BROWNING AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH CHAPTER I GOD By the term "God" we understand the one absolutely and infinitely perfect Being who is the Creator of all visible and, invisible things. The first article of the poet's creed is "I find first Writ down for very A. B. C. of fact, 'In the beginning, God made heaven and earth.' "1 Apart from a written revelation, the belief in a Creator is natural and instinctive to the human mind. Nothing is easier to teach a child than this "A. B. C. of fact." Atheism must be taught a man, Theism of one kind or another-dim, 1 The Ring and the Book, Pt. I., 11. 707-9. B 2 NO ATHEIST RACES imperfect, or corrupt-is instinctive. There are no atheist races of men; every savage tribe has some sort of belief in a Spirit or Being outside and more powerful than men. Pure Atheism is repugnant to all, and can only be arrived at by a long process of perverted reasoning. Atheism has no A. B. C. Yet the arguments from a general consensus of human belief must not be pushed too far. "We must give up," says Lotze,1 "the attempt to base belief in the existence of God upon the agreement of mankind. Moods and presentiments that point to something unknown and invisible are indeed developed in every human soul under the influence of the experience of life; but, except under favourable conditions of development, they hardly produced more than a state of objectless fear, to which brutes also would be subject if they were not too devoid of thought to collect into a permanent group the individual frights which they experience." Yet Cicero could say in his day that "No people is without faith in a God, although they may be ignorant of His Nature." The discovery of new races of men, and the researches of anthropology, according to the investigations and conclusions of Tylor, Quatrefages, Tiele, Peschel, and others, prove that all savage tribes, however degraded, so far as known, have some 1 Mikrokosmus, vol. i., p. 685. WHAT FOOLS CALL NATURE 3 kind of religious sense, and some idea of moral obligation. If these are not of divine origin, by whom and how was religion invented? The Supreme Being, says Browning, is "What I call God, And fools call Nature."1 He recognizes a great First Cause-God; fools call Nature the First Cause, mistaking the effect for the cause. The Pantheist makes his creative cause identical with the created things themselves. Browning was not a Materialist. Materialism teaches that matter is the origin and principle of all existing things. Matter is declared to be eternal, containing all things, and beside it is neither God, nor soul, nor conscience. Pantheism teaches that all things are identical in nature, substance, and essence. All things are but manifestations or forms of the One Infinite Being. Neither Materialism nor Pantheism have any place in Browning's system. He taught the doctrine of a Personal God. By the licence allowed to poets he calls those persons "fools" who call Nature-whether Matter or the Manifestation of the Infinite-God. In his long poem, La Saisiaz, we have the result of the poet's musings on death, God, the soul, and the future state. The poem is of the first importance for the purpose of this work, because the 1 The Ring and the Book: "The Pope," ll. 1073-4. 4 TWO FACTS, GOD AND THE SOUL conclusions arrived at must be considered as the author's deliberate convictions; the opinions expressed and the faith proclaimed cannot be set aside as utterances dramatically put into the mouths of characters with whom the writer has merely a literary sympathy. The poem expresses a Theism of the loftiest kind, and the grounds on which the arguments are based are as philosophical as they are devout. The anxious questioning of the poet's soul is answered. In a more or less satisfactory way the soul's craving for truth is rewarded by a reply. The mental process of question and answer presupposes knowledge, and the recognition of a force perceived to be outside itself and "actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, unaffected by its end." We have here, says the poet, two facts-God, and the soul: the only facts he wants upon which to base his Theistic system. He cannot prove them facts, and that he cannot do so proves them facts. He knows that he knows not something which nevertheless is fact. "No syllogistic proof," says F. W. Newman,1 "is possible that a God exists or listens to prayer, just as no syllogistic proof of an outer world will ever be gained. Perhaps there is no outer world, and our internal sensations are the universe." Some tell us that substance and matter are illusive 1 The Soul, p. 120. I THINK, THEREFORE I AM" 5 terms; and that a substance is nothing but a congeries of forces, coherent and repulsive." The famous metaphysical proof of Descartes was evidently in the poet's mind in this connection: Cogito, ergo sum-"I think, therefore I am." We know that our senses often mislead us as to the nature of things without us. We strike our forehead in the dark, we see sparks though there are none; we fancy we hear sounds when half asleep, bells ring, our name is called-it is all in our imagination; in delirium we see objects which have no existence outside our brain. We carry on conversations in our dreams with persons who seem as real to us as any whom we meet in our waking hours. Perhaps we are misled as to there being anything without us at all. Even in mathematics our most certain judgments may be illusory. Descartes finds his primary unit of thought and being, on which depends all knowledge, in simple self-consciousness. think": all else may be illusion, but this at least is real. Separate the thinking self from that which it thinks about, and still the thinking self remains, and in thinking, "I am." Cogito, ergo sum. The soul, therefore, is certain of its own existence, and recognizes that there is a power outside itself, and which is altogether independent of the soul, and Browning calls this power-God. So we have, as Newman said, a certainty of the existence of " two, and two only, "I |