Notre liberté, dans les mouvements mêmes par
où elle s'affirme, crée les habitudes naissantes qui
l'étoufferont si elle ne se renouvelle par un effort
constant.
_Bergson._
It is quite true that to be popular a religion must be corrupt. The fact
is noted both by its critics and enemies and by its friends and
devotees. They express their minds in different terms but they agree.
There is, however, a difference running through their agreement, at
least in many cases. The critics who are also enemies regard the
corruption not strictly as corruption but as the clearer manifestation
of the true character religion has from the beginning. The religious man
means precisely what he says when he calls it corrupt. There is a
reality, true, beautiful, good, which men in the multitude do not find
attractive, but which may be adapted, one way or another, overlaid,
delicately or barbarously perverted, to suit them.
Jesus Christ was not popular, nor were his principles. For a time, no
doubt, people heard him gladly. He went about among them doing good,
healing, compassionate. But when they realized how discordant with
themselves his prophetic message really was they hounded him to death.
'Not this man but Barabbas,' they cried. Barabbas was far more popular
than this prophet without honour in the country that should have known
him best, and did know enough of him to be sure that he and his
interests were alien from them and theirs.
It is this that stands in the gate of popularity over against an
uncorrupted Christian religion, this separation from the people and
their interests as they commonly are. The kingdom for which Jesus lived
and died, the community of wisdom and love and self-giving, is not
desired by the societies in which narrower self-interests reign. 'Change
your minds,' the prophet must always say to his people, 'repent, change
your minds about everything in the world, about yourselves, and about
God.'
Can we wonder that bit by bit compromise creeps in? Anything so
subversive must be accommodated here and there to things as they are,
for things as they are have to remain—somehow. The popular conception of
right government and right morals, the popular craving for magic and for
royal roads and easy-going machines, for an assured salvation or an
infallible guide, permeates insensibly the religion which a poetic
religious genius has revealed. The divine voice is drowned in the
shouting of men who will be heard and listened to. So, whether great
Rome or the little Bethel be established in popularity, the Christian
religion must have been corrupted in it to meet the desires and condone
the sins and errors of the people who have so disastrously been won
without being transformed.
Christianity became popular. Shall we, then, look for its truth in
popular presentations of it? If science were popular, should we seek its
truth that way? Or do we take popular philosophy, or the view of the
world or of the British Constitution presented in newspapers, as our
guide to the truth of these things? Yet it seems that when a man studies
the Christian religion he does just what he would regard himself as a
fool for doing in regard to any other serious matter. He takes it in its
established and popular or once popular guise, and then says—'this,
this, is what the Christian religion is.' And if another presentation is
offered him, say that of the Gospels or the great mystics, prophets,
saints, who have been nurtured in the true faith, and fed by the divine
wisdom of Christ, he says it is not Christianity at all, because
Christianity is and must be taken as the religion of Christians in the
multitude, not as the private discoveries or inventions of certain
gifted or peculiar men—those saints, prophets, mystics—or even as Jesus
Christ himself, living, dying, living for ever, whom Nietzsche took to
be the only Christian.
If a man is more careful, he seems to himself to have been as careful as
he need be when he goes to the official presentation of religion by
theologians and doctors, and in the organized procedure of religious
government and institutions. That, he says, must show me what
Christianity really is. That is Christian orthodoxy. And, undoubtedly,
if he carries his investigations far he will find there much that is
more valuable and more difficult to dispose of easily, than what he
finds current in the multitude. Yet here he needs more caution than he
usually shows, however careful he is to distinguish between the official
orthodoxy and the unofficial representation of it. He needs to learn or
to recall continually the manner of life and thought everywhere in
regard to life's effects and tools and products. He needs to tell
himself that just as in the monsters of bygone epochs on the earth life
was overwhelmed in monstrosity, and in the armoured beasts it was
checked by the very instruments that seemed its best protection, so in
all human organizations (and every Church, whatever else it may be, is a
human organization) there is an ever-present danger to the spirit and
the life they have been designed, well or ill, to serve. 'Automatism
dogs our steps; the formula crystallizes the living thought that gave it
birth, the idea is oppressed by the word, the spirit overwhelmed by the
letter.' And if to this ever-present danger to religion there is added,
as there very frequently is, the insidious influence of the
worldly-world, of ambition, political intrigue, the pressure of popular
demands and of a narrow but immensely powerful self-interest, the
religious institution, if it persists unchanged, easily—one may dare to
say inevitably—ceases to bear faithful witness to the religious life.
Again, the procedure of theologians, and above all the procedure of
'theologizers,' is open and always has been open to serious question.
They are aware that their work is one of science; but as it began in a
time when science had not learnt its best methods, nor the necessity of
ever relating itself anew to living experience, theirs is a science very
far from being what we have come to know and trust as scientific.
Moreover, although it does change and move and grow, far more than most
of us or of its professors see or acknowledge, it has never formally
adopted change and movement and growth as in principle and fact
necessary for its well-being. The theologians who claim to represent the
orthodoxy of by far the great majority of Christians, those of the
Church, Eastern or Western, are in the main determined to make every
effort to abide in the old paths, and with more or less ingenuity accord
themselves with a past supposed unchanging. That the present changes,
they too often deplore, that in and by their own work the past has been
changed, they seem not to know. And their own reluctance to change both
disguises the fact that despite themselves they have done so, and
militates against the value for other people of their change. The man
who looks to them as representing the Christian religion takes them at
their own estimate as in the main unchanging, and judges what they give
him as being 'that which was from the beginning.' Along the Christian
ages Christian theologians have changed into their own likeness the
'faith once delivered to the saints' and they have but rarely been
saints.
It is to the saints and the prophets that we must look for the Christian
religion, rather than to its doctors. But more than to any of these it
is to the Supreme Person, Christ himself, saint and prophet above and in
all others.
We have already found our advantage in this for the discussions of these
pages. We have caught glimpses of the depth and range of some of the
principles embodied both in the teaching and in the life of Jesus. The
Gospels have brought us riches, although we have only taken grains of
gold from their mine here or there. The Christian whom we are using as
our authority for the time being is one who has sat at the feet of
Christ and has the mind of Christ. He is one, happily, among many of all
ages. And if for us he has no name, no concrete existence, nevertheless,
as he is he is a witness whose testimony we can put to proof. He brings
his documents, and better, he appeals to the witness in ourselves as
truthseekers. He makes an appeal to which some of us at least find
response within us. There are moments when what he says appears to be
self-evident, so firmly rooted in us is a belief in those living facts
of freedom and dependence, holiness and sin, love and its rejection, of
which he speaks; so little is there, if there is anything, in what we
have learnt from science and philosophy, that disputes them.
As to his documents—they too both carry and call forth their witness. We
have those Gospels from different men; they speak in different voices
and each with its own predilection, even prejudice, and its own
colouring of thought, of knowledge or ignorance, of desire. Yet which
among these writers could invent his subject? Which has succeeded in
seriously defacing it? Behind them all he stands, the prophet of
Nazareth, Jesus—God and man, the Christian says—and draws men to
himself.
No doubt the Christian has much more to tell us than we can ask him for
just now, or admit to our discussion. He has a great deal to say in
defence of his institutions and his theologians, which may well be said
and listened to. But it remains true that for us who are now asking, not
for justification of these though ample justification there may be, but
for the deepest principles of the Christian religion, it is to the mind
of Christ and to him who has that mind that we must turn. Jesus built up
no institution, gave no laws, announced no established plans, erected no
infallible authority. He gave principles, living and spiritual
principles. 'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they
are life.' So his great mystical interpreter hears him say. And men have
indeed found response to his words in the opening out of their own life
and spirit.
We seek the truth and reality of spirit and life, we who are seeking
here. And in this search we find ourselves more and more at one with the
Christian. The view that he and his fellows take of the Christian
Church, that organization which is at least meant to foreshadow the
kingdom Jesus preached, lies beyond the scope of this enquiry. All that
needs to be said here is that we must not and do not foreclose an
enquiry that shall include it. We stand now upon the very threshold of
the kingdom; and, may be, we look with longing eyes.
-------