prove that no revelation
has been given, 'I want to destroy the fetich of centuries and to
instil in its place a life of duty, and of faith in God and man, and I
believe there is a power that has impelled me to attempt this task....
A system that has produced such results must be essentially bad....  It
will not be difficult to create a faith and a religion that will serve
the needs of humanity, where Christianity has so deplorably failed.'[4]

{7}

'If Christianity,' argues Mr. Charles Watts, 'were potent for good,
that good would have been displayed ere now....  The ties of domestic
affection, the bonds of the social compact, the political relations of
rulers and ruled, all have surrendered themselves to its influence.
Yet with all these advantages, it has proved unable to keep pace with a
progressive civilisation.'[5]

'In a really humane and civilised nation,' Mr. Robert Blatchford
contends, 'there should be and need be no such thing as Ignorance,
Crime, Idleness, War, Slavery, Hate, Envy, Pride, Greed, Gluttony,
Vice.  But this is not a humane and civilised nation, and never will be
while it accepts Christianity as its religion.  These are my reasons
for opposing Christianity.'[6]  'Christianity,' he iterates and
reiterates, 'is not true.'[7]

'Onward, ye children of the new Faith!' {8} exultantly cries Mr.
Moncure D. Conway.  'The sun of Christendom hastes to its setting, but
the hope never sets of those who know that the sunset here is a sunrise
there!'[8]

Such is the manner in which the downfall of Christianity is now
proclaimed.  And the impression is prevalent that, though in all ages
Christianity has been the object of doubt and of scorn, yet never has
it been rejected with such intensity of hatred as now, never have keen
criticism and deep earnestness, wide learning and shrewd mother-wit
been so combined in the attack.  It is not merely the reckless, the
dissolute, the frivolous who turn away from its reproofs, seeking
excuses for their self-indulgence, but it is the thoughtful, the
austere, the high-principled, the reverent, the unselfish, who are
engaged in a crusade against all that we, as Christians, hold dear.
'To the old spirit of mockery, coarse or refined, to the old wrangle of
argument, {9} also coarse or refined, has succeeded the spirit of
grave, measured, determined negation.'[9]  Men whose integrity and
elevation of character are beyond suspicion, take their places among
the rebels against the authority of Christ.  They are fighting, they
assert, not for the removal of a check to their vices, but for the
introduction of a nobler ideal.  In the demolition of Christianity, in
the sweeping away of every vestige of religious belief, religious
custom, religious hope, they imagine themselves to be conferring
inestimable benefits upon mankind.  Christianity, in their view, is the
product of delusion and the buttress of all social ills.


II

The contrast which so many are drawing between the present and the past
is not a little exaggerated.  There have been few periods in which
Christianity has not been the {10} object of animadversion and attack,
in which its speedy downfall has not been confidently predicted.  It
was two hundred years ago that Dean Swift wrote _An Argument to prove
that the Abolishing of Christianity in England may, as things now
stand, be attended with some Inconveniences, and perhaps not produce
those many good effects proposed thereby_': the Dean, with scathing
sarcasm, ridiculing at once the conventional customs by which
Christianity was misrepresented, and the supercilious ignorance which
assumed that it was extinct.[10]  It was about a quarter of a century
later that Bishop Butler, in the advertisement to his _Analogy of
Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature_, stated, 'It is
come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that
Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is
now, at length, discovered to be fictitious.  And accordingly they
treat it as if, {11} in the present age, this were an agreed point
among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up
as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of
reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the
world.'  And the Bishop drily gave as the aim of the _Analogy_: 'Thus
much, at least, will be here found, not taken for granted but proved,
that any reasonable man who will thoroughly consider the matter, may be
as much assured as he is of his own being, that it is not, however, so
clear a case that there is nothing in it.'

The assumption that Christianity is a thing of the past can hardly be
more prevalent now than it was then; and the groundlessness of the
assumption then may lead to the conclusion that the assumption is
equally groundless now.  Since the days of Butler or of Swift, the
progress of Christianity has not ceased: its developments of thought
and {12} life have been among the most remarkable in its whole career.
The exultation over its decay in the twentieth century may possibly be
found as premature and as vain as the exultation over its decay in the
eighteenth century, or in any of the centuries which have gone before.


III

The most popular impeachments of Christianity are mainly these.

It is a mass of false and superstitious beliefs long exploded.  It is
the opponent of progress and inquiry, the discoveries of science having
been made in direct defiance of its teaching and its influence.

It is the champion of oppression and tyranny.  It aims at keeping the
poor in ignorance and destitution.  It prostrates itself before the
rich and seeks the patronage of the great.

It so insists on people being absorbed in {13} the thought of heaven
that it practically precludes them from doing any good on earth.

It is a system of selfishness, inculcating the dogma that no one need
care for anything except the salvation of his own soul.[11]

It is the foster-mother of all the evil and misery by which society is
distressed.  Dishonesty, cruelty, slavery, war, persecution, avarice,
drunkenness, vice, would seem to be its natural fruits.

  'How calm and sweet the victories of life,'

shrieked Shelley in one of his early poems.

  'How terrorless the triumph of the grave...
 ... but for thy aid
  Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend,
  Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men,
  And heaven with slaves!
  Thou taintest all thou look'st upon!'[12]

What shall we say to these accusations?  Christians have been credulous
and superstitious, have argued and acted as if only in {14} the
abnormal and exceptional could the Divine Presence be found, as if God
were a hard Taskmaster and capricious Tyrant.  They have resisted
progress and inquiry, blindly refusing to see the light which was
streaming upon them.  They have unquestionably been guilty of miserable
pride towards inferiors in wealth or in station, and guilty of
miserable sycophancy towards the rich and the powerful.  Christians
have too frequently neglected the material well-being of the community,
have suffered disgraceful outward conditions to remain without protest,
have not striven to shed abroad happiness and brightness in squalid and
wretched lives.  Christians have been art and part in fostering such
conditions as wrung from compassionate and indignant hearts the _Song
of the Shirt_ and the _Cry of the Children_.  Christians have imagined
that correctness of belief would make up for falseness of heart, and
loudness of profession for depravity of {15} practice.  Christians have
supposed that in religion all that has to be striven for is the
salvation of one's own soul, have even represented the joy of the
redeemed as heightened by a contemplation of the torments of the lost.
Christians must bear the responsibility of much of the abounding vice
which they have not earnestly tried to combat where it already exists,
and which, in various forms, they have introduced into regions where it
was unknown before.  Lawlessness and degradation in the slums, fraud
and dishonesty in trade, gross revelations in the fashionable world;
bigotry, slander, scandals in the ecclesiastical world; plots, wars,
treacheries, assassinations, in the political world: these things ought
not so to be.  The fiercest denunciations, the most withering satires,
which unbelievers have employed, do not exceed in intensity of
condemnation the judgment which Christian preachers and Christian
writers have pronounced.[13]

{16}

In all ages of the Church the most powerful weapon against Christianity
has been the example of Christians.  The Faith which they nominally
hold has been judged by the lives which they actually lead.[14]
'Christianity,' said a bishop of the eighteenth century, 'would perhaps
be the last religion a wise man would choose, if he were guided by the
lives of those who profess it.'[15]  But is this to admit that the hope
of the world lies in renouncing Christianity? that in confining
ourselves to the seen and the temporal, we shall best elevate mankind?
that the prospect of annihilation and the absence of wisdom, love, and
Providence in the order of the universe constitute the most glorious
gospel which can be proclaimed?  Nothing of the kind