THE WAR AND THEISM
In the leading Catholic periodical of this country there has been some
nervous discussion of the attitude of the Pope. A new man, a strong and
enlightened man, happens to have mounted the chair of Peter in the midst
of the war. For more than a century his predecessors have bemoaned the
increasing wickedness of the world: Pius VII, tossed like a helpless
cork on the waves of the Revolution; Leo XII and Pius VIII, the
associates of the Holy Alliance; Gregory XVI, eating sweetmeats or
mumbling his breviary while young Italy sweated blood; Pius IX, grasping
eagerly his tatters of sovereignty; Leo XIII, the unsuccessful
diplomatist; Pius X, the medieval monk. They saw their Church shrink
decade by decade, and they witnessed the prosperity of all that they
denounced. Benedict XV came to save the Church, and a great moral
opportunity awaited him. But, while claiming to be the moral arbitrator
of the world, he avoids his plain duty, and is content to repeat the
worn phrases about the iniquity of the modern spirit. His apologists say
that the war is politics, and that Popes must not interfere in politics.
I have earlier explained in what sense this war presents a political
aspect to Benedict XV, and given the reason for his reluctance. It is
typical of the whole failure of Christianity. A little over nineteen
centuries ago, it is said in the churches, a star shone over the cradle
of the Saviour, and choirs of angels announced his coming as a promise
of "peace on earth and good-will among men." I am not in this little
work examining the whole question of the influence of Christianity. But
it is well to recall that, according to its own records, its first and
greatest promise to the world was peace; and to that old Roman Empire,
and to Europe at any stage in its later history, no greater blessing
could have been brought. Has Christianity succeeded?
But the religious interest of the war is by no means exhausted when we
have concluded that it marks, in one of the most important departments
of human action, the complete failure of historical Christianity. My
purpose is to discuss this relation to the Churches, and it would not be
completed unless I considered the war in relation to their fundamental
doctrine, the moral government of the universe by a Supreme Being. In a
few months, we hope, the war will be over: the Allies will have
triumphed. We know, from experience and from history, what will follow
in the Churches. From end to end of Britain, from Dover to Penzance and
from Southampton to Aberdeen, there will rise a jubilant cry that God
has blessed our arms and awarded us the victory. Now that we are in the
midst of the horrors and burdens of the war God is little mentioned. One
would imagine that the great majority of the clergy conceived him as
standing aside, for some inscrutable reason, and letting wicked men
deploy their perverse forces. When the triumph comes, gilding the past
sacrifices or driving them from memory, God will be on every lip. The
whole nation will be implored to come and kneel before the altars.
Royalty and nobility and military, judges and stockbrokers and working
men--above all, a surging, thrilling, ecstatic mass of women--will
gather round the clergy, and will avow that they see the finger of God
in this glorious consummation. The relation of the war to God will then
become the supreme consideration for the Christian mind. It may be more
instructive to consider it now, before the last flood of emotion pours
over our judgments.
I have already discussed some of the clerical allusions to the share of
God in the war. They are so frankly repellent that one cannot be
surprised that the majority of the clergy prefer to be silent on that
point. They prefer to await the victory and build on its more genial and
indulgent emotions. The war is either a blessing or a curse. One would
think that there was not much room for choice, but we saw that some are
bold enough to hint that the spiritual good may outweigh the bodily
pain. They remind us of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi writing smugly of
the moral grandeur of war, the need to brace the slackness of human
nature periodically by war, the chivalry and devotion it calls out, and
so on.
Still worse is the theory of those who regard war frankly as a curse,
yet put it to the direct authorship of the Almighty. This theory is
natural enough in the minds of men and women who believe in hell. In
earlier ages men could not distinguish between the law of retaliation
and the need to deter criminals by using violence against them when they
transgressed. In many primitive systems of justice the law of
retaliation is expressly consecrated. It is even introduced,
inconsistently and as a survival of barbaric times, in the Babylonian
and the Judaic codes, side by side with saner views. It is, of course,
merely a systematisation of brute passion. In the beginning, if a man
knocked your tooth out, you knocked one of his teeth out. With the
growth of law and justice, the barbarous nature of the impulse was
recognised, and the community, by its representatives, inflicted a
"punishment" on the offender instead of allowing the offended to
retaliate. With the modern improvement of moral sentiments we have
realised that this is an imperfect advance on the barbaric idea. The
community has no more right to "punish" than the offended individual
had. We now impose hardship on an offender only for the purpose of
intimidating him from repeating the offence, or of deterring others from
offending. The idea is still somewhat crude, and a third stage will in
time be reached; but it is satisfactory that we now--not since the
advent of Christianity, but since the rise of modern humanism--all admit
that the only permissible procedure is deterrence, and not punishment as
such.
It may seem ungracious to be ever repeating that these improvements did
not take place during the period of Christian influence, but in the
recent period of its decay. There is, however, in this case a most
important and urgent reason for emphasising the fact. I say that we
_all_ admit the more humane conception of punishment, but this must be
qualified. In human affairs we do: Carlyle was, perhaps, the last
moralist to cling to the old conception. But in the religious world the
old idea has been flagrantly retained. The doctrine of eternal
punishment is clearly based on the barbaric old idea that a prince whose
dignity has been insulted may justly inflict the most barbarous
punishment on the offender. Theologians have, since the days of Thomas
Aquinas, wasted whole reams of parchment in defending the dogma of hell,
because they knew nothing whatever of comparative jurisprudence and the
evolution of moral ideas. To us the development of the doctrine is
clear. In the Christian doctrine of hell we have a flagrant survival of
the early barbaric theory of punishment. Modern divines--while
continuing to describe the non-religious view of life as "superficial"
and the Christian as "profound"--have actually yielded to the modern
sentiment, and in a very large measure rejected one of the fundamental
dogmas of the Christian tradition. In order to conceal the procedure as
far as possible, some of them are now contending brazenly that Christ
never taught the doctrine of eternal punishment, and are deluding their
uncultivated congregations with sophistical manipulations of Greek
words.
This does not mean that Christians have lower moral sentiments than
non-Christians, but that the rigidity of their traditions, which they
regard as sacred and unalterable, imposes restrictions on them. Hence
the fact that, while Protestants have so very largely rejected the
doctrine of hell, Roman Catholics, with their more rigid conservatism
and claim of infallibility, still cling to it, and offer the amazing
spectacle of a body claiming to possess the highest ideals in the world,
yet actually cherishing an entirely barbaric theory. There is probably
not a Catholic lawyer in the world who does not reject the old idea of
punishment as barbaric, yet he placidly believes that God retains it.
That is why we find a Catholic archbishop like Carr putting forth so
revolting an idea of the war, while Protestant preachers as a rule
shrink from mentioning God in connection with it. These things make it
impossible for one to understand how non-Christians can say, as they do
sometimes, that if they _were_ to accept a creed, it would be the Roman
creed.
Any theory of the war which proceeds on the lines of the hell-theory is
simply barbaric, and is beneath serious discussion. We know to-day that
both ethics and religion are in a state of constant evolution. We look
back over a stream of several thousand years of historically traceable
development; we follow that stream faintly through earlier tens of
thousands of years in the ideas of primitive peoples; and we see the
evolution going on plainly in the creeds and ethical codes of our own
time. But the practice of registering certain stages of this evolution
in sacred books or codes, which are then imposed on man for centuries or
millennia as something unalterable, has been and is a very serious
hindrance to development, both in ethics and religion. It is all the
worse because these codes and sacred books always contain certain
elements which belong to even earlier and less enlightened stages, and
whole regiments of philosophers or theologians are employed for ages in
putting glosses on ancient and barbaric ideas at which the world
eventually laughs. However, we need not linger here over these ancient
ways of regarding life. The man who keeps his God at a moral level which
we disdain ourselves rarely listens to argument. He protects his "faith"
by believing that it is a mortal sin (involving sentence of hell) to
read any book that would examine it critically. It is a most ingenious
arrangement by which the doctrine of a vindictive God protects itself
against moral progress.
Now any suggestion that God sent this war upon Europe--whether as a
judgment on the clergy, or a judgment on unbelievers, or a judgment on
the arrogance of the Germans, etc.--is part of this old barbarism, and
may be disregarded. It conceives that God is vindictive, and at the same
time assures us that Christianity sternly condemns vindictiveness. It
allows God to deal mighty blows at those who affront him, and tells men
to bear affront with patience and turn the other cheek to the smiter. It
is simply part of that mixture and confusion of old and new ideas which
a codified religion always exhibits. We pass it by, and turn to more
serious considerations. I pass by also eccentric ideas of Deity like
those of Sir Oliver Lodge or Mr. G. B. Shaw--two oracles who have been
singularly silent on the religious aspect of the war. Let us examine the
main religious problem as broadly and as honestly as we can.
The first and chief reflection that occurs to any man who does thus
seriously examine the relation of the war to theism is that, after all,
it is not so easy to disentangle theology from the crude old doctrines
which our more liberal divines think they have abandoned. They tell us
that they do not believe in a vindictive Deity, they disdain the
doctrine of eternal punishment, they smile at many of the Judaic
conceptions of Jehovah in the Old Testament. God is the all-holy and
benevolent ruler of the universe. They refuse to believe that the souls
of sinners and unbelievers are tortured for ever after death, and trust
the whole scheme of things to the love and justice of God.
The grave difficulty of this enlightened theology, indeed of all
theology, is the immense amount of pain and evil in the universe, and
this mighty war we are considering puts it in a very acute form. It is
amusing to look back on some of the lines of apologetics in recent
years. There was a school of people, following some "profound" religious
thinker, who held that evil was "only relative." They made the wonderful
discovery that everything real is good, in the metaphysical sense, and
evil is unreal. Evil, they said, is merely the negation, the
falling-short, of good; and you do not ask for the creator or cause of a
negative thing. More recently a school endeavoured to come to their
assistance with the discovery that pain does not really exist at all.
One did not need to know philosophy or science in order to realise that
a sensation of pain is just as positive and real a thing as a sensation
of pleasure; or that, although death is _only_ the negation of life, one
is really entitled to ask why one's dear child is thus "negated" at the
age of six or twelve. Then there came this new school with its discovery
that pain does not exist. Death, of course, is an entry into a more
glorious life beyond; pain is an illusion to be banished by resolute
thought. These childish symposia were interrupted every few years by
some disastrous earthquake, the sinking of a great liner, an epidemic of
disease, a famine, and so on; but the pious philosophers bravely
struggled on. One may trust that the war has reduced them to silence,
and that we need not linger over them.
Then there was the school which sought desperately to find good in evil.
A man or woman is stricken with disease. Very often it brings with it a
softening, an improvement, of character; either in the patient or in the
nurses, or in both. Our religious philosophers fancied they caught in
this a glimpse of the divine plan: cancer was an instrument of
righteousness in the hands of the Almighty, the bacillus of
tuberculosis was a moral agency. They detected cases in which adverse
fortune had sobered and softened a man: the finger of Providence. In
France there was a very considerable return to the Catholic Church, and
recovery of its power, after the disastrous war of 1870. In the south of
Italy there is always much less sexual freedom for a time after an
earthquake has buried a few tens of thousands under the ruins of their
houses. I would undertake to fill a quarto volume with instances of good
things which arose out of or followed upon evil experiences. We saw that
the present war is being examined in the same respect. There are "great
spiritual opportunities": hundreds of thousands of young men are being
compelled (by the authorities) to go to church who had not been for
years; the different denominations are fraternising as they never did
before; the churches are rather fuller than they had been of late:
charity is awakened on a prodigious scale; zeal for an ideal (the
violated peace of Belgium) is dragging men even from our slums to the
colours. Here again one could at least fill a moderate treatise with the
things achieved; and beyond them all is the unuttered vision of the
crowded churches at the triumphant close of the war, perhaps that
long-coveted religious revival.
There is no doubt whatever that this theory of the war will be
assiduously pressed when nature has drawn her green mantle once more
over the blackened area of the war and our hearts are lifted up by
thought of victory. It is already being urged, and I would add a little
to the comments I have already passed on it.
The clergy would do well to realise that, whatever virtue this theory
may have in soothing the minds and dissolving the doubts of their
followers, to an outsider it seems monstrous. In the first place, it
includes no sense of proportion, and amounts to a colossal untruth. We
must surely take into account the amount of evil inflicted and the
amount of good that ensues. Take sickness, for instance. One would
imagine that, if Christians seriously believe that illness is sent by
God to achieve certain salutary modifications of character, they ought
strenuously to oppose the modern determination to reduce disease to a
minimum. They do not, and would, on the contrary, soon reduce to silence
any religious crank who proposed it. They know perfectly well that the
cases of "spiritual advantage" from illness bear no proportion whatever
to the amount of suffering in the world. Slight but painful illnesses
rarely have any beneficent effect on character; very frequently the
reverse. Any large city, at any given moment, is racked with pains which
do but give rise to curses, or a polite equivalent. Most of the
irritation and perversion of character is due to morbid influences. And
for every case in which a long illness issues in some signal advance of
character, a hundred others could be quoted in which the illness was an
unmitigated calamity. So it is with bereavement and with adversity of
fortune. Look honestly into the experience of any class of the
community, and ask in what _proportion_ of cases narrowness of means,
especially after comfort, brings a "spiritual advantage."
So it is above all with this war. Any man who thinks that the awful
perversion of the character of a great European people, the death of
such vast numbers in such painful circumstances, the ruin of further
millions, and all the innumerable ugly results of a great war, were
worth bringing about in order to secure a few spiritual advantages has
neither sense of proportion nor sense of decency nor sense of humour.
The theory would be too repulsive if it were put in this plain form, and
it is more usual merely to point out these good results and hint that
war is not absolutely and in every respect an evil. As if any person
ever said that it was. The point is simple, and ought not to be
obscured. A few incidental advantages do not reconcile us to this
colossal misery, suffering, and waste, and do not in the slightest
degree alleviate the position of the man who thinks that God directed
human events to this awful consummation. If an earthly ruler employed
such agencies to educate his subjects, with such an extraordinary
disproportion between the suffering inflicted and the results attained,
what should we think of him?
The parallel reminds us that of infinite wisdom we expect infinitely
more than of a human ruler. Once unintelligent nature had a crude,
wasteful, hard method of producing new and higher types of life. Man,
having intelligence, produces the same result without waste or
suffering. We expect immeasurably higher procedure of such an
intelligence as Christians ascribe to God. One can understand the man
who says that the plan of such an intelligence might be beyond human
ken, but I am discussing the opinions of people who contend that they
bring it within human ken. In fact, there is no need here to remind us
of the mysteriousness of the ways of an infinite intelligence. If the
war was designed for certain practical uses, such as those we have had
suggested by various divines, one may reply at once that a more brutal
and unjust way of attaining those ends could not have been devised. It
is almost impossible to conceive any man seriously entertaining the
notion. Yet all the jubilation and thanksgiving that will follow the
war, all the supplication that accompanies its fortunes to-day, and the
whole teaching of Christian theology, imply that God did direct the
political movements and military ambitions which have culminated in the
war. Even a human statesman could have devised a less terrible method of
attaining any end that has yet been conceived for the war. The idea of
the war as a punishment is quite logical and intelligible, though five
hundred years out of date. But the idea of the war as a medicinal or an
educative process has neither logic nor intelligibility, and does not
even attain that consistency with modern ethical sentiments which it
seeks. The colossal amount of suffering inflicted on innocent people and
on children puts it entirely out of court.
Thirdly, this theory, as I said, raises the question whether the end
justifies the means. Here we have another illustration of the way in
which Christian dogma keeps the Christian conscience in many matters
behind the ethical sentiment of the age. Many liberal divines would
express genuine repugnance at Archbishop Carr's view of the war; yet
some of the most liberal of these divines and laymen are almost as
backward in another direction. They justify the world-process through
which we are struggling on the ground that it will, we hope, issue in a
nobler order of things: of the war, in particular, that hope is
entertained, and to the war, accordingly, this theory of justification
is applied. That is a case of the end justifying the means. Christian
thinkers are advancing so rapidly and erratically that in some cases we
are not clear whether the writer does or does not regard God as infinite
in power and intelligence. We may ignore these few cases. The vast
majority emphatically hold that view. In their regard we can say only
what has been said a hundred times. Whether you speak of the
world-process in general or any particular cruel phase of it, such as
this war, you maintain that God chose, out of many conceivable ways, the
one way that is marked by cruelty and suffering. An infinite God is not
so confined in the choice of means. And just as we say of the
world-process in general, that to build the sunnier lives of a remote
generation on the sufferings of this and earlier generations implies a
grave injustice to _us_, so we must say of the war. No spiritual
advantages to those who survive will reconcile us to the suffering and
the loss of those who fell in the tragic combat. I speak impersonally.
It happens that I have no near relatives of military age, and neither I
nor any near relative is likely to suffer by the war. But when I brood
over the agony of the less fortunate millions, over the harrowing
experience of Belgians, Poles, and Serbs, over the whole ghastly orgy of
blood and tears in Europe, I feel unutterable disdain of these paltry
efforts to justify the ways of God to man.
Let us look a little deeper into the matter. No doubt the plain
statement that God "sent" or caused this war will excite a certain
repugnance in many Christian minds. They will prefer to say that God
"permitted" it. Man has "free will," and it is the plan of providence to
give a certain play to this free will. When man has bruised his
shins--more frequently the shins of other people--God may, on being
supplicated sufficiently, issue his veto and put matters right. I am
quite acquainted, from a severe theological education, with the more
learned language in which this theory is expressed by theologians, but
I prefer to deal with it as it exists in the words of most preachers
and the minds of most Christians.
It would be impossible here to deal at any length with the doctrine of
free will. Unless you conceive it in some novel and irrelevant sense, as
Professor Bergson does, it is a very much disputed thing amongst the
experts whose business it is to inform us on the subject--our
psychologists. The majority of modern psychologists seem to reject it
altogether. On the other hand, no theologian has ever yet reconciled it
in any intelligible scheme with the supposed omnipotence of God. But it
is not necessary to enter into these abstruse considerations. Let us
take the matter in the concrete.
We look back to-day on a long series of processes and circumstances
which culminate in the war. There is the whole history of Germany for a
hundred and fifty years inspiring the German people with a bias toward
aggressive war; there are the economic and geographical circumstances
which, at the end of the nineteenth century, begin to make it think
again of aggressive war; there is the overflowing population, bred by
order of the clergy who stupidly condemn an artificial restriction of
births; there is the coincident trouble of Austria with the Slavs, of
England with its subject peoples, and so on. In the eyes of the careful
student a hundred lines of circumstance and development have led to this
war. The melodramatic idea that it all springs from the free will of the
Kaiser, or of a group of soldiers and statesmen, need not be seriously
considered. Moreover, even when we introduce the personal element--and
the personality of the Kaiser has had a very considerable influence--it
is foolish to throw the whole burden on free will. The mood and outlook
and ambition of the Kaiser take their colour from his notoriously morbid
nervous frame. In a word, you have a mighty concurrence of movements,
whether acts of will or otherwise, converging in all parts of Europe
toward this war. Was God indifferent to the whole of those movements?
Those movements are particularly traceable in Europe during the last
fourteen years. Before that there was a similar concurrence of movements
eventuating in the South African War; and in the meantime a series of
processes and circumstances had given us the Russo-Japanese War and the
Balkan-Turkish War and the Mexican War. So we might go over the wars of
the nineteenth century and all earlier wars. The "permissiveness" or
indifference of the ruler of the universe grows amazingly. In the
meantime we had mighty catastrophes like the sinking of the _Titanic_
and other ships, the earthquakes at Messina and elsewhere, famines and
epidemics and floods in various places, and great numbers of murders,
railway and other accidents, etc. We begin to ask _where_ the ruling of
the universe comes in at all, and, as far as human events go, all that
we can gather in the way of reply is that sometimes individuals who pray
very fervently get their diseases healed or their coffers filled; and
even these claims do not pass rational inquiry.
Now here is the precise difficulty of the unbeliever, and this present
tragedy makes it acute. We ask our neighbour, or seek in some learned
theological treatise, what are the indications of this government of the
universe, and we are told about the making of stars and the decoration
of flowers and the putting of instincts into animals or pretty patterns
on their skins. But when we point out that the really important thing
in our part of the universe is this human life of ours, imperfectly
protected as yet against disease and malice (which is largely disease)
and natural forces, the theologian has no clear evidence to produce.
Even the evidence he draws from stars and flowers and peacocks' tails
and sunsets, with which he is, as a rule, very imperfectly acquainted,
is, of course, heatedly disputed, and the proper authorities on these
subjects are, on the whole, not well disposed toward his interpretation.
But we need not consider that here. Where we should most logically
expect the hand of Providence is in the human order, because in that
order catastrophe is infinitely more important, in view of man's
capacity for pain. Yet it is precisely in regard to this order that the
theologian is vaguest and least satisfactory. He talks grandly of God
moving every atom in the universe, counting the hairs of our heads,
numbering (but not preventing) the fall of the sparrows, and so on; but
when we ask for the evidence of God's concern with contemporary human
events he is very vague if they are good events, and, if they are evil,
he hastily disclaims any interference of the Deity. Some of our more
advanced theologians are claiming that the finest improvement they have
made in their science is to have brought God from _without_ the universe
(where no theologian had ever put him) and make him _immanent_ in it.
But they seem just as incapable as the others to trace his interposition
in human events.
Theologians still maintain a valiant and stubborn fight against
scientific men, but they do not fight historians. They are very keen on
maintaining the influence of God over atoms and stars and roses and
birds, but not half so keen to vindicate it in the life of man. The
story of the world, _our_ world, may be divided into three chapters: a
chapter describing the moulding of the globe and the rocks, a chapter
describing the slow evolution of the plants and animals, and a chapter
describing the antics and fortunes of man. Some may surrender the first
chapter to science, some the second chapter, but it looks as if they all
surrender the third. They have long been accustomed to surrender the
early part, and very much the longer and more laborious part, of man's
story to natural forces, or the devil. Then there was a melodramatic
notion that God, after the lapse of hundreds of thousands of years,
began to take an interest in one very small people and kept revealing
things to it, and smiting its enemies, until Christianity was given to
the world. History tells the story in a totally different way. We find
the stream of moral and religious evolution flowing steadily on nineteen
hundred years ago, much as we do to-day. At this point, of course, the
theologian does make a struggle with the historian. In proportion to the
imperfectness of his culture and the backwardness and conservatism of
his Church, he fights for miraculous interpositions in human events
nineteen hundred years ago. But we need not delay to examine that
difference of opinion, because the later period suffices for my purpose.
A few theologians, not well acquainted with history, see another
miraculous interposition in the fourth century, when Christianity was
established; and the Roman Catholic--in the intellectual rear, as
usual--believes in hundreds of miraculous interpositions, in small
matters, as late as the year 1914. But in order to take a broad view of
the matter we may leave these controversies with the more reactionary on
one side. The history of Europe for the last fifteen centuries at least
is now entrusted to able laymen, and it has been purged of divine
interpositions. Innumerable myths and legends, often based on what are
now acknowledged to be spurious documents, have been cast out of the
science, and we are presented with a quite continuous and purely natural
sequence of events. Religious historians like Bishop Creighton or Lord
Bryce do not find their periods broken by divine interpositions; the
writers of the Cambridge History do not occasionally arrest us before
some great event and warn us that the chain of human causation seems to
be obscure or discontinuous. There are, of course, problems of history,
but they are not obscurities which, like the obscure places in science,
tempt the theologian to enter and claim a divine interposition. The
story is from beginning to end--to use Nietzsche's phrase--"human, all
too human." On the whole, as it has been hitherto written, it is a story
of wars, and, though patriotic piety puts its gloss on the issue of a
war here and there, the historian does not find any serious problem in
them. No French historian will now claim divine action in the Napoleonic
wars, and assuredly few of us are prepared to see the finger of God in
the fortunate issue of Prussia's many campaigns since Frederick the
Great.
Whatever we may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of
that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is
working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some
pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through
whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will
eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more element of
miracle or revelation in his action than when he discovers the use of
steam or of aluminium or of the spectroscope. His mind expands and his
ideals rise. It is a little incongruous to suppose that some infinitely
wiser and affectionate parent was looking on all the time and giving no
assistance. In the dialogue between Mephistopheles and God which Goethe
prefixes to his _Faust_, the devil obviously scores. In the sight of
such an intelligence man must have made a pretty fool of himself during
the last 1500 years. We human beings are more charitable. Take the whole
story as the gradual development of human intelligence and emotion under
unfavourable political conditions, hampered by a despotic and perverse
clergy, and it seems natural enough.
This is the impression one gets from history, and the nearer history is
to our own time and the better we know it, the less it suggests a divine
guidance. There is something parochial or rural about the average
Christian way of looking at events. One day the German Christian goes to
church to thank God for driving the Russians out of East Prussia; the
next day the English Christian thanks the same God for killing or
wounding 20,000 Germans at Neuve Chapelle--with the help of 350 guns.
Yet such things as these are the only claims we have offered to us of
the action of God in human events. Neither the steps that man takes
onward nor the steps that he takes backward are ascribed to divine
influence. All that is claimed is that when a ship goes down, for
instance, he saves the saved, and "permits" the rest to be drowned; when
a war has been raging for a few months by his "permission," he puts a
stop to it when one army is worn out. The unbeliever is really entitled
to a good deal of sympathy for his inability to follow this tortuous
reasoning with confidence. One cannot entirely blame him for being more
interested in the heart of man than in the petals of a rose.
These considerations are, of course, not novel. I am only applying to
this special case of the war a difficulty that has been discussed in all
ages, and has been acutely felt by very able religious thinkers. How a
group of bishops can sit down to write, in very deliberate and elegant
language, that such a calamity as this makes the soul more sensible of
"the approach of Christ" is one of the many little mysteries of the
clerical mind. It has precisely the opposite effect in any logical mind.
When the way of life is smooth, and our nation or home is prospering, we
may be genially disposed to think that God is near and is looking after
us as well as the sparrows. But when a black storm bursts suddenly and
disastrously on us; when the earth shakes their roofs on ten thousand of
our fellows, or a great ship strikes a rock and pours a laughing crowd
suddenly into the lap of death; when vast provinces are laid desolate by
war, and we see the tens of thousands clasping the hand of their loved
ones for the last time, it seems rather uncanny that this should suggest
to any person the approach of Christ. To very many people it is a
confirmation of the general impression they get from the world-process
and the story of man: that these great forces deploy and interlace and
build up and destroy without the slightest intervention from without.
In our time, we must remember, this difficulty had already been
enormously increased. St. Augustine, who felt the problem acutely in the
prime of his intelligence, had really a very much lighter task than the
modern divine. He had merely to suggest why evil was permitted in the
narrow world he knew; and he had the great advantage of being able to
appeal to a primitive sin and primitive punishment of the race. The
problem became more serious when original sin, or at least the notion
that the race might justly be damned for one man's fault, was abandoned.
It became graver still when science discovered the tombs of inhabitants
of this globe who had lived during millions of earlier years, and showed
that the very law of their life and progress was struggle against evil.
Every attempt to minimise the struggle of those earlier ages has failed.
At a time when there was no possibility of "spiritual advantage" there
was acute consciousness of pain, the struggle and suffering were
prodigious. Theistic literature of the last half century, growing more
weary and more wistful in each decade, reflects the increasing
difficulty. If any man can see in this war a relief of the difficulty,
and not an appalling accentuation and illustration of it, he must be
gifted with a peculiar type of mind and emotion. It is more probable
that an increasing number will conclude that, if God is indifferent to
these things, they will be indifferent to him. Professor William James,
in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, declared that the only gods
the men of the new generation would recognise would be gods of some use
to them. The war does not encourage the chances of the Christian God.
A few modern religious thinkers seem to imagine that they have found
some relief by devising the formula that God's plan is to "co-operate
with man," and in those modern advances which I have freely admitted
they see indications of this co-operation. This new formula is not a
whit better than the other phrases which have, at various stages, been
regarded by religions people as profound thoughts. In the recent history
of moral progress we have, as a rule, a minority of high-minded men and
women struggling to impress their sentiments on the inert majority. The
new theologian is not daunted in the application of his theory by the
fact that a large proportion of these pioneers did not believe in God at
all, so I will not discuss that aspect; though no doubt the plain man
will find it interesting to trace how, in the earlier and more difficult
days of modern humanism, so few of the reformers were Christian
ministers and so many Rationalists. From the historical point of view,
however, we find this line of development quite intelligible. We find,
for instance, Robert Owen (a great Rationalist) advocating the
substitution of arbitration for war nearly a century ago, and we
discover the earlier sources of Owen's enthusiasm in English Radicals
like Godwin, who were affected by the early French Revolutionaries, who
had been influenced by Rousseau, and so on. It is a quite natural
evolution of ideas, as they find a congenial soil in each generation in
certain types of temperament. But where are the traces or what was the
nature of God's co-operation with these men? Looking to their generally
heterodox character and the hostility of the Churches to them, the idea
is not without humour; but, even if we reconcile ourselves to this
peculiar feature, anything in the nature of positive evidence of divine
action is wholly lacking, and we can understand the whole process
without it. The theory is merely a desperate and unfounded assertion of
men who are determined that God shall not be left out.
There is a further grave difficulty. One would imagine that the kind of
paternal affection which is ascribed to God would have induced him to
intervene at an earlier stage. The kind of father who co-operates with
the more gifted and ambitious of his children, and does nothing for the
less gifted and sluggish, is a narrow-minded and narrow-hearted man.
Affection turns rather to those who cannot help themselves, or who need
judicious and constant inspiration. This view we are considering is even
less flattering to God, because the aspiring children of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries seem able to dispense with his co-operation,
while the ignorant and priest-ridden children of earlier ages could do
little of themselves. The theologians who have found this new formula
are of the more liberal school. They do not attribute all the blunders
and crimes and failures of the Middle Ages to free will, to a sheer and
deliberate obstinacy in clinging to evil. They realise the overpowering
nature of the environment and the drastic discouragement by the clergy
of anything like novelty or initiative in ethics. It was then that man
needed God, if there is a God. But, on this theory, God argued with the
academic wisdom of a medieval theologian; he concluded that medieval men
were quite capable of originating modern ideas, and he would not
co-operate until they did. The theory is preposterous in every respect.
Finally, we have the very large class of candid or of hopelessly puzzled
Christians who give up the matter as a mystery. They do not understand
how this ruling of the universe which they seem to see clearly in stars
and flowers should become so obscure or disappear altogether in the
human order. They realise that, if this war were an isolated
occurrence, they might imagine God holding his hand for a season, for
some reason unknown to us; but they know that it is not an isolated
occurrence: it is part of the human order of things. It has been
preceded by other wars at intervals of every few years, and war itself
is only one of a series of catastrophes and calamities that splash the
human chronicle with innocent blood. They give it up, sorrowfully, and
find a thin consolation in learned formulæ about the impossibility of a
finite mind understanding an infinite mind, and so on: which give, as I
say, thin consolation, for one may at least see that an infinite
benevolence ought not to act worse than a moderate human benevolence.
Now if there were any very strong evidence of divine ruling outside the
human order, we might find a certain amount of logic in this position.
The mystery of a God who moves the stars and inspires the bees, yet
leaves man to his own unhappy impulses (after putting those impulses in
him), would be, one imagines, painful enough; but if there were
irresistible evidence that God does move the stars and quicken the bird
and beast, we might be compelled to reconcile ourselves to that unhappy
dilemma. There is, however, no such irresistible evidence. This is not
the place to examine such evidence as is adduced. I must be content to
recall the fact that it is all highly controverted; that theologians
tear to pieces each other's "proofs" of the existence of God; and that a
large and increasing body of cultivated men and women discard the
evidence entirely. So that, in the last resort, the situation is this:
on the one hand we have a number of very disputable suggestions, which
are growing fainter in proportion as science investigates these matters,
of divine action in stars and rocks and reptiles, and on the other hand
we have a stupendous mass of suffering, starting millions of years ago
at the very birth of consciousness and piled up mountains high in this
year 1915, which no thinker has ever yet reconciled with the notion of a
divine ruling of the life of man. This is a very grave and plain
situation, and if the clergy have nothing more to say about it than to
borrow from an ancient Hebrew certain offensive gibes at the unbeliever,
or to offer us the kind of apologies we examined in the last chapter,
one must conclude that they do not realise the situation. The war has
terribly accentuated the most terrible difficulty they ever had to face.
Whether there is intelligence manifested in nature is, after all, an
academic question which does not profoundly stir the modern world.
Whether there is benevolence, a moral personality, reflected in the
course of man's history is the much more important question. And this
appalling calamity will induce many to take a more candid view of the
world-process and conclude that, as far as the critical eye can see,
man's world seems to be left entirely to his own efforts, to his own
crimes and blunders and aspirations.