not, the remark is this--Did it ever strike you, reader, as a most
memorable phenomenon about Christianity, as one of those contradictory
functions which, to a thing of human mechanism, is impossible, but which
are found in _vital_ agencies and in all deep-laid systems of
truth--that the same scheme of belief which is the most settling,
freezing, tranquillizing for one purpose, is the most unbinding,
agitating, revolutionary in another? Christianity is that religion which
most of all settles what is perilous in scepticism; and yet, also, it is
that which most of all unsettles whatever may invite man's intellectual
activity. It is the sole religion which can give any deep anchorage for
man's hopes; and yet, also, in mysterious self-antagonism, it is the
sole religion which opens a pathless ocean to man's useful and blameless
speculations. Whilst all false religions neither as a matter of fact
_have_ produced--nor as a matter of possibility _could_ have produced--a
philosophy, it is a most significant distinction of Christianity, and
one upon which volumes might be written, that simply by means of the
great truths which that faith has fixed when brought afterwards into
collision with the innumerable questions which that faith has left
undetermined (as not essential to her own final purposes), Christianity
has bred, and tempted, and stimulated a vast body of philosophy on
neutral ground; ground religious enough to create an interest in the
questions, yet not so religious as to react upon capital truths by any
errors that may be committed in the discussion. For instance, on that
one sea-like question of free agency, besides the _explicit_ philosophy
that Christianity has bred amongst the Schoolmen, and since their time,
what a number of sects, heresies, orthodox churches have _implicitly_
couched and diffused some one view or other of this question amongst
their characteristic differences; and without prejudice to the integrity
of their Christian views or the purity of their Christian morals.
Whilst, on the other hand, the very noblest of false religions (the
noblest as having stolen much from Christianity), viz., Islamism, has
foreclosed all philosophy on this subject by the stupid and killing
doctrine of fatalism. This we give as one instance; but in all the rest
it is the same. You might fancy that from a false religion should arise
a false philosophy--false, but still a philosophy. Is it so? On the
contrary: the result of