The religion of the tolerated religious minority has always been
essentially the same religion: that is why its changes of name and form
have made so little difference. That is why, also, a nation so civilized
as the English can convert negroes to their faith with great ease,
but cannot convert Mahometans or Jews. The negro finds in civilized
Salvationism an unspeakably more comforting version of his crude creed;
but neither Saracen nor Jew sees any advantage in it over his own
version. The Crusader was surprised to find the Saracen quite as
religious and moral as himself, and rather more than less civilized.
The Latin Christian has nothing to offer the Greek Christian that
Greek Christianity has not already provided. They are all, at root,
Salvationists.
Let us trace this religion of Salvation from its beginnings. So
many things that man does not himself contrive or desire are always
happening: death, plagues, tempests, blights, floods, sunrise and
sunset, growths and harvests and decay, and Kant's two wonders of the
starry heavens above us and the moral law within us, that we conclude
that somebody must be doing it all, or that somebody is doing the good
and somebody else doing the evil, or that armies of invisible persons,
benefit-cut and malevolent, are doing it; hence you postulate gods and
devils, angels and demons. You propitiate these powers with presents,
called sacrifices, and flatteries, called praises. Then the Kantian
moral law within you makes you conceive your god as a judge; and
straightway you try to corrupt him, also with presents and flatteries.
This seems shocking to us; but our objection to it is quite a recent
development: no longer ago than Shakespear's time it was thought quite
natural that litigants should give presents to human judges; and the
buying off of divine wrath by actual money payments to priests, or, in
the reformed churches which discountenance this, by subscriptions to
charities and church building and the like, is still in full swing. Its
practical disadvantage is that though it makes matters very easy for
the rich, it cuts off the poor from all hope of divine favor. And this
quickens the moral criticism of the poor to such an extent, that they
soon find the moral law within them revolting against the idea of buying
off the deity with gold and gifts, though they are still quite ready
to buy him off with the paper money of praise and professions of
repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may
last unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the
conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process
of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means
of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet when
commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the people
into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can barely live, a
movement for religious reform will arise among the poor, and will be
essentially a movement for cheap or entirely gratuitous salvation. To
understand what the poor mean by propitiation, we must examine for a
moment what they mean by justice.