Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1867

With this title, Mr. Hippolyte Rodrigues published a book in which he foresees the merger of the three major religions from the Bible. One of the writers of the journal Le Pays provides the following thoughts about it, in the issue of December 10^th, 1866:

"What the three daughters of the Bible? The first is Jewish, the second is Catholic, the third is Muslim.

We see immediately that this is a serious book, and the work of Mr. Hippolyte Rodrigues is especially of interest to serious minds, given to the moral and philosophical meditations about human destiny. The author believes in a future merger of the three great religions, that he calls the three daughters of the Bible, and he works to bring about this result, in which he sees a huge progress. It is from this fusion that the new religion will come, that he considers to be the final religion of humanity.

I do not want to initiate here, with Mr. Hippolyte Rodrigues, an untimely polemic on the religious issue, that has been agitated for so many years in the depths of conscience and in the bowels of society. However, I will allow myself a reflection. He wants to have the new belief accepted by reasoning. Until this day, there has been only the faith that has founded and maintained religions, for this supreme reason that, when we reason, we no longer believe, and only when a people, an era, has ceased believing, one soon sees the collapse of the existing religion, and one does not see the rise of a new religion."

A. de Césena.

This tendency, that is becoming general, to foresee the unification of cults, like everything connected with the fusion of peoples, with the lowering of barriers that separate them, morally and commercially, is also one of the characteristic signs of the times. We will not judge the work of Mr. Rodrigues, since we do not know it, nor do we have examined it, for the moment, by which circumstances might be brought about the result that he hopes for, and that he rightly considers as progress; we only want to comment on the above article.

The author makes a big mistake when he says that “when we reason we no longer believe.” We say, on the contrary, that when we reason our belief, we believe more firmly, because we understand; it is by virtue of this principle that we have said: There is no unshakeable faith except the one that can meet reason, face to face, at all ages of humanity.

The fault of most religions is to have set up the principle of blind faith as an absolute dogma, and to have, thanks to this principle that annihilates the action of intelligence, made people accept, for some time, beliefs that subsequent advances in science have come to contradict. It resulted, for a large number of people, in this prevention that any religious belief cannot withstand free examination, confusing, in a general disapproval, what were only special cases. This way of judging things is no more rational than if we condemned a whole poem, because it would contain some incorrect lines, but it is more convenient for those that do not want to believe in anything, because, by rejecting everything , they believe they are exempt from examining anything.

The author commits another capital error when he says: "When a people, a time has ceased to believe, we soon see the existing religion crumble, we do not see the rise of a new religion.” Where, in history, has he seen a people, a time without religion?

Most religions originated in remote times, when scientific knowledge was very limited or non-existent; they erected erroneous notions into beliefs, which time alone could rectify. Unfortunately, all of them were based on the principle of immutability, and as almost all of them confused, in the same code, the civil law and the religious law, it resulted that, at a given time, having the human spirit advanced, while religions remained stationary, these have no longer found themselves up to the new ideas. Then, they fall by the force of circumstances, as do laws, social mores, and political systems that cannot satisfy new needs. But, since religious beliefs are instinctive in man, and constitute, for the heart and the mind, a need as imperative as civil legislation for the social order, they do not annihilate themselves; they are transformed.

The transition never takes place abruptly, but through the temporary mixing of old and new ideas; it is first a mixed faith that participates in one and another; little by little the old belief is extinguished, the new one grows, until the substitution is complete. The transformation, sometimes, is only partial; these are then sects that separate from the mother religion, by modifying a few points of detail. This is how Christianity succeeded Paganism, Islamism succeeded Arab fetishism, Protestantism, and the Greek religion, separated from Catholicism. Everywhere we see peoples abandoning a belief only to adopt another one, appropriate to their moral and intellectual advancement; but nowhere there is a break in continuity.

It is true that we see absolute incredulity today, erected as a doctrine, and professed by some philosophical sects; but its representatives, that constitute a tiny minority in the intelligent population, make the mistake of believing themselves to be a whole people, a whole era, and because they no longer want religion, they believe that their personal opinion is the closure of the religious time, while it is only a partial transition to another order of ideas.