To give oneself religiously is a continuing operation expressed in a
series of acts. It can be nothing else. You cannot dedicate yourself
and then go away to live just as you have lived before. It is a poor
travesty of religion that does not produce an essential change in the
life which embraces it. But in the established and older religions
of our race, this change of conduct has involved much self-abasement
merely to the God or Gods, or much self-mortification merely with
a view to the moral perfecting of self. Christian devotion, for
example, in these early stages, before the hermit life gave place
to organised monastic life, did not to any extent direct itself to
service except the spiritual service of other human beings. But as
Christianity became a definite social organising force, it took on
a great series of healing, comforting, helping, manufacturing and
educational activities. The modern tendency has been and is all in the
direction of minimising what one might call self-centred devotion and
self-subjugation, and of expanding and developing external service. The
idea of inner perfectibility dwindles with the diminishing importance
attached to individuality. We cease to think of mortifying or exalting
or perfecting ourselves and seek to lose ourselves in a greater life.
We think less and less of “conquering” self and more and more of
escaping from self. It we attempt to perfect ourselves in any respect
it is only as a soldier sharpens and polishes an essential weapon.
Our quickened apprehension of continuing change, our broader and fuller
vision of the history of life, disabuse our minds of many limitations
set to the imaginations of our predecessors. Much that they saw as
fixed and determinate, we see as transitory and controllable. They
saw life fixed in its species and subjected to irrevocable laws. We
see life struggling insecurely but with a gathering successfulness
for freedom and power against restriction and death. We see life
coming at last to our tragic and hopeful human level. Certain great
possibilities, certain mighty problems, we realise, confront mankind
to-day. They frame our existences. The practical aspect, the material
form, the embodiment, of the modernised religious impulse is the
direction of the whole life to the solution of these problems and the
realisation of their possibilities.
The modern religious life like all forms of religious life must needs
have its own subtle and deep inner activities, its meditations, its
self-confrontations, its phases of stress and search and appeal, its
serene and prayerful moods, but these inward aspects do not come into
the scope of this present enquiry, which is concerned entirely with the
outward shape, the direction and the organisation of modern religious
effort, with the question of what, given religious devotion, we have to
do and how that has to be done.
Now as the modern vision of life has grown clear, certain vast
possibilities and certain great dangers have become plain. They
challenge mankind. They furnish an entirely new frame and setting for
the moral life. In the fixed and limited outlook of the past, practical
good works took the form mainly of palliative measures against evils
that were conceived of as incurable; the religious community nursed the
sick, fed the hungry, provided sanctuary for the fugitive, pleaded with
the powerful for mercy. It did not dream of preventing sickness, famine
or tyranny. Otherworldliness was its ready refuge from the invincible
evil and confusion of the existing scheme of things. It is possible
now to imagine an order in human affairs from which these evils have
been largely or entirely eliminated. More and more people are coming
to realise that such an order is a material possibility. And with the
realisation that this is a material possibility, we can no longer
be content with a field of good deeds and right action restricted
to palliative and consolatory activities. Such things are merely
“first-aid.” The religious mind grows bolder than it has ever been
before. It pushes through the curtain it once imagined was a barrier.
It apprehends its larger obligations. The way in which our activities
conduce to the realisation of that conceivable better order in human
affairs, becomes the new criterion of conduct.
The realisation of this conceivable better order involves certain
necessary achievements. It is impossible for any clear-headed person
to suppose that the ever more destructive stupidities of war can be
eliminated from human affairs until some common political control
dominates the earth, and unless certain pressures due to the growth of
population, due to the enlarging scope of human operations or due to
conflicting standards and traditions of life, are disposed of. To avoid
the positive evils of war and to attain the new levels of prosperity
and power that now come into view, an effective world control, not
merely of armed force but of the production and main movements of
staple commodities and the drift and expansion of population, is
required. It is absurd to dream of peace and world-wide progress
without that much control. These things assured, the abilities and
energies of a greatly increased proportion of human beings could be
diverted to the happy activities of scientific research and creative
work with an ever-increasing release and enlargement of human
possibility. Such a forward stride in human life, the first stride in a
mighty continuing advance, an advance to which no limit appears, is now
materially possible. The opportunity is offered to mankind. But there
is no certainty, no material necessity, that it should ever be taken.
It will not be taken by mankind inadvertently. It can only be taken
through such an organisation of will and energy to take it as this
world has never seen before.
These are the new conditions that unfold themselves before the more
alert minds of our generation and which will presently become the
general mental background, as the modern interpretations of the history
of life and of material and mental possibilities establish themselves.
Evil political, social and economic usages and arrangements may seem
obdurate and huge, but they are neither permanent nor uncontrollable.
They can be controlled, however, only by an effort more powerful and
determined than the instincts and inertias that sustain them. Religion,
modern and disillusioned, has for its outward task to set itself to
the control and direction of political, social and economic life,
or admit itself a mere drug for easing discomfort. Can it or can it
not synthesise the needed effort to lift mankind out of our present
disorders, dangers, baseness, frustrations and futilities, to a phase
of relative security, accumulating knowledge, systematic and continuing
growth in power and the widespread deep happiness of hopeful and
increasing life?
Our answer here is that it can, and our subject now is to enquire what
are the necessary opening stages in the synthesis of that effort.
We write here for those who believe that it can, and who do already
grasp the implications of world history and contemporary scientific
achievement.
_Chapter V_