separated from the official and national cults, and among the Hebrews
was often in opposition to them. The Hebrew prophets certainly
proclaimed that 'the history of the world is the judgment of the world,'
and often assumed, too crudely as it seems to us, that national
calamities are a proof of national transgression; but the whole course
of development in prophecy was towards an autonomous morality based on a
spiritual valuation of life. Its quarrel with sacerdotalism was mainly
directed against the unethical _tabu_-morality of the priesthood; the
revolt was grounded in a lofty moral idealism, which found expression in
a half-symbolic vision of a coming state in which might and right should
coincide. The apocalyptic prophecies of post-exilic Judaism, which were
not based, like some political predictions of the earlier prophets, on a
statesmanlike view of the international situation, but on hopes of
supernatural intervention, had their roots in visions of a new and
better world-order. This aspiration, which had to disentangle itself by
degrees from the patriotic dreams of a stubborn and unfortunate race,
was projected into the near future, and was mixed with less worthy
political ambitions which had a different origin. The prophet always
foreshortens his revelation, and generally blends the city of God with a
vision of his own country transfigured. We see him doing this even
to-day, in his Utopian dreams of social reconstruction.
And so it has always been. We remember Condorcet foretelling a reign of
truth and peace just before he was compelled to flee from the storm of
calumny to die in a damp cell at Bourg la Reine; and Kant hailing the
approach of a peaceful international republic while Napoleon was
preparing to drown Europe in blood. Apocalyptism is a compromise between
the religion of rewards and punishments and the religion of spiritual
deliverance. It calls a new world into existence to redress the balance
of the old; but its discontent with the old is mainly the result of a
moral and spiritual valuation of life. Greek philosophy has really much
in common with Hebrew prophecy, though the Greek envisaged his ideal
world as the eternal background of reality, and not under the form of
history. In its maturest form, it is a transvaluation of all values in
accordance with an absolute ideal standard--that of the Good, the True,
and the Beautiful. This idealism appears in a still more drastic form in
the religions of Asia, which preach deliverance by demonetising at a
stroke all the world's currency. Spiritual values are alone accepted;
man wins peace and freedom by renouncing in advance all of which fortune
may deprive him.
We are apt to assume, in deference to our theories of human progress,
that the evolution of religion is normally from a lower to a higher
type. It would, indeed, be absurd to question that the religion of a
civilised people is usually more spiritual and more rational than that
of barbarians. But none the less, the history of religions is generally
a history of decline. In Judaism the prophets came before the Scribes
and the Pharisees. Brahmanism and Buddhism were both degraded by
superstitions and unethical rites. Christianity, which began as a
republication of the purest prophetic teaching, has suffered the same
fate. In each case, when the revelation has lost its freshness, and the
enthusiasm which it evoked has begun to cool, a reversion to older
habits of thought and customs takes place; and sometimes it may be said
that the old religion has really conquered the new.
Christianity, as taught by its Founder, is based on a transvaluation of
values even more complete than that of Stoicism and the later Platonism,
because, while it regards the objects of ordinary ambition as a positive
hindrance to the higher life, it accepts and gives value to those pains
of sympathy which Greek thought dreaded, as detracting from the calm
enjoyment of the philosophic life. This acceptance of the world's
suffering, from which every other spiritual religion and philosophy
promise a way of escape, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of
Christian ethics. In practice, it thus achieves a more complete conquest
of evil than any other system; and by bringing sorrow and sympathy into
the Divine life, it not only presents the character and nature of the
Deity in a new light, but opens out a new ideal of moral perfection.
This is not the place for a discussion of the main characteristics of
the Gospel of Christ, and they are familiar to us all. But, since we are
now considering the charge of failure brought against Christianity in
connexion with the present world-war, it seems necessary to emphasise
two points which are not always remembered.
The first is that there is no evidence that the historical Christ ever
intended to found a new institutional religion. He neither attempted to
make a schism in the Jewish Church nor to substitute a new system for
it. He placed Himself deliberately in the prophetic line, only claiming
to sum up the series in Himself. The whole manner of His life and
teaching was prophetic. The differences which undoubtedly may be found
between His style and that of the older prophets do not remove Him from
the company in which He clearly wished to stand. He treated the
institutional religion of His people with the independence and
indifference of the prophet and mystic; and the hierarchy, which, like
other hierarchies, had a sure instinct in discerning a dangerous enemy,
was not slow to declare war to the knife against Him. Such, He reminded
His enemies, was the treatment which all the prophets had met with from
the class to which those enemies belonged. This, then, is the first fact
to remember. Institutional Christianity may be a legitimate and
necessary historical development from the original Gospel, but it is
something alien to the Gospel itself. The first disciples believed that
they had the Master's authority for expecting the end of the existing
world-order in their own lifetime. They believed that He had come
forward with the cry of 'Hora novissima!' Whether they misunderstood Him
or not, they clearly could not have held this opinion if they had
received instructions for the constitution of a Church.
The second point on which it is necessary to insist is that Christ never
expected, or taught His disciples to expect, that His teaching would
meet with wide acceptance, or exercise political influence. 'The
world'--organised human society--was the enemy and was to continue the
enemy. His message, He foresaw, would be scorned and rejected by the
majority; and those who preached it were to expect persecution. This
warning is repeated so often in the Gospels that it would be superfluous
to give quotations. He made it quite plain that the big battalions are
never likely to be gathered before the narrow gate. He declared that
only false prophets are well spoken of by the majority. When we consider
the revolutionary character of the Christian idealism, its indifference
to nearly all that passes for 'religion' with the vulgar, and its
reversal of all current valuations, it is plain that it is never likely
to be a popular creed. As surely as the presence of high spiritual
instincts in the human mind guarantees its indestructibility, so surely
the deeply-rooted prejudices which keep the majority on a lower level
must prevent the Gospel of Christ from dominating mundane politics or
social life.
Moreover, the actual extent of its influence cannot be estimated. The
inwardness and individualism of its teaching make its apparent
effectiveness smaller than its real power, which works secretly and
unobserved. The vices which Christ regarded with abhorrence are
perversions of character--hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, and worldliness
or secularity; and who can say what degree of success the Gospel has
achieved in combating these? The method of Christianity is alien to all
externalism and machinery; it does not lend itself to those
accommodations and compromises without which nothing can be done in
politics. As Harnack says, the Gospel is not one of social improvement,
but of spiritual redemption. Its influence upon social and political
life is indirect and obscure, operating through a subtle modification of
current valuations, and curbing the competitive and acquisitive
instincts, which nearly correspond with what Christ called 'Mammon' and
St. Paul 'the flesh.' Christianity is a spiritual dynamic, which has
very little to do directly with the mechanism of social life.
It is, therefore, certain that when we speak of Christianity as a
factor in human life, we must not identify it with the opinions or
actions of the multitudes who are nominally Christians. We must not even
identify it, without qualification, with the types of character
exhibited by those who try to frame their lives in accordance with its
precepts. For these types are very largely determined by the ideals
which belong to the stage through which the life of the race is passing;
and these differ so widely in different ages and countries that the
historian of religion might well despair if he was compelled to regard
them all as typical manifestations of the same idea. There are times
when the disciple of Christ seems to turn his back upon society; he is
occupied solely with the relation of the individual soul to God. These
are periods when the opportunities for social service are much
restricted by a faulty structure of the body politic; periods when
secular civilisation is so brutal, or so servile, that the religious
life can only be led in seclusion from it. At another time the typical
Christian seems to be the active and valiant soldier of a militant
corporation. At another, again, he is a philanthropist, who devotes his
life to the redress of some great wrong, such as slavery, or the
promotion of a more righteous system of production and distribution. In
all these types we can trace the operation of the genius of
Christianity, but they are partial manifestations of it, with much alien
admixture. The spirit of the age, as well as the spirit of Christ, has
moulded the various types of Christian piety.
If there has ever been a time when organised Christianity was a concrete
embodiment of the pure principles of the Gospel, we must look for it in
the era of the persecutions, when the Church had already gained
coherence and discipline and a corporate self-consciousness, and was
still preserved from the corrupting influence of secularity by the
danger which attended the profession of an illicit creed. A vivid
picture of the Christian communities at this period has been given by
Dobschütz, whose learning and impartiality are unimpeachable. The Church
at this time demanded from its followers an unreserved confession, even
when this meant death. It was a brotherhood within which there was no
privileged class. Men and women, the free and the slave, had an equal
share in it. It abolished the fundamental Greek distinction of civilised
and barbarian. It looked with contempt on none. Its great organisation
was spread by purely voluntary means, till it gained a firm footing
throughout the Empire and beyond it. To a large extent it was an
association for mutual aid. Wherever anyone was in need, help was at
hand. The tangible advantages of belonging to such a guild were so great
that the Church had to enforce labour on all who could work, as a
condition of sharing in the benefits of membership. Social distinctions,
such as those of rich and poor, master and slave, were not abolished,
but they had lost their sting, because genuine affection, loyalty and
sympathy neutralised these inequalities. Great importance was laid on
truth, integrity in business, and sexual purity. A complete rupture with
pagan standards of morality was insisted on from new members. The human
body must be kept holy, as the temple of God. Revenge was forbidden, and
injustice was endured with meekness and pardon. This is no imaginary
picture. In that brief golden age of the Church, such were indeed the
characteristics of the Christian society. In the opinion of Dobschütz
the moral condition of the Church in the second century was much higher
than among St. Paul's converts in the first. The paucity of references
to sins of the flesh, and to fraud, is to be accounted for by the actual
rarity of such offences. For a short time, then, the artificial
selection effected by the persecutions kept the Church pure; and from
the happy pictures which we can reconstruct of this period we can judge
what a really Christian society would be like.
The history of institutional Catholicism must be approached from a
different side. Troeltsch argues with much cogency that the Catholic
Church must be regarded rather as the last creative achievement of
classical antiquity than as the beginning of the Middle Ages. Its growth
belongs mainly to the political history of Europe; the strictly
religious element in it is quite subordinate. There is, as Modernist
critics have seen, a real break between the Palestinian Gospel and the
elaborate mystery-religion, with its graded hierarchy, its Roman
organisation, its Hellenistic speculative theology, which achieved the
conquest of the Empire in the fourth century. The Church, as Loisy says,
determined to survive and to conquer, and adapted itself to the demands
of the time. It has travelled far from the simple teaching of the
earthly Christ; though we may, if we choose, hold that His spirit
continued to direct the growing and changing institution which, as a
matter of history, had its source in the Galilean ministry. In truth,
however, the extremely efficient organisation of the Roman Church began
in self-defence and was continued for conquest. It is one of the
strongest of all human institutions, so that it was said before the war
that it is one of the 'three invincibles,' the other two being the
German Army and the Standard Oil Trust.
But our admiration for the subtle and tenacious power of this
corporation must not blind us to its essentially political character.
Its policy has been always directed to self-preservation and
aggrandisement; it is an _imperium in imperio_, which has only checked
fanatical nationalism by the competing influence of a still more
fanatical partisanship. In the present war, the problem before the
Pope's councillors was whether the friendship of the Central Powers or
that of the Entente was best worth cultivating; and the unshaken loyalty
of Austria to the Church, together with a natural preference for German
methods of governing as compared with democracy, turned the scale
against us. In Ireland, in Canada and in Spain the Catholic priests have
been formidable enemies of our cause. As for the other Churches, they
have not the same power of arbitrating in national quarrels. The Russian
Church has never been independent of the secular government; and the
Anglican and Lutheran Churches can hardly be expected to be impartial
when the vital interests of England or Germany are at stake. Lovers of
peace have not much to hope for from organised religion. National
Christianity, as Mr. Bernard Shaw says, will only be possible when we
have a nation of Christs.
The downfall of the medieval European system, though in truth it was a
theory rather than a fact, has removed some of the restraints upon war.
The determining principle of the medieval political theory was the
conception of a 'lex Dei,' which included the 'lex Mosis,' the 'lex
Christi,' and the 'lex ecclesiae,' but which also, as 'lex naturæ,'
comprised the law, science, and ethics of antiquity. These laws were
super-national, and no nation dared explicitly to repudiate them. They
formed the basis of a real system of international law, resting, like
everything else in the Middle Ages, on supposed divine authority.
This theory, with its sanctions, was shattered at the Renaissance; and
the Machiavellian doctrine of the absolute State, accepted by Bacon and
put into practice by Frederick the Great, has prevailed ever since,
though not without frequent protests. The rise of nationalities, each
with an intense self-consciousness, has facilitated the adoption of a
theory too grossly immoral to have found favour except in the peculiar
circumstances of modern civilisation. The emergence of nationalities was
often connected with a legitimate struggle for freedom; and at such
times _esprit de corps_ seems to be almost the sum of morality, the
substitute for all other virtues. Loyalty is one of the most attractive
of moral qualities, and it necessarily inhibits criticism of its own
objects, which has the appearance of treason. But, unless the aims of
the corporate body which claims our absolute allegiance are right and
reasonable, loyalty may be, and often has been, the parent of hideous
crimes, and a social evil of the first magnitude. The perversion of
_esprit de corps_ does incalculable harm in every direction, destroying
all sense of honour and justice, of chivalry and generosity, of sympathy
and humanity. It involves a complete repudiation of Christianity, which
breaks down all barriers by ignoring them, and insists on love and
justice towards all mankind without distinction. The worship of the
State has during the last half-century been sedulously and artificially
fostered in Germany, until it has produced a kind of moral insanity.
Even philosophical historians like Troeltsch seem unable to see the
monstrosity of a political doctrine which has caused his country to be
justly regarded as the enemy of the whole human race. Eucken, writing
some years before the war, in a rather gingerly manner deprecates
_Politismus_ as a national danger; but he does not dare to grasp the
nettle firmly. It is possible that this deification of the State in
Germany may be in part due to an unsatisfied instinct of worship. In
Roman Catholic countries, where there must be a divided allegiance,
patriotism never, perhaps, assumes such sinister and fanatical forms.
But we shall not understand the attraction which this naked immoralism
in international affairs exercises over the minds of many who are not
otherwise ignoble, if we do not remember that the repudiation of the
Christian ethical standard has been equally thorough in commercial
competition. The German officer believes himself to have chosen a
morally nobler profession than that of the business-man; he serves (he
thinks) a larger cause, and he is content with much less personal
reward. Socialist assailants of our industrial system, much as they
dislike war, would probably agree with him. It is not necessary to
condemn all competition. The desire to excel others is not
reprehensible, when the rivalry is in rendering useful social service.
But it cannot be denied that the present condition of industry is such
that a heavy premium is offered to mere cupidity; that the fraternal
social life which Christianity enjoins is often literally impossible,
except at the cost of economic suicide; and that in a competitive system
a business man is, by the very force of circumstances, a warrior, though
war is an enemy of love and destructive of Christian society. When the
object of bargaining is to give as little and gain as much as possible,
the Christian standard of values has been rejected as completely as it
was by Machiavelli himself. The competition between two parties to a
bargain is often a competition in unserviceableness. Money is very
frequently made by creating a local and temporary monopoly, which
enables the vendor to squeeze the purchaser. In all such transactions
one man's gain is another man's loss. This state of things, the evils of
which are almost universally recognised and deplored, marks the end of
the glorification of productive industry which was one result of the
Reformation.
Hardly anything distinguishes modern from medieval ethics more sharply
than the emphasis laid by Protestant morality on the duty of making and
producing something tangible. Theoretically the Protestant may hold that
'doing ends in death,' and he may sing these words on Sunday; but his
whole life on week days is occupied in strenuous 'doing.' We find in
Calvinism and Quakerism the genuinely religious basis of the modern
business life, which, however, has degenerated sadly, now that the
largest fortunes are made by dealing in money rather than in
commodities. In the books of Samuel Smiles, and in Clough's poem
beginning 'Hope ever more and believe, O Man,' we find the Gospel of
productive work preached with fervour. It is out of favour now in
England; but in America we still see quaint attempts to make business a
religion, as in the Middle Ages religion was a business. In these
circles, it is productive activity as such to which value is attached,
without much enquiry as to the utility of the product. The result has
been an immense accumulation of the apparatus of life, without any
corresponding elevation in moral standards. The mischiefs wrought by
modern commercialism are largely the fruit of the purely irrational
production which it encourages. There are, says Professor Santayana,
Nibelungen who toil underground over a gold which they will never use,
and in their obsession with production begrudge themselves all
inclinations to recreation, to merriment, to fancy. Visible signs of
such unreason appear in the relentless and hideous aspect which life
puts on; for those instruments which emancipate themselves from their
uses soon become hateful. 'A barbaric civilisation, built on blind
impulse and ambition, should fear to awaken a deeper detestation than
could ever be aroused by those more beautiful tyrannies, chivalrous or
religious, against which past revolutions have been directed.' We
cannot, indeed, be surprised that this ideal of productive work as a
means of grace, precious for its own sake, has no attraction for the
masses, and that independent thinkers like Edward Carpenter should write
books on 'Civilisation, its Cause and Cure.'