The Sun.
London, England, 1866-03-06 00:00:00

The Religious Controversy of our Age.

Within the last quarter of a century an extraor-
dinary animation has been evidenced, now in this
country now in that, but more particularly amongst
ourselves, in the diffusion, the maintenance, and
the general development of Religious Controversy.
Belief and Unbelief, within the interval just named,
have been not only very frequently in direct colli-
sion, but-all the while they have been assiduously and
energetically working, each in its own way and quite
irrespectively the one of the other. As illustrative of
the intensity of the intellectual warfare now more I
especially alluded to, we would here very briefly
recall to mind a number of hitherto scattered, but—
as will be seen upon the instant, we conjecture,
when they have been once brought into juxtaposi-
tion—wonderfully significant particulars. The
spectacle presented to view, indeed, upon our
taking the merest casual glance of retrospection
down the vista of this last past quarter of a century,
is one indicative of so great a ferment and agitation
of Religious Opinion in Western Europe, but more
especially in England, that it will be found to have
extended, upon the one hand, to the wildest extra-
vagances of fanaticism and, upon the other, to the
deadliest blasphemies of infidelity. Yonder, on the
right hand—raving, shrieking, foaming at the mouth;
as if in what is spoken of in Holy Writ as actual
possession by the devil—appear the Revivalists.
Yonder upon the left—cynically sneering at the belief
of millions upon millions, of many successive gene-
rations, of philosophic intellects as profound and
comprehensive as those of Blaise Pascal and Isaac
Newton, of hearts as pure and gentle as those of
Jeremy Taylor and Thomas a Kempas. —appear that
over-abundant, self-sufficient throng made up of the
D eistical,Atheistical, Materialistic, so-called Logical,
soi-disant Rationalist writers of this Nineteenth
Century ! Scoffers at the day-dream (as it seems to
them) of Revelation—deriders of the fantasy of a
hereafter--mockers at the notion of a soul--men
tracing back the origin of the human race to an ape—
laughing to scorn the Divinity of Christ—denying

even the existence of a God.
Within the comparatively brief interval of the last
half century, indeed, what extravagances of all
kinds—old ones revived, new ones, bran new ones,
freshly invented—have we not witnessed ? The
mesmeric agency of yesterday has ripened into the
odic force of to-day. Materialism has been running
its career meanwhile cheek-by-jowl with a some-
thing-or-another, vulgarly known as Spiritualism.
A Spiritualism so petty, and utterly contemptible,
and" impish in its manifestations that its loftiest
achievement% have been but as the fabled feats of
Puck or Robin Goodfellow.
Table-turning, spirit-rapping, tying and untying
knotted cords in the dark—writing in the name of
Shakspere and with the orthography of a kitchen-
maid—twanging the strings of a guitar with aerial
fingers about as musically dexterous as those of a
street banjo-player—behold ! the achievements of
that preposterous science affecting to open up to the
world through the intervention of some illiterate
Medium, direct communication—visible, audible,
even (save the mark !) tangible communication—with
the awful Spirit-World.
Meanwhile, in the loftier regions of philosophy
what have not modern inquirers been resorting
to, as in the instance of Mr. Darwin—what have
they not been rising or falling to, what, at any
rate let us say, have they not been wandering to-
wards, by many devious tracks, as in such instances
as those of M. Comte, of Mr. Mill, and of Pro-
fessor Huxley. Mr. Darwin's theory is, after all, in
point of fact, nothing more than La Marck's theory,
the once famous Lamarckian theory redivivus—the
theory of development. Mr. Mill's logic, again,
while it would lead his disciples to regard mankind
at large as little better than amiable repeti-
tions or reduplications of the Monster in " Franken-
stein," has resulted, in his own instance, in landing
him, from the outside sea of politics, as a bore of the
very first magnitude, within the walls of the British
House of Commons. Professor Huxley for his
part would fain induce us, if he could, to re-
gard the whole universe as presenting to view
—as clearly as we can put it in words—a
maze of chemical and mechanical phenomena,
originating, as precisely as may be conjectured,
in the Unknown and Unknowable! M. Comte mean -
while having already, in his time, with the matchless
audacity of a French metaphysical theorist, subli-
mated all the philosophies and all the religions of
preceding ages—Christian, Pagan, Heretical, and
Schismatical—into his own transcendental creed,
science, dogma, or whatever else we may like to
call it—now familiarly known the wide world over
by the name, style, or title of Positivism.
As a little episode or interlude among the grander
and more audacious speculations of intellectual
giants like Auguste Comte and Stuart Mill, it may
be remembered, again, that while Thomas Carlyle
was oracularly issuing to his fellow-men his series of
" Latter Day Pamphlets" (whatever that title may
have meant), there appeared, to the shuddering
marvel of the ordinary run of believers, a terribly
cold-blooded deistical Dialogue demonstrative, or,
at any rate, designed to be demonstrative, of such
heartening truths (!) as these that human emo-
tions and human affections are nothing better
after all, than—let us say by way of homely illus-
tration—the electric thrill that can be produced upon
the palate, by bringing together the edges of a zinc
and silver disc placed the one above the other below
the tongue—a deadly deistical Dialogue, maintained
between Miss Harriet Martineau, that archetype or
highest exemplar of your strong-minded woman
and a congenial male disputant, by name
Mr. Atkinson. It may be remembered, moreover,
by those who still retain any recollection at all of
that ephemeral publication—ephemeral even though
emanating partly from the usually vivifying intelli-
gence of Harriet Martineau—that the preposterous
non-sequitur arrived at, as the result of that ques-
tionably philosophic argument, was happily hit off
at the time by the exquisitely paradoxical witticism
—expressive in point of fact of the whole drift of
the Dialogue—

" There is no God—and Atkinson is His Prophet !"

Somewhere about the same time that Mr. Atkinson
and Miss Martineau were thus confabulating in
a stage whisper (audible all over the land) about
the infinitudes that, according to them, were really
little better than a vacuum, and about the eterni-
ties that, contemplated through their judgment,
were of no more worth, when all had been said and
done, than the single throb of a pendulum—there
appeared a now famous book entitled " The Vestiges
of Creation." A book modestly given to the world
by an anonymous searcher into the Mysteries of
Cosmogony, a writer of most picturesque style and
of singularly vivid imagination, in regard to thaprob-
lem of whose identity all sorts of conjectures were
for along while indulged in—fastening at one time
on
Lord Byron's daughter, Ada, the late Countess of
Lovelace, but eventually settling down, resolutely,
and we believe with reason, upon Mr. Robert
Chambers, the well-known publisher of Edinburgh,
as the real Simon Pure, the author of the Dis-
quisition.
Subsequently, indeed some considerable time after-
wards, the daring speculations thus indulged in by
geological
and astronomical in •
q.mrers with a view
to the solution, if possible, of some at le
the countless Mysteries of the Physical ast among
Universe
a cluster of
were applied by Divines until then
regarded as orthodox members of the Church Esta-
blishment, to the investigation, it might even be said
to the elucidation, by the sheer force of human rea-
soning, of some among the far more inscrutable Mys..
teries of the au ouster and diviner science of Theology.
Their labours in this way resulting in the only too-
well-known " Essays and Reviews"-7-the writers of
which thereby immediately acquired for themselves
the title, still current, of Essayists and Reviewers. Dr.
Whewell at Cambridge and Sir David Brewster in
Scotland, might, if they so pleased, keep up the ball of
conjecture between them as to the existence or the
non-existence of other worlds peopled like our own
by intelligent beings. The Essayists and Reviewers
aimed higher than that and further than that—
immeasurably. They were bent upon looking
into the abysses of light without any fear at all
Their endeavour was to sift and analyse to their very
uttermost the dogmas hitherto accepted with reve-
rent and believing
confidence.
The Eternity of