Credulity and Research.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 2508, 19 January 1877, Page 3

Credulity and Research.

All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are liable to revision. The change of times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things which in themselves are the same they always were. Facts supposed once to be fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer acquaintance with the phenomena of experience lias revealed to us the action of forces, before undreamt of, working throughout nature with unerring uniformity; and to the inediceval stories of magic, witchcraft, or the miracles of the saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The direct evidence on which such atories were received may remain unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Our age, like every age which has gone- before it, judges the value of testimony, not by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own sense of the laws of probability ; and we consider events probable or improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of tlfe middle ages a miracle was more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch ; and if two or more witnesses could have been found to swear that they bad heard an old woman curse him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers ; when he can find a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the intervention of a cause beyond nature, and thus the very element of marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of truth,, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion. So, throughout history we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence, and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget—that God is truth. Yet essential as they are to each other, each keeps too absolutely to the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its natural enemy. To the warm and enthusiastic prelatist the inquirer appears as a hater of God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he calls the honor of God, makes war upon such people with steal and fire. The innovator, on the other hand, knowing he is not that evil creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too desires only truth—first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and scaffold, suffers in our later times in good name, in reputation, in worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of triumph) takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness, his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal separation religion dishonors itself with unavailing enmity to what nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation ; and science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it, turns away with answering hostility from doctrines- without which its own highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes. Is this antagonism a law of humanity ? Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion ? Is faith never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each new discovery as a victory over its rival ? How it may be for the future it is idle to guess ; for the present the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the title-deeds are again to be looked through, and established opinions again tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the world's history, the last occasion and the greatest being the Reformation of the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that religion merges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before. Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and,the religious press ring again with old shrieks of sacrilege; the machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning. It will not answer; the worse danger to what is really true is the want of wisdom in its defenders.— Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects. ■■■•'.