Reincarnation alone, nor in _Nirvana_ alone, but precisely in the
combination of the two; for that ceaseless flux of reincarnation was
there felt with such horror, that the _Nirvana_--the condition in which
that flux is abolished--was hailed as a blessed release. The judgement
as to the facts--that all human experience is of sheer, boundless
change--was doubtless excessive; but the value-judgement--that if life
be such pure shiftingness, then the cessation of life is the one end for
man to work and pray for--was assuredly the authentic cry of the human
soul when fully normal and awake. This position thus strikingly confirms
the whole Jewish and Christian persistent search for permanence in
change--for a Simultaneity, the support of our succession.
And Mohammedanism, both in its striking achievements and in its marked
limitations, indeed also in the presentations of it by its own
spokesmen, appears as a religion primarily not of a special pervasive
spirit and of large, variously applicable maxims, but as one of precise,
entirely immutable rules. Thus we find here something not all unlike,
but mostly still more rigid than, the post-Exilic Jewish
religion--something doubtless useful for certain times and races, but
which could not expand and adapt itself to indefinite varieties of
growths and peoples without losing that interior unity and self-identity
so essential to all living and powerful religion.
III
Let us now attempt, in a somewhat loose and elastic order, a short
allocation and estimate of the facts in past and present religion which
mainly concern the question of Religion and Progress.
We West Europeans have apparently again reached the fruitful stage when
man is not simply alive to this or that physical or psychic need, nor
even to the practical interest and advantage of this or that Art,
Science, Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further to the
question as to why and how these several activities, all so costly where
at all effectual, can deserve all this sacrifice--can be based in
anything sufficiently abiding and objective. The history of all the past
efforts, and indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook,
combine, I think, to answer that only the experience and the conviction
of an Objective Reality distinct from, and more than, man, or indeed
than the whole of the world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal
to, man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious roots for
our sense and need of an objective supreme Beauty, Truth, and
Goodness--of a living Reality already overflowing that which, in lesser
degrees and ways, we small realities cannot altogether cease from
desiring to become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with
increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence and
conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality of God, and its
need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion, although considerable
systems, which are largely satisfactory in the more immediate questions
raised by Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely anxious
to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully at work to explain
away these essential characteristics of all wideawake Religion. Paul
Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived
pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto
Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led
much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly
not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.
The intimations as to this deepest Reality certainly arise within my own
mind, emotion, will; and these my faculties cannot, upon the whole, be
constrained by my fellow mortals; indeed, as men grow more manysidedly
awake, all attempts at any such constraint only arrest or deflect the
growth of these intimations. Yet the dispositions necessary for the
sufficient apprehension of these religious intimations--sincerity,
conscientiousness, docility--are not, even collectively, already
Religion, any more than they are Science or Philosophy. With these
dispositions on our part, objective facts and living Reality can reach
us--and, even so, these facts reach us practically always, at first,
through human teachers already experienced in these things. The need of
such facts and such persons to teach them are, in the first years of
every man, and for long ages in the history of mankind, far more
pressing than any question of toleration. Even vigorous persecution or
keen exclusiveness of feeling have--_pace_ Lord Acton--saved for
mankind, at certain crises of its difficult development, convictions of
priceless worth--as in the Deuteronomic Reform and the Johannine
Writings. In proportion as men become more manysidedly awake, they
acquire at least the capacity for greater sensitiveness concerning the
laws and forces intrinsic to the various ranges and levels of life; and,
where such sensitiveness is really at work, it can advantageously
replace, by means of the spontaneous acceptance of such objective
realities, the constraints of past ages--constraints which now, in any
case, have become directly mischievous for such minds. None the less
will men, after this change as before, require the corporate experience
and manifestation of religion as, in varying degrees and ways, a
permanent necessity for the vigorous life of religion. Indeed, such
corporate tradition operates strongly even where men's spiritual sense
seems most individual, or where, with the retention of some ethical
nobility of outlook, they most keenly combat all and every religious
institution. So with George Fox's doctrine of the Divine Enlightenment
of every soul separately and without mediation of any kind, a doctrine
derived by him from that highly ecclesiastical document, the Gospel of
St. John; and with many a Jacobin's fierce proclamation of the rights of
Man, never far away from reminiscences of St. Paul.
This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily a need
for men to teach and exemplify, not simply Natural, This-World Morality,
but a Supernatural, Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction,
Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that rich concretion,
this or that Historical Religion. In proportion as such an Historical
Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with
all that is wholesome and real within the other extant historical
religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through their
special developments, where these developments remain true at all. As
well deprive a flower of its 'mere details' of pistil, stamen, pollen,
or an insect of its 'superfluous' antennae, as simplify any Historical
Religion down to the sorry stump labelled 'the religion of every honest
man'. We shall escape all bigotry, without lapsing into such most unjust
indifferentism, if we vigorously hold and unceasingly apply the doctrine
of such a Church theologian as Juan de Lugo. De Lugo (A.D. 1583-1660),
Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological
Professor, and a Cardinal writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban
VIII, teaches that the members of the various Christian sects, of the
Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the heathen religions and
philosophical schools, who achieve their salvation, do so, ordinarily,
simply through the aid afforded by God's grace to their good faith in
its instinctive concentration upon, and in its practice of, those
elements in their respective community's worship and teaching, which are
true and good and originally revealed by God.[51] Thus we escape all
undue individualism and all unjust equalization of the (very variously
valuable) religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly hold
the profound importance of the single soul's good faith and religious
instinct, and of the worship or school, be they ever so elementary and
imperfect, which environ such a soul.
A man's religion, in proportion to its depth, will move in a Concrete
Time which becomes more and more a Partial Simultaneity. And these his
depths then more and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully
Simultaneous, God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of
mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its
variously close interpenetrations of the successive parts; and because
these interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness and
fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he can, indeed he must,
conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous. God is thus
not Unending, but Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room
or reason for succession and our poor need of it. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller
has admirably drawn out this grand doctrine, with the aid of Aristotle's
Unmoving Action, in _Humanism_, 1903, pp. 204-27. We need only
persistently apprehend this Simultaneity as essential to God, and
Succession as varyingly essential to all creatures, and there remains no
difficulty--at least as regards the Time-element--in the doctrine of
Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does Time thus arise
at all--it exists only in and through them. And assuredly all finite
things, that we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a
beginning and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his great _Know
Thyself_, has noble pages on this large theme.[52] In any case we must
beware of all more or less Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous
life of God and the successive life of creatures as but essential and
necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence, in the
manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce, in his powerful work _The World
and the Individual_, 2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under
an adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil. A certain
real independence must have been left by God to reasonable creatures.
And let it be noted carefully: the great difficulty against all Theism
lies in the terrible reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this
same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical
attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But
Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical
difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality
behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to
transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook,
really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian
forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced,
it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble insistence
upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all
this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing
in the midst of deep suffering, through a still deeper faith and love,
souls the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.
The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies man's deepest, most
nearly simultaneous life, by a certain adaptation of its own intrinsic
life to these human spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or
action the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain
successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures to achieve as
much simultaneity as is compatible with their several ranks and calls.
We must not wonder if, in the religious literature, these condescensions
of God largely appear as though they themselves were more or less
non-successive; nor, again, if the deepest religious consciousness tends
usually to conceive God's outward action, if future, then as proximate,
and, if present, then as strictly instantaneous. For God in Himself is
indeed Simultaneous; and if we try to picture Simultaneity by means of
temporal images at all, then the instant, and not any period long or
short, is certainly nearest to the truth--as regards the form and
vehicle of the experience.
The greater acts of Divine Condescension and Self-Revelation, our
Religious _Accessions_, have mostly occurred at considerable intervals,
each from the other, in our human history. After they have actually
occurred, these several acts can be compared and arranged, according to
their chief characteristics, and even in a series of (upon the whole)
growing content and worth--hence the Science of Religion. Yet such
Science gives us no power to produce, or even to foresee, any further
acts. These great Accessions of Spiritual Knowledge and Experience are
not the simple result of the conditions obtaining previously in the
other levels of life, or even in that of religion itself; they often
much anticipate, they sometimes greatly lag behind, the rise or decline
of the other kinds of life. And where (as with the great Jewish
Prophets, and, in some degree, with John the Baptist and Our Lord) these
Accessions do occur at times of national stress, these several crises
are, at most, the occasion for the demand, not the cause of the supply.
The mostly long gaps between these Accessions have been more or less
filled up, amongst the peoples concerned, by varyingly vigorous and
valuable attempts to articulate and systematize, to apply in practice,
and rightly to place (within the other ranges of man's total life) these
great, closely-packed masses of spiritual fact; or to elude, to deflect,
or directly to combat them, or some of their interpretations or
applications. Now fairly steady improvement is possible, desirable, and
largely actual, in the critical sifting and appraisement, as to the
dates and the actual reality, of the historical documents and details of
these Accessions; in the philosophical articulation of their doctrinal
and evidential content; in the finer understanding and wider application
of their ethical demands; and in the greater adequacy (both as to
firmness and comprehensiveness) of the institutional organs and
incorporations special to these same Accessions. All this can and does
progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent
paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with
one-sidedness, travesties, and--worst of all--with worldly indifference
and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are
here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress
except through a deep religious sense--all mere scepticism and all
levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress
in the Science of Religion more appropriately than we can of progress in
the Knowledge of Religion.
The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no doubt exercised, in
the long run, so potent a secularizing influence, because men's minds
had become too largely other-worldly--had lost a sufficient interest in
this wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently boundless
outlooks and problems were taken up largely as a revolt and escape from
what looked like a prison-house--religion. Yet through all these violent
oscillations there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and
call. In this God is the great central interest, love and care of the
soul. We must look to it that both these interests and Ethics are kept
awake, strong and distinct within a costingly rich totality of life: the
Ethic of the honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer--of Confucius and
Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their deepest, of the
Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes, of St. Paul's great eulogy
of love, of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia, of Father
Damian's voluntarily dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the
born incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other. The
Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage the This-world
Stage; the State, at its higher limit, can, more or less consciously,
prepare us for the Other-World Stage. Both spring from the same God, at
two levels of His action; both concern the same men, at two stages of
their response and need. Yet the primary duty of the State is turned to
this life; the primary care of the Church, to that life--to life in its
deepest depths.
Will men, after this great war, more largely again apprehend, love, and
practise this double polarity of their lives? Only thus will the truest
progress be possible in the understanding, the application, and the
fruitfulness of Religion, with its great central origin and object, God,
the beginning and end of all our true progress, precisely because He
Himself already possesses immeasurably more than all He helps us to
become,--He Who, even now already, is our Peace in Action, our Joy even
in the Cross.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
I. 1. Oswold Kuelpe, _The Philosophy of the Present in Germany_,
English translation. London: George Allen, 1913, _3s. 6d._
net.
2. J. McKeller Stewart, _A Critical Exposition of Bergon's
Philosophy_. London: Macmillan, 1913, _6s._ net.
II. 1. R. H. Charles, _A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future
Life_. London: A. & C. Black, 1899, _10s. 6d._ net.
2. Ernest T. Scott, _The Fourth Gospel_. Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 1906, _6s._ net.
III. 1. Aliotta, _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_. English
translation. Macmillan, 1914, _12s._ net.
2. F. C. Schiller, _Humanism_, Macmillan, 1903, _7s. 6d._ net.
3. C. C. J. Webb, _Group Theories of Religion and the Individual_,
Allen and Unwin, 1916, _5s._ net.
FOOTNOTES:
[32] _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_, Engl. tr. 1914, pp. 6,
7.
[33] _A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze_, 1895, p. 104.
[34] Aliotta, op. cit., pp. 89, 187.
[35] _Encyl. Brit._, 'Psychology,' 11th ed., p. 577.
[36] Ed. 1898, p. 90.
[37] _Discours sur la Methode_, 1637, IVe Partie.
[38] Aliotta, op. cit., p. 408.
[39] Ed. 1893, vol. ii, p. 759.
[40] _First Principles_, 6th ed., 1900, vol. i, p. 67.
[41] Article, 'Moses,' in _Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_,
1913.
[42] Ed. Mangey, vol. i, pp. 44, 49.
[43] Ibid., pp. 80-179.
[44] Ibid., pp. 308, 427.
[45] Ibid., pp. 213, 121, 562, 691.
[46] _Conf._ x, 13, 2.
[47] Autumn, 387.
[48] _Conf._ 1, 6, 3; x, 27; x, 20.
[49] _Conf._ xi, 13.
[50] _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen_, 1912, pp.
263-5.
[51] _De Fide_, Disp. xix, 7, 10; xx, 107, 194.
[52] _Cognosci Te Stesso_, 1912, pp. 144-7.
VI
MORAL PROGRESS
L. P. JACKS
From the syllabus of all the lectures in this course I gather that every
lecturer on the programme is dealing with the question of moral
progress. This is inevitable. Each lecturer must show that the
particular sort of progress he is dealing with is real or genuine
progress, and this it cannot be unless it is moral. That is itself a
significant fact and throws a valuable light on our subject. It shows
that progress, as it is studied throughout the course, is not progress
in the abstract, whatever that may mean, but progress _for us_
constituted as we are; and since our constitution is essentially moral
all progress that we can recognize as such must be moral also. Science,
Industry, Government, might all claim progress on their own ground and
in their own nature, but this would not prove progress as we understand
the word, unless it could be shown further that these things contribute
to human betterment in the highest sense of the word. _Their_ progress
might conceivably involve _our_ regress.
To believe in moral progress as an historical fact, as a process that
has begun, and is going on, and will be continued--that is one thing,
and it is my own position. To believe that this progress is far advanced
is another thing, and is not my position. While believing in Moral
Progress as a fact, I also believe that we are much nearer to the
beginnings of it than the end. We should do well to accustom ourselves
to this thought. Many of our despairs, lamentations, and pessimisms are
disappointments which arise from our extravagant notions of the degree
of progress already attained. There has been a great deal of what I have
called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps it would be better called aeonic
pharisaism. I mean the spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I
thank thee, O God, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric,
cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my dinner with a
knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes to the State; I study human
science, talk freely about humanity, and spend much of my time in making
speeches on social questions'. Now there is truth in all this, but not
the kind of truth which should lead us to self-flattery. A good rule for
optimists would be this: 'Believe in moral progress, but do not believe
in too much of it.' I think there would be more optimists in the world,
more cheerfulness, more belief in moral progress, if we candidly faced
the fact that morally considered we are still in a neolithic age, not
brutes indeed any longer, and yet not so far outgrown the brutish stage
as to justify these trumpetings. One of the beneficent lessons of the
present war has been to moderate our claims in this respect. It has
revealed us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done, and
it has revealed, among other things, that moral progress is not nearly
so advanced as we thought it was. It has been a terrible blow to the
pharisaism of which I have just spoken. It has not discredited science,
nor philosophy, nor government, nor anything else that we value, but it
has shown that these things have not brought us as far as we thought.
That very knowledge, when you come to think of it, is itself a very
distinct step in moral progress. Before the war we were growing morally
conceited; we thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality,
than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real barrier to
our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed to take this conceit out
of us--to remind us that as yet we are only at the bare beginnings of
moral advance--and not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the
goal. This sudden awakening to the truth is full of promise for the
future.