CHAPTER III. Theology and Religious Establishments

THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS

The age into which Adam Smith was born was an age of religious doubt and philosophic curiosity. During his lifetime the governing classes in England, undisturbed by enthusiasms, were little disposed to entertain revolutionary ideas in politics or religion. It seemed to be the function of philosophic thinkers to leave the constitution of a tolerably liberal State and a tolerably lax Church, and to advance in other directions. The fierce storms that bent the course of Selden and Milton and Hobbes had abated. Men tried to forget

“The lifted axe, the agonising wheel, Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel.”

No one believed that the Deity created kings; many doubted whether there was a Deity at all. Since the great days of Athens, philosophy had seldom reaped a richer harvest than in Great Britain during the eighty years that followed the Act of Union. Newton’s Principia, and the philosophy of Shaftesbury, Clarke, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler, as well as of Hume and Adam Smith, all fall within this period. Speculative discovery went hand in hand with mechanical invention. The poetry of enthusiasm, religious and political fervour, persecution, martyrdom, with all their heroic and squalid accompaniments, preceded and followed this prosaic illumination. It was a chapter of dry light between two of heat and fire and smoke. Reason reigned; and as reason seldom wears an air of originality, we need not wonder if later ingenuity has discovered that all these philosophers borrowed their doctrines either from the ancients or from one another or from foreigners.

But though there appears to be just now a tendency to carry the search for the genealogy and pedigree of ideas rather too far, it is certainly not our purpose to show that Adam Smith was a solitary conqueror who founded a kingdom entirely for himself, and peopled it with the creatures of his imagination. Every great thinker holds the past in fee, as he levies a perpetual tribute on the future. We may see how in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and in his lectures on Justice and Police Smith selected and used his materials; how, with the aid of Hutcheson and Mandeville and Hume, he invented a new doctrine of sympathy, and how he worked up the Platonic idea of the division of labour, and the Aristotelian theory of money, into a true science of national wealth. Nothing is left of the first part of the lectures, which dealt (briefly, no doubt) with natural theology and, in the earliest years of his professorship, very fully with moral philosophy. His pupil and friend Millar says that under the head of Natural Theology, the first part of his course, Smith considered the proofs of the being and attributes of God, and those principles of the human mind upon which religion is founded.

In the Moral Sentiments and his other writings there are plenty of passages to indicate that he was a theist with a belief rather more active and definite than that of his friend Hume or of his master Aristotle, but few or none that he was a Christian. As professor he had to sign the Westminster Confession of Faith, a perfunctory act which even Hume would readily have performed without the scandal that surrounded Jowett’s cynical subscription a century later. But it was noticed by the orthodox that he was sadly wanting in zeal. Hutcheson, doubtless with the purpose of naturalising theology, had conducted a Sunday class on Christian evidences. Adam Smith discontinued this practice, and it was even whispered that he had applied to the authorities shortly after his appointment to be excused from opening his class with prayer. The request was refused, but the results were not satisfactory; for according to a contemporary, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, his opening prayers “savoured strongly of natural religion,” while his theological lectures, though shorter, were no less flattering to human pride than those of Hutcheson, and led “presumptuous striplings” to draw the unwarranted conclusion “that the great truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature without any special revelation.” He was also, they say, often seen to smile openly during divine service in his place in the college chapel. When one remembers what orthodox Scottish sermons at that time meant, it is safe to conjecture that the smile was not always due (as Ramsay would have it) to an absent thought.

Although the lectures on Natural Theology have disappeared, the lectures on Morals were elaborated and published in 1759 as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. From this, his first important work, we may sufficiently ascertain how far Smith’s philosophy of life was based upon religious conceptions. Fortune governs the world. Nature intended the happiness and perfection of the species. Every part of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates the providential care of its Author. Smith’s own scepticism is so carefully phrased and so disguised in soft language, that a stupid reader is never perplexed, a devout one never offended. Take, for example, his reflections upon the doctrine of a future life. That there is a world to come, he says in a passage of striking eloquence, “is a doctrine in every respect so venerable, so comfortable to the weakness, so flattering to the grandeur of human nature, that the virtuous man, who has the misfortune to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and anxiously to believe it. It could never have been exposed to the derision of the scoffer, had not the distribution of rewards and punishments, which some of its most zealous assertors have taught us was to be made in that world to come, been too frequently in direct opposition to all our moral sentiments.” Smith had no great respect for the devout. To him the ritual and worship of the Deity seemed like the service and courtship of kings. He refuses to believe that an all-wise Deity would have a mind for adulation or would offer heavenly rewards to those who consecrate their lives to His worship:—

“That the assiduous courtier is often more favoured than the faithful and active servant; that attendance and adulation are often shorter and surer roads to preferment than merit or service; and that a campaign at Versailles or St. James’s is often worth two either in Germany or Flanders, is a complaint which we have all heard from many a venerable, but discontented, old officer. But what is considered as the greatest reproach even to the weakness of earthly sovereigns, has been ascribed, as an act of justice, to divine perfection; and the duties of devotion, the public and private worship of the Deity, have been represented even by men of virtue and abilities, as the sole virtues which can either entitle to reward or exempt from punishment in the life to come.”

His indignation flames out against celebrated doctors, both civil and ecclesiastical, who have questioned whether faith should be kept with rebels and heretics (“those unlucky persons who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party”). Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, “faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest.”

Morality is natural, but its rules have been sanctioned by the rudest forms of religion. Whether our moral faculties depend upon a modification of reason, upon a moral sense, or upon some other principle of our nature, they carry with them the most evident badges of authority, and were plainly set up within us to superintend our passions and appetites and to be the supreme arbiters of our actions. They are described in religious language as the vice-regents of God within us; they never fail to punish sin by the torments of inward shame and self-condemnation; they reward obedience with tranquillity and contentment. Oncken thinks that Smith’s eloquent vindication of conscience helped to form Kant’s moral idealism; but it puts us more in mind of the Roman satirist’s great line—

“Nocte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem.”

Moral judgments likewise help to correct in some measure the course of this world. “The industrious knave cultivates the soil; the indolent good man leaves it uncultivated. Who ought to reap the harvest?” Here the natural course of things decides against the natural sentiments of mankind. Human laws therefore often punish the knave or traitor though industrious, and reward the good citizen though improvident. Thus man is by nature prompted to correct nature; but even so his endeavours are often impotent; the current is too strong. Our natural sentiments are often shocked. We see great combinations oppress small. We see the innocent suffer. Despairing of earthly forces to check the triumph of injustice, we naturally appeal to heaven, “and thus we are led to a belief in the future state by the love of virtue,” and moral rules acquire new sanctity by being regarded as the laws of an all-powerful Deity. As religion in this way enforces an innate sense of duty, mankind is generally disposed to place great confidence in the probity of those who seem to be deeply religious.

And where religion has not been corrupted, “wherever men are not taught to regard frivolous observances, as more immediate duties of religion, than acts of justice and beneficence; and to imagine, that by sacrifices, and ceremonies, and vain supplications, they can bargain with the Deity for fraud, and perfidy, and violence, the world undoubtedly judges right in this respect, and justly places a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man’s behaviour.”

Upon the dangerous question of religious establishments and dissenting sects he wrote afterwards in the Wealth of Nations (Book v. i.) with a boldness and an air of detachment that might well startle even that age of tolerant indifference. He contrasts the teachers of new religions with the clergy of an ancient system, who are frequently possessed of learning, eloquence, and all the gentlemanly virtues. “Such a clergy, when attacked by a set of popular and bold though perhaps stupid and ignorant enthusiasts, feel themselves as perfectly defenceless as the indolent, effeminate, and full-fed nations of the southern parts of Asia, when they were invaded by the active, hardy, and hungry Tartars of the north.” Commonly, the only resource of such a clergy upon such an emergency is to summon the government to persecute or expel their adversaries. “It was thus that the Roman Catholic clergy called upon the civil magistrate to persecute the Protestants, and the Church of England to persecute the Dissenters.”

An established church may have a superiority of learning, but in the art of gaining popularity the advantage is always with its adversaries. He finds that, as dissenting bodies grow richer, their zeal and activity abate. The Independents, for instance, had many learned, ingenious, and respectable men; but the Methodists, without half the learning of the Dissenters, were more in vogue. The strength of the Church of Rome he attributed to the fact that the industry of its inferior clergy was better fostered by motives of self-interest than in the case of any established Protestant church; for many of the parish priests subsisted largely on voluntary gifts, “a source of revenue which confession gives them many opportunities of improving.” He notes also Machiavelli’s observation, that the establishment of the begging orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis revived, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the languishing faith and devotion of the Catholic Church. Upon the question of the value of a State Church, Smith quotes from a certain passage of Hume’s History, referring to his friend as “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age.” Hume had come to the conclusion that the civil magistrate who neglects to establish a religion will find he has dearly paid for his frugality, “and that in reality the most decent and advantageous composition which he can make with the spiritual guides, is to bribe their indolence by assigning stated salaries to their profession,” so that ecclesiastical establishments, “though commonly they arose at first from religious views, prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society.”

But Smith, with the same dislike for “zeal,” had too much respect for liberty, too much love of honesty in politics, to adopt Hume’s cynical solution. He would find security in numbers. A State should extend toleration to all; society would naturally divide itself into hundreds of small sects, none of which could be considerable enough to disturb the public tranquillity. The teachers of each sect would be forced to learn a candour and moderation which is seldom to be found among an established clergy; and in this way, by mutual concessions, their doctrine would probably be reduced in time “to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established, but such as positive law has perhaps never yet established in any country.” This plan of ecclesiastical government, he adds, or more properly no ecclesiastical government, was what the Independents, “a sect no doubt of very wild enthusiasts,” proposed to establish in England towards the end of the Civil War. “If it had been established, though of a very unphilosophical origin, it would probably by this time have been productive of the most philosophical good temper and moderation with regard to every sort of religious principle.” Such is the plan favoured by Adam Smith, and he observes that in Pennsylvania, where it had been adopted, experience justified his opinion.

Smith was so popular with his orthodox contemporaries that they tried to parry charges of infidelity by saying either that he had adopted Hume’s opinions out of the intense affection he felt for him, or that he had been perverted by French atheists. “In the course of his travels,” says one of the most broad-minded of his Presbyterian contemporaries (John Ramsay), “he became acquainted with Voltaire and the other French philosophers who were then labouring with unhallowed industry in the vineyard of infidelity.” What impression they made upon him, adds this cautious man, “cannot be precisely known, because neither before nor after this period was his religious creed ever properly ascertained.”

Twenty years after Adam Smith’s death, Archbishop Magee, in a controversy with Unitarian theologians, cited a passage from the Moral Sentiments on the doctrine of atonement, in which Smith had said that the doctrines of revelation coincide in every respect with the original anticipations of nature. “Such,” wrote the divine, “are the reflections of a man whose powers of thinking and reasoning will surely not be pronounced inferior to those of any even of the most distinguished champions of the Unitarian school.” The rejoinder was at once made that in the sixth edition, which Smith prepared for the press in 1790, the passage was omitted; whereupon the prelate (forgetting that Hume died in 1776, after four editions had appeared with this presentation of the reasonableness of an atonement) deftly turned a new moral: “It adds one proof more to the many that already existed of the danger, even to the most enlightened, from a familiar contact with infidelity.”