It is only by such images, it is only by the use of what are practically

parables, that I can in any way express these things in my mind. These

two things, I say, are the two aspects of my belief; one is the form and

the other the light. The former places me as it were in a scheme, the

latter illuminates and inspires me. I am a member in that great being,

and my function is, I take it, to develop my capacity for beauty

and convey the perception of it to my fellows, to gather and store

experience and increase the racial consciousness. I hazard no whys

nor wherefores. That is how I see things; that is how the universe, in

response to my demand for a synthesizing aspect, presents itself to me.

2.12. OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY.

These are my beliefs. They begin with arbitrary assumptions; they end in

a mystery.

So do all beliefs that are not grossly utilitarian and material,

promising houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting or a cosmic

mortgage. The Peace of God passeth understanding, the Kingdom of

Heaven within us and without can be presented only by parables. But the

unapproachable distance and vagueness of these things makes them none

the less necessary, just as a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight remotely

seen upon the sea are as real as, and to many people far more necessary

than, pork chops. The driven swine may root and take no heed, but man

the dreamer drives. And because these things are vague and impalpable

and wilfully attained, it is none the less important that they should be

rendered with all the truth of one’s being. To be atmospherically vague

is one thing; to be haphazard, wanton and untruthful, quite another.

But here I may give a specific answer to a question that many find

profoundly important, though indeed it is already implicitly answered in

what has gone before.

I do not believe I have any personal immortality. I am part of an

immortality perhaps; but that is different. I am not the continuing

thing. I personally am experimental, incidental. I feel I have to

do something, a number of things no one else could do, and then I am

finished and finished altogether. Then my substance returns to the

common lot. I am a temporary enclosure for a temporary purpose; that

served, and my skull and teeth, my idiosyncracy and desire, will

disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a booth after a fair.

Let me shift my ground a little and ask you to consider what is involved

in the opposite belief.

My idea of the unknown scheme is of something so wide and deep that I

cannot conceive it encumbered by my egotism perpetually. I shall serve

my purpose and pass under the wheel and end. That distresses me not at

all. Immortality would distress and perplex me. If I may put this in a

mixture of theological and social language, I cannot respect, I cannot

believe in a God who is always going about with me.

But this is after all what I feel is true and what I choose to believe.

It is not a matter of fact. So far as that goes there is no evidence

that I am immortal and none that I am not.

I may be altogether wrong in my beliefs; I may be misled by the

appearances of things. I believe in the great and growing Being of the

Species from which I rise, to which I return, and which, it may be, will

ultimately even transcend the limitation of the Species and grow into

the Conscious Being, the eternally conscious Being of all things.

Believing that, I cannot also believe that my peculiar little thread

will not undergo synthesis and vanish as a separate thing.

And what after all is my distinctive something, a few capacities, a few

incapacities, an uncertain memory, a hesitating presence? It matters

no doubt in its place and time, as all things matter in their place

and time, but where in it all is the eternally indispensable? The great

things of my life, love, faith, the intimation of beauty, the things

most savouring of immortality, are the things most general, the things

most shared and least distinctively me.

2.13. A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY.

And here perhaps, before I go on to the question of Conduct, is the

place to define a relationship to that system of faith and religious

observance out of which I and most of my readers have come. How do these

beliefs on which I base my rule of conduct stand to Christianity?

They do not stand in any attitude of antagonism. A religious system so

many-faced and so enduring as Christianity must necessarily be saturated

with truth even if it be not wholly true. To assume, as the Atheist and

Deist seem to do, that Christianity is a sort of disease that came

upon civilization, an unprofitable and wasting disease, is to deny that

conception of a progressive scheme and rightness which we have taken

as our basis of belief. As I have already confessed, the Scheme of

Salvation, the idea of a process of sorrow and atonement, presents

itself to me as adequately true. So far I do not think my new faith

breaks with my old. But it follows as a natural consequence of my

metaphysical preliminaries that I should find the Christian theology

Aristotelian, over defined and excessively personified. The painted

figure of that bearded ancient upon the Sistine Chapel, or William

Blake’s wild-haired, wild-eyed Trinity, convey no nearer sense of God

to me than some mother-of-pearl-eyed painted and carven monster from

the worship of the South Sea Islanders. And the Miltonic fable of the

offended creator and the sacrificial son! it cannot span the circle of

my ideas; it is a little thing, and none the less little because it is

intimate, flesh of my flesh and spirit of my spirit, like the drawings

of my youngest boy. I put it aside as I would put aside the gay figure

of a costumed officiating priest. The passage of time has made his

canonicals too strange, too unlike my world of common thought and

costume. These things helped, but now they hinder and disturb. I cannot

bring myself back to them...

But the psychological experience and the theology of Christianity are

only a ground-work for its essential feature, which is the conception

of a relationship of the individual believer to a mystical being at once

human and divine, the Risen Christ. This being presents itself to the

modern consciousness as a familiar and beautiful figure, associated with

a series of sayings and incidents that coalesce with a very distinct and

rounded-off and complete effect of personality. After we have cleared

off all the definitions of theology, He remains, mystically suffering

for humanity, mystically asserting that love in pain and sacrifice in

service are the necessary substance of Salvation. Whether he actually

existed as a finite individual person in the opening of the Christian

era seems to me a question entirely beside the mark. The evidence at

this distance is of imperceptible force for or against. The Christ we

know is quite evidently something different from any finite person,

a figure, a conception, a synthesis of emotions, experiences and

inspirations, sustained by and sustaining millions of human souls.

Now it seems to be the common teaching of almost all Christians, that

Salvation, that is to say the consolidation and amplification of one’s

motives through the conception of a general scheme or purpose, is to be

attained through the personality of Christ. Christ is made cardinal to

the act of Faith. The act of Faith, they assert, is not simply, as I

hold it to be, BELIEF, but BELIEF IN HIM.

We are dealing here, be it remembered, with beliefs deliberately

undertaken and not with questions of fact. The only matters of fact

material here are facts of experience. If in your experience Salvation

is attainable through Christ, then certainly Christianity is true for

you. And if a Christian asserts that my belief is a false light and that

presently I shall “come to Christ,” I cannot disprove his assertion. I

can but disbelieve it. I hesitate even to make the obvious retort.

I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I assert that this great

and very definite personality in the hearts and imaginations of mankind

does not and never has attracted me. It is a fact I record about myself

without aggression or regret. I do not find myself able to associate Him

in any way with the emotion of Salvation.

I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of a divine-human

friend and mediator. If it were possible to have access by prayer, by

meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to such a being whose feet

were in the darknesses, who stooped down from the light, who was at once

great and little, limitless in power and virtue and one’s very brother;

if it were possible by sheer will in believing to make and make one’s

way to such a helper, who would refuse such help? But I do not find such

a being in Christ. I do not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish

I could. To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as

an incomprehensibly sinless being neither God nor man. His sinlessness

wears his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his white self unchanged.

He had no petty weaknesses.

Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses. If I am

to have that love, that sense of understanding fellowship, which is,

I conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this idea of a personal

Saviour, then I need someone quite other than this image of virtue, this

terrible and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of thorns, his

blood-stained hands and feet. I cannot love him any more than I can

love a man upon the rack. Even in the face of torments I do not think

I should feel a need for him. I had rather then a hundred times have

Botticelli’s armed angel in his Tobit at Florence. (I hope I do not seem

to want to shock in writing these things, but indeed my only aim is to

lay my feelings bare.) I know what love for an idealized person can be.

It happens that in my younger days I found a character in the history

of literature who had a singular and extraordinary charm for me, of

whom the thought was tender and comforting, who indeed helped me through

shames and humiliations as though he held my hand. This person was

Oliver Goldsmith. His blunders and troubles, his vices and vanities,

seized and still hold my imagination. The slights of Boswell, the

contempt of Gibbon and all his company save Johnson, the exquisite

fineness of spirit in his “Vicar of Wakefield,” and that green suit of

his and the doctor’s cane and the love despised, these things together

made him a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I thought of him as

others pray. When I think of that youthful feeling for Goldsmith, I know

what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte who has seen a candle

can imagine the sun. But the Christian Christ in none of his three

characteristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from whom I am cut off

by the wanton and indecent purity of the Immaculate Conception), nor

as the white-robed, spotless miracle worker, nor as the fierce unreal

torment of the cross, comes close to my soul. I do not understand the

Agony in the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play in an unknown

tongue. The la t cry of despair is the one human touch, discordant with

all the rest of the story. One cry of despair does not suffice. The

Christian’s Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not

flesh enough, not earth enough. He was never foolish and hot-eared

and inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, nor tangled his

miracles. I could love him I think more easily if the dead had not risen

and if he had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back more

enhaloed and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own tragedy.

When I think of the Resurrection I am always reminded of the “happy

endings” that editors and actor managers are accustomed to impose upon

essentially tragic novels and plays...

You see how I stand in this matter, puzzled and confused by the

Christian presentation of Christ. I know there are many will answer--as

I suppose my friend the Rev. R.J. Campbell would answer--that what

confuses me is the overlaying of the personality of Jesus by stories

and superstitions and conflicting symbols; he will in effect ask me to

disentangle the Christ I need from the accumulated material, choosing

and rejecting. Perhaps one may do that. He does, I know, so present Him

as a man inspired, and strenuously, inadequately and erringly presenting

a dream of human brotherhood and the immediate Kingdom of Heaven on

earth and so blundering to his failure and death. But that will be a

recovered and restored person he would give me, and not the Christ

the Christians worship and declare they love, in whom they find their

Salvation.

When I write “declare they love” I throw doubt intentionally upon the

universal love of Christians for their Saviour. I have watched men and

nations in this matter. I am struck by the fact that so many Christians

fall back upon more humanized figures, upon the tender figure of Mary,

upon patron saints and such more erring creatures, for the effect of

mediation and sympathy they need.

You see it comes to this: that I think Christianity has been true and is

for countless people practically true, but that it is not true now for

me, and that for most people it is true only with modifications.

Every believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother, but if

systematically I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men I

should imply too much and so tell a lie.

2.14. OF OTHER RELIGIONS.

In the same manner, in varying degree, I hold all religions to be in

a measure true. Least comprehensible to me are the Indian formulae,

because they seem to stand not on common experience but on those

intellectual assumptions my metaphysical analysis destroys.

Transmigration of souls without a continuing memory is to my mind

utter foolishness, the imagining of a race of children. The aggression,

discipline and submission of Mahommedanism makes, I think, an

intellectually limited but fine and honourable religion--for men. Its

spirit if not its formulae is abundantly present in our modern world.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example, manifestly preaches a Mahommedan God,

a modernised God with a taste for engineering. I have no doubt that in

devotion to a virile, almost national Deity and to the service of His

Empire of stern Law and Order, efficiently upheld, men have found and

will find Salvation.

All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true

thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are, and they

have served a purpose, they have worked. Men and women have lived in and

by them. Men and women still do. Only they are not true for me to

live in them. I have, I believe, to live in a new edifice of my own

discovery. They do not work for me.

These schemes are true, and also these schemes are false! in the sense

that new things, new phrasings, have to replace them.

2.15.

Such are the essential beliefs by which I express myself. But now comes

the practical outcome of these things, and that is to discuss and show

how upon this metaphysical basis and these beliefs, and in obedience to

the ruling motive that arises with them, I frame principles of conduct.

BOOK THE THIRD -- OF GENERAL CONDUCT

3.1. CONDUCT FOLLOWS FROM BELIEF.

I hold that the broad direction of conduct follows necessarily from

belief. The believer does not require rewards and punishments to direct

him to the right. Motive and idea are not so separable. To believe

truly is to want to do right. To get salvation is to be unified by a

comprehending idea of a purpose and by a ruling motive.

The believer wants to do right, he naturally and necessarily seeks to do

right. If he fails to do right, if he finds he has done wrong instead

of right, he is not greatly distressed or terrified, he naturally and

cheerfully does his best to correct his error. He can be damned only

by the fading and loss of his belief. And naturally he recurs to and

refreshes his belief.

I write in phrases that the evangelical Christianity of my childhood

made familiar to me, because they are the most expressive phrases I have

ever met for the psychological facts with which I am dealing.

But faith, though it banishes fear and despair and brings with it a real

prevailing desire to know and do the Good, does not in itself determine

what is the Good or supply any simple guide to the choice between

alternatives. If it did, there would be nothing more to be said, this

book upon conduct would be unnecessary.

3.2. WHAT IS GOOD?

It seems to me one of the heedless errors of those who deal in

philosophy, to suppose all things that have simple names or unified

effects are in their nature simple and may be discovered and isolated as

a sort of essence by analysis. It is natural to suppose--and I think it

is also quite wrong to suppose--that such things as Good and Beauty can

be abstracted from good and beautiful things and considered alone. But

pure Good and pure Beauty are to me empty terms. It seems to me that

these are in their nature synthetic things, that they arise out of the

coming together of contributory things and conditions, and vanish at

their dispersal; they are synthetic just as more obviously Harmony is

synthetic. It is consequently not possible to give a definition of Good,

just as it is not possible to give a definition of that other something

which is so closely akin to it, Beauty. Nor is it to be maintained that

what is good for one is good for another. But what is good of one’s

general relations and what is right in action must be determined by the

nature of one’s beliefs about the purpose in things. I have set down my

broad impression of that purpose in respect to me, as the awakening and

development of the consciousness and will of our species, and I have

confessed my belief that in subordinating myself and all my motives to

that idea lies my Salvation. It follows from that, that the good life

is the life that most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience

and renders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively

to the collective growth.

This is in general terms my idea of Good. So soon as one passes from

general terms to the question of individual good, one encounters

individuality; for everyone in the differing quality and measure of

their personality and powers and possibilities, good and right must be

different. We are all engaged, each contributing from his or her own

standpoint, in the collective synthesis; whatever one can best do, one

must do that; in whatever manner one can best help the synthesis, one

must exert oneself; the setting apart of oneself, secrecy, the service

of secret and personal ends, is the waste of life and the essential

quality of Sin.

That is the general expression for right living as I conceive it.

3.3. SOCIALISM.

In the study of what is Good, it is very convenient to make a rough

division of our subject into general and particular. There are first the

interests and problems that affect us all collectively, in which we have

a common concern and from which no one may legitimately seek exemption;

of these interests and problems we may fairly say every man should do so

and so, or so and so, or the law should be so and so, or so and so; and

secondly there are those other problems in which individual difference

and the interplay of one or two individualities is predominant. This

is of course no hard and fast classification, but it gives a method of

approach. We can begin with the generalized person in ourselves and end

with individuality.

In the world of ideas about me, I have found going on a great social and

political movement that correlates itself with my conception of a great

synthesis of human purpose as the aspect towards us of the universal

scheme. This movement is Socialism. Socialism is to me no clear-cut

system of theories and dogmas; it is one of those solid and extensive

and synthetic ideas that are better indicated by a number of different

formulae than by one, just as one only realizes a statue by walking

round it and seeing it from a number of points of view. I do not think

it is to be completely expressed by any one system of formulae or by

any one man. Its common quality from nearly every point of view is the

subordination of the will of the self-seeking individual to the idea of

a racial well-being embodied in an organized state, organized for every

end that can be obtained collectively. Upon that I seize; that is the

value of Socialism for me.

Socialism for me is a common step we are all taking in the great

synthesis of human purpose. It is the organization, in regard to a

great mass of common and fundamental interests that have hitherto been

dispersedly served, of a collective purpose.

I see humanity scattered over the world, dispersed, conflicting,

unawakened... I see human life as avoidable waste and curable confusion.

I see peasants living in wretched huts knee-deep in manure, mere

parasites on their own pigs and cows; I see shy hunters wandering in

primaeval forests; I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial

production; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible

creatures of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and indignity; tens

of thousands of wealthy people wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying

trivialities, hundreds of thousands meanly chaffering themselves, rich

or poor, in the wasteful byways of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes,

toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility,

fills me with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order, to

develop understanding... All these people reflect and are part of the

waste and discontent of my life, and this co-ordination of the species

to a common general end, and the quest for my personal salvation, are

the social and the individual aspect of essentially the same desire...

And yet dispersed as all these people are, they are far more closely

drawn together to common ends and common effort than the filthy savages

who ate food rotten and uncooked in the age of unpolished stone. They

live in the mere opening phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which

surpasses our imagination. Such intercourse and community as they

have is only a dawn. We look towards the day, the day of the organized

civilized world state. The first clear intimation of that conscious

synthesis of human thought to which I look, the first edge of the

dayspring, has arisen--as Socialism, as I conceive of Socialism.

Socialism is to me no more and no less than the awakening of a

collective consciousness in humanity, a collective will and a collective

mind out of which finer individualities may arise forever in a perpetual

series of fresh endeavours and fresh achievements for the race.

3.4. A CRITICISM OF CERTAIN FORMS OF SOCIALISM.

It is necessary to point out that a Socialism arising in this way out

of the conception of a synthesis of the will and thought of the species

will necessarily differ from conceptions of Socialism arrived at

in other and different ways. It is based on a self-discontent and

self-abnegation and not on self-satisfaction, and it will be a scheme

of persistent thought and construction, essentially, and it will support

this or that method of law-making, or this or that method of economic

exploitation, or this or that matter of social grouping, only

incidentally and in relation to that.

Such a conception of Socialism is very remote in spirit, however it may

agree in method, from that philanthropic administrative socialism one

finds among the British ruling and administrative class. That seems to

me to be based on a pity which is largely unjustifiable and a pride

that is altogether unintelligent. The pity is for the obvious wants and

distresses of poverty, the pride appears in the arrogant and aggressive

conception of raising one’s fellows. I have no strong feeling for

the horrors and discomforts of poverty as such, sensibilities can be

hardened to endure the life led by the “Romans” in Dartmoor jail a

hundred years ago (See “The Story of Dartmoor Prison” by Basil Thomson

(Heinemann--1907).), or softened to detect the crumpled rose-leaf; what

disgusts me is the stupidity and warring purposes of which poverty is

the outcome. When it comes to the idea of raising human beings, I must

confess the only person I feel concerned about raising is H.G. Wells,

and that even in his case my energies might be better employed. After

all, presently he must die and the world will have done with him. His

output for the species is more important than his individual elevation.

Moreover, all this talk of raising implies a classification I doubt. I

find it hard to fix any standards that will determine who is above me

and who below. Most people are different from me I perceive, but

which among them is better, which worse? I have a certain power of

communicating with other minds, but what experiences I communicate

seem often far thinner and poorer stuff than those which others less

expressive than I half fail to communicate and half display to me.

My “inferiors,” judged by the common social standards, seem indeed

intellectually more limited than I and with a narrower outlook; they

are often dirtier and more driven, more under the stress of hunger and

animal appetites; but on the other hand have they not more vigorous

sensations than I, and through sheer coarsening and hardening of fibre,

the power to do more toilsome things and sustain intenser sensations

than I could endure? When I sit upon the bench, a respectable

magistrate, and commit some battered reprobate for trial for this

lurid offence or that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness or

such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my mind which of us after

all is indeed getting nearest to the keen edge of life. Are I and my

respectable colleagues much more than successful evasions of THAT?

Perhaps these people in the dock know more of the essential strains and

stresses of nature, are more intimate with pain. At any rate I do not

think I am justified in saying certainly that they do not know...

No, I do not want to raise people using my own position as a standard, I

do not want to be one of a gang of consciously superior people, I do not

want arrogantly to change the quality of other lives. I do not want to

interfere with other lives, except incidentally--incidentally, in this

way that I do want to get to an understanding with them, I do want to

share and feel with them in our commerce with the collective mind. I

suppose I do not stretch language very much when I say I want to get

rid of stresses and obstacles between our minds and personalities and to

establish a relation that is understanding and sympathy.

I want to make more generally possible a relationship of communication

and interchange, that for want of a less battered and ambiguous word I

must needs call love.

And if I disavow the Socialism of condescension, so also do I disavow

the Socialism of revolt. There is a form of Socialism based upon the

economic generalizations of Marx, an economic fatalistic Socialism that

I hold to be rather wrong in its vision of facts, rather more distinctly

wrong in its theory, and altogether wrong and hopeless in its spirit. It

preaches, as inevitable, a concentration of property in the hands of

a limited number of property owners and the expropriation of the great

proletarian mass of mankind, a concentration which is after all no more

than a tendency conditional on changing and changeable conventions about

property, and it finds its hope of a better future in the outcome of a

class conflict between the expropriated Many and the expropriating Few.

Both sides are to be equally swayed by self-interest, but the toilers

are to be gregarious and mutually loyal in their self-interest--Heaven

knows why, except that otherwise the Marxist dream will not work. The

experience of contemporary events seems to show at least an equal power

of combination for material ends among owners and employers as among

workers.

Now this class-war idea is one diametrically opposed to that

religious-spirited Socialism which supplies the form of my general

activities. This class-war idea would exacerbate the antagonism of the

interests of the many individuals against the few individuals, and I

would oppose the conceiving of the Whole to the self-seeking of the

Individual. The spirit and constructive intention of the many to-day

are no better than those of the few, poor and rich alike are

over-individualized, self-seeking and non-creative; to organize the

confused jostling competitions, over-reachings, envies and hatreds of

to-day into two great class-hatreds and antagonisms will advance

the reign of love at most only a very little, only so far as it will

simplify and make plain certain issues. It may very possibly not

advance the reign of love at all, but rather shatter the order we have.

Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I have presented it in my book, “New

Worlds for Old,” seeks to change economic arrangements only by the way,

as an aspect and outcome of a great change, a change in the spirit and

method of human intercourse.

I know that here I go beyond the limits many Socialists in the past,

and some who are still contemporary, have set themselves. Much Socialism

to-day seems to think of itself as fighting a battle against poverty and

its concomitants alone. Now poverty is only a symptom of a profounder

evil and is never to be cured by itself. It is one aspect of divided

and dispersed purposes. If Socialism is only a conflict with poverty,

Socialism is nothing. But I hold that Socialism is and must be a battle

against human stupidity and egotism and disorder, a battle fought

all through the forests and jungles of the soul of man. As we get

intellectual and moral light and the realization of brotherhood, so

social and economic organization will develop. But the Socialist may

attack poverty for ever, disregarding the intellectual and moral factors

that necessitate it, and he will remain until the end a purely economic

doctrinaire crying in the wilderness in vain.

And if I antagonize myself in this way to the philanthropic Socialism of

kindly prosperous people on the one hand and to the fierce class-hatred

Socialism on the other, still more am I opposed to that furtive

Socialism of the specialist which one meets most typically in the

Fabian Society. It arises very naturally out of what I may perhaps call

specialist fatigue and impatience. It is very easy for writers like

myself to deal in the broad generalities of Socialism and urge their

adoption as general principles; it is altogether another affair with

a man who sets himself to work out the riddle of the complications of

actuality in order to modify them in the direction of Socialism. He

finds himself in a jungle of difficulties that strain his intellectual

power to the utmost. He emerges at last with conclusions, and they are

rarely the obvious conclusions, as to what needs to be done. Even the

people of his own side he finds do not see as he sees; they are, he

perceives, crude and ignorant.

Now I hold that his duty is to explain his discoveries and intentions

until they see as he sees. But the specialist temperament is often not a

generalizing and expository temperament. Specialists are apt to measure

minds by their speciality and underrate the average intelligence. The

specialist is appalled by the real task before him, and he sets himself

by tricks and misrepresentations, by benevolent scoundrelism in fact,

to effect changes he desires. Too often he fails even in that. Where he

might have found fellowship he arouses suspicion. And even if a thing is

done in this way, its essential merit is lost. For it is better, I hold,

for a man to die of his disease than to be cured unwittingly. That is

to cheat him of life and to cheat life of the contribution his

consciousness might have given it.

The Socialism of my beliefs rests on a profounder faith and broader

proposition. It looks over and beyond the warring purposes of to-day

as a general may look over and beyond a crowd of sullen, excited and

confused recruits, to the day when they will be disciplined, exercised,

trained, willing and convergent on a common end. It holds persistently

to the idea of men increasingly working in agreement, doing things

that are sane to do, on a basis of mutual helpfulness, temperance and

toleration. It sees the great masses of humanity rising out of base and

immediate anxieties, out of dwarfing pressures and cramped surroundings,

to understanding and participation and fine effort. It sees the

resources of the earth husbanded and harvested, economized and used with

scientific skill for the maximum of result. It sees towns and cities

finely built, a race of beings finely bred and taught and trained, open

ways and peace and freedom from end to end of the earth. It sees beauty

increasing in humanity, about humanity and through humanity. Through

this great body of mankind goes evermore an increasing understanding, an

intensifying brotherhood. As Christians have dreamt of the New Jerusalem

so does Socialism, growing ever more temperate, patient, forgiving and

resolute, set its face to the World City of Mankind.

3.5. HATE AND LOVE.

Before I go on to point out the broad principles of action that flow

from this wide conception of Socialism, I may perhaps give a section to

elucidating that opposition of hate and love I made when I dealt with

the class war. I have already used the word love several times; it is an

ambiguous word and it may be well to spend a few words in making clear

the sense in which it is used here. I use it in a very broad sense to

convey all that complex of motives, impulses, sentiments, that incline

us to find our happiness and satisfactions in the happiness and sympathy

of others. Essentially it is a synthetic force in human affairs, the

merger tendency, a linking force, an expression in personal will and

feeling of the common element and interest. It insists upon resemblances

and shares and sympathies. And hate, I take it, is the emotional aspect

of antagonism, it is the expression in personal will and feeling of the

individual’s separation from others. It is the competing and destructive

tendency. So long as we are individuals and members of a species, we

must needs both hate and love. But because I believe, as I have already

confessed, that the oneness of the species is a greater fact than

individuality, and that we individuals are temporary separations from a

collective purpose, and since hate eliminates itself by eliminating its

objects, whilst love multiplies itself by multiplying its objects, so

love must be a thing more comprehensive and enduring than hate.

Moreover, hate must be in its nature a good thing. We individuals exist

as such, I believe, for the purpose in things, and our separations and

antagonisms serve that purpose. We play against each other like hammer

and anvil. But the synthesis of a collective will in humanity, which is

I believe our human and terrestrial share in that purpose, is an idea

that carries with it a conception of a secular alteration in the scope

and method of both love and hate. Both widen and change with man’s

widening and developing apprehension of the purpose he serves. The

savage man loves in gusts a fellow creature or so about him, and fears

and hates all other people. Every expansion of his scope and ideas

widens either circle. The common man of our civilized world loves not

only many of his friends and associates systematically and enduringly,

but dimly he loves also his city and his country, his creed and his

race; he loves it may be less intensely but over a far wider field and

much more steadily. But he hates also more widely if less passionately

and vehemently than a savage, and since love makes rather harmony and

peace and hate rather conflict and events, one may easily be led to

suppose that hate is the ruling motive in human affairs. Men band

themselves together in leagues and loyalties, in cults and organizations

and nationalities, and it is often hard to say whether the bond is one

of love for the association or hatred of those to whom the association

is antagonized. The two things pass insensibly into one another. London

people have recently seen an edifying instance of the transition, in

the Brown Dog statue riots. A number of people drawn together by

their common pity for animal suffering, by love indeed of the most

disinterested sort, had so forgotten their initial spirit as to erect a

monument with an inscription at once recklessly untruthful, spiteful in

spirit and particularly vexatious to one great medical school of London.

They have provoked riots and placarded London with taunts and irritating

misrepresentation of the spirit of medical research, and they have

infected a whole fresh generation of London students with a bitter

partizan contempt for the humanitarian effort that has so lamentably

misconducted itself. Both sides vow they will never give in, and the

anti-vivisectionists are busy manufacturing small china copies of

the Brown Dog figure, inscription and all, for purposes of domestic

irritation. Here hate, the evil ugly brother of effort, has manifestly

slain love the initiator and taken the affair in hand. That is a little

model of human conflicts. So soon as we become militant and play against

one another, comes this danger of strain and this possible reversal of

motive. The fight begins. Into a pit of heat and hate fall right and

wrong together.

Now it seems to me that a religious faith such as I have set forth in

the second Book, and a clear sense of our community of blood with all

mankind, must necessarily affect both our loving and our hatred. It will

certainly not abolish hate, but it will subordinate it altogether to

love. We are individuals, so the Purpose presents itself to me, in

order that we may hate the things that have to go, ugliness, baseness,

insufficiency, unreality, that we may love and experiment and strive

for the things that collectively we seek--power and beauty. Before our

conversion we did this darkly and with our hate spreading to persons and

parties from the things for which they stood. But the believer will hate

lovingly and without fear. We are of one blood and substance with our

antagonists, even with those that we desire keenly may die and leave

no issue in flesh or persuasion. They all touch us and are part of one

necessary experience. They are all necessary to the synthesis, even if

they are necessary only as the potato-peel in the dust-bin is necessary

to my dinner.

So it is I disavow and deplore the whole spirit of class-war Socialism

with its doctrine of hate, its envious assault upon the leisure and

freedom of the wealthy. Without leisure and freedom and the experience

of life they gave, the ideas of Socialism could never have been born.

The true mission of Socialism is against darkness, vanity and cowardice,

that darkness which hides from the property owner the intense beauty,

the potentialities of interest, the splendid possibilities of life, that

vanity and cowardice that make him clutch his precious holdings and

fear and hate the shadow of change. It has to teach the collective

organization of society; and to that the class-consciousness and intense

class-prejudices of the worker need to bow quite as much as those of the

property owner. But when I say that Socialism’s mission is to teach, I

do not mean that its mission is a merely verbal and mental one; it must

use all instruments and teach by example as well as precept. Socialism

by becoming charitable and merciful will not cease to be militant.

Socialism must, lovingly but resolutely, use law, use force, to

dispossess the owners of socially disadvantageous wealth, as one coerces

a lunatic brother or takes a wrongfully acquired toy from a spoilt and

obstinate child. It must intervene between all who would keep their

children from instruction in the business of citizenship and the lessons

of fraternity. It must build and guard what it builds with laws and

with that sword which is behind all laws. Non-resistance is for the

non-constructive man, for the hermit in the cave and the naked saint in

the dust; the builder and maker with the first stroke of his foundation

spade uses force and opens war against the anti-builder.

3.6. THE PRELIMINARY SOCIAL DUTY.

The belief I have that contributing to the development of the collective

being of man is the individual’s general meaning and duty, and the

formulae of the Socialism which embodies this belief so far as our

common activities go, give a general framework and direction how a man

or woman should live. (I do throughout all this book mean man or woman

equally when I write of “man,” unless it is manifestly inapplicable.)

And first in this present time he must see to it that he does live, that

is to say he must get food, clothing, covering, and adequate leisure for

the finer aspects of living. Socialism plans an organized civilization

in which these things will be a collective solicitude, and the gaining

of a subsistence an easy preliminary to the fine drama of existence, but

in the world as we have it we are forced to engage much of our energy

in scrambling for these preliminary necessities. Our problems of conduct

lie in the world as it is and not in the world as we want it to be.

First then a man must get a living, a fair civilized living for himself.

It is a fundamental duty. It must be a fair living, not pinched nor mean

nor strained. A man can do nothing higher, he can be no service to any

cause, until he himself is fed and clothed and equipped and free.

He must earn this living or equip himself to earn it in some way not

socially disadvantageous, he must contrive as far as possible that

the work he does shall be constructive and contributory to the general

well-being.

And these primary necessities of food, clothing and freedom being

secured, one comes to the general disposition of one’s surplus energy.

With regard to that I think that a very simple proposition follows from

the broad beliefs I have chosen to adopt. The general duty of a man,

his existence being secured, is to educate, and chiefly to educate

and develop himself. It is his duty to live, to make all he can out of

himself and life, to get full of experience, to make himself fine and

perceiving and expressive, to render his experience and perceptions

honestly and helpfully to others. And in particular he has to educate

himself and others with himself in Socialism. He has to make and keep

this idea of synthetic human effort and of conscious constructive effort

clear first to himself and then clear in the general mind. For it is an

idea that comes and goes. We are all of us continually lapsing from

it towards individual isolation again. He needs, we all need, constant

refreshment in this belief if it is to remain a predominant living fact

in our lives.

And that duty of education, of building up the collective idea and

organization of humanity, falls into various divisions depending in

their importance upon individual quality. For all there is one personal

work that none may evade, and that is thinking hard, criticising

strenuously and understanding as clearly as one can religion, socialism

and the general principle of one’s acts. The intellectual factor is

of primary importance in my religion. I can see no more reason why

salvation should come to the intellectually incapable than to the

morally incapable. For simple souls thinking in simple processes,

salvation perhaps comes easily, but there is none for the intellectual

coward, for the mental sloven and sluggard, for the stupid and obdurate

mind. The Believer will think hard and continue to grow and learn, to

read and seek discussion as his needs determine.

Correlated with one’s own intellectual activity, part of it and growing

out of it for almost everyone, is intellectual work with and upon

others. By teaching we learn. Not to communicate one’s thoughts to

others, to keep one’s thoughts to oneself as people say, is either

cowardice or pride. It is a form of sin. It is a duty to talk, teach,

explain, write, lecture, read and listen. Every truly religious man,

every good Socialist, is a propagandist. Those who cannot write or

discuss can talk, those who cannot argue can induce people to listen to

others and read. We have a belief and an idea that we want to spread,

each to the utmost of his means and measure, throughout all the world.

We have a thought that we want to make humanity’s thought. And it is

a duty too that one should, within the compass of one’s ability, make

teaching, writing and lecturing possible where it has not existed

before. This can be done in a hundred ways, by founding and enlarging

schools and universities and chairs, for example; by making print

and reading and all the material of thought cheap and abundant, by

organizing discussion and societies for inquiry.

And talk and thought and study are but the more generalized aspects of

duty. The Believer may find his own special aptitude lies rather

among concrete things, in experimenting and promoting experiments in

collective action. Things teach as well as words, and some of us are

most expressive by concrete methods. The Believer will work himself

and help others to his utmost in all those developments of material

civilization, in organized sanitation for example, all those

developments that force collective acts upon communities and collective

realizations into the minds of men. And the whole field of scientific

research is a field of duty calling to everyone who can enter it, to add

to the permanent store of knowledge and new resources for the race.

The Mind of that Civilized State we seek to make by giving ourselves

into its making, is evidently the central work before us. But while

the writer, the publisher and printer, the bookseller and librarian and

teacher and preacher, the investigator and experimenter, the reader

and everyone who thinks, will be contributing themselves to this great

organized mind and intention in the world, many sorts of specialized

men will be more immediately concerned with parallel and more concrete

aspects of the human synthesis. The medical worker and the medical

investigator, for example, will be building up the body of a new

generation, the body of the civilized state, and he will be doing all

he can, not simply as an individual, but as a citizen, to ORGANIZE his

services of cure and prevention, of hygiene and selection. A great

and growing multitude of men will be working out the apparatus of the

civilized state; the organizers of transit and housing, the engineers

in their incessantly increasing variety, the miners and geologists

estimating the world’s resources in metals and minerals, the mechanical

inventors perpetually economizing force. The scientific agriculturist

again will be studying the food supply of the world as a whole, and how

it may be increased and distributed and economized. And to the student

of law comes the task of rephrasing his intricate and often quite

beautiful science in relation to modern conceptions. All these and a

hundred other aspects are integral to the wide project of Constructive

Socialism as it shapes itself in my faith.

3.7. WRONG WAYS OF LIVING.

When we lay down the proposition that it is one’s duty to get one’s

living in some way not socially disadvantageous, and as far as possible

by work that is contributory to the general well-being and development,

when we state that one’s surplus energies, after one’s living is gained,

must be devoted to experience, self-development and constructive work,

it is clear we condemn by implication many modes of life that are

followed to-day.

For example, it is manifest we condemn living in idleness or on

non-productive sport, on the income derived from private property, and

all sorts of ways of earning a living that cannot be shown to conduce to

the constructive process. We condemn trading that is merely speculative,

and in fact all trading and manufacture that is not a positive social

service; we condemn living by gambling or by playing games for either

stakes or pay. Much more do we condemn dishonest or fraudulent trading

and every act of advertisement that is not punctiliously truthful. We

must condemn too the taking of any income from the community that is

neither earned nor conceded in the collective interest. But to this last

point, and to certain issues arising out of it, I will return in the

section next following this one.

And it follows evidently from our general propositions that every form

of prostitution is a double sin, against one’s individuality and against

the species which we serve by the development of that individuality’s

preferences and idiosyncracies.

And by prostitution I mean not simply the act of a woman who sells

for money, and against her thoughts and preferences, her smiles and

endearments and the secret beauty and pleasure of her body, but the act

of anyone who, to gain a living, suppresses himself, does things in a

manner alien to himself and subserves aims and purposes with which he

disagrees. The journalist who writes against his personal convictions,

the solicitor who knowingly assists the schemes of rogues, the barrister

who pits himself against what he perceives is justice and the right,

the artist who does unbeautiful things or less beautiful things than

he might, simply to please base employers, the craftsman who makes

instruments for foolish uses or bad uses, the dealer who sells and

pushes an article because it fits the customer’s folly; all these are

prostitutes of mind and soul if not of body, with no right to lift an

eyebrow at the painted disasters of the streets.

3.8. SOCIAL PARASITISM AND CONTEMPORARY INJUSTICES.

These broad principles about one’s way of living are very simple;

our minds move freely among them. But the real interest is with the

individual case, and the individual case is almost always complicated

by the fact that the existing social and economic system is based upon

conditions that the growing collective intelligence condemns as unjust

and undesirable, and that the constructive spirit in men now seeks to

supersede. We have to live in a provisional State while we dream of and

work for a better one.

The ideal life for the ordinary man in a civilized, that is to say a

Socialist, State would be in public employment or in private enterprise

aiming at public recognition. But in our present world only a small

minority can have that direct and honourable relation of public service

in the work they do; most of the important business of the community is

done upon the older and more tortuous private ownership system, and the

great mass of men in socially useful employment find themselves working

only indirectly for the community and directly for the profit of a

private owner, or they themselves are private owners. Every man who has

any money put by in the bank, or any money invested, is a private owner,

and in so far as he draws interest or profit from this investment he is

a social parasite. It is in practice almost impossible to divest oneself

of that parasitic quality however straightforward the general principle

may be.

It is practically impossible for two equally valid sets of reasons.

The first is that under existing conditions, saving and investment

constitute the only way to rest and security in old age, to leisure,

study and intellectual independence, to the safe upbringing of a family

and the happiness of one’s weaker dependents. These are things that

should not be left for the individual to provide; in the civilized

state, the state itself will insure every citizen against these

anxieties that now make the study of the City Article almost a duty.

To abandon saving and investment to-day, and to do so is of course to

abandon all insurance, is to become a driven and uncertain worker,

to risk one’s personal freedom and culture and the upbringing and

efficiency of one’s children. It is to lower the standard of one’s

personal civilization, to think with less deliberation and less

detachment, to fall away from that work of accumulating fine habits and

beautiful and pleasant ways of living contributory to the coming State.

And in the second place there is not only no return for such a sacrifice

in anything won for Socialism, but for fine-thinking and living people

to give up property is merely to let it pass into the hands of more

egoistic possessors. Since at present things must be privately owned,

it is better that they should be owned by people consciously working for

social development and willing to use them to that end.

We have to live in the present system and under the conditions of the

present system, while we work with all our power to change that system

for a better one.

The case of Cadburys the cocoa and chocolate makers, and the practical

slavery under the Portuguese of the East African negroes who grow

the raw material for Messrs. Cadbury, is an illuminating one in this

connection. The Cadburys, like the Rowntrees, are well known as an

energetic and public-spirited family, their social and industrial

experiments at Bournville and their general social and political

activities are broad and constructive in the best sense. But they find

themselves in the peculiar dilemma that they must either abandon an

important and profitable portion of their great manufacture or continue

to buy produce grown under cruel and even horrible conditions. Their

retirement from the branch of the cocoa and chocolate trade concerned

would, under these circumstances, mean no diminution of the manufacture

or of the horrors of this particular slavery; it would merely mean that

less humanitarian manufacturers would step in to take up the abandoned

trade. The self-righteous individualist would have no doubts about the

question; he would keep his hands clean anyhow, retrench his social

work, abandon the types of cocoa involved, and pass by on the other

side. But indeed I do not believe we came into the mire of life simply

to hold our hands up out of it. Messrs. Cadbury follow a better line;

they keep their business going, and exert themselves in every way to

let light into the secrets of Portuguese East Africa and to organize a

better control of these labour cruelties. That I think is altogether the

right course in this difficulty.

We cannot keep our hands clean in this world as it is. There is no

excuse indeed for a life of fraud or any other positive fruitless

wrong-doing or for a purely parasitic non-productive life, yet all but

the fortunate few who are properly paid and recognized state servants

must in financial and business matters do their best amidst and through

institutions tainted with injustice and flawed with unrealities. All

Socialists everywhere are like expeditionary soldiers far ahead of the

main advance. The organized state that should own and administer their

possessions for the general good has not arrived to take them over; and

in the meanwhile they must act like its anticipatory agents according to

their lights and make things ready for its coming.

The Believer then who is not in the public service, whose life lies

among the operations of private enterprise, must work always on the

supposition that the property he administers, the business in which

he works, the profession he follows, is destined to be taken over and

organized collectively for the commonweal and must be made ready for

the taking over; that the private outlook he secures by investment,

the provision he makes for his friends and children, are temporary,

wasteful, though at present unavoidable devices to be presently

merged in and superseded by the broad and scientific previsions of the

co-operative commonwealth.

3.9. THE CASE OF THE WIFE AND MOTHER.

These principles give a rule also for the problem that faces the great

majority of thinking wives and mothers to-day. The most urgent and

necessary social work falls upon them; they bear, and largely educate

and order the homes of, the next generation, and they have no direct

recognition from the community for either of these supreme functions.

They are supposed to perform them not for God or the world, but to

please and satisfy a particular man. Our laws, our social conventions,

our economic methods, so hem a woman about that, however fitted for and

desirous of maternity she may be, she can only effectually do that

duty in a dependent relation to her husband. Nearly always he is the

paymaster, and if his payments are grudging or irregular, she has

little remedy short of a breach and the rupture of the home. Her duty

is conceived of as first to him and only secondarily to her children and

the State. Many wives become under these circumstances mere prostitutes

to their husbands, often evading the bearing of children with their

consent and even at their request, and “loving for a living.” That is a

natural outcome of the proprietary theory of the family out of which our

civilization emerges. But our modern ideas trend more and more to regard

a woman’s primary duty to be her duty to the children and to the world

to which she gives them. She is to be a citizen side by side with her

husband; no longer is he to intervene between her and the community. As

a matter of contemporary fact he can do so and does so habitually, and

most women have to square their ideas of life to that possibility.

Before any woman who is clear-headed enough to perceive that this great

business of motherhood is one of supreme public importance, there are a

number of alternatives at the present time. She may, like Grant Allan’s

heroine in “The Woman Who Did,” declare an exaggerated and impossible

independence, refuse the fetters of marriage and bear children to a

lover. This, in the present state of public opinion in almost every

existing social atmosphere, would be a purely anarchistic course. It

would mean a fatherless home, and since the woman will have to play the

double part of income-earner and mother, an impoverished and struggling

home. It would mean also an unsocial because ostracized home. In most

cases, and even assuming it to be right in idea, it would still be on

all fours with that immediate abandonment of private property we have

already discussed, a sort of suicide that helps the world nothing.

Or she may “strike,” refuse marriage and pursue a solitary and childless

career, engaging her surplus energies in constructive work. But that

also is suicide; it is to miss the keenest experiences, the finest

realities life has to offer.

Or she may meet a man whom she can trust to keep a treaty with her and

supplement the common interpretations and legal insufficiencies of the

marriage bond, who will respect her always as a free and independent

person, will abstain absolutely from authoritative methods, and will

either share and trust his income and property with her in a frank

communism, or give her a sufficient and private income for her personal

use. It is only fair under existing economic conditions that at marriage

a husband should insure his life in his wife’s interest, and I do not

think it would be impossible to bring our legal marriage contract into

accordance with modern ideas in that matter. Certainly it should be

legally imperative that at the birth of each child a new policy upon its

father’s life, as the income-getter, should begin. The latter provision

at least should be a normal condition of marriage and one that the

wife should have power to enforce when payments fall away. With such

safeguards and under such conditions marriage ceases to be a haphazard

dependence for a woman, and she may live, teaching and rearing and free,

almost as though the co-operative commonwealth had come.

But in many cases, since great numbers of women marry so young and

so ignorantly that their thinking about realities begins only after

marriage, a woman will find herself already married to a man before she

realizes the significance of these things. She may be already the mother

of children. Her husband’s ideas may not be her ideas. He may dominate,

he may prohibit, he may intervene, he may default. He may, if he sees

fit, burthen the family income with the charges of his illegitimate

offspring.

We live in the world as it is and not in the world as it should be. That

sentence becomes the refrain of this discussion.

The normal modern married woman has to make the best of a bad position,

to do her best under the old conditions, to live as though she was under

the new conditions, to make good citizens, to give her spare energies

as far as she can to bringing about a better state of affairs. Like the

private property owner and the official in a privately owned business,

her best method of conduct is to consider herself an unrecognized public

official, irregularly commanded and improperly paid. There is no good

in flagrant rebellion. She has to study her particular circumstances and

make what good she can out of them, keeping her face towards the coming

time. I cannot better the image I have already used for the thinking

and believing modern-minded people of to-day as an advance guard cut

off from proper supplies, ill furnished so that makeshift prevails,

and rather demoralized. We have to be wise as well as loyal; discretion

itself is loyalty to the coming State.

3.10. ASSOCIATIONS.

In the previous section I have dealt with the single individual’s duty

in relation to the general community and to law and generally received

institutions. But there is a new set of questions now to be considered.

Let us take up the modifications that arise when it is not one

isolated individual but a group of individuals who find themselves in

disagreement with contemporary rule or usage and disposed to find a

rightness in things not established or not conceded. They too live in

the world as it is and not in the world as it ought to be, but their

association opens up quite new possibilities of anticipating coming

developments of living, and of protecting and guaranteeing one another

from what for a single unprotected individual would be the inevitable

consequences of a particular line of conduct, conduct which happened to

be unorthodox or only, in the face of existing conditions, unwise.

For example, a friend of mine who had read a copy of the preceding

section wrote as follows:--

“I can see no reason why even to-day a number of persons avowedly united

in the same ‘Belief’ and recognizing each other as the self-constituted

social vanguard should not form a recognized spiritual community

centering round some kind of ‘religious’ edifice and ritual, and agree

to register and consecrate the union of any couples of the members

according to a contract which the whole community should have voted

acceptable. The community would be the guardian of money deposited or

paid in gradually as insurance for the children. And the fact of

the whole business being regular, open and connected with a common

intellectual and moral ritual and a common name, such for example as

your name of ‘The Samurai,’ would secure the respect of outsiders, so

that eventually these new marriage arrangements would modify the old

ones. People would ask, ‘Were you married before the registrar?’ and the

answer would be, ‘No, we are Samurai and were united before the

Elders.’ In Catholic countries those who use only the civil marriage

are considered outcasts by the religiously minded, which shows that

recognition by the State is not as potent as recognition by the

community to which one belongs. The religious marriage is considered

the only one binding by Catholics, and the civil ceremony is respected

merely because the State has brute force behind it.”

There is in this passage one particularly valuable idea, the idea of

an association of people to guarantee the welfare of their children in

common. I will follow that a little, though it takes me away from my

main line of thought. It seems to me that such an association might be

found in many cases a practicable way of easing the conflict that so

many men and women experience, between their individual public service

and their duty to their own families. Many people of exceptional gifts,

whose gifts are not necessarily remunerative, are forced by these

personal considerations to direct them more or less askew, to divert

them from their best application to some inferior but money-making

use; and many more are given the disagreeable alternative of evading

parentage or losing the freedom of mind needed for socially beneficial

work. This is particularly the case with many scientific investigators,

many sociological and philosophical workers, many artists, teachers and

the like. Even when such people are fairly prosperous personally they do

not care to incur the obligation to keep prosperous at any cost to their

work that a family in our competitive system involves. It gives great

ease of mind to any sort of artistic or intellectual worker to feel

free to become poor. I do not see why a group of such people should not

attempt a merger of their family anxieties and family adventures,

insure all its members, and while each retains a sufficient personal

independence for freedom of word and movement, pool their family

solicitudes and resources, organize a collective school and a

common maintenance fund for all the children born of members of

the association. I do not see why they should not in fact develop a

permanent trust to maintain, educate and send out all their children

into the world, a trust to which their childless friends and associates

could contribute by gift and bequest, and to which the irregular good

fortune that is not uncommon in the careers of these exceptional types

could be devoted. I do not mean any sort of charity but an enlarged

family basis.

Such an idea passes very readily into the form of a Eugenic association.

It would be quite possible and very interesting for prosperous people

interested in Eugenics to create a trust for the offspring of a selected

band of beneficiaries, and with increasing resources to admit new

members and so build up within the present social system a special

strain of chosen people. So far people with eugenic ideas and people

with conceptions of associated and consolidated families have been too

various and too dispersed for such associations to be practicable, but

as such views of life become more common, the chance of a number of

sufficiently homogeneous and congenial people working out the method of

such a grouping increases steadily.

Moreover, I can imagine no reason to prevent any women who are in

agreement with the moral standards of the “Woman who Did” (standards I

will not discuss at this present point but defer for a later section)

combining for mutual protection and social support and the welfare of

such children as they may bear. Then certainly, to the extent that

this succeeds, the objections that arise from the evil effects upon the

children of social isolation disappear. This isolation would be at worst

a group isolation, and there can be no doubt that my friend is right

in pointing out that there is much more social toleration for an act

committed under the sanction of a group than for an isolated act that

may be merely impulsive misbehaviour masquerading as high principle.

It seems to me remarkable that, to the best of my knowledge, so

obvious a form of combination has never yet been put in practice. It

is remarkable but not inexplicable. The first people to develop novel

ideas, more particularly of this type, are usually people in isolated

circumstances and temperamentally incapable of disciplined cooperation.

3.11. OF AN ORGANIZED BROTHERHOOD.

The idea of organizing the progressive elements in the social chaos into

a regular developing force is one that has had a great attraction

for me. I have written upon it elsewhere, and I make no apology

for returning to it here and examining it in the light of various

afterthoughts and with fresh suggestions.

I first broached this idea in a book called “Anticipations,” wherein I

described a possible development of thought and concerted action which

I called the New Republicanism, and afterwards I redrew the thing

rather more elaborately in my “Modern Utopia.” I had been struck by the

apparently chaotic and wasteful character of most contemporary reform

movements, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that those who aimed at

organizing society and replacing chaos and waste by wise arrangements,

might very well begin by producing a more effective organization

for their own efforts. These complexities of good intention made me

impatient, and I sought industriously in my mind for a short cut

through them. In doing so I think I overlooked altogether too much how

heterogeneous all progressive thought and progressive people must be.

In my “Modern Utopia” I turned this idea of an organized brotherhood

about very thoroughly and looked at it from this point and that; I

let it loose as it were, and gave it its fullest development, and so

produced a sort of secular Order of governing men and women. In a spirit

entirely journalistic I called this the Order of the Samurai, for at the

time I wrote there was much interest in Bushido because of the capacity

for hardship and self-sacrifice this chivalrous culture appears to

have developed in the Japanese. These Samurai of mine were a sort of

voluntary nobility who supplied the administrative and organizing forces

that held my Utopian world together. They were the “New Republicans”

of my “Anticipations” and “Mankind in the Making,” much developed and

supposed triumphant and ruling the world.

I sought of course to set out these ideas as attractively as possible in

my books, and they have as a matter of fact proved very attractive to a

certain number of people. Quite a number have wanted to go on with them.

Several little organizations of Utopians and Samurai and the like have

sprung up and informed me of themselves, and some survive; and young men

do still at times drop into my world “personally or by letter” declaring

themselves New Republicans.

All this has been very helpful and at times a little embarrassing to

me. It has given me an opportunity of seeing the ideals I flung into

the distance beyond Sirius and among the mountain snows coming home

partially incarnate in girls and young men. It has made me look into

individualized human aspirations, human impatience, human vanity and a

certain human need of fellowship, at close quarters. It has illuminated

subtle and fine traits; it has displayed nobilities, and it has brought

out aspects of human absurdity to which only the pencil of Mr. George

Morrow could do adequate justice. The thing I have had to explain most

generally is that my New Republicans and Samurai are but figures of

suggestion, figures to think over and use in planning disciplines, but

by no means copies to follow. I have had to go over again, as though it

had never been raised before in any previous writings, the difference

between the spirit and the letter.

These responses have on the whole confirmed my main idea that there is

a real need, a need that many people, and especially adolescent people,

feel very strongly, for some sort of constructive brotherhood of a

closer type than mere political association, to co-ordinate and partly

guide their loose chaotic efforts to get hold of life--but they have

also convinced me that no wide and comprehensive organization can supply

that want.

My New Republicans were presented as in many respects harsh and

overbearing people, “a sort of outspoken secret society” for the

organization of the world. They were not so much an ideal order as the

Samurai of the later book, being rather deduced as a possible outcome of

certain forces and tendencies in contemporary life (A.D. 1900) than,

as literary people say, “created.” They were to be drawn from among

engineers, doctors, scientific business organizers and the like, and I

found that it is to energetic young men of the more responsible classes

that this particular ideal appeals. Their organization was quite

informal, a common purpose held them together.

Most of the people who have written to me to call themselves New

Republicans are I find also Imperialists and Tariff Reformers, and I

suppose that among the prominent political figures of to-day the

nearest approach to my New Republicans is Lord Milner and the

Socialist-Unionists of his group. It is a type harshly constructive,

inclined to an unscrupulous pose and slipping readily into a

Kiplingesque brutality.

The Samurai on the other hand were more picturesque figures, with a much

more elaborated organization.

I may perhaps recapitulate the points about that Order here.

In the “Modern Utopia” the visitor from earth remarks:--

“These Samurai form the real body of the State. All this time that I

have spent going to and fro in this planet, it has been growing upon me

that this order of men and women, wearing such a uniform as you wear,

and with faces strengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is

the Utopian reality; that but for them the whole fabric of these fair

appearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at

last, back I should be amidst the grime and disorders of the life of

earth. Tell me about these Samurai, who remind me of Plato’s guardians,

who look like Knight Templars, who bear a name that recalls the

swordsmen of Japan. What are they? Are they an hereditary cast, a

specially educated order, an elected class? For, certainly, this world

turns upon them as a door upon its hinges.”

His informant explains:--

“Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their

hands; all our head teachers and disciplinary heads of colleges,

our judges, barristers, employers of labour beyond a certain limit,

practising medical men, legislators, must be Samurai, and all the

executive committees and so forth, that play so large a part in our

affairs, are drawn by lot exclusively from them. The order is not

hereditary--we know just enough of biology and the uncertainties of

inheritance to know how silly that would be--and it does not require an

early consecration or novitiate or ceremonies and initiations of that

sort. The Samurai are, in fact, volunteers. Any intelligent adult in a

reasonably healthy and efficient state may, at any age after five and

twenty, become one of the Samurai and take a hand in the universal

control.”

“Provided he follows the Rule.”

“Precisely--provided he follows the Rule.”

“I have heard the phrase, ‘voluntary nobility.’”

“That was the idea of our Founders. They made a noble and privileged

order--open to the whole world. No one could complain of an unjust

exclusion, for the only thing that could exclude them from the order was

unwillingness or inability to follow the Rule.

“The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base altogether, to discipline

the impulses and emotions, to develop a moral habit and sustain a man

in periods of stress, fatigue and temptation, to produce the maximum

co-operation of all men of good-intent, and in fact to keep all the

Samurai in a state of moral and bodily health and efficiency. It does

as much of this as well as it can, but of course, like all general

propositions, it does not do it in any case with absolute precision. AT

FIRST IN THE MILITANT DAYS, IT WAS A TRIFLE HARD AND UNCOMPROMISING;

IT HAD RATHER TOO STRONG AN APPEAL TO THE MORAL PRIG AND THE HARSHLY

RIGHTEOUS MAN, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and

expansion, and every year it becomes a little better adapted to the need

of a general rule of life that all men may try to follow. We have now

a whole literature with many very fine things in it, written about the

Rule.

“The Rule consists of three parts; there is the list of things that

qualify, the list of things that must not be done, and the list of

things that must be done. Qualification exacts a little exertion as

evidence of good faith and it is designed to weed out the duller dull

and many of the base.”

He goes on to tell of certain intellectual qualifications and

disciplines.

“Next to the intellectual qualification comes the physical, the man must

be in sound health, free from certain foul, avoidable and demoralizing

diseases, and in good training. We reject men who are fat, or thin, or

flabby, or whose nerves are shaky--we refer them back to training. And

finally the man or woman must be fully adult.”

“Twenty-one? But you said twenty-five!”

“The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five or over; then the

minimum became twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women. Now there

is a feeling that it ought to be raised. We don’t want to take advantage

of mere boy and girl emotions--men of my way of thinking, at any rate,

don’t--we want to get our Samurai with experiences, with settled mature

conviction. Our hygiene and regimen are rapidly pushing back old age and

death, and keeping men hale and hearty to eighty and more. There’s no

need to hurry the young. Let them have a chance of wine, love and song;

let them feel the bite of full-blooded desire, and know what devils they

have to reckon with...

“We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures do no great harm, but we

think it well to forbid them none the less, so that we can weed out the

self-indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to little seductions

is good for a man’s quality. At any rate, it shows that a man is

prepared to pay something for his honour and privileges. We prescribe

a regimen of food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any alcoholic drink, all

narcotic drugs...

“Originally the Samurai were forbidden usury, that is to say, the

lending of money at fixed rates of interest. They are still under that

interdiction, but since our commercial code practically prevents usury

altogether, and our law will not recognize contracts for interest upon

private accommodation loans to unprosperous borrowers,” (he is speaking

of Utopia), “it is now scarcely necessary. The idea of a man growing

richer by mere inaction and at the expense of an impoverished debtor is

profoundly distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our State insists pretty

effectually now upon the participation of the lender in the borrower’s

risks. This, however, is only one part of a series of limitations of

the same character. It is felt that to buy simply in order to sell again

brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance

profits and falsify values, and so the Samurai are forbidden to buy or

sell on their own account or for any employer save the State, unless by

some process of manufacture they change the nature of the commodity (a

mere change in bulk or packing does not suffice), and they are forbidden

salesmanship and all its arts. Nor may the Samurai do personal services,

except in the matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers,

for example, nor inn waiters nor boot cleaners, men do such services for

themselves. Nor may a man under the Rule be any man’s servant, pledged

to do whatever he is told. He may neither be a servant nor keep one;

he must shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own food from the

helper’s place, redd his sleeping room and leave it clean...”

Finally came the things they had to do. Their Rule contained:--

“many precise directions regarding his health, and rules that would aim

at once at health and that constant exercise or will that makes life

good. Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the Samurai must

bathe in cold water and the men shave every day; they have the precisest

directions in such matters; the body must be in health, the skin and

nerves and muscles in perfect tone, or the Samurai must go to the

doctors of the order and give implicit obedience to the regimen

prescribed. They must sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they

must eat with and talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their

conversation for an hour at least, at the nearest club-house of the

Samurai, once on three chosen days in every week. Moreover they must

read aloud from the Book of the Samurai for at least five minutes every

day. Every month they must buy and read faithfully through at least one

book that has been published during the past five years, and the only

intervention with private choice in that matter is the prescription of

a certain minimum of length for the monthly book or books. But the full

rule in these minor compulsory matters is voluminous and detailed,

and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim is rather to keep before the

Samurai by a number of simple duties, as it were, the need of and some

of the chief methods towards health of body and mind rather than

to provide a comprehensive rule, and to ensure the maintenance of a

community of feeling and interests among the Samurai through habit,

intercourse and a living contemporary literature. These minor

obligations do not earmark more than an hour in the day. Yet they

serve to break down isolations of sympathy, all sorts of physical and

intellectual sluggishness and the development of unsocial preoccupations

of many sorts...

“So far as the Samurai have a purpose in common in maintaining the State

and the order and discipline of the world, so far, by their discipline

and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship God together.

But the ultimate fount of motives lies in the individual life, it lies

in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this the most striking of

all the rules of the Samurai aims. For seven consecutive days of the

year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of

all the life of men into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no

man or woman and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They must go

bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper or money. Provision must

be taken for the period of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack--for they

must sleep under the open sky--but no means of making a fire. They may

study maps before to guide them, showing any difficulties and dangers

in the journey, but they may not carry such helps. They must not go by

beaten ways or wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare,

quiet places of the globe--the regions set apart for them.

“This discipline was invented to secure a certain stoutness of heart

and body in the Samurai. Otherwise the order might have lain open to

too many timorous, merely abstemious men and women. Many things had

been suggested, sword-play and tests that verged on torture, climbing

in giddy places and the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to

ensure good training and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly also,

it is to draw the minds of the Samurai for a space from the insistent

details of life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort to

work, from personal quarrels and personal affections and the things of

the heated room. Out they must go, clean out of the world...”

These passages will at least serve to present the Samurai idea and the

idea of common Rule of conduct it embodied.

In the “Modern Utopia” I discuss also a lesser Rule and the modification

of the Rule for women and the relation to the order of what I call the

poietic types, those types whose business in life seems to be rather to

experience and express than to act and effectually do. For those things

I must refer the reader to the book itself. Together with a sentence

I have put in italics above, they serve to show that even when I was

devising these Samurai I was not unmindful of the defects that are

essential to such a scheme.

This dream of the Samurai proved attractive to a much more various

group of readers than the New Republican suggestion, and there have been

actual attempts to realise the way of life proposed. In most of these

cases there was manifest a disposition greatly to over-accentuate

organization, to make too much of the disciplinary side of the Rule and

to forget the entire subordination of such things to active thought and

constructive effort. They are valuable and indeed only justifiable as

a means to an end. These attempts of a number of people of very

miscellaneous origins and social traditions to come together and work

like one machine made the essential wastefulness of any terrestrial

realization of my Samurai very clear. The only reason for such an Order

is the economy and development of force, and under existing conditions

disciplines would consume more force than they would engender. The

Order, so far from being a power, would be an isolation. Manifestly the

elements of organization and uniformity were overdone in my Utopia; in

this matter I was nearer the truth in the case of my New Republicans.

These, in contrast with the Samurai, had no formal general organization,

they worked for a common end, because their minds and the suggestion of

their circumstances pointed them to a common end. Nothing was enforced

upon them in the way of observance or discipline. They were not

shepherded and trained together, they came together. It was assumed

that if they wanted strongly they would see to it that they lived in the

manner most conducive to their end just as in all this book I am taking

it for granted that to believe truly is to want to do right. It was

not even required of them that they should sedulously propagate their

constructive idea.

Apart from the illumination of my ideas by these experiments and

proposals, my Samurai idea has also had a quite unmerited amount of

subtle and able criticism from people who found it at once interesting

and antipathetic. My friends Vernon Lee and G.K. Chesterton, for

example, have criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground

that the invincible tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would

inevitably vitiate its working. All its disciplines would tend to give

its members a sense of distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and

rob it of any intimacy and sympathy with those outside the Order...

It seems to me now that anyone who shares the faith I have been

developing in this book will see the value of these comments and

recognize with me that this dream is a dream; the Samurai are just one

more picture of the Perfect Knight, an ideal of clean, resolute and

balanced living. They may be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as

an ideal of organization. They are never to be put, as people say, upon

a business footing and made available as a refuge from the individual

problem.

To modernize the parable, the Believer must not only not bury his talent

but he must not bank it with an organization. Each Believer must decide

for himself how far he wants to be kinetic or efficient, how far he

needs a stringent rule of conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter

and adventure among the coarse and dangerous things of life. There is

no reason why one should not, and there is every reason why one should,

discuss one’s personal needs and habits and disciplines and elaborate

one’s way of life with those about one, and form perhaps with those of

like training and congenial temperament small groups for mutual support.

That sort of association I have already discussed in the previous

section. With adolescent people in particular such association is in

many cases an almost instinctive necessity. There is no reason moreover

why everyone who is lonely should not seek out congenial minds and

contrive a grouping with them. All mutual lovers for example are Orders

of a limited membership, many married couples and endless cliques

and sets are that. Such small and natural associations are indeed

force-giving Orders because they are brought together by a common innate

disposition out of a possibility of mutual assistance and inspiration;

they observe a Rule that springs up and not a Rule imposed. The more

of such groups and Orders we have the better. I do not see why having

formed themselves they should not define and organize themselves. I

believe there is a phase somewhere between fifteen and thirty, in the

life of nearly everybody, when such a group is sought, is needed and

would be helpful in self-development and self-discovery. In leagues and

societies for specific ends, too, we must all participate. But the order

of the Samurai as a great progressive force controlling a multitude of

lives right down to their intimate details and through all the phases of

personal development is a thing unrealizable. To seek to realize it is

impatience. True brotherhood is universal brotherhood. The way to that

is long and toilsome, but it is a way that permits of no such energetic

short cuts as this militant order of my dream would achieve.

3.12. CONCERNING NEW STARTS AND NEW RELIGIONS.

When one is discussing this possible formation of cults and

brotherhoods, it may be well to consider a few of the conditions that

rule such human re-groupings. We live in the world as it is and not in

the world as we want it to be, that is the practical rule by which we

steer, and in directing our lives we must constantly consider the forces

and practicabilities of the social medium in which we move.

In contemporary life the existing ties are so various and so imperative

that the detachment necessary as a preliminary condition to such new

groupings is rarely found. This is not a period in which large numbers

of people break away easily and completely from old connexions. Things

change less catastrophically than once they did. More particularly

is there less driving out into the wilderness. There is less heresy

hunting; persecution is frequently reluctant and can be evaded by slight

concessions. The world as a whole is less harsh and emphatic than it

was. Customs and customary attitudes change nowadays not so much by

open, defiant and revolutionary breaches as by the attrition of partial

negligences and new glosses. Innovating people do conform to current

usage, albeit they conform unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a

constant breaking down and building up of usage, and as a consequence

a lessened need of wholesale substitutions. Human methods have become

viviparous; the New nowadays lives for a time in the form of the Old.

The friend I quote in Chapter 2.10 writes of a possible sect with a

“religious edifice” and ritual of its own, a new religious edifice and

a new ritual. In practice I doubt whether “real” people, people

who matter, people who are getting things done and who have already

developed complex associations, can afford the extensive re-adjustment

implied in such a new grouping. It would mean too much loss of time,

too much loss of energy and attention, too much sacrifice of existing

co-operations.

New cults, new religions, new organizations of all sorts, insisting

upon their novelty and difference, are most prolific and most successful

wherever there is an abundant supply of dissociated people, where

movement is in excess of deliberation, and creeds and formulae

unyielding and unadaptable because they are unthinking. In England,

for example, in the last century, where social conditions have been

comparatively stable, discussion good and abundant and internal

migration small, there have been far fewer such developments than in

the United States of America. In England toleration has become an

institution, and where Tory and Socialist, Bishop and Infidel, can all

meet at the same dinner-table and spend an agreeable week-end together,

there is no need for defensive segregations. In such an atmosphere

opinion and usage change and change continually, not dramatically as the

results of separations and pitched battles but continuously and fluently

as the outcome of innumerable personal reactions. America, on the other

hand, because of its material preoccupations, because of the dispersal

of its thinking classes over great areas, because of the cruder

understanding of its more heterogeneous population (which constantly

renders hard and explicit statement necessary), MEANS its creeds much

more literally and is at once more experimental and less compromising

and tolerant. It is there if anywhere that new brotherhoods and new

creeds will continue to appear. But even in America I think the trend

of things is away from separations and segregations and new starts, and

towards more comprehensive and graduated methods of development.

New religions, I think, appear and are possible and necessary in phases

of social disorganization, in phases when considerable numbers of people

are detached from old systems of direction and unsettled and distressed.

So, at any rate, it was Christianity appeared, in a strained and

disturbed community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental thought, and for

a long time it was confined to the drifting population of seaports

and great cities and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching the most

settled and most adjusted class, the pagani, last of all and in its

most adaptable forms. It was the greatest new beginning in the world’s

history, and the wealth of political and literary and social and

artistic traditions it abandoned had subsequently to be revived and

assimilated to it fragment by fragment from the past it had submerged.

Now, I do not see that the world to-day presents any fair parallelism

to that sere age of stresses in whose recasting Christianity played the

part of a flux. Ours is on the whole an organizing and synthetic rather

than a disintegrating phase throughout the world. Old institutions

are neither hard nor obstinate to-day, and the immense and various

constructive forces at work are saturated now with the conception

of evolution, of secular progressive development, as opposed to the

revolutionary idea. Only a very vast and terrible war explosion can, I

think, change this state of affairs.

This conveys in general terms, at least, my interpretation of the

present time, and it is in accordance with this view that the world

is moving forward as a whole and with much dispersed and discrepant

rightness, that I do not want to go apart from the world as a whole

into any smaller community, with all the implication of an exclusive

possession of right which such a going apart involves. Put to the test

by my own Samurai for example by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic

discipline, I found I did not in the least want to be one of that

organization, that it only expressed one side of a much more complex

self than its disciplines permitted. And still less do I want to

hamper the play of my thoughts and motives by going apart into the

particularism of a new religion. Such refuges are well enough when the

times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about the present age, so

far as I am able to judge the world, is that it does not threaten to

overwhelm; that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its way of

thinking instead of assimilating mine.

3.13. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.

Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a

person of my way of thinking to the Church and religious institutions

generally. I have already discussed my relation to commonly accepted

beliefs, but the question of institutions is, it seems to me, a

different one altogether. Not to realize that, to confuse a church

with its creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of disastrous and

life-wasting errors.

Now my rules of conduct are based on the supposition that moral

decisions are to be determined by the belief that the individual life

guided by its perception of beauty is incidental, experimental, and

contributory to the undying life of the blood and race. I have decided

for myself that the general business of life is the development of

a collective consciousness and will and purpose out of a chaos of

individual consciousnesses and wills and purposes, and that the way

to that is through the development of the Socialist State, through

the socialization of existing State organizations and their merger of

pacific association in a World State. But so far I have not taken up

the collateral aspect of the synthesis of human consciousness, the

development of collective feeling and willing and expression in the

form, among others, of religious institutions.

Religious institutions are things to be legitimately distinguished from

the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated. Customs

are far more enduring things than ideas,--witness the mistletoe at

Christmas, or the old lady turning her money in her pocket at the sight

of the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious institution is of

much less significance to us than its present effect. The theory of a

religion may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of

an irascible Deity or a dozen other things as its end and aim; the

practical fact is that it draws together great multitudes of diverse

individualized people in a common solemnity and self-subordination

however vague, and is so far, like the State, and in a manner far more

intimate and emotional and fundamental than the State, a synthetic

power. And in particular, the idea of the Catholic Church is charged

with synthetic suggestion; it is in many ways an idea broader and

finer than the constructive idea of any existing State. And just as

the Beliefs I have adopted lead me to regard myself as in and of the

existing State, such as it is, and working for its rectification and

development, so I think there is a reasonable case for considering

oneself in and of the Catholic Church and bound to work for its

rectification and development; and this in spite of the fact that one

may not feel justified in calling oneself a Christian in any sense of

the term.

It may be maintained very plausibly that the Catholic Church is

something greater than Christianity, however much the Christians may

have contributed to its making. From the historical point of view it is

a religious and social method that developed with the later development

of the world empire of Rome and as the expression of its moral and

spiritual side. Its head was, and so far as its main body is concerned

still is, the pontifex maximus of the Roman world empire, an official

who was performing sacrifices centuries before Christ was born. It

is easy to assert that the Empire was converted to Christianity and

submitted to its terrestrial leader, the bishop of Rome; it is quite

equally plausible to say that the religious organization of the Empire

adopted Christianity and so made Rome, which had hitherto had no

priority over Jerusalem or Antioch in the Christian Church, the

headquarters of the adopted cult. And if the Christian movement could

take over and assimilate the prestige, the world predominance and

sacrificial conception of the pontifex maximus and go on with that as

part at any rate of the basis of a universal Church, it is manifest

that now in the fulness of time this great organization, after its

accumulation of Christian tradition, may conceivably go on still further

to alter and broaden its teaching and observances and formulae.

In a sense no doubt all we moderns are bound to consider ourselves

children of the Catholic Church, albeit critical and innovating children

with a tendency to hark back to our Greek grandparents; we cannot detach

ourselves absolutely from the Church without at the same time detaching

ourselves from the main process of spiritual synthesis that has made us

what we are. And there is a strong case for supposing that not only is

this reasonable for us who live in the tradition of Western Europe, but

that we are legitimately entitled to call upon extra European peoples to

join with us in that attitude of filiation to the Catholic Church since,

outside it, there is no organization whatever aiming at a religious

catholicity and professing or attempting to formulate a collective

religious consciousness in the world. So far as they come to a

conception of a human synthesis they come to it by coming into our

tradition.

I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea. To come from that

idea to the world of present realities is to come to a tangle of

difficulties. Is the Catholic Church merely the Roman communion or does

it include the Greek and Protestant Churches? Some of these bodies

are declaredly dissentient, some claim to be integral portions of the

Catholic Church which have protested against and abandoned certain

errors of the central organization. I admit it becomes a very confusing

riddle in such a country as England to determine which is the Catholic

Church; whether it is the body which possesses and administers

Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, or the bodies claiming to

represent purer and finer or more authentic and authoritative forms

of Catholic teaching which have erected that new Byzantine-looking

cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield’s Tabernacle in the Tottenham

Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized and independent bodies.

It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church in

America among an immense confusion of sectarian fragments.

Many people, I know, take refuge from the struggle with this tangle

of controversies by refusing to recognize any institutions whatever as

representing the Church. They assume a mystical Church made up of all

true believers, of all men and women of good intent, whatever their

formulae or connexion. Wherever there is worship, there, they say, is

a fragment of the Church. All and none of these bodies are the true

Church.

This is no doubt profoundly true. It gives something like a working

assumption for the needs of the present time. People can get along

upon that. But it does not exhaust the question. We seek a real and

understanding synthesis. We want a real collectivism, not a poetical

idea; a means whereby men and women of all sorts, all kinds of humanity,

may pray together, sing together, stand side by side, feel the same wave

of emotion, develop a collective being. Doubtless right-spirited men are

praying now at a thousand discrepant altars. But for the most part those

who pray imagine those others who do not pray beside them are in

error, they do not know their common brotherhood and salvation. Their

brotherhood is masked by unanalyzable differences; theirs is a dispersed

collectivism; their churches are only a little more extensive than their

individualities and intenser in their collective separations.

The true Church towards which my own thoughts tend will be the conscious

illuminated expression of Catholic brotherhood. It must, I think,

develop out of the existing medley of Church fragments and out of all

that is worthy in our poetry and literature, just as the worldwide

Socialist State at which I aim must develop out of such state and casual

economic organizations and constructive movements as exist to-day. There

is no “beginning again” in these things. In neither case will going

apart out of existing organizations secure our ends. Out of what is,

we have to develop what has to be. To work for the Reformation of the

Catholic Church is an integral part of the duty of a believer.

It is curious how misleading a word can be. We speak of a certain

phase in the history of Christianity as the Reformation, and that word

effectually conceals from most people the simple indisputable fact that

there has been no Reformation. There was an attempt at a Reformation

in the Catholic Church, and through a variety of causes it failed.

It detached great masses from the Catholic Church and left that

organization impoverished intellectually and spiritually, but it

achieved no reconstruction at all. It achieved no reconstruction because

the movement as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one fundamentally

necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity. It fell into particularism

and failed. It set up a vast process of fragmentation among Christian

associations. It drove huge fissures through the once common platform.

In innumerable cases they were fissures of organization and prejudice

rather than real differences in belief and mental habit. Sometimes

it was manifestly conflicting material interests that made the split.

People are now divided by forgotten points of difference, by sides taken

by their predecessors in the disputes of the sixteenth century, by mere

sectarian names and the walls of separate meeting places. In the present

time, as a result of the dissenting method, there are multitudes of

believing men scattered quite solitarily through the world.

The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the Catholic Church lies still

before us. It is a necessary work. It is a work strictly parallel to

the reformation and expansion of the organized State. Together, these

processes constitute the general duty before mankind.

3.14. OF SECESSION.

The whole trend of my thought in matters of conduct is against

whatever accentuates one’s individual separation from the collective

consciousness. It follows naturally from my fundamental creed that

avoidable silences and secrecy are sins, just as abstinences are in

themselves sins rather than virtues. And so I think that to leave

any organization or human association except for a wider and larger

association, to detach oneself in order to go alone, or to go apart

narrowly with just a few, is fragmentation and sin. Even if one

disagrees with the professions or formulae or usages of an association,

one should be sure that the disagreement is sufficiently profound to

justify one’s secession, and in any case of doubt, one should remain. I

count schism a graver sin than heresy.

No profession of faith, no formula, no usage can be perfect. It is only

required that it should be possible. More particularly does this apply

to churches and religious organizations. There never was a creed nor a

religious declaration but admitted of a wide variety of interpretations

and implied both more and less than it expressed. The pedantically

conscientious man, in his search for an unblemished religious

brotherhood, has tended always to a solitude of universal dissent.

In the religious as in the economic sphere one must not look for perfect

conditions. Setting up for oneself in a new sect is like founding

Utopias in Paraguay, an evasion of the essential question; our real

business is to take what we have, live in and by it, use it and do our

best to better such faults as are manifest to us, in the direction of

a wider and nobler organization. If you do not agree with the church

in which you find yourself, your best course is to become a reformer

IN that church, to declare it a detached forgetful part of the greater

church that ought to be, just as your State is a detached unawakened

part of the World State. You take it at what it is and try and broaden

it towards reunion. It is only when secession is absolutely unavoidable

that it is right to secede.

This is particularly true of state churches such as is the Church of

England. These are bodies constituted by the national law and amenable

to the collective will. I do not think a man should consider himself

excluded from them because they have articles of religion to which he

cannot subscribe and creeds he will not say. A national state church has

no right to be thus limited and exclusive. Rather then let any man,

just to the very limit that is possible for his intellectual or moral

temperament, remain in his church to redress the balance and do his

utmost to change and broaden it.

But perhaps the Church will not endure a broad-minded man in its body,

speaking and reforming, and will expel him?

Be expelled--well and good! That is altogether different. Let them expel

you, struggling valiantly and resolved to return so soon as they release

you, to hammer at the door. But withdrawing--sulking--going off in a

serene huff to live by yourself spiritually and materially in your own

way--that is voluntary damnation, the denial of the Brotherhood of

Man. Be a rebel or a revolutionary to your heart’s content, but a mere

seceder never.

For otherwise it is manifest that we shall have to pay for each step

of moral and intellectual progress with a fresh start, with a conflict

between the new organization and the old from which it sprang, a

perpetually-recurring parricide. There will be a series of religious

institutions in developing order, each containing the remnant too dull

or too hypocritical to secede at the time of stress that began the new

body. Something of the sort has indeed happened to both the Catholic

and the English Protestant churches. We have the intellectual and

moral guidance of the people falling more and more into the hands of an

informal Church of morally impassioned leaders, writers, speakers, and

the like, while the beautiful cathedrals in which their predecessors

sheltered fall more and more into the hands of an uninspiring,

retrogressive but conforming clergy.

Now this was all very well for the Individualist Liberal of the Early

Victorian period, but Individualist Liberalism was a mere destructive

phase in the process of renewing the old Catholic order, a clearing up

of the site. We Socialists want a Church through which we can feel and

think collectively, as much as we want a State that we can serve and be

served by. Whether as members or external critics we have to do our best

to get rid of obsolete doctrinal and ceremonial barriers, so that

the churches may merge again in a universal Church, and that Church

comprehend again the whole growing and amplifying spiritual life of the

race.