Few people, if any, are always sustained by unselfish or religious
motives, and few or none are altogether beyond their influence.
The daily lives of the great majority of human beings are frankly
irreligious; they seem to differ only in their scope, variety and
intelligence from the lives of animals; they are determined by
instinctive impulses, individual desires and personal ends; they pass
from one satisfaction or disappointment to another; they are attracted
and deflected by casual encounters; they forget more or less completely
and they resume. Nevertheless, the conduct of most lives is restricted
and defined by the prevalent conceptions of what is honourable and
becoming, and right and wrong. Although the lives of the great run of
people are neither moral essentially nor essentially religious, they
respect current moral and religious forms and maxims, just as they
conform to current usages and beaten tracks. It is the line of least
resistance for them, and that suffices.
Communities have been held together in the past and are still held
together by laws and moral codes systematised upon religious ideas,
and this although few people have more than a superficial apprehension
of such ideas. Religion in its completeness has always been the
peculiarity of a minority; it has shaped and innervated communities
but never pervaded them throughout. But its presence seems to have
been necessary for collective life. Without it morality was baseless
and law unjustifiable. The intermittent disposition of most human
beings towards some sort of righteousness beyond self-seeking has been
upheld, as some sprawling, weak-jointed climbing plant may be upheld
on a trellis, by that more steadfast minority of sincere and devoted
persons. It is these latter who have preserved disinterested standards,
and who still preserve them; who have been and who continue to be the
salt of the earth.
Religious ideas in the past have derived from the most diverse
emotional and intellectual origins in the integrating mind of
man. Speculative explanations, metaphors hardened by usage into
quasi-factual statements, fantasies arising out of germinating
and suppressed impulses, false analogies, parables begotten and
lit by flashes of spiritual insight, traditions misconceived and
distorted, dogmatic excesses in explicitness evoked by the irritation
of contradictory criticism, the odd compromises of theological
diplomatists, the craving for supernatural sanctions and vindications
and the nightmare creations of fear, that haunting shadow of all
conscious life, have mingled inextricably in every religious fabric.
But the survival value of a religion to a community has lain always in
the practical assistance it afforded in the subordination of self and
the achievement of co-operative loyalties not otherwise obtainable.
No community seems ever to have been held together in wholesome
and vigorous collective life by “enlightened self-interest” alone.
Enlightened self-interest in exceptional cases and under slight or
moderate stresses may produce enough simulated disinterestedness to be
practically undistinguishable from public virtue, and the great mass of
lives in every community is no doubt kept at this or that moral level,
and in this or that form of behaviour according to the quality and
intensity of the beliefs that hold that community together with little
or no co-operating force in the lives themselves. But somewhere and
effectively in that community the sustaining beliefs of the community
must be passionately and sincerely held and maintained. A community
where binding beliefs have decayed altogether is like a building whose
mortar has been changed to sand. It may stand for a time, but it stands
precariously.
Now in the communities in which we are living to-day there has been
a far-reaching weakening and change in religious beliefs. This has
been due to an enormous growth of knowledge, to an enhanced vigour
of criticism, to a relative enfeeblement of government and authority
which released unprecedented freedom of speech and permitted the
crystallisation of doubts into coherent and militant denials. At the
same time there have been developments of the mechanical conditions of
life that have enlarged the scale of possible human operations, made
economical life increasingly international and brought once autonomous
states and regions into a mutually disintegrative intimacy of reaction.
The stresses upon our communities are greater than they have ever
been and the blinding forces less. The outlook before our race seems
therefore to be wider, more uncertain and much more dangerous than has
ever appeared before.
In the past, in the history of every community there have been
phases of moral and religious confusion. The beliefs and ideas of
right conduct that have served hitherto begin, in the presence of
new circumstances or new challenges, to lose authority or to fail in
meeting current moral problems. An age of relaxation and a sort of
experimental wickedness dawns. Scruples vanish. Treachery, cruelty,
unrestrained self-indulgence, which have been kept under hatches,
emerge conspicuously. Government becomes more adventurous, tyrannous
and unjust, and the moral distinction between ruler and brigand fines
away to the vanishing-point. There seems no longer any good faith
nor any sweetness of soul in human life, except among the sacrificial
simple. What will for a better life still manifests itself in the world
is for a while quite unable to take hold of the disorder. Italy in
the Machiavellian period and Germany after the intricate wars of the
Reformation may be cited as typical instances of such “wicked” phases
in social history. Yet it was not that the heart of man changed for
the worse in those ages, not that there was a sudden generation of
vipers, but that intellectual confusion had divided and enfeebled that
graver-spirited minority which had, under more assured conditions,
sustained the faith of most people and the moral disciplines of
everyone. The quality of the ingredients of the human mixture remained
the same, but the restraining and directive forces had in their
interplay come upon a phase of mutual neutralisation and collective
ineffectiveness.
There are many signs that to-day over large parts of the world there is
a drift towards such another disintegrative and distressful phase. The
brigand, the boss and the adventurer become portentously successful
and immune. People who, in other times, would have been active and
confident in their own lives and vigorously co-operative in the control
of human affairs are uncertain in their hearts and unhappy in their
interventions. The old faiths have become unconvincing, unsubstantial
and insincere, and though there are clear intimations of a new faith in
the world, it still awaits embodiment in formulæ and organisations that
will bring it into effective reaction upon human affairs as a whole.
This present essay is an attempt to assemble these intimations in a
form that will be available for the practical direction of the writer’s
and the reader’s life.
_Chapter II_