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Page 12
[Footnote 8: _Anthropologie_, para. 87 c.]
Such an anthropocentric view of life and destiny in exalting man,
of course, thereby liberated him, not merely from ecclesiastical
domination, but also from those illusive fears and questionings, those
remote and imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and those
consequent exacting demands upon himself which are a part of the
religious interpretation of life. Humanistic writing is full of the
exulting sense of this emancipation. These superconsiderations do not
belong in the world of experience as the humanist ordinarily conceives
of it. Hence, man lives in an immensely contracted, but a very real
and tangible world and within the small experimental circumference of
it, he holds a far larger place (from one viewpoint, a far smaller one
from another) than that of a finite creature caught in the snare of
this world and yet a child of the Eternal, having infinite destinies.
The humanist sees man as freed from the tyranny of this supernatural
revelation and laws. He rejoices over man because now he stands,
"self-poised on manhood's solid earth
Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,
Fed from within with all the strength he needs."
It is this sense of independence which arouses in Goethe a perennial
enthusiasm. It is the greatest bliss, he says, that the humanist won
back for us. Henceforth, we must strive with all our power to keep it.
We have attempted this brief sketch of one of the chief sources of the
contemporary thought movement, that we may realize the pit whence we
were digged, the quarry from which many corner stones in the present
edifice of civilization were dug. The preacher tends to underestimate
the comprehensive character of the pervasive ideas, worked into many
institutions and practices, which are continually impinging upon him
and his message. They form a perpetual attrition, working silently and
ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religious
conceptions of the community. Much of the vagueness and sentimentalism
of present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, is due to the
influence of the non-religious or, at least, the insufficiently
religious character of the ruling ideas and motives outside the church
which are impinging upon it, and upon the rest of the thinking of the
moment.
Now, this _abstract_ humanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries had a considerable influence upon early American preaching.
The latter part of the eighteenth century marked a breaking away from
the Protestant scholasticism of the Reformation theology. The French
Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the
typical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereignty
of the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion
in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication with
many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious
consideration. College students modestly admitted that they were
infidels and with a delicious na�vet� assumed the names of Voltaire,
Thomas Paine and even of that notorious and notable egotist
Rousseau. It is said that in 1795, on the first Sunday of President
administration in Yale College, only three undergraduates remained
after service to take the sacrament. The reasons were partly
political, probably, but these themselves were grounded in the new
philosophical, anti-religious attitude.
Of course, this affected the churches. There was a reaction from
Protestant scholasticism within them which, later on, culminated in
Unitarianism, Universalism and Arminianism. The most significant thing
in the Unitarian movement was not its rejection of the Trinitarian
speculation, but its positive contribution to the reassertion of
Jesus' doctrine of the worth and dignity of human nature. But it
recovered that doctrine much more by the way of humanistic philosophy
than by way of the teaching of the New Testament. I suppose the
thing which has made the weakness of the Unitarian movement, its
acknowledged lack of religious warmth and feeling, is due not to the
place where it stands, but to the road by which it got there.
Yet, take it for all in all, the effect upon the preaching of the
supernatural and speculative doctrines and insights of Christianity,
was not in America as great as might be expected. Kant died in 1804,
and Goethe in 1832, but only in the last sixty years has the preaching
of the "evangelical" churches been fundamentally affected by the
prevailing intellectual currents of the day. This is due, I think,
to two causes. One was the nature of the German Reformation. It
found preaching at a low ebb. Every great force, scholastic, popular,
mystical, which had contributed to the splendor of the mediaeval
pulpit had fallen into decay, and the widespread moral laxity of the
clergy precluded spiritual insight. The Reformation, with its ethical
and political interests, revived preaching and by the nature of these
same interests fixed the limits and determined the direction within
which it should develop. It is important to remember that Luther did
not break with the old theological system. He continued his belief
in an authority and revelation anterior, exterior and superior to
man, merely shifting the locus of that authority from the Church
to the Book. Thus he paved the way for Zwingli and the Protestant
scholasticism which became more rigid and sterile than the Catholic
which it succeeded. We usually regard the Reformation as a part of the
Renaissance and hence included in the humanistic movement. Politically
and religiously, it undoubtedly should be so regarded, for it was
a chief factor in the renewal of German nationalism and its central
doctrines of justification by faith, and the right of each separate
believer to an unmediated access to the Highest, exalted the integrity
and dignity of the individual. Inconsistently, however, it continued
the old theological tradition. In the Lutheran system, says Paul de
Lagarde, we see the Catholic scholastic structure standing
untouched with the exception of a few loci. And Harnack, in the
_Dogmengeschichte_ calls it "a miserable duplication of the Catholic
Church."
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