The Collapse of the Faith [pp. 164-184]

THE IPtRIN CE TON RE VIE W.
vanced thinkers of our own time. Niebuhr, the leader and
almost creator of modern historical criticism, recognized the
atheistic unbelief of his own day as worse than insanity-as
almost a demoniacal frenzy.
It avails but little, however, to refer to Butler or Berkeley, or
even to Niebuhr with his old-fashioned notions about Providence
and prayer and moral retribution which he so obstinately retained with his new theories of the philosophy of history. The
advanced critics of our time are characteristically averse to any
comparison of old times and old thoughts with the events and
thoughts of the present. Butler and Berkeley, in the opinion
of many, have been altogether left behind by the prodigious
advances of modern science and the deeper insight of modern
philosophy. Development and evolution are no longer used in
the high spiritual significance in which Niebuhr employed these,
terms. It is only as these terms have become wholly materialized by Comte and Spencer that they are accepted in the most
modern philosophy.
The authority of Butler has not only been set aside, but by
the dexterous use of modern dialectics it has been shown that
the cumbrous and old-fashioned battery which he contrived for
the defence of Christianity is capable of being used with deadly
effect by the new-fashioned assailants of theism. And as for
Berkeley, the new atheistic materialism is ostentatiously Berkeleian in its creed-using the very arguments which Berkeley
devised for the annihilation of matter to demonstrate that spirit
and matter are in substance but one.
Leaving the times of Butler and Berkeley to themselves,
with their historians and critics, and returning to our own, we
cannot deny the fact that a collapse of faith has befallen us in
a somewhat peculiar and a very formidable fashion. Its most
alarming feature is this, that, whether reasonably or unreasonably, men of knowledge' and culture are so extensively taking it
for granted that Christian theism, in the essential truths of personality in God, responsibility in man, and the providential and
supernatural conduct of human history, is doomed to vanish before what is called modern science and culture. They do not
all affirm that this collapse will be final. But they find unmistakable and alarming indications that it is making rapid progress
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