By the late Auguste Sabatier. Translated from the French by Victor Leuliette, B.-ès-L. (Paris), A.K.C. London: Williams & Norgate; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1904.1
No one who has ever read ten lines of the writings of the late Prof. Auguste Sabatier but will have been impressed with the grace of his style and the truly Gallic attractiveness of his method of opening and presenting a subject. His learning seemed only to adorn, his polemic zeal only to add zest to, what seemed always primarily a piece of literature. Whatever else he was he was always eminently readable. The two essays which combine to make up the little volume at present before us are like the rest of his writings in these things. They are like the rest of his writings also in the poverty-stricken thinness of the religious conceptions which they present to us as the only form in which Christianity can hope to live—or rather must expect to die—in the conditions presented by modern culture.
The second of these essays is really an address which was delivered at the Religious Science Congress at Stockholm, September 2, 1897. It undertakes to elucidate precisely the problem of the relations of religion and modern culture. These relations, we are told, are summed up in the one word “conflict.” The principle of modern culture is expressed in the single term “autonomy”—that is to say, “the unconquerable assurance of the human mind, in its present advanced state of development, that it possesses within itself the norm of its life and of its thought” (p. 169). It, of course, scouts the “heteronomy” in which traditional religion entrenches itself. Traditional religion, on the other hand, too timid to trust the human soul to its inherent religious instinct, and clinging in one way or another to “external authority,” profoundly distrusts the efforts of the human spirit, characterizing every department of modern culture, to realize its independence. What is to be done and what is the outlook for the future? Prof. Sabatier counsels cessation of the external conflict, and points with hope to the mutual interpenetration of religion and culture.
At this point, we delight to say, we are heartily at one with Prof. Sabatier; and the section of the address in which he pictures the coming reconciliation through mutual internal influence, is a beautiful expression of a noble conception, and as well, as we shall be happy to believe, a true forecast of the ultimate issue. “To the violent and sterile conflict which we have just described there succeeds the closest and most active solidarity” (p. 212). Scientific men having become religious, the science they produce will exhibit the traits of their religion. Religious men having become scientific, the religion they serve will take on the forms of rational and intellectually defensible expression. “Being an inner inspiration, a deep-seated life, kindled within the soul itself by the spirit of God, piety will not act from without upon science in order to curb it beneath a strange law; it will not impose its methods or assign its limits to science, still less will it dictate its conclusions. But it will call forth and maintain, within the heart of the scientist, the sacred flame of the religious, that is to say, absolute love of truth” (p. 212). Similarly religion will manifest itself as “in communication and close touch with human culture” (p. 218). It is the vision of the lion and lamb lying down together: and, we praise God for it, it is a vision that is to be realized.
It is all the more regrettable that, when we look closely at Prof. Sabatier’s personal expectation—perhaps we would better say, individual prophecy—of the precise manner in which this great end shall be attained, we discover that the side of the lion where he looks (and hopes) to see the lamb lie down is the inside. He tells us, indeed, that religion is to borrow nothing from culture, but to go its own way to its own perfect development. But he conceives that religion in its perfect development will possess nothing that culture can take the least interest in. The process by which religion is to make itself “agreeable to the general culture of modern times” is a process of “freeing itself from worn out forms and old ideas.” And to Prof. Sabatier every form and idea is old and worn out except the pure products of the religious sentiment itself. The Socinian criticism, the Rationalistic assault, the demands of Modern Culture, these, in Prof. Sabatier’s apprehension, are the successive instruments by means of which religion has been progressively purified; and the pure religion he commends to us as the religion of the future is accordingly just a highly sentimentalized natural religion. He expresses this dreary conclusion in terms so gracious and so suggestive that we scarcely realize that it is merely bald natural religion that is commended to us. We read almost without shock of the doctrines of the Trinity, of the Person of Christ, of the Sacrificial Atonement as so much “Christian mythology” which has “broken down beneath the blows of the rationalism of the eighteenth century” (pp. 221 f.). Under the sense of the beauty of the conception of piety which describes it as “the sensitiveness of the heart for God,” we almost fail to catch what is meant when we are told that “the permanent Christian consciousness will be the religious consciousness of man, induced by the experience of filial piety wrought in the soul of Christ” (p. 204). It is with all the more shock that we realize in the end that when Prof. Sabatier commends to us the religion of Jesus, he means rather the religion which Jesus had than the religion that has Jesus.