interdependent philosophic theory, its intellectual interpretation
and defense. As Kant is the noblest of the moralists, so I suppose
William James and, still later, Henri Bergson and Croce are the chief
protagonists of unrestrained feeling and naturalistic values in the
world of thought. To the neo-realists "the thing given" is alone
reality. James' pragmatism frankly relinquishes any absolute standard
in favor of relativity. In _the Varieties of Religious Experience_,
which Professor Babbitt tells us someone in Cambridge suggested should
have had for a subtitle "Wild Religions I Have Known," he is plainly
more interested in the intensity than in the normality, in the
excesses than in the essence of the religious life. Indeed, Professor
Babbitt quotes him as saying in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton,
"mere sanity is the most Philistine and at the bottom most unessential
of a man's attributes."[15] In the same way Bergson, consistently
anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that
whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis.
He refuses to recognize Plato's _One in the Many_, sees the whole
universe as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties," a universal and
meaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say,
and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his
_elan vital_, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions.
We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitter
English is the intellectual defense and solemn glorification of
impulse. "Time," says Bergson, "is a continuous stream, a present that
endures."[16] Time apparently is all. "Life can have no purpose in the
human sense of the word."[17] Essentially, then, James, Bergson and
Croce appeal from intellect to feeling. They return to primitivism.
[Footnote 15: Letter to C.E. Norton, June 30, 1904.]
[Footnote 16: _Le Perception de Changement_, 30.]
[Footnote 17: _L'evolution creatrice_, 55.]
Here is a philosophy which obviously may be both as antihumanistic and
as irreligious as any which could well be conceived. Here is license
in conduct and romanticism in expression going hand in hand with
this all but exclusive emphasis upon relativity in thought. Here is
disorder, erected as a universal concept; the world conceived of as
a vast and impenetrable veil which is hiding nothing; an intricacy
without pattern. Obviously so ungoverned and fluid a universe
justifies uncritical and irresponsible thinking and living.
We have tried thus to sketch that declension into paganism on the
part of much of the present world, of which we spoke earlier in the
chapter. It denies or ignores the humanistic law with its exacting
moral and aesthetic standards; it openly flouts the attitude of
obedience and humility before religious mandates, and, so far as
opportunity offers or prudence permits, goes its own insolently wanton
way. Our world is full of dilettanti in the colleges, anarchists in
the state, atheists in the church, bohemians in art, sybarites in
conduct and ineffably silly women in society, who have felt, and
occasionally studied the scientific and naturalistic movement just far
enough and superficially enough to grasp the idea of relativity and
to exalt it as sufficient and complete in itself. Many of them are
incapable of realizing the implications for conduct and belief which
it entails. Others of them, who are of the lesser sort, pulled by
the imperious hungers of the flesh, the untutored instincts of a
restless spirit, hating Hellenic discipline no less than Christian
renunciation, having no stomach either for self-control or
self-surrender, look out on the mass of endlessly opposing
complexities of the modern world and gladly use that vision as an
excuse for abandoning what is indeed the ever failing but also the
ever necessary struggle to achieve order, unity, yes, even perfection.
To them, therefore, the only way to conquer a temptation is to yield
to it. They rail nonsensically at all repression, forgetting that man
cannot express the full circle of his mutually exclusive instincts,
and that when he gives rein to one he thereby negates another;
that choice, therefore, is inevitable and that the more exacting
and critical the choice, the more valuable and comprehensive the
expression. So they frankly assert their choices along the lines of
least resistance and abandon themselves, at least in principle, to
emotional chaos and moral sentimentalism. Very often they are of all
men the most meticulously mannered. But their manners are not the
decorum of the humanist, they are the etiquette of the worldling.
Chesterfield had these folk in mind when he spoke with an intolerable,
if incisive, cynicism of those who know the art of combining the
useful appearances of virtue with the solid satisfactions of vice.
Such naturalism is sometimes tolerated by those who aspire to urbane
and liberal judgments because they think it can be defended on
humanistic grounds. But, as a matter of fact, it is as offensive to
the thoroughgoing humanist as it is to the sincere religionist.
They have a common quarrel with it. Take, for example, the notorious
naturalistic doctrine of art for art's sake, the defiant divorcing of
ethical and aesthetic values. Civilization no less than religion
must fight this. For it is as false in experience and as unclear in
thinking as could well be imagined. Its defense, so far as it has
any, is based upon the confusion in the pagan mind of morality with
moralizing, a confusion that no good humanist would ever permit
himself. Of course, the end of art is neither preaching nor teaching
but delighting. For that very reason, however, art, too, must
conform--hateful word!--conform to fixed standards. For the sense of
proportion, the instinct for elimination, is integral to art and this,
as Professor Babbitt points out, is attained only with the aid of
the ethical imagination.[18] Because without the ethical restraint,
the creative spirit roams among unbridled emotions; art becomes
impressionism. What it then produces may indeed be picturesque,
melodramatic, sensual, but it will not be beautiful because there
will be no imaginative wholeness in it. In other words, the artist
who divorces aesthetics from ethics does gain creative license, but
he gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmonious expression.
If you do not believe it, compare the Venus de Milo with the Venus de
Medici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with
a Donatello Madonna. When ethical restraint disappears, art tends to
caricature, it becomes depersonalized. The Venus de Milo is a living
being, a great personage; indeed, a genuine and gracious goddess. The
Venus de Medici has scarcely any personality at all; she is chiefly
objectified desire! The essence of art is not spontaneous expression
nor naked passion; the essence of art is critical expression,
restrained passion.
[Footnote 18: _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 206.]
Now, such extreme naturalism has been the continuing peril and the
arch foe of every successive civilization. It is the "reversion to
type" of the scientist, the "natural depravity" of the older theology,
the scoffing devil, with his eternal no! in Goethe's _Faust_. It tends
to accept all powerful impulses as thereby justified, all vital and
novel interests as _ipso facto_ beautiful and good. Nothing desirable
is ugly or evil. It pays no attention, except to ridicule them, to
the problems that vex high and serious souls: What is right and wrong?
What is ugly and beautiful? What is holy and what is profane? It
either refuses to admit the existence of these questions or else
asserts that, as insoluble, they are also negligible problems. To all
such stupid moralizing it prefers the click of the castanets! The
law, then, of this naturalism always and everywhere is the law of
rebellion, of ruthless self-assertion, of whim and impulse, of cunning
and of might.
You may wonder why we, being preachers, have spent so much time
talking about it. Folk of this sort do not ordinarily flock to the
stenciled walls and carpeted floors of our comfortable, middle-class
Protestant meeting-houses. They are not attracted by Tiffany glass
windows, nor the vanilla-flavored music of a mixed quartet, nor the
oddly assorted "enrichments" we have dovetailed into a once puritan
order of worship. That is true, but it is also true that these are
they who need the Gospel; also that these folk do influence the
time-current that enfolds us and pervades the very air we breathe and
that they and their standards are profoundly influencing the youth of
this generation. You need only attend a few college dances to be sure
of that! One of the sad things about the Protestant preacher is his
usual willingness to move in a strictly professional society and
activity, his lack of extra-ecclesiastical interests, hence his narrow
and unskillful observations and perceptions outside his own parish and
his own field.
Moreover, there are other forms in which naturalism is dominating
modern society. It began, like all movements, in literature and
philosophy and individual bohemianism; but it soon worked its way
into social and political and economic organizations. Now, when we are
dealing with them we are dealing with the world of the middle class;
this is our world. And here we find naturalism today in its most
brutal and entrenched expressions. Here it confronts every preacher
on the middle aisle of his Sunday morning congregation. We are
continually forgetting this because it is a common fallacy of our
hard-headed and prosperous parishioners to suppose that the vagaries
of philosophers and the maunderings of poets have only the slightest
practical significance. But few things could be further from the
truth. It is abstract thought and pure feeling which are perpetually
moulding the life of office and market and street. It has sometimes
been the dire mistake of preaching that it took only an indifferent
and contemptuous interest in such contemporary movements in literature
and art. Its attitude toward them has been determined by temperamental
indifference to their appeal. It forgets the significance of their
intellectual and emotional sources. This is, then, provincialism and
obtuseness and nowhere are they by their very nature more indefensible
or more disastrous than in the preacher of religion.
Let us turn, then, to those organized expressions of society where
our own civilization is strained the most, where it is nearest to the
breaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order. Let us
ask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant
there. That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that we
see obvious political decadence on the one hand, and a determination
to experiment with fresh governmental processes on the other, few
would deny. It would appear to me that in both cases the revolt and
the decadence are due to that fierce, short creed of rebellion against
humane no less than religious standards, which has more and more
governed our national economic systems and our international political
intercourse. Let me begin with business and industry as they existed
before the war. I paint a general picture; there are many and notable
exceptions to it, human idealism there is in plenty, but it and they
only prove the rule. And as I paint the picture, ask yourselves the
two questions which should interest us as preachers regarding it.
First, by which of these three laws of human development, religious,
humanistic, naturalistic, has it been largely governed? Secondly, by
what law are men now attempting to solve its present difficulties?
The present industrial situation is the product of two causes. One
of them was the invention of machinery and the discovery of steam
transit. These multiplied production. They made accessible unexploited
sources of raw material and new markets for finished goods. The
opportunities for lucrative trading and the profitableness of
overproduction which they made possible became almost immeasurable.
Before these discoveries western society was generally agricultural,
accompanied by cottage industries and guild trades. It was largely
made up of direct contacts and controlled by local interests. After
them it became a huge industrial empire of ramified international
relationships.
The second factor in the situation was the intellectual and spiritual
nature of the society which these inventions entered. It was, as we
have seen, essentially humanistic. It believed much in the natural
rights of man. The individual was justified, by the natural order, in
seeking his separate good. If he only sought it hard enough and well
enough the result would be for the general welfare of society. Thus at
the moment when mechanical invention offered unheard-of opportunities
for material expansion and lucrative business, the thought and feeling
of the community pretty generally sanctioned an individualistic
philosophy of life. The result was tragic if inevitable. The new
industrial order offered both the practical incentive and the
theoretical justification for institutional declension from humane
to primitive standards. It is not to be supposed that men slipped
deliberately into paganism; the human mind is not so sinister as it
is stupid nor so cruel as it is unimaginative nor so brutal as it
is complacent. For the most part we do not really understand, in
our daily lives, what we are about. Hence society degenerated, as
it always does, in the confident and stubborn belief that it was
improving the time and doing God's service. But He that sitteth in the
heavens must have laughed, He must have had us in derision!
For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this new empire been
founded? That it has produced great humanists is gratefully
conceded; that real spiritual progress has issued from its incidental
cosmopolitanism is manifest; but which way has it fronted, what have
been its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies?
Let its own works testify. It has created a world of new and extreme
inequality, both in the distribution of material, of intellectual
and of spiritual goods. Here is a small group who own the land, the
houses, the factories, machinery and the tools. Here is a very large
group, without houses, without tools, without land or goods. At this
moment only 7 per cent of our 110,000,000 of American people have an
income of $3,000 or more; only 1¼ per cent have an income of $5,000
or more! What law produced and justifies such a society? The unwritten
law of heaven? No. The law of humanism, of Confucius and Buddha and
Epictetus and Aurelius? No. The law of naked individualism; of might;
force; cunning? Yes.
Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolently
worldly people. They have their palatial town house, their broad
inland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish and
game preserves as well. Here in our American cities are the alien, the
ignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements,
sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre. What justifies a
pseudo-civilization which permits such tragic inequality of fortune?
Inequality of endowment? No. First, because there is no natural
inequality so extreme as that; secondly, because no one would dare
assert that these cleavages in the industrial state even remotely
parallel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of ability
among mankind. What justifies it, then? The unwritten law of heaven?
No. The law of humanism? No. The law of the jungle? Yes.
Now for our second question. By what law, admitting many exceptions,
are men on the whole trying to change this situation at once indecent
and impious? This is a yet more important query. Our world has
obviously awakened to the rottenness in Denmark. But where are we
turning for our remedy? Is it to the penitence and confession, the
public-mindedness, the identification of the fate of the individual
with the fate of the whole group which is the religious impulse? Is it
to a disinterested and even-handed justice, the high legalism of the
Golden Rule, which would be the humanist's way? Or is it to the old
law of aggression and might transferring the gain thereof from the
present exploiters to the recently exploited?
It would appear to be generally true that society at this moment is
not chiefly concerned with either love or justice, renunciation
or discipline, not with the supplanting of the old order, but
with perpetuating the naturalistic principle by means of a partial
redivision of the spoils, a series of compromises, designed to make it
more tolerable for one class of its former victims. Thus in capital we
have the autocratic corporation, atoning for past outrages on humanity
by a well-advertised benevolent paternalism, calculated to make men
comfortable so that they may not struggle to be free, or by huge gifts
to education, to philanthropy, to religion. In labor we see men rising
in brute fury against both employer and society. They deny the basic
necessities of life to their fellow citizens; they bring the bludgeon
of the picket down upon the head of the scab; by means of the closed
shop they refuse the right to work to their brother craftsmen; they
level the incapable men up and the capable men down by insisting upon
uniformity of production and wage. Thus they replace the artificial
inequality of the aristocrat with the artificial equality of the
proletariat, striving to organize a new tyranny for the old. It is
significant that our society believes that this is the only way by
which it can gain its rights. That betrays our real infidelity. For
between the two, associated capital and associated labor, what is
there to choose today? By what law, depending upon what sort of power,
is each seeking its respective ends? By the unwritten law of heaven?
No. By the humane law, some objective standard of common rights and
inclusive justice? No! By the ancient law that the only effectual
appeal is to might and that opportunity therefore justifies the deed?
On the whole it is to this question that we must answer, yes!
Turn away now from national economics and industry to international
politics. Does not its _real politik_ make the philosophical
naturalism of Spencer and Haeckel seem like child's play? For long
there has been one code of ethics for the peaceful penetration of
commercially desirable lands, for punitive expeditions against peoples
possessed of raw materials, for international banking and finance
and diplomatic intercourse, and another code for private honor and
personal morality. There has been one moral scale of values for the
father of his family and another for the same man as ward or state or
federal politician; one code to govern internal disputes within the
nation; another code to govern external disputes between nations.
And what is this code that produced the Prussian autocracy, that long
insisted on the opium trade between India and China, that permitted
the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, that sent first Russia and then
Japan into Port Arthur and first Germany and then Japan into Shantung,
that insists upon retaining the Turk in Constantinople, that produced
the already discredited treaty of Versailles? What is the code that
made the deadly rivalry of mounting armaments between army and army,
navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914? The code, to be sure, of
cunning, of greed, of might; the materialism of the philosopher and
the naturalism of the sensualist, clothed in grandiose forms and
covered with the insufferable hypocrisy of solemn phrases. There are
no conceivable ethical or religious interests and no humane goals
or values that justify these things. International diplomacy and
politics, economic imperialism, using political machinery and power to
half-cloak, half-champion its ends, has no law of Christian sacrifice
and no law of Greek moderation behind it. On the contrary, what
should interest the Christian preacher, as he regards it, is its sheer
anarchy, its unashamed and naked paganism. Its law is that of the
unscrupulous and the daring, not that of the compassionate or the
just. In what does scientific and emotional naturalism issue, then? In
this; a man, if he be a man, will stand above divine or human law and
make it operative only for the weaklings beneath. Wherever opportunity
offers he will consult his own will and gratify it to the full. To
have, to get, to buy, to sell, to exploit the world for power, to
exploit one's self for pleasure, this is to live. The only law is
the old primitive snarl; each man for himself, let the devil take the
hindmost.
There is only one end to such naturalism and that is increasing
anarchy. It means my will against your will; my appetite for gold, for
land, for women, for luxury and beauty against your appetite; until
at length it culminates in the open madness of physical violence,
physical destruction, physical death and despair. There can be no
other end to it. If men dare not risk being the lovers of their kind,
then they must choose between being the slaves of duty or the slaves
of force. What are we reading in the public prints and hearing from
platform and stage? The unending wail for "rights"; the assertion of
the individual. Ceased is the chant of duty, forgotten the sacrifice
of love!
The events which have transformed the world since 1914 are an awful
commentary upon such naturalism and a dreadful confirmation of our
indictment. Before the spectacle that many of us saw on those sodden
fields of Flanders, both humanist and religionist should be alike
aghast. How childish not to perceive that its causes, as distinguished
from its occasions, were common to our whole civilization. How
perverse not to confess that beneath all our modern life, as its
dominating motive, has lain that ruthless and pagan philosophy, which
creates alike the sybarite, the tyrant and the anarch; the philosophy
in which lust goes hand in hand with cruelty and unrestrained will to
power is accompanied by unmeasured and unscrupulous force.
It is incredible to me how men can take this delirium of
self-destruction, this plunging of the sword into our own heart in
a final frenzy of competing anarchy and deck it out with heroic and
poetic values, fling over it the seamless robe of Christ, unfurl above
it the banner of the Cross! The only contribution the World War
has made to religion has been to throw into intolerable relief the
essentially irreligious and inhumane character of our civilization.
Of course, the men and the ideals who actually fought the contest
as distinguished from the men and ideals which precipitated it and
determined its movements, fill gallant pages with their heroism and
holy sacrifice. For wars are fought by the young at the dictation of
the old, and youth is everywhere humane and poetic. Thus, if I may be
permitted to quote from a book of mine recently published:
"Our sons were bade to enter it as a 'war to end war,' a final
struggle which should abolish the intolerable burdens of armaments and
conscription. They were taught to exalt it as a strife for oppressed
and helpless peoples; the prelude to a new brotherhood and cooperation
among the nations, and to that reign of justice which is the
antecedent condition of peace.
"They did their part. With adventurous faith they glorified their
cause and offered their fresh lives to make it good. Their sacrifice,
the idealism which lay behind it in their respective communities--the
unofficial perceptions that they, the fathers and mothers and the
boys, were fighting to vindicate the supremacy of the moral over the
material factors of life--this has made an imperishable gift to the
new world and our children's lives. When an entire commuity rises to
something of magnanimity, and a nation identifies its fate with
the lot of weaker states, then even mutilation and death may be
gift-bringers to mankind.
"But it is more significant to our purpose to note that the blood of
youth had hardly ceased to run before the officials began to dicker
for the material fruits of conquest. Not how to obtain peace but how
to exploit victory--to wrest each for himself the larger tribute from
the fallen foe--became their primary concern. So the youth appear to
have died for a tariff, perished for trade routes and harbors, for
the furthering of the commercial advantages of this nation as against
that, for the seizing of the markets of the world. They supposed they
fought 'to end business of that sort' but they returned to find their
accredited representatives contemplating universal military service
in frank expectation of 'the next war.' They strove for the
'self-determination of peoples' but find that it was for some people,
but not all. And as for the cooperation among nations, Judge Gary has
recently told us that, as a result of the war, we should prepare for
'the fiercest commercial struggle in the history of mankind!'"[19]
[Footnote 19: _Can the Church Survive_? pp. 14 ff.]