RELIGION
I
It ought to be laid down as a first principle that grave questions which
have divided us in the past, and divide us still with much bitterness,
should not be thrust aside and kept out of view in the hope of harmony.
Where the attitude is such, the hope is vain. They should be approached
with courage in the hope of creating mutual respect and an honourable
solution for all. Religion is such a question. To the majority of men
this touches their most intimate life. Because of their jealous regard
for that intimate part of themselves they are prepared for bitter
hostilities with anyone who will assail it; and because of the
unmeasured bitterness of assaults on all sides we have come to count it
a virtue to bring together in societies labelled non-sectarian, men who
have been violently opposed on this issue. It will be readily allowed
that to bring men together anyhow, even suspiciously, is somewhat of an
advance, when we keep in mind how angrily they have quarrelled. But 'tis
not to our credit that in any assembly a particular name hardly dare be
mentioned; and it must be realised that, whatever purpose it may serve
in lesser undertakings, in the great fight for freedom no such attitude
will suffice. No grave question can be settled by ignoring it. Since it
is our duty to make the War of Independence a reality and a success, we
must invoke a contest that will as surely rouse every latent passion and
give every latent suspicion an occasion and a field. That is the danger
ahead. We must anticipate that danger, meet and destroy it. Perhaps at
this suggestion most of us will at once get restive. Some may say with
irritation: Why raise this matter? Others on the other side may prepare
forthwith to dig up the hatchet. Is not the attitude on both sides
evidence of the danger? Does anyone suppose we can start a fight for
freedom without making that danger a grimmer reality? Who can claim it a
wise policy merely for the moment to dodge it? For that is what we do.
Let us have courage and face it. At what I have to say let no man take
offence or fright--it commits no one to anything. It is written to try
and make opponents understand and respect one another, not to set them
at one another, least of all to make them "liberal," that is, lax and
contemptible, ready to explain everything away. We want primarily the
man who is prepared to fight his ground, but who is big enough in heart
and mind to respect opponents who will also fight theirs. In the
integrity and courage of both sides is the guarantee of the independence
of both. That should be our guiding thought. But as on this question
most people abandon all tolerance, it is quite possible what may be
written will satisfy none; still, it may serve the purpose of making a
need apparent. To repeat, we must face the question. But whoever elects
to start it, should approach the issue with sympathy and forbearance.
These are as necessary as courage and resolution; yet, since many often
sacrifice firmness to sympathy, others will take the opposite line of
riding roughshod over everyone, a harshness that confirms the weakling
in his weakness. To note all this is but to note the difficulty; and if
what is now written fails in its appeal, it need only be said to walk
unerringly here would require the insight of a prophet and the balance
of an angel.
II
What everyone should take as a fair demand is that all men should be
sincere in their professions, and that we should justify ourselves by
the consistency of our own lives rather than by the wickedness of our
neighbours: which is nothing new. It is our trouble that we must
emphasise obvious duties. To approach the question frankly with no
matter what good faith will lead to much heart-burning, perhaps, to no
little bitterness; but if we realise that all sides are about equally to
blame, we may induce an earnestness that may lead to better things. It
is in that hope I write. Catholics and Protestants, instead of saying to
one another the things with which we are familiar, should look to their
own houses; and if in this age of fashionable agnosticism, they should
conclude that the general enemy is the atheist, socialist, and the
syndicalist, they should still be reminded to look to their own houses;
and if the agnostic take this to justify himself, he should be reminded
he has never done anything to justify himself. It may seem a curious way
for inducing harmony to set out to prove everyone in the wrong; but the
point is clear, not to attack what men believe but to ask them to
justify their words by their deeds. The request is not unreasonable and
it may be asked in a tone that will show the sincerity of him who makes
it and waken a kindred feeling in all earnest men. The world will be a
better place to live in, and we shall be all better friends when every
man makes a genuine resolve to give us all the example of a better life.
III
A development that would require a treatise in itself I will but touch
on, to suggest to all interested a matter of general and grave
concern--the growing materialism of religious bodies. On all sides
self-constituted defenders of the faith are troubling themselves, not
with the faith but with the numbers of their adherents who have jobs,
equal sharers in emoluments, and so forth. A Protestant of standing
writes a book and proves his religion is one of efficiency; a Catholic
of equal standing quickly rejoins with another book to prove his
religion is also efficient; each blind to the fact that the resulting
campaign is disgraceful to both. When religion ceases to represent to us
something spiritual, and purely spiritual, we begin to drift away from
it. "Where thy treasure is, there thy heart is also." "No man can serve
God and Mammon." The modern rejoinder is familiar: "We must live." This,
our generation is not likely to forget. The grave concern is that
well-meaning men are accustoming themselves to this cry to sacrifice all
higher considerations for the "equal division of emoluments." Let us as
citizens and a community see that every man has the right and the means
to live; but when self-interested bodies start a rivalry in the name of
their particular creeds, we know it ends in a squalid greed and fight
for place, in a pursuit of luxury, the logical outcome of which must be
to make the world ugly, sordid and brutal. It would be a mistake to
overlook that high-minded men are allowing themselves to be committed
by plausible reasons to this growing evil. It is misguided enthusiasm.
There is a divine authority that warns us all: "Be zealous for the
better gifts."
IV
I wish to examine the attitude of the average Christian to the Agnostic.
"The world is falling away from religion," he will cry when depressed,
without thinking how much he himself may be a contributing cause. Let
him study it in this light. What is his attitude? When he comes to speak
of the tendency of the age he will indulge in vague generalities about
atheism, socialism, irreligion, and the rest; always the cause is
outside of him, and against him; he is not part of it. I ask him to pass
by the atheist awhile and take what may be of more concern. There is a
type of Catholic and Protestant who has as little genuine religion in
him as any infidel, who does not deny the letter of the law, but who
does not observe its spirit, whose only use for the letter is to
criticise and harass adversaries. Observe the high use he has for
liberty--drinking, card-playing, gambling, luxury; he has no place in
his life for any worthy deeds, nay, only scorn for such. Still he passes
for orthodox. If he is a Catholic, he secures that by putting in an
appearance at Mass on Sundays. His mind is not there; he arrives late
and goes early. His Protestant fellow in his private judgment finds more
scope: "Let the women go listen to the parson." This is the sort of
saying gives him such a conceit of himself. We have the type on both
sides, so all can see it. Now it is not in the way of the Pharisee we
come to note them, but to note that, strange as it may appear, either or
both together will come to applaud the denouncing of the atheist. We
gather such into our religious societies, and flatter them that they are
adherents of religion and the bulwark of the faith, and they forthwith
anathematise the atheist with great gusto. The one so anathematised is
often as worthless as themselves with a conceit to despise priest and
parson alike. But it sometimes happens he is a fine character who has no
religion as most of us understand it, but who has yet a fine spiritual
fervour, ready to fight and make sacrifices for a national or social
principle that he believes will make for better things, a man of
integrity and worth whom the best of men may be glad to hold as a
friend. Yet we find in the condition to which we have drifted such a one
may be pilloried by wasters, gamblers, rioters, a crew that are the
curse of every community. We lash the atheist and the age but give
little heed to the insincerity and cant of those we do not refuse to
call our own. What an example for the man anathematised. He sees the
vice and meanness of those we allow to pass for orthodox, and when he
sees also the complacency of the better part, he is unconvinced. We
praise the sweetness of the healing waters of Christ-like charity, but
despite our gospel he never gets it, never. We give him execration,
injustice; if we let him go with a word, it is never a gentle word, but
a bitter epithet; and we wonder he is estranged, when he sees our
amazing composure in an amazing welter of hypocrisy and deceit. There
is, of course, the better side, the many thousands of Catholics and
Protestants who sincerely aim at better things. But what has to be
admitted is that most sincerely religious people adopt to the man of no
established religion the same attitude as does the hypocrite: they join
in the general cry. They should look to their own houses; they should
purge the temple of the money-lender and the knave; they should see that
their field gives good harvest; they should remember that not to the
atheist only but to the orthodox was it written: "Every tree therefore
that doth not yield good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the
fire."
V
There is a word to be said to the man for whom was invented the curious
name agnostic. I'm concerned only with him who is sincere and
high-minded. Let us pass the flippant critics of things they do not
understand. But all sincere men are comrades in a deep and fine sense.
What the honest unbeliever has to keep in mind is that the darker side
is but one side. If he stands studying a crowd of the orthodox and finds
therein the drunkard, the gambler, the sensualist; and if he says bitter
things of the value of religion and gets in return the clerical fiat of
one who is more a politician than a priest; and if he rejoins
contemptuously, "This is fit for women and children," let him be
reminded that he can also study the other side if he care. If he has the
instinct of a fighter he must know every army has in its trail the
camp-follower and the vulture, but when the battle is set and the danger
is imminent, only the true soldier stands his ground. Because some who
are of poor spirit are in high place, let him not forget the old spirit
still exists. Not only the women but the best intellects of men still
keep the old traditions. Newman and Pascal, Dante and Milton, Erigena
and Aquinas, are all dead, but in our time even they have had followers
not too far off. In the same spirit Gilbert Chesterton found wonder at a
wooden post, and Francis Thompson, in his divine wandering, troubled the
gold gateways of the stars. Let our friend before he frames his final
judgment pause here. He may well be baffled by many anomalies of the
time, his eye may rest on the meaner horde, his ear be filled with the
arrogance of some unworthy successor of Paul; and if he says: "Why
permit these things?" he may be told there are some alive in this
generation who will question all such things, and who, however hard it
go with them, have no fear for the final victory.
VI
Perhaps the conventional Christian and conventional non-Christian may
rest a moment to consider the reality. Between the bitter believer and
the exasperated unbeliever, Christianity is being turned from a practice
to a polemic, and if we are to recall the old spirit we must recall the
old earnestness and simplicity of the early Martyrs. We do not hear that
they called Nero an atheist, but we do hear that they went singing to
the arena. By their example we may recover the spirit of song, and have
done with invective. If we find music and joyousness in the old
conception, it is not in the fashion of the time to explain it away in
some "new theology," for he to whom it is not a fashion, but a vital
thing, keeps his anchor by tradition. To him it is the shining light
away in the mists of antiquity; it is the strong sun over the living
world; it is the pillar of fire over the widening seas and worlds of the
unknown; it is the expanse of infinity. When he is lost in its mystery
he adverts to the wonder about him, for all that is wonderful is touched
with it, and all that is lovely is its expression. It is in the breath
of the wind, pure and bracing from the mountain top. It is in the song
of the lark holding his musical revel in the sunlight. It is in the
ecstasy of a Spring morning. It is in the glory of all beautiful things.
When it has entered and purified his spirit, his heart goes out to the
persecuted in all ages and countries. None will he reject. "I am not
come to call the just but sinners." He remembers those words, and his
great charity encompasses not only the persecuted orthodox, but the
persecuted heretics and infidels.
VII
I will not say if such an endeavour as I suggest can have an immediate
success. But I think it will be a step forward if we get sincere men on
one side to understand the sincerity of the other side; and if in
matters of religion and speculation, where there is so much difficulty
and there is likely to be so much conflict of opinion, there should be
no constraint, but rather the finest charity and forbearance; then the
orthodox would be concerned with practising their faith rather than in
harassing the infidel, and the infidel would receive a more useful
lesson than the ill-considered tirades he despises. He may remain still
unconvinced, but he will give over his contempt. This question of
religion is one on which men will differ, and differing, ultimately they
will fight if we find no better way. We must remember while freedom is
to win we are facing a national struggle, and if we are threatened
within by a civil war of creeds it may undo us. That is why we must face
the question. That is why I think utter frankness in these grave matters
is of grave urgency. If we approach them in the right spirit we need
have no fear--for at heart the most of men are susceptible to high
appeals. What we need is courage and intensity; it is gabbling about
surface things makes the bitterness. If in truth we safeguard the right
of every man as we are bound to do we shall win the confidence of all,
and we may hope for a braver and better future, wherein some light of
the primal Beauty may wander again over earth as in the beginning it
dawned on chaos when the Spirit of God first moved over the waters.