exploiter? Simply terror, the terror of losing his job. And if you
could get into the inmost soul of Christian ministers, you would find
that precisely the same force is keeping many of them slaves to
Tradition. They are educated men, and thousands of them must resent
the dilemma which compels them to be either fools or hypocrites. They
have caught enough of the spirit of their time not to enjoy having to
pose as miracle-mongers, rain-makers and witch-doctors; they would
like to say frankly that they do not believe that Jonah ever swallowed
the whale, and even that they are dubious about Hercules and Achilles
and other demigods. But they are part of a machine, and the old men
and the rich men who run the machine have laid down the law. Those who
find themselves tempted to think, remember suddenly that they have
wives and children; they have only one profession, they have been
unfitted for any other by a life-time of study of dead things, as well
as by the practice of altruism.
But now the Social Revolution is coming; coming upon swift wings--it
may be here before this book sees the light. And who knows but then we
may see in America that wonderful sight which we saw in Russia, when
Christian monks assembled and burned their holy books, and petitioned
the state to take them in as citizens and human beings? It is my
belief that when the power of exploitation is broken, we shall see the
Dead Hand crumble into dust, as a mummy crumbles when it is exposed to
the air. All those men who stay in the Church and pretend to believe
nonsense, because it affords an easy way to earn a living, will
suddenly realize that it is possible to earn a living outside; that
any man can go into a factory, clean and well-ventilated and humanly
run, and by four hours work can earn the purchasing power of ten or
fifteen dollars. Do you not think that there may be some who will
choose freedom and self-respect on those terms?
And what of those thousands and tens of thousands who join the church
because it is a part of the regime of respectability, a way to make
the acquaintance of the rich, to curry favor and obtain promotion, to
get customers if you are a tradesman, to extend your practice if you
are a professional man? And what about the millions who go to church
because they are poor, and because life is a desperate struggle, and
this is one way to keep the favor of the boss, to get a little better
chance for the children, to get charity if you fall into need; in
short, to acquire influence with the well-to-do and powerful, who
stand together, and like to see the poor humble and reverent,
contented in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call
them?
#The Church Redeemed#
Do I mean that I expect to see the Church--all churches--perish and
pass away? I do not, for I believe that the Church answers one of the
fundamental needs of man. The Social Revolution will abolish poverty
and parasitism, it will make temptations fewer, and the soul's path
through life much easier; but it will not remove the necessity of
struggle for individual virtue, it will only clear the way for the
discovery of newer and higher types of virtue. Men will gather more
than ever in beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one
another; but the places in which they gather will be places swept
clean of superstition and tyranny. As the Reformation compelled the
Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its
abuses, so the Social Revolution will compel it to repudiate its
defense of parasitism and exploitation. I will record the prophecy
that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that
the Church ever opposed Socialism--true Socialism; just as today they
deny that the Church ever tortured Galileo, ever burned men for
teaching that the earth moves around the sun, ever sold the right to
commit crime, ever gave away the New World to Spain and Portugal, ever
buried newly-born infants in the cellars of nunneries.
The Social Revolution will compel all churches, Christian, Hebrew,
Buddhist, Confucian, or what you will, to drive out their formalists
and traditionalists. If there is any church that refuses so to adapt
itself, the swift progress of enlightenment and freedom will leave it
without followers. But in the great religions, which have a soul of
goodness and sincerity, we may be sure that reformers will arise,
prophets and saints who, as of old, will preach the living word of
God. In many churches today we can see the beginning of that new
Counter-Reformation. Even in the Catholic Church there is a
"modernist" rebellion; read the books of the "Sillon", and Fogazzaro's
trilogy of novels, "The Saint", and you will see a genuine and vital
protest against the economic corruption of the Church. In America, the
"Knights of Slavery" have been forced by public pressure to support a
"War for Democracy", and even to compete with the Y.M.C.A. in the
training camps. They are doing good work, I am told.
This gradual conquest of the old religiosity by the spirit of modern
common sense is shown most interestingly in the Salvation Army.
William Booth was a man with a great heart, who took his life into his
hands and went out with a bass-drum to save the lost souls of the
slums. He was stoned and jailed, but he persisted, and brought his
captives to Jesus---
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death.
Incidentally the "General" learned to know his slum population. He had
not wanted to engage in charity and material activities; he feared
hypocrisy and corruption. But in his writings he lets us see how
utterly impossible it is for a man of real heart to do anything for
the souls of the slum-dwellers without at the same time helping their
diseased and hunger-racked bodies. So the Salvation army was forced
into useful work--old clothes depots, nights lodgings, Christmas
dinners, farm colonies--until today the bare list of the various kinds
of enterprises it carries on fills three printed pages. It is all done
with the money of the rich, and is tainted by subservience to
authority, but no one can deny that it is better than "Gibson's
Preservative", and the fox-hunting parsons filling themselves with
port.
And in Protestant Churches the advance has been even greater. Here and
there you will find a real rebel, hanging onto his job and preaching
the proletarian Jesus; while even the great Fifth Avenue churches are
making attempts at "missions" and "settlements" in the slums. The more
vital churches are gradually turning themselves into societies for the
practical betterment of their members. Their clergy are running boys
clubs and sewing-schools for girls, food conservation lectures for
mothers, social study clubs for men. You get prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing along with this; but here is the fact that hangs always
before the clergyman's face--that with prayer-meetings and
psalm-singing alone he has a hard time, while with clubs and
educational societies and social reforms he thrives.
And now the War has broken upon the world, and caught the churches,
like everything else, in its mighty current; the clergy and the
congregations are confronted by pressing national needs, they are
forced to take notice of a thousand new problems, to engage in a
thousand practical activities. No one can see the end of this--any
more than he can see the end of the vast upheaval in politics and
industry. But we who are trained in revolutionary thought can see the
main outlines of the future. We see that in these new church
activities the clergy are inspired by things read, not in ancient
Hebrew texts, but in the daily newspapers. They are responding to the
actual, instant needs of their boys in the trenches and the camps; and
this is bound to have an effect upon their psychology. Just as we can
say that an English girl who leaves the narrow circle of her old life,
and goes into a munition factory and joins a union and takes part in
its debates, will never after be a docile home-slave; so we can say
that the clergyman who helps in Y.M.C.A. work in France, or in Red
Cross organization in America, will be less the bigot and formalist
forever after. He will have learned, in spite of himself, to adjust
means to ends; he will have learned co-operation and social solidarity
by the method which modern educators most favor--by doing. Also he
will have absorbed a mass of ideas in news despatches from over the
world. He is forced to read these despatches carefully, because the
fate of his own boys is involved; and we Socialists will see to it
that the despatches are well filled with propaganda!
#The Desire of Nations#
So the churches, like all the rest of the world, are caught in the
great revolutionary current, and swept on towards a goal which they do
not forsee, and from which they would shrink in dismay: the Church of
the future, the Church redeemed by the spirit of Brotherhood, the
Church which we Socialists will join. They call us materialists, and
say that we think about nothing but the belly--and that is true, in a
way; because we are the representatives of a starving class, which
thinks about its belly precisely as does any individual who is
ravening with hunger. But give us what that arrant materialist, James,
the brother of Jesus, calls "those things which are needful to the
body," and then we will use our minds, and even discover that we have
souls; whereas at present we are led to despise the very word
"spiritual", which has become the stock-in-trade of parasites and
poseurs.
We have children, whom we love, and whose future is precious to us. We
would be glad to have them trained in ways of decency and
self-control, of dignity and grace. It would make us happy if there
were in the world institutions conducted by men and women of
consecrated life who would specialize in teaching a true morality to
the young. But it must be a morality of freedom, not of slavery; a
morality founded upon reason, not upon superstition. The men who teach
it must be men who know what truth is, and the passionate loyalty
which the search for truth inspires. They cannot be the pitiful
shufflers and compromisers we see in the churches today, the Jowetts
who say they used to believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost. Rather than trust our children to such shameless cynics, we
will make shift to train them ourselves--we amateurs, not knowing much
about children, and absorbed in the desperate struggle against
organized wrong.
It is a statement which many revolutionists would resent, yet it is a
fact nevertheless, that we need a new religion, need it just as badly
as any of the rest of our pitifully groping race. That we need it is
proven by the rivalries and quarrels in our midst--the schisms which
waste the greater part of our activities, and which are often the
result of personal jealousies and petty vanities. To lift men above
such weakness, to make them really brothers in a great cause--that is
the work of "personal religion" in the true and vital sense of the
words.
We pioneers and propagandists may not live to see the birth of the new
Church of Humanity; but our children will see it, and the dream of it
is in our hearts; our poets have sung of it with fervor and
conviction. Read these lines from "The Desire of Nations," by Edwin
Markham, in which he tells of the new Redeemer who is at hand:
And when he comes into the world gone wrong,
He will rebuild her beauty with a song.
To every heart he will its own dream be:
One moon has many phantoms in the sea.
Out of the North the norns will cry to men:
"Baldur the Beautiful has come again!"
The flutes of Greece will whisper from the dead:
"Apollo has unveiled his sunbright head!"
The stones of Thebes and Memphis will find voice:
"Osiris comes: Oh tribes of Time, rejoice!"
And social architects who build the State,
Serving the Dream at citadel and gate,
Will hail Him coming through the labor-hum.
And glad quick cries will go from man to man:
"Lo, He has come, our Christ the artisan,
The King who loved the lilies, He has come!"
#The Knowable#
The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as
demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker the
basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the microscope and
the telescope, of the new psychology and the new sociology are more
wonderful than all the magic recorded in ancient Mythologies. And even
if this were not so, the business of the thinker is to follow the
facts. The history of all philosophy might be summed up in this
simile: The infant opens his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out
his hands and cries for it; but those in charge do not give it to him,
and so after a while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his
mother's breast and takes a drink of milk.
Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him to
be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He demands the knowledge
immediately and finally, and invents innumerable systems and creeds.
He makes himself believe them, with fire and torture makes other men
believe them; until finally, in the confusion of a million theories,
it occurs to him to investigate his instruments, and he makes the
discovery that his tools are inadequate, and all their products
worthless. His mind is finite, while the thing he seeks is infinite;
his knowledge is relative, while the First Cause is absolute.
This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern
philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he proved four propositions:
first, that the universe is limitless in time and space; second, that
matter is composed of simple, indivisible elements; third, that free
will is impossible; and fourth, that there must be an absolute or
first cause. And having proven these things, he turned round and
proved their opposites, with arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any
one who follows these demonstrations and understands them, takes all
his metaphysical learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology
and magic.
It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear, that
when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can prove
whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension;
you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside foremost, inside
out; and when you get tired of this condition, you take another
flight, and come back the way you were before. So metaphysical
thinking serves the purpose of Catholic cheats like Cardinal Newman
and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves hysterical women like
"Mother" Eddy; it serves the New-thoughters, who wish to fill their
bellies with wind; it serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to
befuddle the wits of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they
would a bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of
Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of Haeckel, and the
materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that it
is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the ultimate
nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist who lays down
a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a Christian.
How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an
Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital
letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an
inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the
"Positivists", and attended their imitation church in London, but I
did not get any satisfaction from them. In the midst of their dogmatic
pronouncements I found myself remembering how the egg falls apart and
reveals a chicken, how the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly.
The spirit of man is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile
occupation to set limits upon the future. Our business is not to say
what men will know ten thousand years from now, but to content
ourselves with the simple statement of what men know #now#. What we
know is a procession of phenomena called an environment; our life
being an act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the
conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.
In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is
automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify his
faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there is
worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is order in
creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which can be
applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for its mother's
breast, so the most skeptical of scientists trusts it when he declares
that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and sets
it down for a certainty that this will always be so--that he is not
being played with by some sportive demon, who will today cause H20 to
behave like water, and tomorrow like benzine.
#Nature's Insurgent Son#
Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each bit of
knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the life becomes a new
thing. Consider, for example, what a different place the world became
to the man who discovered that the force which laid the forest in
ashes could be tamed and made to warm a cave and make wild grains
nutritious! In other words, man can create life, he can make the world
and himself into that which his reason decides it ought to be, The
means by which he does this is the most magical of all the tools he
has invented since his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool
of experimental science--and when one considers that this weapon has
been understood and deliberately employed for but two or three
centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the beginning of
human evolution.
To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and
deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered
product--that is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this forth
with beautiful precision in his book, "The Kingdom of Man". We are, at
this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous transition stage, as a
child playing with explosives. This child has found out how to alter
his environment in many startling ways, but he does not yet know why
he wishes to alter it, nor to what purpose. He finds that certain
things are uncomfortable, and these he proceeds immediately to change.
Discovering that grain fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of
drunkards; discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and
prepared in alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases
that it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that
captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession of
empires, which are eaten through with luxury and corruption, and fall
into ruins again.
This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping blindly,
experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It takes a million
eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a million million men to
produce one idea--algebra, or the bow and arrow, or democracy.
Nature's present impulse appears as a rebellion against her own
methods; man, her creature, will emancipate himself from her law, will
save himself from her blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's
insurgent son"; but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task
in her old blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination
because of defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and
the breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child
would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the name
of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.
What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing our
sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so wasteful, because we
can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific breeding which
will prevent the unfit from getting a chance at life. We can replace
instinct by self-discipline. We can substitute for the regime of
"Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin" the regime of man the
creator, knowing what he wishes to be and how to set about to be it.
Whether this can happen, whether the thing which we call civilization
is to be the great triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is
to go back into the melting pot, is a question being determined by an
infinitude of contests between enlightenment and ignorance: precisely
such a contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man
who has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to
perform the act of self-emancipation, to take up the marvellous new
tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact knowledge,
the creator of your own life and in part of the life of the race.
#The New Morality#
Life is a process of expansion, of the unfoldment of new powers;
driven by that inner impulse which the philosophers of Pragmatism call
the #élan vital#. Whenever this impulse has its way, there is an
emotion of joy; whenever it is balked, there is one of distress. So
pleasure and pain are the guides of life, and the final goal is a
condition of free and constantly accelerating growth, in which joy is
enduring.
That man will ever reach such a state is more than we can say. It is a
perfectly conceivable thing that tomorrow a comet may fall upon the
earth and wipe out all man's labor's. But on the other hand, it is a
conceivable thing that man may some day learn to control the movements
of comets, and even of starry systems. It seems certain that if he is
given time, he will make himself master of the forces of his immediate
environment---
The untamed giants of nature shall bow down---
The tides, the tempest and the lightning cease
From mockery and destruction, and be turned
Unto the making of the soul of man.
It is a conceivable thing that man may learn to create his food from
the elements without the slow processes of agriculture; it is
conceivable that he may master the bacteria which at present prey upon
his body, and so put an end to death. It is certain that he will
ascertain the laws of heredity, and create human qualities as he has
created the spurs of the fighting-cock and the legs of the greyhound.
He will find out what genius is, and the laws of its being, and the
tests whereby it may be recognized. In the new science of
psycho-analysis he has already begun the work of bringing an infinity
of subconsciousness into the light of day; it may be that in the
evidence of telepathy which the psychic researchers are accumulating,
he is beginning to grope his way into a universal consciousness, which
may come to include the joys and griefs of the inhabitants of Mars,
and of the dark stars which the spectroscope and the telescope are
disclosing.
All these are fascinating possibilities. What stands in the way of
their realization? Ignorance and superstition, fear and submission,
the old habits of rapine and hatred which man has brought with him
from his animal past. These make him a slave, a victim of himself and
of others; to root them out of the garden of the soul is the task of
the modern thinker.
The new morality is thus a morality of freedom. It teaches that man is
the master, or shall become so; that there is no law, save the law of
his own being, no check upon his will save that which he himself
imposes.
The new morality is a morality of joy. It teaches that true pleasure
is the end of being, and the test of all righteousness.
The new morality is a morality of reason. It teaches that there is no
authority above reason; no possibility of such authority, because if
such were to appear, reason would have to judge it, and accept or
reject it.
The new morality is a morality of development. It teaches that there
can no more be an immutable law of conduct, than there can be an
immutable position for the steering-wheel of an aeroplane. The
business of the pilot of an aeroplane is to keep his machine aloft
amid shifting currents of wind. The business of a moralist is to
adjust life to a constantly changing environment. An action which was
suicide yesterday becomes heroism today, and futility or hypocrisy
tomorrow.