Short Studies on Great SubjectsFroude, James Anthony
Religion
Short Studies on Great Subjects
Froude, James Anthony
English essays; English literature; History; Religion -- Biography
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 had 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 that 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 it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among
ourselves, 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 one another, 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 pietist the enquirer 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 honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.
The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that 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 own later days 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 dishonours 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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