CHURCHES
Religion plays but a small and insignificant part in the life of any
commercial nation. I have travelled all round the world, have seen
life under the Southern Cross in Australia, in the United States of
America, in Canada, and on the Continent of Europe, and what strikes
me more than anything else is the complete divorce between organised
religion and the people. The people are not, and never have been,
actively hostile to religion, but the organisations for the spread of
religion have failed, and are still failing, to get any sort of hold on
the common people, who do not oppose nor accept religion, but remain
completely indifferent. The reason for this is that religion, like
everything else in the world to-day, is looked upon by most of us as a
matter of business.
All through the latter half of the nineteenth century we were brought
up to believe that if we made a bargain with God our past and future
sins would be forgiven and our place in Heaven secure. We might be poor
or rich--as men count poverty and riches in this life--but a belief in
the sacrifice of our Lord would bring us safely to Paradise at last. As
a boy I grew up with the most wonderful idea of Heaven. I imagined it
a place where in very deed we should see God and Christ and the angels,
with the whole company of redeemed sitting on thrones beside the Jasper
Sea. My picture of Hell was that of a veritable lake into which were
cast all wicked men and women, and little children who disobeyed their
parents, told lies, or stole. It was often a nightmare question to me
whether, after all, my place might not be the lake of fire, eternal
torment and damnation.
Though the Heaven and Hell of my childhood have gone, it is true to say
that, whatever else I have lost hold of in this connection, I have lost
no shred of faith and hope in the continuance of life after death. I
am heir of all the ages, and am also part of the life of the future.
Somewhere in that future there is a tiny corner for me which, by the
grace of God, I shall fill; but as to a life of indolent ease, it is
all banished from my mind. I know that for me all life will be one
long struggle upwards. It may be I shall not get, as it were, one yard
forward, but that does not matter; what is important is that I should
make the effort.
I say all this because in criticising the Churches I do not want to be
taken as a critic of religion in its fullest and best sense; for it is
an eternal truth, “Man does not live by bread alone.” Look where you
will, investigate as you may, you will find how true a saying it is.
Yet religion plays but a small part in our national or private life.
There are many thousands of good men and women who toil and work for
the “coming of the Kingdom” with a courage and zeal beyond all praise;
there are priests who labour incessantly, striving to bring the message
of the gospel of peace into the dark and squalid places of our great
cities; yet the common people pass by unheeding. Big-hearted men and
women, seeing into the great gulf which divides the social life and
conditions of the rich and of the poor, create social and religious
centres where rich and poor may meet together. Educated young men and
women come East to learn all about the poor, to investigate and analyse
conditions, and to look, as it were, at the curious life and customs
of those who work. Clubs are formed, boys’ brigades, companies of boy
scouts, girls’ clubs, mothers’ meetings, fathers’ meetings, and so
on. At the last-mentioned tobacco is sometimes thrown in, and quite
occasionally something called religion is talked about and discussed.
Only a minute fraction of the population surrounding any of these
settlements attends these meetings or clubs, and fewer people still
ever dream of attending the churches or chapels attached to such places.
I think the workers owe an enormous debt to Canon Barnett and his
wife for their selfless work in the establishment and organisation of
the first of these settlements at Toynbee Hall. They have had many
followers in many parts of the country, but so far these settlements
all fail to do more than touch the outside fringe of the social life
of the people, and this because they all appear to accept the present
social order as a God-ordained institution, and are quite content to
allow the struggle for bread to remain as the recognised dominant
factor in the life of the people.
Many of the young men from Oxford and Cambridge and the Public Schools
manage, however, to do very well by themselves, in some cases by means
of debating clubs and classes. There they gain knowledge and experience
of the Trade Union movement, which knowledge is later on used to secure
for them first-class positions as Government or municipal servants.
Many of us have watched with interest the careers of these young men,
who, having come to East London with what I am sure was a genuine and
generous interest in the working class, and with a real desire to
improve conditions, have gradually discovered that the one royal road
out is a complete social revolution; but (seeing the difficulties, like
the rich young man in the parable) have turned back and found their way
into Government Departments and into the House of Commons, and even on
to the Treasury Bench, where they have been engaged in the business of
making the present conditions more tolerable, with no sort of idea of
destroying evil conditions by attacking root causes.
It is the spirit which is all wrong; and to make this plain I cannot do
better than describe an incident which happened at a meeting in Oxford
which Lord Hugh Cecil and myself addressed. The meeting was organised
for the purpose of enlisting young men as residents for Oxford House,
Bethnal Green. There was a fine attendance of healthy, vigorous young
men, full of enthusiasm and quite keen to hear us both. Lord Hugh was
the first speaker, and based his appeal on the fact that those young
men would be the future law-makers and administrators of Britain; he
urged that it was their bounden duty to make themselves acquainted with
the people whom they would be called upon to govern and whose public
affairs they would be called upon to administer. In saying this, he
was summarising what is to him the very highest conception of public
life and duty, so far as the great landed class to which he belongs is
concerned. He believes in a governing class whose duty it is to govern
wisely for the good of the nation and to equip itself efficiently for
the discharge of its duties. This is the alleged justification for
the existence of the landed gentry; and all who know anything of the
public life of the Cecils know how well they try to live up to their
conception of public duty. But I was not convinced then, and am not
convinced now, that governing classes are a necessity; and so, when it
came to my turn, I said something like this: “You young men have great
opportunities given you to educate yourselves, to acquire knowledge;
and it is your bounden duty to give back all and more than you receive
to the service of the nation. Your education, your culture, is all
given at the expense of the workers, who day and night toil that you
and your class may understand something of the joy of living. I want
you to come down to Bethnal Green to teach the people all you know,
teach them to hate poverty and dirt and unwholesome conditions, and
organise them to control and manage their own lives. Above all, teach
them that poverty is a result of man-made conditions, and that mankind,
if it will, can as easily create better conditions.”
Both our speeches were, as usual, heartily cheered, though for all
practical purposes my speech, so far as I know, fell on deaf ears,
for I have not yet discovered any rebels amongst the Oxford House
residents. I think there is a better spirit growing up amongst all
those who go to live in these social settlements, but these social
efforts will continue to be worth very little until the whole thing
is founded on sounder lines. The workers in great numbers will never
respond to their call until those who are responsible for this kind of
work go down to root causes, and declare their faith in the principles
of co-operation and brotherhood, not those of competition and strife,
as the right means of obtaining our daily bread. There was a time when
many hoped the Nonconformist Churches would fill up the gap left by the
established and older churches in the religious life of the people. The
coming of Wesley promised great things, but alas! dissenting chapels
in large centres fare little better than other religious efforts,
and often huge chapels and assembly halls will be found on Sunday
half-empty, whilst all around them, living in squalor and want, are
myriads of men and women hungering and thirsting for the message which
Christians should have to give. Look where we will, we shall find the
same conditions prevailing, and these may be practically summed up in
the statement that the nation has left God and religion out of account.
Archbishops, bishops, presidents of the Free Church Council, write
excellent pastorals calling us all to repentance and hope, and
especially at this crisis in our nation’s history do we find them
intent on calling our attention to our national and personal aims.
At the same time, though, most of them refuse to give any sanction,
any help, to the young men who, rightly or wrongly, refuse to take
up arms. Some Church dignitaries have scorned and ridiculed the
conscientious objectors, most of whom, whether we agree with them
or not, are undoubtedly standing out for the very highest thing in
life; that is, the right to follow the light of one’s own conscience.
It is men and women like these who in all ages have made progress
of any kind possible. It is a matter of history that, because of
their determination to follow the light of their own consciences,
the early Christians were flung to the lions by Nero and other Roman
Imperialists. The young men who just now are being flung into prison,
and who are enduring the obloquy and ridicule of religious and
irreligious men, are the true descendants of the saints and martyrs of
whom we sing:
They climbed the steep ascent to heaven
Mid sorrow, care, and pain;
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train.
And yet scarcely a voice is raised in Christendom (outside the Society
of Friends) on their behalf; in fact, the defence of the conscience
has been left largely to Quakers and Agnostics, whilst official
Christianity has declared on behalf of the war, as it always has
done on behalf of all war since that fatal day in the history of
Christianity when Constantine established the Christian religion as
part of the State machinery of Government.
I have brought the war in here because it seems to me important in
this chapter to show the attitude of the churches towards “force as a
remedy for international wrong,” and to compare it with the attitude
taken up by those same churches toward the great social class war which
curses the whole civilised world. During my life-time there have been
innumerable labour disputes, lock-outs, and strikes; but on scarcely
any occasion do I remember the leaders of the churches coming out and
definitely taking sides. It is true that in the first great London
dock strike, nearly twenty years ago, the late Cardinal Manning and
Bishop Temple, together with some leading Nonconformists, came out with
a demand for a conference and arbitration, and by the influence they
exerted were able to secure for the docker the 6d. per hour minimum;
but, so far as I recollect, there was no great uprising of Christians
on the side of the worker, and this has been true all through the
railway, coal, and transport strikes. All I remember of the “Christian”
attitude towards these are sermons and articles written by learned
Divines telling the workers to moderate their demands, and to give up
using such terrible methods as those of the strike. When I appealed to
the archbishops and bishops during the Dublin strike, and during other
labour disputes, they always declared that the business of the church
was not to take sides, but to remain neutral, because it was impossible
for the church to know which side was right.
In the case of international war it is different. When Protestant
is killing Protestant, and Catholic killing Catholic, the religious
leaders of Europe, with the exception of His Holiness the Pope and
some leading Quakers, _do_ take sides, and each claims that God
is on the side of his particular nation in the terrible struggle. It
may be that people who are against all war are wrong, but the leaders
of Christendom cannot have the best of both worlds. They cannot teach
the workers to love their masters, to put their trust in religion as a
means for fighting social wrong; they cannot deprecate the use of force
and violence by the workers against their masters, and then defend
bloodshed and violence when these are undertaken at the bidding of
Governments against each other. Besides this, during time of strike,
children, women, and men are killed by order of the Executive. Hull,
Liverpool, Featherstone, Dublin, Belfast, Llanelly, and Tonypandy, to
say nothing of Johannesburg, are all places which labour will remember,
while memory remains, as the towns and cities where unarmed people were
shot down by order of the Government when striving for freedom.
It may be said in reply to me that religious organisations which oppose
the present war have mostly been indifferent to labour’s fight for
better conditions. I quite agree that this is so, and I want to urge
the Society of Friends and other pacifists to remember that social
conditions create social and class wars, and working for peace must
mean not only international peace but peace at home in our ordinary
and everyday life. All Christendom is guilty in so far as it tolerates
evil conditions and does little or nothing to try and improve them.
The point is that the Church cannot have it both ways. If it is right
in taking sides in war, it cannot be right in refusing to take sides in
labour conflicts: let it take sides in war by all means if it really
feels that compatible with the teaching of Christ, but then let it be
logical and take sides in labour conflicts too.
There may be special circumstances about the present war which make it
different from all others, but the organised exponents of religion have
supported all wars within my memory. A faint voice, here and there, as
now, has feebly protested; but in the main the wars of the past sixty
years have all been blessed by the followers of the Prince of Peace,
and all the strikes, all the efforts of labour to organise itself,
have been opposed. The labour struggles have been, if not frowned
upon, at least left alone. The churches, when not hostile, have been
benevolently neutral towards the employer. A bishop whom I respect
very much said the other day that there were some disputes in which it
was a sin to be neutral, in which Christians must take sides. He was
speaking of the attitude of neutral nations, particularly of America,
towards Germany in the present war. When I read the report of this
speech I could not help wishing it had been possible to tell him that
practically all Christendom had for centuries been either neutral or
hostile to the workers in their great struggles for freedom, and that
the failure of the churches was entirely due to this one fact. Indeed
there has been no great popular movement for social equality which
has not been bitterly opposed by the organised churches. The churches
profess to believe in and to teach brotherhood, love, and co-operation.
The mass of humanity pays little or no heed to their message, because
it believes the leaders of the churches do not believe what they say
they believe. I spoke recently at a great National Mission meeting
in the North of England, where I tried to express the thought that
our Lord intended His teaching to be acted upon, to be lived up to,
and that we who profess to be Christians must find some means of
bringing this about. A clergyman followed me with a witty, clever
speech in which he tried to drive home the fact that in his opinion
the church could and should lay down great principles, but must never
attempt to say how these principles should be put into practice. In
the same speech he defended the war as a war of righteousness. This
speech distressed me, not because of the support given to war, for
I think I do understand the point of view of Christians who support
the war; but it seemed to me such an extraordinary theory that the
church should be considered worthy to lay down great principles of
life and conduct, but should not be considered worthy to tell us how
to apply these principles. It is sheer cowardice and fear which make
the church, in its corporate capacity, such a helpless organisation
when social questions have to be dealt with. Drunkenness is a terrible
scourge, brought about by a variety of conditions, but made possible
because some people want to make money out of the trade. Prostitution
is a social evil, bringing in its train mental, moral, and physical
death; it is aggravated by the double standard of morals as shown in
the divorce laws, by sweating and bad housing. All these are things
which the church never attacks in anything like a determined manner.
Occasionally a bishop or a clergyman, more daring than his colleagues,
will speak out against these evils; but in the main the church is
silent. The reason is not far to seek. The money for maintaining
churches and chapels comes very largely from rich men and women who
benefit materially because of bad social conditions. The church I was
married in was paid for by money given by a brewer. A few months later
it was burned to the ground, having been opened for service less than
two years. I stood in the crowd that watched its destruction, and
people were saying it was a just retribution on the church for taking
money from such a trade for the purpose of church-building.
It is very well known to the clergy how money is made, how fortunes are
amassed, and how their own positions are maintained, and it is this
which makes them hesitate to take sides. Yet if they would but follow
the example of Christ, they would denounce all of us who are whited
sepulchres, destroyers of widows’ houses, spoilers of the people. It
is courage they lack, and there is no hope for them, no likelihood of
their message being accepted, until in the strength of their Master
they do take sides on the great moral issues involved in the social
class war. It is impossible that the people should believe in the
sincerity of those who are only able to see the justice of a great
international war, who can see the wickedness of the Germans in sinking
unarmed ships and destroying thousands of innocent men and women, but
who cannot take sides in the great social war against destitution and
prostitution, sweating and all the other evils of our day. Germany may
slay her thousands of innocent victims, but the competitive system, the
get-rich-quick race for wealth, the “buy in the cheapest and sell in
the dearest” theories of life, all find expression in a national life
which can count its victims by the million. And yet the church dare
not take sides! Do you, reader, understand that in a strike the women
and children of the workers are starved just as surely as if they were
inhabitants of a beleaguered city; that their cries often fall on deaf
ears, because, forsooth, the church must not take sides, must not have
an opinion of the great moral issue involved in all labour disputes?
My contention is that if organised Christianity can take sides on such
questions as those involved in a great war it must also be able and
willing to understand and take sides on these great questions of life
and conduct.
What a travesty of true religion all this clerical cowardice and apathy
is! But, alas! how in keeping with the official traditions of that
organised religion which refused to help Wilberforce in his struggle
to free the slaves--nay, which, in many cases, actively opposed his
campaign--and which, in our day, has stood passively by whilst men
and women have been thrown into prison and tortured by forcible
feeding and other brutal means of persecution! Facts like these stamp
the church and its work with ghastly failure. It would not be right
for me not to acknowledge the splendid work which rebels within the
churches have done on behalf of God and the people, from the days
of the early fathers until now, but the work of men like John Ball
has been crushed by the dead weight of the episcopacy. A generation
ago Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes, and others made a great effort to
stir the conscience of the church. In our own day, Stewart Headlam,
Conrad Noel, Lewis Donaldson, and their fellow-priests of the Church
Socialist League have done magnificent work, striving to make men and
women realise that serving God and belonging to the society of Christ’s
people on earth involves something more than the repetition of words
and phrases and lip-service. In other churches, too, individual men
and women have upheld the literal truth of the teaching of Christ,
and have pleaded for its practical application to the problems of
life--only to find themselves isolated and alone.
Yet they have never really been alone, for to them, as to every true
disciple of Christ, the promise of the Master is true: “Lo, I am with
you alway, even unto the end of the World.” And that is the message
and promise for us all. Leaders may fail us, the churches may fail in
carrying the gospel message in all its fulness to the hearts of the
people, but the message is finding its way home in other ways. The
common people through their own efforts are finding their way back
to God, and are realising every day what are the things in life that
really matter. And all those who love England, who love Humanity,
should range themselves alongside the great army of labour, that
army of men and women who are marching towards the light, who gain
inspiration, courage, and hope from a firm and unswerving faith in the
solidarity and brotherhood of all mankind, and who to-day are hungering
and thirsting for a fuller life. It is said that on the scaffold Sir
Harry Vane declared: “The people of England have long been asleep;
when they waken they will be hungry.” We might well say the same thing
to-day. Our people have again been asleep for a long time, and they are
once more waking to find themselves hungry. They will not find their
food and their satisfaction in the worn-out theories of competition and
beggar-my-neighbour commercialism; but, instead, they will discover
their greatest incentive to life and effort in the teachings of the
great masters of religion. They are discovering that religion is not
merely a matter of creed, but a matter of life and conduct also, and
that though churches have failed, science and scientific men have
failed also. Some day there will be a great revival, when all the
religious leaders of the world will come together and proclaim the
unity of all life, of all religions that have a message of brotherhood
and goodwill. When that day comes we shall learn that we cannot serve
God by means of strife, that we cannot establish God’s Kingdom on earth
by mutual slaughter. We shall, indeed, discover the utter impossibility
of serving God and the Devil, and the futility of trying to cast out
evil by evil. Chief of all, we shall realise that love and love only is
the thing that matters; that perfect love to God and man will enable
us to cast out fear, and will give us courage to fight the good fight,
will give us faith and confidence in the ultimate triumph of right over
wrong; and this, after all, is the true work of all the churches.