Prof. Goldwin Smith on the Dethronement of Conscience (1878)

Prof. Goldwin Smith, Macmillanʼs Magazine, Feb. 1878

(cited in The Coming Prince, Sir Robert Anderson; 1967; p. 8).

ʻThe denial of the existence of God and of the future state, in a word, is the dethronement of conscience; and society will pass, to say the least, through a dangerous interval before social science can fill the vacant throne. . . .

But in the meantime mankind, or some portions of it, may be in danger of an anarchy of self-interest, compressed, for the purpose of political order, by a despotism of force.

ʻThat science and criticism, acting thanks to the liberty of opinion won by political effort with a freedom never known before, have delivered us from a mass of dark and degrading superstitions, we own with heartfelt thankfulness to the deliverers, and in the firm conviction that the removal of false beliefs, and of the authorities or institutions founded on them, cannot prove in the end anything but a blessing to mankind.

But at the same time the foundations of general morality have inevitably been shaken, and a crisis has been brought on, the gravity of which nobody can fail to see, and nobody but a fanatic of materialism can see without the most serious misgiving.

ʻThere has been nothing in the history of man like the present situation. The decadence of the ancient mythologies is very far from affording a parallel. . . .

The Reformation was a tremendous earthquake: it shook down the fabric of mediaeval religion, and as a consequence of the disturbance in the religious sphere, filled the world with revolutions and wars.

But it left the authority of the Bible unshaken, and men might feel that the destructive process had its limit, and that adamant [solid rock, ed.] was still beneath its feet.

But a world which is intellectual and keenly alive to the significance of these questions, reading all that is written about them with almost passionate avidity, finds itself brought to a crisis the character of which any one may realize by distinctly presenting to himself the idea of existence without a God.ʼ

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