I have been thinking over your objection that my notions are “vague;”
feeling that there is some truth in it, but that your words do not quite
express your probable meaning. I think you mean, not that the “notions”
are vague, but that the proofs are vague. The “notions” are in the
Creeds, if you interpret the Creeds spiritually: and I do not think that
the Creeds are more “vague” when interpreted spiritually than when
interpreted literally. The spiritual Resurrection of Christ, for
example—is it more vague than the material Resurrection? If you admit
that there is a spirit in man, and that this spirit is made apparently
powerless by death, is it “vague” to say that the spirit of Jesus, after
passing through this state of death, manifested itself to the disciples
in greater power than ever? Even those who maintain the material
Resurrection admit that it would be a mere mockery without the spiritual
Resurrection, and that the latter is the essence of the act: so that to
declare the statement of the spiritual Resurrection of Jesus to be
“vague,” appears to be equivalent to declaring that _any_ statement of
the _essential_ Resurrection of Jesus is “vague.” Again, redemption from
sin is a spiritual notion, redemption from the flames of a material hell
is a material notion; but is the former more “vague” than the latter? If
so, then we are led to this conclusion, that all spiritual notions are
more vague than material notions; and the vagueness which you censure is
a necessary characteristic of every religion that approaches God as He
ought to be approached, I mean, as a Spirit and through the medium of
spiritual conceptions. But to my mind you are not justified in thus
using the word “vague,” which ought rather to be applied to notions
wanderingly and shiftingly defined; as for example, if I defined the
Resurrection of Jesus as being at one time the rising of His body, at
another the rising of His Spirit; or if I spoke of redemption, now as
deliverance from sin, and now as deliverance from punishment. Convict me
of such inconsistencies, and I will submit to be called “vague;” but at
present I plead, “Not guilty.”
However I think you meant that the proofs, and not the notions were
vague; and here, although you should not have used the word “vague,” I
will admit that you would have been right if you had said that they were
“complex” and “more easy to feel than to define.” No doubt the proof of
Christ’s divinity from the material Resurrection is simple and
straightforward enough: “It is impossible that a man’s body could have
arisen from the grave, and that the man could have afterwards lived with
his friends on earth for several days, and then have ascended into
heaven, if he had not been under the express protection of God; and such
a man we are prepared to believe, if he tells us that he is the Son of
God.” That certainly would seem to a large number of minds a very plain
and straightforward argument—as plain as Paley’s _Evidences_. No trust,
no faith, no affection, is here requisite: nothing is needed except that
rough and ready assumption—in which we are all disposed to
acquiesce—that any altogether exceptional and startling power must come
from God. It must be admitted that this sort of proof would be cogent as
well as direct. Let a man rise from the dead to-morrow, and transport
his body through closed doors, and say that he is Christ, and then mount
up to the clouds and disappear; and I doubt not many of those who saw
him would cry “This must be the Christ,” without so much as enquiring
what manner of man he was. But cogent and popular and delightfully
simple though it may be, this is not the kind of proof on which Jesus
appears to have relied, or by which Jesus has produced a spiritual
change in the hearts of mankind. The very fact that no trust or faith or
affection is needed in such a demonstration, unfits it for spiritual
purposes. In order to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, a man needs
the testimony of all his powers, emotional as well as intellectual,
trust and love as well as reason; and I have endeavoured to shew above
that the whole of the training of the human Imagination, and all the
mysterious natural provisions which have stimulated the eye of the mind
to see what the eye of the body cannot see, have contributed to bring
about the faith in the risen Saviour. As we are to love God with our
strength and with our mind as well as with our heart and our soul, so
are we to believe in Christ with the same collective energy. The proof
therefore of Christ’s Resurrection and of Christ’s divinity is intended
to be, in a certain sense, complex, because it is intended to appeal to
our every faculty and to be based upon our every experience.
But “this form of Christianity can never commend itself to the masses.”
Objection in the shape of prophecy is always difficult to meet, and not
often worth meeting. However, this prophecy has so specious a sound that
it deserves some reply. But first let me ask, Does the present form of
Christianity commend itself to the masses? Surely not to the very poor,
that is to say, not to the class to whom Christ appears to have
specially addressed Himself. And even among the classes which retain the
tradition of worshipping Christ, has Christianity been such as would
commend itself to Christ? Has not our religion been too often divorced
from morality? Has there been dominant among us that habit of mutual
helpfulness—“comforting one another,” as St. Paul calls it—which is the
criterion of a truly Christian nation? Have not the laws in almost all
cases, until the French Revolution, been made in the interests of the
rich, rather than in the interests of the poor; and where the poor have
been considered, has not the consideration arisen largely from the fear
of violence and revolution? There has been a certain amount of
alms-giving, or legacy-leaving, on the part of the minority who have
laid themselves out to lead religious lives; and there has always been a
still more select minority who have been imbued with a truly Christian
enthusiasm for their fellow-creatures, a passionate desire to do
something for Christ, and to leave the world a little better for their
having lived: but the great unheeding mass of men in Christian countries
has rolled on in its selfish path, less selfish certainly, less
brutishly intent on present pleasure than the masses of heathendom, and
indirectly humanized and leavened by a thousand Christian influences,
but still not more than superficially Christian. The reason for this
comparative failure has been, in part, that Christ has not been rightly
presented to the hearts of the people. Too often it has not been Christ
at all—it has been but a lifeless semblance of Christianity—to which
they have given their adhesion. The fear of hell, the hope of
heaven—these have been often the chief motives of religion; and
alms-giving, church-going, Bible-reading, and the use of the sacraments,
have been the means by which men have thought they could escape the one
and secure the other. Asking still further the cause for this
perversion, by which Christ has been converted into a second Law, we
find that in some cases and more especially in recent times, it appears
to have arisen in part from the miraculous element in our religion. This
has made Christ unreal to some of us by taking Him out of the reach of
our sympathies and affection; this also has artificialized our religious
conceptions and divorced our religion from morality by making us think
that God will suspend the laws of spiritual nature for us, as He has
suspended the laws of material nature for Christ and Christ’s Apostles.
Hence has arisen too often a pitiable and preposterous reversal of the
Pauline theology. We have “died” unto Christ, and “risen again” unto the
Law. “Grace” has fled away, and, with it, all natural and harmonious
morality; and the whole duty of a Christian man has been degraded to a
routine of “works.”
It is for this cause that the morality of Agnostics frequently surpasses
the morality of professing Christians. The philanthropy of the former,
so far as it goes, is at all events perfectly natural. They do not love
their brother man in order to obey the Gospel or save their own souls;
they love because they must love. Christ’s heaven is often in their
hearts without any of the corruptions of a conventional Christianity.
They do not believe in a capricious Heaven and Hell, but they are drawn
towards goodness, kindness, justice and mutual helpfulness, whenever and
wherever they see them; and such worship as they have, they give to
these qualities. Hence also in foreign politics the working people and
the Agnostics often manifest a much purer and more Christian feeling
than church-goers. For the Hyper-orthodox, foreign politics lie outside
the Bible; and whatsoever lies outside the Bible lies, for them, outside
morality: but the Agnostic makes no such distinction; he does not
believe that the laws of right and wrong can be miraculously suspended
in favour of his own country. The disbelief in a future Heaven makes the
poor indisposed to tolerate present remediable miseries in the hope of
coming compensation. Hence they shew a much stronger determination not
to put up with a state of things in which the happiness and prosperity
of a whole nation are purchased by the misery of one class. They are
willing enough individually to make sacrifices for one another, and, in
bad times the working people have sometimes collectively borne
considerable burdens with an admirable patience; but that the unwilling
wretchedness of some should form the basis of the prosperity of the
rest, and that the rest should be content to have it so—this they cannot
endure; and sooner than this, they would prefer to see every class in
the nation pulled down two or three degrees in wealth and refinement, if
thereby the lowest class could be raised a single degree.
Rich church-goers are far more ready to acquiesce in present
inequalities, sometimes consoling themselves with the thought that in
heaven all these evils will be redressed, sometimes fortifying their
acquiescence in the inevitable with a text of Scripture. But the poor
declaim passionately against the Bible, when thus quoted—as being a mere
instrument in the hands of the rich, and the priests their accomplices,
to keep the miserable in a state of contentment with their misery. It is
a pity that the poor should be embittered by misrepresentations against
that which is pre-eminently the poor man’s Book; for no tribune or
democrat more persistently than the Bible takes the side of the
oppressed, or more emphatically declares that it is part of God’s method
to raise up the poor from the dung-hill and to fill the hungry with good
things, while He casts down the princes and sends the rich empty away.
But the fact remains that, even when he raves against his own Book, the
poor man is raving in the spirit of the Book. It is not in accordance
with the Bible—and still less in accordance with the spirit of the New
Testament and of Christ—that any nation should tolerate and perpetuate
the misery of a class in order that the whole nation may prosper. Indeed
in such a nation permanent prosperity—in any sense, and much more in the
Christian sense—is quite impossible. Even though they may suppress
rebellion and escape revolution for the time, the governing classes
cannot escape the spiritual evils that must ultimately spring from that
comfortable acquiescence in the wretchedness of others to which they may
give the name of resignation but to which Christ would have given the
name of hypocrisy. Material misery _may_ imply the immorality of those
who are forced to endure it; but it _must_ imply the immorality and
spiritual degradation of those who acquiesce in it because it does not
come nigh them, and because “the Bible says it must be so.” Let but such
Pharisaism continue for a generation, and it will have gone far to
extinguish the purest of religions and to prepare the way for
revolutionary strife.
It appears then that what is called “socialism” is really nothing but a
narrow and unwise form of Christianity; narrow because it excludes the
rich from its sympathies, and unwise because, instead of going to the
root of evils, it simply aims at the branches; capable also, of course,
(like every other theory) of being made to appear immoral, when adopted
for self-interested or vindictive purposes—yet nevertheless containing
much more of the Spirit of Christ than that selfish form of Christianity
which has for its sole object the salvation of the individual. Socialism
owes all that is good in it to Christ.
The gigantic evil of slavery (which is antagonistic to all true
socialism) after a contest of eighteen centuries, has succumbed at last
in Christian countries to Christ’s Spirit and to no other champion. Do
you suppose that it perished owing to the “march of intellect,” or the
discoveries of science, or the general refinement and rise in the
standard of comfort and happiness among mankind? There is no reason at
all for thinking so. The Law of Moses, as you know, recognized, though
it controlled and mitigated, the institution of slavery. The race that
gave birth to Socrates, Aristotle, Sophocles, Phidias, Euclid,
Archimedes, and Ptolemy, was unable so much as to conceive of a state of
society where slavery should not exist: civilization appeared to them to
require the servitude of the masses as its necessary foundation. It was
not cruelty or callousness that prompted Aristotle to divide “tools”
into two classes, “lifeless” and “living”—under which latter head came
slaves: it was want of faith in human nature. “Who would do the
scullion-work in the great household of humanity if there were no
slaves?” Such was the question which perplexed the great philosophers of
antiquity and which Christ came to answer by making Himself the slave of
mankind and classing Himself among the scullions. How strangely dull and
unappreciative do those words of Renan sound, that, if you deduct from
what Christ taught, what other people have taught before Him, little
will be left that is original! “Taught!” It was not the teaching, it was
the doing. Nay, it was not the doing, it was the in-breathing into
mankind of a new Spirit, by means of doing, that ultimately destroyed
slavery. “Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to
minister and to give his life a ransom for many”—the Spirit that
dictated these words, dictated also the death upon the Cross; and this
Spirit has destroyed slavery and will establish true socialism upon
earth.
“But this Spirit of Christ has never been fully obeyed or even
understood by His followers: even St. Paul does not seem to have
understood that Christianity was incompatible with slavery.” You are
quite right. The Spirit of Christ has never yet been fully obeyed, and,
when we thus obey it, life will be heaven. Do you not see that your
objection ignores the fact that we are not yet in heaven, and that
Christianity is to be a gradual growth? Are you not a little like the
child who sows his mustard-seed at night and comes down next morning
expecting to see the great tree in which the birds of the air ought to
have built their nests? The important question is whether the Christian
Spirit so far as it has been obeyed, has worked well; so that we may
trust it to lead us still further forward into practical ameliorations
of our existence, whether individual or national. But to expect it to do
everything in eighteen hundred years, is to forget all the teaching of
history, astronomy, and geology, three voices that unite in proclaiming
that the Hand of God works slowly.
And further, as to your objection that even St. Paul did not realize the
incompatibility between Christianity and slavery, what follows from
that? Nothing I suppose except a confirmation of the words in the Fourth
Gospel, that the followers of Christ must not depend entirely upon St.
Paul, but upon that Spirit which shall “guide us into all truth.” To my
mind it is refreshing and delightful to confess—as I am sure St. Paul
himself would have been the first to confess—that he had not fully
realized all the consequences to which the Spirit of Christ would lead
posterity. I believe that St. Paul wished slaves to take every lawful
opportunity of becoming free, but that he would by no means have
encouraged slaves to run away or to rise violently against their
masters. If he had encouraged them, and if he had universally succeeded,
he would have caused the whole Empire, all civilized society, to
collapse at once. Was he wrong in not causing this? I am not prepared to
say so. I think he shewed more statesmanlike and Christian intuition in
doing nothing of the kind. But he did much. He had no slaves of his own,
you may be sure; he worked like a slave all night, that he might preach
all day; he bore fetters like a slave, and was proud to call himself a
slave for the sake of Christ; he inveighed against the spirit of
slavery, declaring that in Christ “there is neither bond nor free;” and
on the only occasion that we know of, when he had to mediate in a
practical way between an angry master and a runaway slave, he sent the
man back to his master without conditions or stipulations, but with a
letter that was equivalent to an emancipation: “For perhaps he was
therefore parted from thee for a season that thou shouldest have him for
ever; no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a brother beloved,
specially to me, but how much rather to thee, both in the flesh and in
the Lord. If then thou countest me a partner, receive him as myself.”
Was not this, practically and morally, more efficacious than if the
Apostle had fulminated against the master Philemon fiery utterances
about the rights of man and the incompatibility between Christianity and
slavery? Was not Onesimus more sure of being emancipated by the quiet
apostolic method? Was not Philemon likely to feel a quickened sense of
new and higher duty when the Spirit of Christ was breathed into his
heart by these touching and affectionate words, than if a Pauline edict
had confronted him with a “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not”? St. Paul’s
method has been the method of the Spirit of Christ: for eighteen
centuries Christ has been saying to men, not “All slavery is unlawful,”
but to each master about each individual slave, “If then thou countest
Me a partner, receive him as Myself.” Hence by degrees has been shaped a
conviction that slavery in itself is against the will of God.
But the destruction of slavery has not destroyed other problems of life
which still await their solution from Christian socialism. When men
cease to work from the compulsion of a master, they either give up
working, or they work for some other motive—their own subsistence, or
their own comfort, luxury, avarice, ambition, the mere pleasure and
interest of work, or for the sake of others. Are people to give up
working? And, if they work, which of these motives is to take the place
of the old bestial coercion which prevailed in the days of slavery?
These are the great questions of the present, affecting the happiness,
morality, and religion of the whole human race. True Christians and true
socialists are here at one. “If a man will not work, neither let him
eat” is their answer to the first question; and the more we can combine
to make the drone feel that he is out of place in the hive, and that he
must either conform to the hive’s ways or betake himself elsewhither,
the better will it be morally, and therefore ultimately better in all
respects, for the inhabitants of the hive. As to the second question,
socialists and moralists agree that each must work for the sake of
others, and, as far as possible, for all. To my mind, therefore, one of
the most hopeful signs of the times is to be discerned in the spread of
the higher socialist spirit which protests against making competition
the basis of national prosperity. Disguise it as you may, competition
contains an ugly element which was clearly brought out by its first
eulogist, the practical agricultural Hesiod, who tells us that there are
two kinds of strife, namely, war and competition. The latter, he says,
is good; for it rouses even the sluggard to action, when he sees his
neighbour hastening to wealth:
“—this strife is good for mortals,
And potter _envieth_ potter and carpenter carpenter.”
This is the plain truth. Competition is always in danger of producing
“envy,” and, when it is carried consistently to its extreme—as where a
large manufacturer undersells and ruins small manufacturers that he may
secure a monopoly—it verges on that other kind of strife which Hesiod
has himself described as “blameful;” it becomes a kind of war, and is
manifestly unchristian. Christianity might have been therefore expected
to protest against it; but it has not done so: that task has been
reserved for the informal kind of Christianity called socialism. But
very much more than protest is needed. The problem of competition and
how to dispense with it—or how to restrain it while remedying its
evils—is far more complex than that of slavery. Some people regard it as
an inherent law of human society, a natural and continuous development
of the law of the struggle for existence which we have inherited from
our remotest ancestry. Others, while admitting this primæval origin,
hope that, as progressive man has worked out from his nature much else
of the baser element, so he may in time eliminate this also. But, if any
success is to be attained, all sorts of experiments will have to be
tried; all sorts of failures will have to be encountered; and it may be
that in the end the Pauline method of dealing with slavery may be found
the best means of dealing with competition—not so much protesting and
fulminating, but the earnest, informal action of individual enthusiasm.
Action like St. Paul’s may prepare the way for legislation; but, without
change of temper, mere legislation cannot permanently help a people to
deal with a great social difficulty.
In the solution of the complicated problems presented by competition,
socialism, when severed from Christianity, labours (1885) under most
serious disadvantages. Ignoring Christ, it reads amiss the whole of the
history of the past and is in danger of making terrible mistakes in the
future. Even where it avoids revolutionary extravagances, it is tempted
to trust far too much to force, moral if not physical coercion,
legislative enactments, and other shapes of what St. Paul would call
“Law.” Looking up to no Leader in heaven, it does not feel sufficiently
sure of ultimate success. “He that believeth,” says the prophet, “shall
not make haste:” now socialism has no firm basis of belief and therefore
is disposed to “make haste,” not always the haste of energy, sometimes
the spasmodic haste of self-distrust and error, followed perhaps by
dejection or inaction. Its neglect of the true religion leads it into
political as well as religious mistakes. Taking too little account of
sentiments, imaginations, and associations, it aims at a merely material
prosperity which, if attained, would leave the minds of men still vacant
and craving more; and besides, it proceeds by methods which excite alarm
and distrust in many well-wishers. The most serious evil of all is that
the leaders of the socialist movement, if they themselves see no Leader
above them, are actuated by no sense of loyalty and affection such as
Christians should feel for Christ, and consequently are far more exposed
to the dangers arising from their own individual weaknesses and
shortcomings. Their mainspring of action is a passionate enthusiasm for
poor toiling humanity: but how if humanity shews itself to them at times
in its basest aspects, ungrateful, suspicious, mean and shabby, timorous
and traitorous, quite unworthy of their devotion? Are they to serve such
a god as this? And it is a perishable god too; for must not all things
perish, and the earth itself become ultimately as vacant as the moon?
For so vile a master as this, then, are they to endure to be humiliated
and attacked by the rich and powerful, envied and slandered by rival
leaders, occasionally suspected even by the very poor to whom they are
giving their lives? In moments of depression, when thoughts like these
occur—as occur they must—it is hard indeed for a leaderless leader of
men to refrain from flinging up his task, or from continuing to pursue
it out of mere shame of inconsistency, or mere love of occupation,
excitement, and power. When that change comes over the tribune of the
poor, all is over with him. His work is done, though he may have done
nothing. Outwardly such a man’s conduct may be little changed, but
inwardly his spirit is dead within him. His religion—for it was a
religion to him—is now dead; and sooner or later his changed influence
must make itself felt in an infection of deadness spreading through the
whole of the multitudes whom he once inspired.
It is for these reasons that I look to a simpler form of Christianity as
the future religion of the masses; first because I see that the most
active religious forces of the present day are already unconsciously
following on the lines traced by Christ’s spirit; and secondly, because
these movements already exhibit a deficiency which the worship of Christ
alone can fill up.
The worship of Christ as the type and King of men helps to solve the
problems of the individual as well as those of the nation. As long as
human nature is what it is, as long as friends and families are parted
by death, as long as the mind is liable to be weighed down by
depression, and the body to be racked by physical pain, so long will
there be hours when we shall all look upward and demand some other
consolation than the commonplace; “These misfortunes are common to all.”
Stripped of all myth and miracle, the life and death and triumph of
Christ convey to the simplest heart the simplest answer that can be
given to the irrepressible question, “Whence comes this misery?” From
the cross of Christ there is sent back to each of us this answer, “We
know not fully; but our Leader bore it, and good came of it in the end.”
And when we stand at the brink of the grave and ask, “What is death?”
again the answer comes back from the same source, “We know not fully;
but He passed through it and He still lives and reigns.”
But besides the powerful influence of religion in the critical and
exceptional moments of our lives, the influence of Christ would come
full of strength and blessing to the working men of England even if they
acknowledged Him, at first, in the most inarticulate of creeds, as the
man whom they admired most: “We used to think that Christ was a fiction
of the priests; at all events not a man like us in any way; a different
sort of being altogether; one who could do what he liked—so people
said—and turn the world upside down if he pleased: and then we could not
make him out at all. Why, thought we, did he not turn the world upside
down and make it better, if he could? It was all a mystery to us. But
now we find he was a man after all, like us; a poor working man, who had
a heart for the poor, and wanted to turn the world upside down, but
could not do it at once; and he went a strange way, and a long way
round, to do it; but he has come nearer doing it, spite of his enemies,
than any man we know; and now that we understand this, we say—though we
don’t understand it all or anything like it—‘He is the man for us.’” I
say that even if this rudimentary feeling of gratitude and admiration
for their great Leader could possess the hearts of English working
men—and this is surely not too much to expect—much would come from even
this inadequate worship. And, for myself, I unhesitatingly declare that
I would sooner be in the position of a working man who doubts about
Heaven and Hell and even about God, but can say of Christ, “He is the
man for me,” than I would be in the position of the well-to-do
manufacturer who is persuaded of the reality of Heaven and Hell and of
the truth of all the theology of the Church of England, but can
reconcile his religion with the deliberate establishment of a colossal
fortune on the ruin of his fellow creatures.
But I do not believe that the feeling of the working man for Jesus of
Nazareth could long confine itself to admiration. It is not so easy to
make a happy nation or a happy world as the working man thinks: and this
he will soon find out. When sanitation, education, culture, science,
political rearrangements, enlargements for the poor, and restrictions
for the rich, have all done their best and failed—as they necessarily
must fail, unless helped by something more—then the working man will
find what that “something more” is, without which nothing effectual can
be done. Then he will perceive that, after all, unless there is a spirit
of mutual concession in classes and individuals, no Acts of Parliament
can ever be devised to secure lasting prosperity and concord. Then he
will awaken to the fact that Jesus of Nazareth revealed and exemplified
that spirit of concession or self-sacrifice, and that it was by this
means that He went as far as He did toward “turning the world upside
down;” and so he will be gradually led still further to see that the way
which He went was after all not such a very “long way round,” but a
divine way, a way truly worthy of the Son of God. I believe that the
recognition of this single fact would go further than even the
recognition of the marvellous phenomena which manifested the
Resurrection of Christ, to convince working men that the man who
possessed this sublime intuition into spiritual truth, and the perfect
unselfishness and self-control needful to give effect to his plans for
the raising up of mankind, must be no other than the Son of God. The
rest would follow. They would find they had been all their lives on a
wrong track in their search after the divine reality; worshipping brute
force while protesting against it; bowing in their hearts to pomp, and
wealth, and high birth, even while they professed to deride them;
despising things familiar and near; gaping in stupid servile admiration
at things far and unknown; yet all the time God was near them, among
them, in them; the Spirit of God was none other than the spirit of true
socialism; the Son of God was none other than the poor and lowly Workman
of Nazareth.