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He fought against social Utopianism as against religious dogmatism, and fought against the dogmatism of property as against political authority; he sought to transform Socialism upon severely scientific and realistic lines, and to free it from all the fetters of dogmatic religion; and yet, just as Rousseau did, he placed at the head of his system a dogma: "Man is born free"; and at the conclusion of it the teleological phrase of a moral order of society two propositions which can never be proved by experience, but rather contradict all experience.
Let me read it: "To-day I told mother I meant to attend a course of medical lectures: we had a scene, and she called in Cousin Jane to reason with me. How I detest Cousin Jane! She is nothing but a mass of orthodox dogmatism. Of course we quarreled over it, and she ended by telling me I was disgracing the family, and was no true woman.
Thus, alike in its oracular dogmatism, in its harsh discipline, in its multiplied restrictions, in its professed asceticism, and in its faith in the devices of men, the old educational regime was akin to the social systems with which it was contemporaneous; and similarly, in the reverse of these characteristics, our modern modes of culture correspond to our more liberal religious and political institutions.
There can be no objection to a frank admission that we are not here walking in the light of established knowledge. But it does seem to savor of dogmatism for a man to insist that no increase in our knowledge can ever reveal that the physical world is an orderly system throughout, and that all the changes in material things are explicable in terms of the one unified science.
Jesus brings men back to the ultimate fact. Our views are too short and too narrow. He would have us face God, see him and realize him think in the terms of God, look at things from God's point of view, live in God and with God. In modern phrase, he breaks up our dogmatism and puts us at a universal point of view to see things over again in a new and true perspective.
This, at any rate, we may, perhaps, say: they had a sure and clear knowledge of the living God, who had talked with them as with a friend; they knew His inspiring, guiding presence; they knew the forgiveness of sins; they knew, though they very dimly understood, the promise, 'In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. How far they looked across the gulf of death and beheld anything even cloudland on the other side, is a question very hard to answer, and about which confident dogmatism, either affirmative or negative, is unwarranted.
In passing on to consider more particularly Pascal’s philosophical and religious attitude, we shall see more fully the bearing of these remarks. Pascal, in point of fact, embraces many points of view; and, if he leans sometimes to scepticism, he sees also the strong side of what he calls dogmatism or rational philosophy.
But he asserted that ‘Nothing worthy proving can be proven,’ and that even as to the great laws which are the basis of Science, ‘We have but faith, we cannot know.’ He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of God. ‘I dare hardly name His Name,’ he would say, and accordingly he named Him in ‘The Ancient Sage’ the ‘Nameless.’ ‘But take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God,’ he said, ‘and you take away the backbone of the world.’ ‘On God and God-like men we build our trust.’ A week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the Personality and of the Love of God, ‘That God, Whose eyes consider the poor,’ ‘Who catereth, even for the sparrow.’ ‘I should,’ he said, ‘infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone.’ He would allow that God is unknowable in ‘his whole world-self, and all-in-all,’ and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection made by some people to the word ‘Personality’ as being ‘anthropomorphic,’ and that, perhaps ‘Self-consciousness’ or ‘Mind’ might be clearer to them: but at the same time he insisted that, although ‘man is like a thing of nought’ in ‘the boundless plan,’ our highest view of God must be more or less anthropomorphic: and that ‘Personality,’ as far as our intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes ‘Mind,’ ‘Self-consciousness,’ ‘Will,’ ‘Love,’ and other attributes of the Real, the Supreme, ‘the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose name is Holy.’”
Certainly nothing could be easier than to show that James, while encouraging in so reckless a manner the emancipation of the ministers of an advanced sect in the Reformed Church from control of government, and their usurpation of supreme authority which had been destroyed in England, was outdoing himself in dogmatism and inconsistency.
The worthy citizen was not without a spice of the dogmatism which grows on the best disposition, when a word is a law to all around.
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