adaptation; but dig down, first to the centre of the world, and then to
the centre of your own nature, and you will find a most wonderful
correspondence, a most beautiful harmony, between the two--the world
made for the hero and the hero made for the world.
Whoever embarks on the task of religious inquiry, which is tantamount
to inquiry into the meaning of his life--a question he would have no
interest in asking unless he were fundamentally a religious
being,--whoever embarks on this task will find the ground encumbered
with a multitude of preconceptions which warp the mind at every point
and render independent judgment extremely difficult. Unless the
inquirer keeps a watch upon himself his mind will run in a groove from
the outset. And when he has followed his groove as far as it goes and
found _nothing_ at the end of it, he will conclude that religion has
broken down. But in nine cases out of ten he will perceive, if he
reflects on what has happened, that the groove which has led to this
result was cut by minds not primarily interested in religion but bent
on protecting some quite alien interest, possibly a vested interest,
institutional or political, to which religion had proved itself
serviceable.
The most obstinate of these misconceptions, and the deepest of the
grooves in which they run, are those connected with the term "God."
There is no worldly interest which has not been anxious to secure God
for an ally. In all ages the attempt has been made to domesticate the
idea of God to the secular purposes of individuals and of groups. If
we examine the current forms of the idea we may observe the marks of
this domesticating process at many points. For example, the idea of
God as the sovereign potentate, governing the universe under a system
of iron law, the legislator of nature and the taskmaster of the soul,
the rewarder of them that obey and the punisher of them that disobey,
is plainly an idea borrowed from politics, the form of the idea most
convenient to those who need God as an ally in the maintenance of law
and order as they conceive them.
This does not prove the idea untrue to reality; it may conceivably be
used as a strong argument to the contrary. At the same time it puts us
on our guard, warning us to look out for other forms of "domestication"
which may be less in accord with essential truth than the one I have
just mentioned. Certainly it is extremely difficult to find any form
of the idea of God which has retained a purely spiritual or religious
character throughout the entire course of its history. Between the
conception of Deity implied in the teachings of Jesus and the
conception as it appears in "God save the King" the distance is
immense; and few theologians I imagine would be so hardy or so
patriotic as to affirm that the latter conception is nearer to the
Divine Reality.
The theologian who takes up the proof of the existence of God should
make it clear, both to himself and to his audience, at which end of
this long line, which has not been one of "development," he lays the
emphasis. Any proof of the existence of "the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ" would certainly prove the non-existence of the being
adumbrated in "God save the King"; and vice versa. Which may be
expanded into a more general proposition. Reasons given in favour of a
spiritual or religious conception of God become less and less valid
exactly in proportion as we approach its secular modifications; while
reasons given in favour of these latter are worthless as proofs of the
spiritual reality. Most of our difficulties in believing in God arise
from the fact that God, in our meaning of the term, is no longer
"spirit" (as Jesus said), but spirit shorn of its freedom and reduced
to the dimensions of some human utility or purpose--that is, not
"spirit" at all.
For these reasons I will venture to suggest to anyone who is perplexed
by doubts about the reality of God, not to trust the fortunes of his
faith too unreservedly to the field of mere argumentation. If he does
so he runs a serious risk of falling, without being aware of it, into
one of the many grooves of thought, which alien interests have cut deep
into the ground of theological controversy, leading the mind in a
direction contrary to that in which spiritual reality is to be found.
Neither let him deem himself an atheist because he cannot believe in
the Deity adumbrated by "God save the King." Rather let him conceive
it possible that God is speaking to him in his refusal to believe in
_that_ God. Let him seek God in the very heart of his doubts about
God, saying to himself words such as these:
"God, if there be such an one, will reveal himself as a companion
spirit in my endeavour to achieve a better-than-what-is; incidentally
therefore in my rejection of all debased, or even man-made, images of
himself. He will not consent to be the servant of men's designs, or
the ally of their policies, not even when these things clothe
themselves in great words spelt with capital letters--like Democracy.
He will not even submit to the shackles of their forms of thought."
I suggest further that the only final mode of ascertaining whether or
no such a God exists is _by experiment_, standing or falling by the
issue, and resorting to the methods of argumentation only to confirm or
elucidate the results so obtained. The experiment first, the
argumentation second.
But of what nature is the experiment in question? I conceive it being
made in the following manner:
"Of the many Gods, or conceptions of God, that are offered me, the only
one I am concerned to believe in, and should find it a calamity not to
believe in, is the God who is sympathetic, and _actively_ sympathetic,
on the lines of my determination to achieve a better-than-what-is.
Omnipotence and Omniscience I could dispense with if need be; the
disappearance of the Cosmic Potentate would not leave me orphaned; the
Absolute does not enthral me and I should suffer no nightmare were I to
learn that it did not exist. But were I forced to admit that the
universe, as a whole, is quite indifferent to this desire of mine to
achieve a better-than-what-is, that there is nothing in its nature
which shares my interest in that matter, nothing there that backs me
up, nothing to which the failure or success of my attempt makes the
slightest difference, then indeed a dark and cruel blight would fall
upon my soul.
"To that blight I may have to submit. But I will not submit until I
have tested the universe in the only way that is open to me. I will
trust it as a friend. There are those about me who say that my trust
will not be betrayed, having made the same experiment themselves. They
remind me that the world I am living in is not _any_ kind of world, but
just the one particular kind needed by a soul whose business it is to
create new values, in the way of Truth, Beauty and Goodness; that its
laws, forces and material readily lend themselves to the purpose of
anyone who will use them for that high creative end, turning out, in
fact, to be the very kind of laws, forces and material which such an
one needs. Well then, I will see. I will base my life on the
assumption that somewhere, in the height above or in the depth below,
Power is waiting to back me up. That Power, if I find it, shall be my
God. Is it not reasonable to suppose that, if it exists, it will find
some means of making me aware of its presence? That then shall be my
experiment, and I will abide by the result."
A person who reasons with himself in this manner is taking the most
practical, and the wisest means I know of to determine the question
whether God exists. For my own part I should view his experiment with
hope proportioned to his sincerity. Frankly, I should expect him to
make discovery of the Living God, as a reality, as a companion, as a
friend. Whether to the reality, companion, friend, so discovered he
gave the name "God," or some other name, I should not regard as a
matter of supreme importance. If he chose to call it Christ, or more
simply "the Spirit," I should not quarrel with him. The discovery is
far too momentous to be imperilled for a name. Its value lies not in
its name but in its _reality_. "Few things are easier," says John
Henry Newman, "than to use the name of God and mean nothing by it."
Call it then by a name which means something, and not by a name which
means nothing.
All religious testimony, so far as I can interpret its meaning,
converges towards a single point, namely this. There is that in the
world, call it what you will, which responds to the confidence of those
who trust it, declaring itself, to them, as a fellow-worker in the
pursuit of the Eternal Values, meeting their loyalty to it with
reciprocal loyalty to them, and coming in at critical moments when the
need of its sympathy is greatest; the conclusion being, that wherever
there is a soul in darkness, obstruction or misery, there also is a
Power which can help, deliver, illuminate and gladden that soul. This
is the Helper of men, sharing their business as Creators of Value,
nearest at hand when the worst has to be encountered; the companion of
the brave, the upholder of the loyal, the friend of the lover, the
healer of the broken, the joy of the victorious--the God who is spirit,
the God who is love.
Had more been heard about this, the God of religion, and less about
that other--the lawyer's God, whose main concern is the policing of his
universe--our religious perplexities would not be what they are. I do
not say they would be easier. They might be harder. But they would
lose their character as irritants and become, instead, incentives to
humane relationships, to noble living and to creative work. For there
are two kinds of religious perplexity. In the one, perplexity
overcomes religion; in the other, religion overcomes perplexity. "We
are perplexed, yet not unto despair."
_III_
_Perplexity in the Christian Religion_
Those who are wondering in what form Christianity is destined to
survive, or whether it will survive at all,[1] would be well advised to
keep in mind two significant facts, discernible enough even when the
view is limited to our own country, but obvious on a wider survey of
what is going forward in foreign lands: first, that the lay mind has
definitely passed beyond clerical control; second, that the most active
religious minds, both among the clergy and the laity, but among the
laity most of all, are learning to use their own eyes in the search for
God, instead of looking for Him through the ill-matched lenses of
Jew-Greek binoculars, and are gradually ceasing to think about Christ
and his religion in terms of the recognized "isms"--Catholicism,
Protestantism, Anglicanism, Modernism, Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, or
any other. They have passed beyond all that and are probing deeper
ground. They are judging spiritual things by spiritual.
If these things are so, and somewhat exceptional opportunities of
observing have convinced me that they are,[2] it would seem to follow
that the form in which Christianity is destined to survive (if it
survives at all) will not be the form of any of the "isms" aforesaid.
In other words, even if the battle of the "isms," as this is now
carried on by professional controversalists and mainly on clerical
ground, were to issue in the final victory of one of them over the
others--of which at present there is little prospect--this would decide
nothing as to the fortunes of Christianity in the world at large.
Thus, though we have no indication of what the surviving form of
Christianity will be, we have a pretty clear indication of what it will
not be. Beyond this it seems impossible to cast the horoscope of
Christianity at the present time. Its fortunes have always been
unpredictable; each new development a surprise to those who witnessed
it. "As the lightning ... so shall be the coming of the Son of Man."
The application of this to what follows will be obvious as we proceed.
To Bishop Gore's denial that Christianity has failed, on the ground
that "it has never been tried," Mr Graham Wallas makes the effective
reply that a religion that has been adopted by the great States of the
world for fifteen centuries and never been "tried" is a religion that
has failed. In this Mr Wallas follows the proper method of judging
Christianity by its own high standards, which certainly require that it
should have been tried ere this. "What thou doest do _quickly_" was
spoken to Judas Iscariot. Does it follow that "What thou doest do
slowly, putting it off, if it so pleases, for fifteen centuries" was
intended to be the motto of the Christian Church?
The command to "sell all that thou hast and give to the poor" was
doubtless spoken "to a particular young man on a particular occasion."
But the parable of the Good Samaritan, with its pungent ending "go and
do thou likewise," was also spoken to a particular lawyer on a
particular occasion. And so with the teachings of Christ in general.
All his universals were seen in particulars. If, then, we are to
discharge everything that was spoken "to particular individuals on
particular occasions" as inapplicable to modern conditions, or to the
world at large, we shall find that there is not much left that we can
apply to anything. What, indeed, remains? The "spirit" of it all?
Yes: but a very different spirit from that which makes these convenient
excisions. Many of the alleged excuses for the failure of Christianity
have been pitched in this key. They are unconvincing.
Others fall back on the magic words "slow and gradual," words that have
induced many persons to believe that the slower and more gradual a
process is the more surely it is divine--as against an earlier thought
which armed the gods with thunderbolts. The convenience of this excuse
is that no depth of failure can be so extreme as not to be covered by
it--just as, in the case cited above, no betrayal of Christ's
principles can be so complete as not to be covered by the plea that the
principles in question "were spoken to particular individuals on
particular occasions." But though the one argument is as convenient as
the other, it is no more satisfactory to an honest man.
How has it come to pass that respectable Christian apologists have
fallen into such flagrant dishonesties?
The cause, I believe, lies in the habit mentioned in the first section
of this book--the habit, namely, of applying carnal logic (admirable
for carnal purposes) to divine things, not judging spiritual things by
spiritual. Anyone who studies this class of apologetics will be struck
by their resemblance to a well-known type of political speech, when the
spokesman of some discredited Government which has broken all the
promises given at the election, attempts to befool his constituents
into believing that the promises have been kept. It is all a matter of
artfully adjusting the emphasis--the art, as somebody has said "of
keeping the public quiet about one thing by making them noisy about
another." There is, I say, a significant resemblance between this
method and that of the Christian apologist when, for example, he exalts
the benevolence promoted by Christianity and ignores the parallel fact
that no other religion has developed such ferocious internal
differences nor been so cruel in its persecution of unbelievers. There
have been moments in the history of Christianity--or of what was called
so--when the slaughter of a million men, or the wiping out of an entire
civilization, meant no more to the leaders of the Church than it did,
by his own confession, to Napoleon. Witness the treatment meted out by
Cortes, in the name of Christ and of his Holy Mother, to the Aztecs of
Mexico. But the searchlight is seldom switched on to these things, and
even when it is "slow and gradual" will cover them.
This application of carnal logic to things divine, this judging the
success of Christianity by the standard of success which passes muster
in the crime-stained record of human society--as though it were the
business of religion to keep pace with the dawdling, creeping, cowardly
movement of mankind to better things, and not to hasten it with urgent
calls to repent of its hesitancy--this is only one form, though perhaps
the crowning form, in which the Kingdom that is not of this world has
been surrendered by its deluded guardians to the kingdoms which are.
In that surrender, so long an established fact that we have lost sight
of its malign implications, so deeply engrained into our mental habits
that we have almost forgotten that it exists, lies the true cause of
the failure of Christianity, and incidentally of its once atrocious
tendency to persecute. For failure most unquestionably there has been:
tragic but not irretrievable, if men have the courage to face the
facts. Let it be acknowledged! Let an end come swiftly to the
invention of sophistries to prove the contrary. That way lies failure
deeper still.
The Christian Religion, in the course of its long history, has become
entangled with a multitude of things which do not properly belong to
it, with philosophies, with dogmatic systems, with political ideas,
with the vested interests of great institutions; and especially with
the habits of mind which have grown up with these things, this last,
the entanglement with deeply entrenched habits of mind, being the most
formidable of them all. These entanglements are another name for our
perplexities. They are so many and so deep that it becomes a matter of
difficulty to extract the original genius of Christianity, to recover
its original impulse and power.
It has become the fashion to rejoice in these entanglements. Men say
that Christianity, by becoming entangled with these foreign elements,
has permeated them with its spirit, acting upon them like leaven and so
transfiguring them with its own value. That view I cannot share: at
least not without great reservations. Were it not truer to say that
these foreign elements, these outside things, these worldly
philosophies and institutions, have rather permeated Christianity with
their spirit than suffered Christianity to permeate them with its own?
No one in his senses will deny that Christianity has done something to
make these worldly things better. They would all be much worse than
they are if Christianity had never touched them. But, on the other
hand, Christianity would be much better than it is if they had never
touched it. They have distorted it; have maimed it; have devitalized
it at essential points. Dean Inge is speaking the truth when he says
that Christianity has become secularized. It has become secularized
not only in its outward form, but in something far deeper, namely, in
its habits of thought, in its standard of values, and especially in its
strivings for power, this last being the characteristic vice of the
kingdoms that are of this world. Is it not a fact that for a long time
past the Churches of Christendom have been engaged in strife as to who
shall be greatest? There can be no surer sign of secularization than
that.
Christianity, in the official, or authorized presentation of it, is a
_smothered_ religion; smothered almost to the point of total
asphyxiation and collapse, but not quite; smothered by the vested
interests of great institutions, and by the ambitions, fears and
self-seekings that such interests breed; smothered by the elaborate
theological defences that Christians have built, not against
Antichrist, but against each other; smothered by anxieties, not
unnatural in these embroilments, for its own future. If you take
Christianity along with its entanglements, encumbrances and unnatural
alliances: if you present it with all the secular baggage which the
ages have fastened upon it, you will then find it a hopelessly
perplexing thing, a thing which neither Reason nor Faith, whether
acting singly or in combination, can accept.
But alongside the authorized version, and sometimes hidden within it as
an inextinguishable spark of life, Christianity has an unauthorized
version, which the former has often repressed, persecuted and condemned
to the hangman or to the eternal flames. Of this unauthorized version
a fair copy exists in the hearts of men, a fairer copy in the hearts of
women, and the fairest copy of all in the hearts of children--for
Christianity is preeminently a religion of the young. It is the
unauthorized version which has kept Christianity alive through the ages
and defied the smotherers even to this day.
Turning to the sources of Christianity in the first three Gospels we
are struck by an immense contrast. There is no money in the purse, no
victuals in the wallet, no munitions in the magazine, no baggage-train,
no commissariat, no provision for trench warfare, and no thought of it.
We are in the presence of elemental realities, more beautiful than
Solomon in all his glory, more majestic than the successor of St Peter
in all his pomp. We are in another atmosphere. All this apparatus of
defence and apology, of preaching and propaganda, of church policies
and chapel oppositions,--things which have given a form so strangely
artificial to our conceptions of Christianity--are here either
secondary or absent altogether. Religion, instead of being
concentrated into strong Sunday doses, is here a pervasive, unobtrusive
presence, that cometh not with observation, the luminous background of
human conduct, the hiding-place of the light which irradiates the whole
picture of man's life. Even the name of God, which comes to our lips
so easily--too easily--was used by Jesus with a reverential rarity.
You may read whole pages of the Gospels without finding it once.
Jesus, we say, preached the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of
Man. But he was not _always_ preaching them, and as a matter of fact
he never mentioned either of them in exactly those terms. He enforced
them, illustrated them, revealed them, exemplified them, by living as
though they were true, which is a very different thing from "preaching"
them. His days were spent going about doing good, his preaching being
little more than a comment that arose naturally from the good that he
did. The Gospel is neither a sermon nor a treatise on religion; but a
_story_, which tells how Christianity began in something that happened,
in a deed that was done, in a life that was lived. It abounds in
parables and is a parable itself, revealing things hidden from the
foundation of the world.
The order in which _we_ take these elements of religion--first, moral
and religious propaganda, then performance to follow--is here reversed.
The performance comes first; the propaganda, which reduces itself to
the very simple form "Go and do thou likewise," comes afterwards. The
proportions, too, are different. Instead of an immense campaign of
preaching which leaves little energy for doing the things preached
about, the work done, the life lived here overshadow everything else.
The accusation of Carlyle against modern civilization, that it has run
to seed in mere talk, parliamentary eloquence, stump oratory, and such
like, has no application to the birth of the Christian religion.
Something to talk about, something worth talking about, was furnished
before the talking began.
There we touch the dynamic principle of Christianity, cut free from its
entanglements with a mass of things that do not belong to it; the power
which still keeps it alive under a mountain of verbal accretions that
would smother anything less divine. In the beginning was the deed: go
thou and do likewise. So presented, Christianity is not perplexing;
but quite the most convincing religion ever offered either to the
intellect or the heart. The perplexities have arisen from the reversal
of the true order; from the attempt to subordinate the thing done to
the thing said; to lay the foundations in argument and propaganda which
can only be laid in actual performance; and from the loss of reality
and the descent into hollowness and windiness which inevitably follows
when the talkers get the upper hand of the doers, or when theology gets
the upper hand of religion, which is the same thing. The deeds that I
do, these bear witness of me. What other conceivable witness could
there be?