o i i Q L l - J .

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G b e

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Xitccarp Giube

AND RATIONALIST REVIEW.

[ESTABLISHED 1885.]

No. 41. (N ew Series.)

NOVEM BER 1, 1899. .

Monthly ; T wopence.

Contents.

T he Religion of Consolation. By A. G. W. . 161 A Professor’s Christianity. By F. J. Gould . . 162 D ifferences of Opinion. By Charles T. Gorham . 163 Ingersoll's Last Poem. By G. J. Holyoake . . 163 T he Supremacy of Mind . . , .164 A Manual of E volution . . , .165 By-ways of Human Nature . . . .166 Are we all Irresponsible?.... 167 Imperialism “ an Insensate Superstition” . . 167 Random Jottings . . . . . .168 T he Rationalist’s Bookshelves.— I. E. P. Mere­

God and the other world (or worlds) belong at least to the unproven, and, while they remain so, man has no right to give them credence, far less to assert dogmatically that they are the necessary centres of inspiration and happiness. The utmost that he should allow himself is the vague, momentary hope that the world may, after all, have a fatherly Creator, and that death may be merely a prelude to perfect peace. But even that is an undignified lapse from the purity of rational faith, an unworthy concession to a passing weakness of soul. To him who really loves truth, any yearning beyond its limits is a form of infidelity.

dith’s “ P rophet of Nazareth” . . .169 Signs and Warnings . . . . .170 Rationalism in the Magazines . . .171 Quarterly Magazines Mind ” . . .172 CORRESPONDENCE:— Evolution and Pantheism, by M. D.

O’Brien ; Impersonal Deities, by J. McCabe; Dr. Johnson, by G. S. Walton. . . . .173

Zbe IR elioion o f C o n so la t io n . T he motives which induce people to adopt a certain form of religious belief are usually very complex. Inherited tendencies, family and social environment, educational influences, motives of expediency, till play their parts in the propagation of faith. But nothing, perhaps, is so important in the perpetuation o f belief as the feeling that, without it the world would lose its sweetness and tenderness. Religious people, and more especially devout women, shrink from abandoning the paternal care of a beneficent Creator and relying entirely upon what they are pleased to call the “ blind forces o f Nature.” Heaven is, to them, an oasis at the close o f a long day’s march in a weary land o f sand and thorns ; without the vision of its future delights life lacks all aim, all purpose. Their religion, in short, is the religion o f consolation.

So passionately are the majority of the faithful attached to the consolations of their belief that they are prone to reject Rationalism on the simple ground that its consolatory power is comparatively so weak. They seem to feel that, because their religion is consoling, therefore it is true. And, by a strange inversion of the proposition, they feel that Rationalism, being to them so poor in consolation, cannot be wholly true. Believers in the supernatural have expended far more rhetorical fervour in extolling the soothing efficacy of their faith than in exalting its adherence to truth. It is palpable evidence of the weakness of a man that he should for a moment plead that truth, to be truth to him, should be a source of consolation. He forgets that truth has no duties to fulfil towards mankind. The duty lies all the other way, and it can only be forgotten at the peril of consistency and intellectual self-respect.

Although the world is no longer regarded as the centre of the universe, there is a lingering hope that the fate of the universe is somehow involved in the destiny of man. This aspect of egoism received its first blow when the Copernican system was propounded ; it will only cease to be when man has realized that the universe does not exist to minister to his wants, to bring him into being, to pass him through a probation of earthly toil and suffering, and to present him with compensation in the form of an eternity of infinite pleasure. The belief that one’s little ego is a thing of importance to the Fates is another element in the consolations of faith. It is also another instance of the lengths to which unconscious egoism can go.

It is generally understood that Rationalism has nothing to offer in place o f this consoling belief in a compassionate deity and a heaven o f poetic justice and eternal bliss. In a sense, this is true. Rationalism has no substitute for Jehovah— nothing, that is, which could be put in Jehovah’s place without causing a void in the heart of the believer. Its world is the world between the cradle and the grave ' justice must see its ends accomplished here, and happiness must be won now or not at all. It is against this that the faithful protest, not with their heads, but with their hearts “ We want more,” they cry, “ than reason can give us. The world cannot satisfy the yearnings o f our souls; earthly things are as dross to the bright visions o f the true land of God.”

It is hardly to be expected that people whose emotions so readily run riot with their intellect should see that, in demanding “ something more than reason can g iv e ” them they are asking something beyond, and therefore foreign to’ truth. Anything that is outside the range of reason belongs either to the unknown or the unknowable, and to found a faith upon either of these is the acme of intellectual bankruptcy For practical purposes, a thing unproved or incapable o f proof is a thing untrue— that is to say it has no legitimate claim to rank with established truth as a basis o f thought or conduct. In course of time a thine unproved may find its proof, but not until then can it justify its entrance into a consistent intellectual scheme

To the Rationalist, therefore, the consolations of supernaturalism are the consolations of illusion, the opiates of the aching soul. The consolations that survive the death of faith are the consolations that human work and sympathy supply. It is notable that the most ardent devotees of the religion of consolation are those who are bankrupt in earthly joy. As Guyau says: “ The feeble, the disinherited, the suffering, all those to whom misfortune has not left strength enough for rebellion, have but one resource— the sweet and consoling humility of divine love. Whoever does not love or is not loved completely and sufficiently on earth will always turn towards heaven. The proposition is as regular as the parallelogram of forces.” But such relapsing upon supernatural sympathy is plainly a confession of weakness, an acknowledgment that one’s strength is insufficient to face the stress of existence. One may pity the cases in which such a relief from heart-pain is sought, but it would be utter folly to exalt them into an example for normal, independent human beings. As Mr. G. W. Foote truly says, “ the one great curse is weakness.” The appeal of the religion of consolation is not to our love of honesty or our courage, but to our tendency to rely upon some other strength than our own. That this strength, in the case of supernatural religion, is altogether illusory merely adds to the weakening effects of the forfeiture of independence.

Some adherents of the religion of consolation might be constrained to admit that in the hey-day of life and vigour