LECTURE IV AUTHORITY IN RELIGION Authority in religion suggests the controversy between the mediæval and modern world. The reformation produced by opposing principles in conception of authority of the Church and rights of reason and conscience. To attribute perfection to work of the reformation an optimistic illusion. Revulsion against objective religion tends to exaggeration of subjective religion. Examples from reformed churches. Distinctive characteristics of English reformation. Authority in relation to interpretation of Bible. Is authority antagonistic to reason? Authority in childhood and from hereditary transmission natural, therefore reasonable. Unconscious influence. Authority the sum of influences moulding us from without. No conflict between reason and authority. Authority at every stage associated with reason as its support. Authority requiring blind submission undermines its own foundations. What is education? Mr. Balfour's "Foundation of Belief." He represents reason as enemy and rival of authority. Attacks popular conception of rights of reason. Fails to define the reason which he considers antagonistic to authority. Authority when challenged appeals to reason. Church of Rome appeals to reason in support of authority when attacked. Mr. Balfour says we owe to authority, rather than reason, religion, ethics and politics. Refutation. Old authorities discredited by advance of knowledge. Analysis of psychological climates. Their authority. Public opinion not like a law of nature. Depends upon character of people. Examples in families and nation. Thomas Jefferson on the strength of a nation. Authority, divorced from reason, the ally of superstition. The craving for infallibility in religion. Infallibility in the Roman Church. Dr. Hort's 'Christian Ecclesia." Authority rests upon rational convictions and revelation. Historic faith. IN the previous lectures we have endeavored to illustrate the principle that it is thought and the moral reason including faith, which are the organs for apprehending objective truth. Feeling is in itself purely subjective. It may be kindled by imaginations that have no objective reality; or it may be the result of a process of self-excitation familiar among the religious illusions, which, in the experience of the Christian Church, have turned out to be devoid of permanent results, and tending to superstition and self-deception. The character and the worth of feeling are to be measured by the objective truth which the feeling contains as its origin and its reason. Thus we have seen that reason, faith and feeling are coordinate in Christian beliefs. We are now to consider the relation of religious belief to authority. The word suggests to the popular mind a stormy tract of history extending over the sixteenth century, dividing the forms and the ecclesiastical organisms of the medieval and the modern world. The reformation breaks the history of Christianity into two periods, which are mainly distinguished by directly opposing principles in relation to the authority of the Church and the rights of reason and conscience. Before the reformation the Church had developed, in the growth of centuries, a spiritual monarchy which claimed and exercised discipline and authority over every sphere of human life. By the reformation the unity of organization was broken, and with it the machinery and the forces for the repression of the spirit of liberty. Before, the Church practically controlled the family, the state, the individual; and its authority prescribed the science, the philosophy and the secular knowledge, as well as religious doctrine and discipline. Belief was a law imposed from without, repudiating any conception of the rights of critical intelligence and of personal responsibility. By the reformation the doors of the close corporation of the ecclesiastical organism were broken down. Thought and religion were left free to the open air, and reason and faith resumed their functions in the act and the responsibility of belief. The family and the state reasserted themselves, as divine institutions, and not the creatures of the Church. Christianity is conceived of, not as a law, a visible organism to govern by visible sanctions superseding all other authorities, but as a spirit entering into human nature and redeeming it from the power of evil, and thus regenerating all of its relations. It is designed not to repress, but to sanction and to bless all of God's ordinances for human life; to restore marriage from the dominion of animal passions to the dignity and the purity of its primeval institution; to redeem government from the absolutism of brute force to the loyalty and the love of its subjects as an ordinance of God; not to kill nature and natural |