While attacking religious orthodoxy in this manner, Guyau is careful to point out that if religious fanaticism ls bad, anti-religious fanaticism is equally mischievous, wicked and foolish.[32] While the eighteenth century could only scoff at religion, the nineteenth realised the absurdity of such raillery. We have come to see that even although a belief may be irrational and even erroneous, it may still survive, and it may console multitudes whose minds would be lost on the stormy sea of life without such an anchor. While dogmatic or positive religions do exist they will do so, Guyau reminds us, for quite definite and adequate reasons, chiefly because there are people who believe them, to whom they mean something and often a great deal. These reasons certainly do diminish daily, and the number of adherents, too, but we must refrain from all that savours of anti- religious fanaticism.[33] He himself speaks with great respect of a Christian missionary. Are we not, he asks, both brothers and humble collaborators in the work and advance of humanity? He sees no real inconsistency between his own dislike of orthodoxy and dogma and the missionary’s work of raising the ignorant to a better life by those very dogmas. It is a case of relative advance and mental progress.
[32] He cites a curious case of anti-religious fanaticism at Marseilles in 1885, when all texts and scripture pictures were removed fromthe schools.
[33] Guyau’s book abounds in illustrations. He mentions here Huss’s approval of the sincerity of one man who brought straw from his own house to burn him. Huss admired this act of a man in whom he saw a brother in sincerity.
It is with great wealth of discussion that Guyau recounts the genesis of religions in primitive societies to indicate the sociological basis of religion. More important are his chapters on the dissolution of religions in existing societies, in which he shows the unsatisfactoriness of the dogmas of orthodox Protestantism equally with those of the Catholic Church. As mischievous as the notion of an infallible Church is that of an infallible book, literally—that is to say, foolishly-interpreted. He recognises that for a literal explanation of the Bible must be substituted, and is, indeed, being substituted, a literary explanation. Like Renan, he criticises the vulgar conception of prayer and of religious morality which promotes goodness by promise of paradise or fear of hell. He urges in this connection the futility of the effort made by Michelet, Quinet and, more especially, by Renouvier and Pillon to “Protestantise” France. While admitting a certain intellectual, moral and political superiority to it, Guyau claims that for the promotion of morality there is little use in substituting Protestantism for Catholicism. He forecasts the limitation of the power of priests and other religious teachers over the minds of young children. Protestant clergymen in England and America he considers to be no more tolerant in regard to the educational problem than the priests. Guyau urges the importance of an elementary education being free from religious propaganda. He was writing in 1886, some years after the secular education law had been carried. There is, however, more to be done, and he points out “how strange it is that a society should not do its best to form those whose function it is to form it.”[34] In higher education some attention should be given to the comparative study of religions. “Even from the point of view of philosophy, Buddha and Jesus are more important than Anaximander or Thales.”[35] It is a pity, he thinks, that there is not a little more done to acquaint the young with the ideas for which the great world-teachers, Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Mohammed, stood, instead of cramming a few additional obscure names from early national history. It would give children at least a notion that history had a wider range than their own country, a realisation of the fact that humanity was already old when Christ appeared, and that there are great religions other than Christianity, religions whose followers are not poor ignorant savages or heathen, but intelligent beings, from whom even Christians may learn much. It is thoroughly mischievous, he aptly adds, to bring up children in such a narrow mental atmosphere that the rest of their life is one long disillusionment.