THE REY. A.R. FITCHETT ON SIR. R. STOUT’S LYCEUM ADDRESS.

Evening Star, Issue 7355, 29 October 1887, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE REY. A.R. FITCHETT ON SIR. R. STOUT’S LYCEUM ADDRESS.

At All Saints’ Church on Sunday evening la't the. Rev. A. R. Fitchett reviewed Sir Robert Stout’s address on Christianity and Freethought. The following is the substance of his lecture ; THE NOTE OF A SECT. Whenever a small group of persons separate themselves on religious grounds from the general religious life of the community, wb may expect to find thefrt exaggerating their own importance, imagining that they hold a . monopoly of trtt'th, and have the destinies of the , human race in their keeping. These, the characteristic notes of a, diminutive sect, are the prevailing notes of Sir Robert Stout’s address. We are told of “the rapid progress of the Fieethought movement all over the world,” as the result of which progress “ truth had been exalted, and the brotherhood of man had been proclaimed.” For a parallel to the intellectual narrowness and spiritual conceit of this sentence we must go to the satires of modern novelists on “Salem Chapel” and “Little Bethel.” The rapid progress of “ truth in the form Of Freethought—is purely imaginary. Freethought and Freethinkers, under those names, have existed in our own country for centuries; elsewhere, under the same or other names, they have existed from the beginning of Christianity embarrassing its march, no doubt, but never arresting it. You hear continually of the multiplying of churches, ministers, Sunday schools, missions to the heathen; how are you going to recohcile these indubitable signs of Christian development with the asserted progress of Freethought ? But we are told, to our still greater amaze, that by this progress “ the brotherhood of man has been proclaimed.” Singular hallucination ! —here is a book in everybody’s possession that for eighteen centuries has been proclaiming the brotherhood of man; that “ God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon the earth”; that “in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free”; that men of every clime and color are to adore as brethren one common Father in Heaven. Yet, forsooth, the modern Freethinker lays to his soul the flattering unction that he, as for the first time, is proclaiming the brotherhood of man.

FREETHOUGHT THE OPPOSITE OF EXACT THOUGHT. The same obliquity of vision, or the same audacious disregard of patent facts, is shown in the statement that “ the teachings of the Churches of the present day are opposed to true morality.” The reason why their teachings are opposed to true morality is that they (the churches) “do not exalt the truth”—“the truth” being the opinions and beliefs of the speaker—and that they “do not exalt humanity.” Now, the one element that is common to all forms of Christian teaching, constant in all alike, is the moral element. Doctrines differ, but the moral aim of preaching is always and everywhere the same— to reprove sin, exalt virtue, point men to the highest known stabdards of goodness, and encourage them to endeavors after a better life. Can anyone not blinded by prejudice doubt that this teaching, whether given beneath the dome of St. Paul’s, or by the street preachers of the Salvation Army, makes for righteousness ? The spirit of humanity which distinguishes our modern civilisation from the civilisation that preceded it, which has called forth its magnificent charities, public and private, which devotes millions sterling every year for the teaching and civilising of savage races, is tho direct product of Christian teaching. Yet the Freethinker complains that that teach* ing fails to exalt humanity, and is opposed to true morality ! Ponder this phenomenon, if you are being lured towards the Freethought camp by the hope of finding there clearer light on the problems and mysteries of existence. The Freethinker cannot even read the plainest facts around him. Freethought, it would seem, is the opposite of exact thought. It is freedom to think as you please about patent and indisputable facts.

TIIK BASIS OF MORALITY, Reduced to its simplest terms, the Freethought position may be stated thus: Christianity is unnecessary, since the highest goodness may be attained without it. Christian teachers assert, says Sir Robert Stout, that without the Bible there cannot be morality an assertion which he then proceeds to refute as “a fallacy.” The fallacy really lies in his own statement. We do not assert—no one, so far as I am aware, has ever asserted-that without the Bible there cannot be morality. Wherever human beings live together in society, they must recognise some moral code, written or unwritten, a code of Thou shalts and Thou shalt nets, regulating their relations with each other. The most primitive tribe of savages must possess such a code, or it could not hold together as a tribe. As savagery passes into civilisation and becomes highly complex, its code of rights and duties—in other words its morality—develops Pari -passu. All this is obvious; nobody denies it. Yet it is the habit of Freethinkers to seek a cheap victory by setting up this man of straw and knocking it down again : “Christian teachers assert that there cannot be morality without Christianity,” Nay, what we assert is that there cannot be Christian morality without Christianity—a very different proposition, and one which no Freethinker can refute. The highest elements in our existing moral code are those derived from the teachings of the New Testament. The sentiment of universal brotherhood, the forgiveness of injuries, self-sacrifice for the unworthy and the ungrateful—where do we learn this morality but from Jesus Christ ? MORALITY BEFORE CHRIST. Freethinkers talk as though the moral ideas of the Gospel had always been in the world, or as though they were the natural intuitions of the race. We have, however, the example of a world which lived its life before the modern world was born, which developed a civilisation as complex as our own, but which never attained to the distinctively Christian conception of moral goodness, and which perished for the want of it. If we judged the world which was in decrepitude at the birth of Christianity by its practice, we should pass upon it a very summary condemnation. Its hardness, want of sympathy, inhumanity, would be sufficiently proved by its gladiatoral spectacles —to take one fact out of a hundred, its impurity by the wall paintings unearthed at Pompeii, which were so unspeakably obscene that the Italian Government cannot permit them to be looked upon, but keeps them under lock and key. But we need not judge the ancient world by its practice; it is sufficient if we judge it by its ideals. As the highest moral and social ideal it produced take the “ Republic” of Plato, the picture by a poet and philosopher of a Utopia from which every form of evil, recognised as such, was to be banished. In this picture, which represents the highest moral conceptions of a civilised world without Christianity, we find that the model state is to be organised for conquest and plunder. Its bravest citizens, men and women, are to be formed into an army for the express purpose of carrying fire and sword into the territory of their neighbors. The ancient world fell in practice below its own ideals, but those ideals at their highest were immeasurably below the level of Christianity. THE FREETHOUGHT PLAN FOR REGENERATING THE WORLD. Yet Freethinkers ask us to believe that the distinctive ideas of the Christian religion are their own ideas, spontaneously developed. They talk of brotherhood, charity, humanity, as though they had invented these things, ' or discovered them, apart from Christianity. The words of the Laureate to the appropriators of his poetical ideas and metrical forms are apposite here— Most can raise the flowers now. For all have got the seed. Not that Freethinkers will ever be able to raise by their methods the pure and perfect flower of Christian goodness, even though they coolly appropriate without acknowledgment the moral ideals of Christianity. Human nature is not to be regenerated by philosophical disquisitions on the “ basis of morals," with interludes of instrumental music. Freethought has no Christ, no cross of self-sacrifice, no leader, modem or ancient, who—in accordance I with the suggestion of Talleyrand—gets

himself crucified, and rises again the third day. It is ini the cross and his Divine Redeemer that the Christian Believer finds bis inspiration; his enthusiasm of humanity liaJ fts. source there. _ In tne organised churches this enthusiasm is regulated ; it exists, but is constrained, like steam in a motor engine, to expend fts force through definite channels for definite ends. Not a different kind of enthusiasm, put the same, we see expressing itself under freer conditions in the work of the Salvation Army, whose services to humanity wtne great cities by such agencies as their Prison Gate Brigade, are the admiration of us all. What works of charity, humanity, brotherly kindness has Freethought, considered as a substitute for Christianity, to put in comparison wfth these 1

THfi VICTIMS OF BAP THBOBOOV. The best thing that' Can be said of the .Freethought movement which, I venture to think, is in this City already a spent force is that it represents reaction from defective forms of Christian teaching. I have more than once told Freethought leaders here and elsewhere that they are the victims of baa theology. With the development of intelligence and the moral sense came the Conviction that some of the things taught them in their youth could not possibly be true* Erroneously identifying thes# in* credibilities with the substance of Christianity, they have, tn rejecting them, supposed themselves to be rejecting Christianity itself. It is the duty of all of tis who are happy and at rest in the faith of Christ to show to unbelievers, of whom this is the history, the jkiudliest Christian sympathy, especially as many amongst ourselves have found, with difficulty, emancipation from the narrow schools of religious thought in which we were trained. The Church of Christ opens her doors, and offers d vtelcome, to every sincere inquirer after truth who is willing to find it where God has revealed it—not in' abstract and metaphysical propositions about the “basis of morals,” but in a Divine Person, who is Himself the Truth, the one perfect Life of of ■ Goodness, and the only Way to the Father.