Finally, let us ask why it is that the old superstitions have so
suddenly lost countenance that although, to the utter disgrace of the
nation's leaders and rulers, the laws by which persecutors can destroy
or gag all freedom of thought and speech in these matters are still
unrepealed and ready to the hand of our bigots and fanatics (quite
recently a respectable shopkeeper was convicted of "blasphemy" for
saying that if a modern girl accounted for an illicit pregnancy by
saying she had conceived of the Holy Ghost, we should know what to
think: a remark which would never have occurred to him had he been
properly taught how the story was grafted on the gospel), yet somehow
they are used only against poor men, and that only in a half-hearted
way. When we consider that from the time when the first scholar ventured
to whisper as a professional secret that the Pentateuch could
not possibly have been written by Moses to the time within my own
recollection when Bishop Colenso, for saying the same thing openly, was
inhibited from preaching and actually excommunicated, eight centuries
elapsed (the point at issue, though technically interesting to
paleographers and historians, having no more bearing on human welfare
than the controversy as to whether uncial or cursive is the older form
of writing); yet now, within fifty years of Colenso's heresy, there
is not a Churchman of any authority living, or an educated layman, who
could without ridicule declare that Moses wrote the Pentateuch as Pascal
wrote his Thoughts or D'Aubigny his History of the Reformation, or that
St. Jerome wrote the passage about the three witnesses in the Vulgate,
or that there are less than three different accounts of the creation
jumbled together in the book of Genesis. Now the maddest Progressive
will hardly contend that our growth in wisdom and liberality has been
greater in the last half century than in the sixteen half centuries
preceding: indeed it would be easier to sustain the thesis that the last
fifty years have witnessed a distinct reaction from Victorian Liberalism
to Collectivism which has perceptibly strengthened the State Churches.
Yet the fact remains that whereas Byron's Cain, published a century
ago, is a leading case on the point that there is no copyright in a
blasphemous book, the Salvation Army might now include it among its
publications without shocking anyone.
I suggest that the causes which have produced this sudden clearing of
the air include the transformation of many modern States, notably
the old self-contained French Republic and the tight little Island of
Britain, into empires which overflow the frontiers of all the Churches.
In India, for example, there are less than four million Christians out
of a population of three hundred and sixteen and a half millions. The
King of England is the defender of the faith; but what faith is now
THE faith? The inhabitants of this island would, within the memory of
persons still living, have claimed that their faith is surely the faith
of God, and that all others are heathen. But we islanders are only
forty-five millions; and if we count ourselves all as Christians, there
are still seventy-seven and a quarter million Mahometans in the Empire.
Add to these the Hindoos and Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, whom I was
taught in my childhood, by way of religious instruction, to regard as
gross idolators consigned to eternal perdition, but whose faith I can
now be punished for disparaging by a provocative word, and you have a
total of over three hundred and forty-two and a quarter million heretics
to swamp our forty-five million Britons, of whom, by the way, only six
thousand call themselves distinctively "disciples of Christ," the rest
being members of the Church of England and other denominations whose
discipleship is less emphatically affirmed. In short, the Englishman of
today, instead of being, like the forefathers whose ideas he clings to,
a subject of a State practically wholly Christian, is now crowded, and
indeed considerably overcrowded, into a corner of an Empire in which
the Christians are a mere eleven per cent of the population; so that the
Nonconformist who allows his umbrella stand to be sold up rather than
pay rates towards the support of a Church of England school, finds
himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church of Rome in Malta, but
to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy of offering Bibles for
sale in the streets of Khartoum. Turn to France, a country ten times
more insular in its pre-occupation with its own language, its own
history, its own character, than we, who have always been explorers
and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred nation is forty
millions strong. The total population of the French Republic is about
one hundred and fourteen millions. The French are not in our hopeless
Christian minority of eleven per cent; but they are in a minority of
thirty-five per cent, which is fairly conclusive. And, being a more
logical people than we, they have officially abandoned Christianity and
declared that the French State has no specific religion.
Neither has the British State, though it does not say so. No doubt there
are many innocent people in England who take Charlemagne's view, and
would, as a matter of course, offer our eighty-nine per cent of "pagans,
I regret to say" the alternative of death or Christianity but for a
vague impression that these lost ones are all being converted gradually
by the missionaries. But no statesman can entertain such ludicrously
parochial delusions. No English king or French president can possibly
govern on the assumption that the theology of Peter and Paul, Luther and
Calvin, has any objective validity, or that the Christ is more than the
Buddha, or Jehovah more than Krishna, or Jesus more or less human than
Mahomet or Zoroaster or Confucius. He is actually compelled, in so far
as he makes laws against blasphemy at all, to treat all the religions,
including Christianity, as blasphemous, when paraded before people who
are not accustomed to them and do not want them. And even that is a
concession to a mischievous intolerance which an empire should use its
control of education to eradicate.
On the other hand, Governments cannot really divest themselves of
religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should not only
live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist
sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain
from suicide in the words "Absent thee from felicity awhile," would say
dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many preachers and saints declare,
some of them in the name of Jesus himself, that this world is a vale
of tears, and that our lives had better be passed in sorrow and even
in torment, as a preparation for a better life to come. Make these sad
people comfortable; and they baffle you by putting on hair shirts. None
the less, governments must proceed on dogmatic assumptions, whether they
call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be assumptions common
enough to stamp those who reject them as eccentrics or lunatics. And
the greater and more heterogeneous the population the commoner
the assumptions must be. A Trappist monastery can be conducted on
assumptions which would in twenty-fours hours provoke the village at its
gates to insurrection. That is because the monastery selects its people;
and if a Trappist does not like it he can leave it. But a subject of the
British Empire or the French Republic is not selected; and if he does
not like it he must lump it; for emigration is practicable only
within narrow limits, and seldom provides an effective remedy, all
civilizations being now much alike. To anyone capable of comprehending
government at all it must be evident without argument that the set of
fundamental assumptions drawn up in the thirty-nine articles or in the
Westminster Confession are wildly impossible as political constitutions
for modern empires. A personal profession of them by any person disposed
to take such professions seriously would practically disqualify him
for high imperial office. A Calvinist Viceroy of India and a Particular
Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire.
The Stuarts wrecked even the tight little island which was the nucleus
of the empire by their Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may
be sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English
for self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their
history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed
for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which makes them equally
impatient of systematic despotism and systematic good government: their
history being that of a badly governed and accidentally free people
(comparatively). Thus our success in colonizing, as far as it has
not been produced by exterminating the natives, has been due to our
indifference to the salvation of our subjects. Ireland is the exception
which proves the rule; for Ireland, the standing instance of the
inability of the English to colonize without extermination of natives,
is also the one country under British rule in which the conquerors
and colonizers proceeded on the assumption that their business was to
establish Protestantism as well as to make money and thereby secure at
least the lives of the unfortunate inhabitants out of whose labor
it could be made. At this moment Ulster is refusing to accept
fellowcitizenship with the other Irish provinces because the south
believes in St. Peter and Bossuet, and the north in St. Paul and Calvin.
Imagine the effect of trying to govern India or Egypt from Belfast or
from the Vatican!
The position is perhaps graver for France than for England, because
the sixty-five per cent of French subjects who are neither French nor
Christian nor Modernist includes some thirty millions of negroes who
are susceptible, and indeed highly susceptible, of conversion to those
salvationist forms of pseudo-Christianity which have produced all the
persecutions and religious wars of the last fifteen hundred years. When
the late explorer Sir Henry Stanley told me of the emotional grip which
Christianity had over the Baganda tribes, and read me their letters,
which were exactly like medieval letters in their literal faith and
everpresent piety, I said "Can these men handle a rifle?" To which
Stanley replied with some scorn "Of course they can, as well as any
white man." Now at this moment (1915) a vast European war is being
waged, in which the French are using Senegalese soldiers. I ask the
French Government, which, like our own Government, is deliberately
leaving the religious instruction of these negroes in the hands of
missions of Petrine Catholics and Pauline Calvinists, whether they
have considered the possibility of a new series of crusades, by ardent
African Salvationists, to rescue Paris from the grip of the modern
scientific "infidel," and to raise the cry of "Back to the Apostles:
back to Charlemagne!"
We are more fortunate in that an overwhelming majority of our subjects
are Hindoos, Mahometans and Buddhists: that is, they have, as a
prophylactic against salvationist Christianity, highly civilized
religions of their own. Mahometanism, which Napoleon at the end of his
career classed as perhaps the best popular religion for modern political
use, might in some respects have arisen as a reformed Christianity
if Mahomet had had to deal with a population of seventeenth-century
Christians instead of Arabs who worshipped stones. As it is, men do not
reject Mahomet for Calvin; and to offer a Hindoo so crude a theology as
ours in exchange for his own, or our Jewish canonical literature as an
improvement on Hindoo scripture, is to offer old lamps for older ones in
a market where the oldest lamps, like old furniture in England, are the
most highly valued.
Yet, I repeat, government is impossible without a religion: that is,
without a body of common assumptions. The open mind never acts: when
we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still,
when we can reason and investigate no more, must close our minds for the
moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions. The man
who waits to make an entirely reasonable will dies intestate. A man so
reasonable as to have an open mind about theft and murder, or about
the need for food and reproduction, might just as well be a fool and a
scoundrel for any use he could be as a legislator or a State official.
The modern pseudo-democratic statesman, who says that he is only in
power to carry out the will of the people, and moves only as the cat
jumps, is clearly a political and intellectual brigand. The rule of the
negative man who has no convictions means in practice the rule of the
positive mob. Freedom of conscience as Cromwell used the phrase is an
excellent thing; nevertheless if any man had proposed to give effect to
freedom of conscience as to cannibalism in England, Cromwell would have
laid him by the heels almost as promptly as he would have laid a Roman
Catholic, though in Fiji at the same moment he would have supported
heartily the freedom of conscience of a vegetarian who disparaged the
sacred diet of Long Pig.
Here then come in the importance of the repudiation by Jesus of
proselytism. His rule "Don't pull up the tares: sow the wheat: if you
try to pull up the tares you will pull up the wheat with it" is the
only possible rule for a statesman governing a modern empire, or a voter
supporting such a statesman. There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus
that cannot be assented to by a Brahman, a Mahometan, a Buddhist or a
Jew, without any question of their conversion to Christianity. In some
ways it is easier to reconcile a Mahometan to Jesus than a British
parson, because the idea of a professional priest is unfamiliar and even
monstrous to a Mahometan (the tourist who persists in asking who is the
dean of St. Sophia puzzles beyond words the sacristan who lends him a
huge pair of slippers); and Jesus never suggested that his disciples
should separate themselves from the laity: he picked them up by the
wayside, where any man or woman might follow him. For priests he had not
a civil word; and they showed their sense of his hostility by getting
him killed as soon as possible. He was, in short, a thoroughgoing
anti-Clerical. And though, as we have seen, it is only by political
means that his doctrine can be put into practice, he not only never
suggested a sectarian theocracy as a form of Government, and would
certainly have prophesied the downfall of the late President Kruger if
he had survived to his time, but, when challenged, he refused to teach
his disciples not to pay tribute to Caesar, admitting that Caesar, who
presumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as much as any disciple,
had his place in the scheme of things. Indeed the apostles made this
an excuse for carrying subservience to the State to a pitch of idolatry
that ended in the theory of the divine right of kings, and provoked
men to cut kings' heads off to restore some sense of proportion in the
matter. Jesus certainly did not consider the overthrow of the Roman
empire or the substitution of a new ecclesiastical organization for the
Jewish Church or for the priesthood of the Roman gods as part of his
program. He said that God was better than Mammon; but he never said
that Tweedledum was better than Tweedledee; and that is why it is now
possible for British citizens and statesmen to follow Jesus, though they
cannot possibly follow either Tweedledum or Tweedledee without bringing
the empire down with a crash on their heads. And at that I must leave
it.
LONDON, December 1915.