A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume...

Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems of religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. Hennell produced an Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so important for its time as to be thought worth translating into German by Strauss; and this found a considerable response from the educated English public of its day. In the preface to his second edition (1841) Hennell spoke very plainly of “the large and probably increasing amount of unbelief in all classes around us”; and made the then remarkably courageous declarations that in his experience “neither deism, pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible with uprightness and benevolence”; and that “the real or affected horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel, the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind.” It was in the circle of Hennell that Marian Evans, later to become famous as George Eliot, grew into a rationalist in despite of her religious temperament; and it was she who, when Hennell’s bride gave up the task, undertook the toil of translating Strauss’s Leben Jesu—though at many points she “thought him wrong.”163 In the churches he had of course no overt acceptance. At this stage, English orthodoxy was of such a cast that the pious Tregelles, himself fiercely opposed to all forms of rationalism, had to complain that the most incontrovertible corrections of the current text of the New Testament were angrily denounced.164

In the next generation Theodore Parker in the United States, developing his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at the cost of much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results and a measure of theistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention of the orthodox world; promoting at the same time a semi-philosophic, semi-ethical reaction against the Calvinistic theology of Jonathan Edwards, theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of New England. In the old country a number of writers developed new movements of criticism from theistic points of view. F. W. Newman, the scholarly brother of John Henry,165 produced a book entitled The Soul (1849), and another, Phases of Faith (1853), which had much influence in promoting rationalism of a rather rigidly theistic cast. R. W. Mackay in the same period published two learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity (1854), notably scientific in method for its time; and The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the admiration of Buckle; “George Eliot” translated Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. Greg, one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist study of The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundations Contrasted with its Superstructure (1850), which has gone through many editions and is still reprinted. In 1864 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by Evan Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales.

The book is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament eschatology, which develops into a deistic attack on the central Christian dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous theist, Thomas Scott, whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an influence during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871), which, though less important than the works of Strauss and less popular than those of Renan, played a considerable part in the disintegration of the traditional faith among English churchmen. Still the primacy in critical research on scholarly lines lay with the Germans; and it was the results of their work that were co-ordinated, from a theistic standpoint,166 in the anonymous work, Supernatural Religion (1874–77), a massive and decisive performance, too powerful to be disposed of by the episcopal and other attacks made upon it.167 Since its assimilation the orthodox or inspirationist view of the gospels has lost credit among competent scholars even within the churches. The battleground is now removed to the problem of the historicity of the ostensible origins of the cult; and scholarly orthodoxy takes for granted many positions which fifty years ago were typical of “German rationalism.”

12. In France systematic criticism of the sacred books recommenced in the second half of the century with such writings as those of P. Larroque (Examen Critique des doctrines de la religion chrétienne, 1860); Gustave d’Eichthal (Les Évangiles, ptie. i, 1863); and Alphonse Peyrat (Histoire élémentaire et critique de Jésus, 1864); whereafter the rationalistic view was applied with singular literary charm, if with imperfect consistency, by Renan in his series of seven volumes on the origins of Christianity, and with more scientific breadth of view by Ernest Havet in his Christianisme et ses Origines (1872, etc.). Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863) especially has been read throughout the civilized world. It has been quite justly pronounced, by German and other critics, a romance; but no other “life” properly so called has been anything else, Strauss’s first Life being an analysis rather than a construction; and the epithet was but an unwitting avowal that to accept the gospels, barring miracles, as biography—which is what Renan did—is to be committed to the unhistorical. He began by accepting the fourth as equipollent with the synoptics; and upon this Strauss in his second Life confidently called for a recantation, which came in due course. But Renan, in his fitful way, had critical glimpses which were denied to Strauss—for instance, as to the material of the Sermon on the Mount. The whole series of the Origines, which wound up with Marc Aurèle (1882), has a similar fluctuating value, showing on the whole a progressive critical sense.

The Saint Paul, for example, at the close suddenly discards the traditional view previously accepted in Les Apôtres, and recognizes that the ministry of Paul can have been no more than a propaganda of small conventicles, whose total membership throughout the Empire could not have been above a thousand. But Renan’s total service consisted rather in a highly artistic and winning application of rational historical methods to early Christian history, with the effect of displacing the traditionist method, than in any lasting or comprehensive solution of the problem of the origins. Havet’s survey is both corrective and complementary to his. Renan’s influence on opinion throughout the world, however, was enormous, were it only because he was one of the most finished literary artists of his time.