[British Critic, vol. 24, July 1838.]
Religion is a social principle; it cannot exist without fellow-feeling, nor can fellow-feeling be maintained without assemblies and celebrations. It is very well to maintain its more private and personal nature in a treatise for the closet or a discussion to serve a purpose; but the notion of strictly independent, secret, isolated religion is unreal and theoretical. He who believes in a Maker and Governor believes that he is Maker and Governor of others besides himself; and (if we may so parallel the sacred text) he who regards Him who made, regards them also who are made by Him. And, moreover, in a world of sin, the current of which runs strongly against the voice of conscience, and the high but delicate instincts of truth and purity, human nature, conscious of its weakness, will ever, in mere self-defence, look out for sympathy and co-operation in its arduous duty of maintaining what is unseen against what is seen.
When then men talk of religion being a secret thing between each man and his Maker, as being too sacred for co-operation, and too peculiar and individual for sympathy, they are either letting their words outrun their ideas or they are mere sceptics and men of the world, catching at any excuse which offers and promises well, in order to get rid of a subject they do not like. Men who are well content with things visible, and wish to frame the materials which this world supplies into a perfect system, who have their summum bonum upon earth, and who feel that it is attainable by means which are of earth, consider the religious principle as nothing more or less than a principle of disorder, as the cause of infinite disarrangements and perplexities in that view and method of life which they would fain pursue; and the religious element in our nature as a troublesome and vexatious phenomenon, which they cannot deny to exist, and to require satisfying, though they console themselves by a plain denial of its being a primary or essential part of our nature, or more than the result of education and association, and accordingly do their best to bribe it into quietness as cheaply and as expeditiously as they can.
Such is the case with those who deny that religion is a social principle, because they wish it expelled from society; but others, and the mass of persons, who deny it, deny it in theory only, for party reasons, from bad education, or from other unsatisfactory causes; and they convict themselves of inconsistency, and show that they are using words for ideas, by forthwith proceeding to act against their own doctrine. They resolutely maintain that each individual man must be ultimately dependent for his religious opinions on himself; and yet in spite of this, by societies, and meetings, and tracts, and united movements, and celebrations, they do bring to bear upon him an extrinsic and external influence, an authority distinct from the sacred volume and from his personal and private inquiry into it, and calculated to overawe and to over-persuade him. They set up a power, the same in kind as the visible Church, to impress and seduce his imagination, in advance or in prejudice of his reason. In theory they maintain the right of private judgment, and the supremacy of Scripture without note or comment; yet by all the enthusiasm of social feeling and all the excitement of a struggle, by those means which the Church uses openly and avowedly, they strive, without avowing them, to oppose them when avowed, to oppose them in the Church.
Even a system (of external worship we cannot call it, but) of ceremony and circumstance, is in course of formation, at the shell of testaceous animals, being at once the development and protection of that New Religion, which it has been the fashion among us of late years to substitute for the Ancient Faith. By the ancient religion we mean that which Popery corrupted; by the new religion we mean that which Luther founded in his new definition of faith, and his new dogma, that justification by faith only is the one fundamental truth of the Gospel. The old religion had its pageants, rites, and festivals; and the spirit of destruction which has been unchained in these last centuries declared that such observances were heathenish and idolatrous. The old religion had, or rather it has, its discipline, its monuments, and its ritual, as (by a good Providence) they are still preserved to us; and these were, or rather still are, represented by its enemies as unlawful persuasives, yokes, beggarly elements, instruments of bondage, or rags for the vanity fair of the great Babel. It had its solemn services; and what were these forsooth but mummeries, the fruit of idle legends, of pious frauds, representations ad captandum, evil doings that good might come, or exaggerations of what was true, or occasions of unduly exalting individuals, some poor, frail, and fallible being, who after all was but a man of like passions with the rest? It had its religions societies; and what were these but unscriptural, because not prescribed in Scripture? It had its convocations of clergy; and how could a hundred heads be infallible when laid together, when each separately was not so? It had its processions and litanies, and what were these but accurate and deliberate copies of Pagan customs? The most virtuous feelings were displayed, and the most touching delicacy, and the most jealous indignation at religion, which is a thing of the heart, being made so outward, so unspiritual, so unchristian.