RELIGION AND PROGRESS
Literature--at its highest estimate--is, however, only the luxury of
the few. It influences a strictly limited class. It is produced by a
still more limited class. It is so little operative upon the general
life of the nation that its very claim to be considered in a survey of
the “Condition of England” is doubtful. The published writings which
in the least degree influence the life and opinion of the majority are
the published writings not of the present but of the past. In so far
as such existence occupies itself with anything beyond the newspapers
or the sensational and generally excellent cheap fiction of the day,
it is with the “World’s Classics,” or the reprints of established
authors, which now are so plentifully provided in portable form by the
various contemporary publishers. Whatever evidence of weariness or
revolt may be exhibited by the tiny group of practising authors makes
no impression upon the contented, boisterous spirit of Middle Class
England; which is inclined to attribute all such criticism to a temper
soured by disappointment or a disordered digestion. And below such
classes lie the huge and inarticulate multitudes of the city people,
who find what spiritual and emotional satisfactions “literature” can
bring in the journals and popular writings which they consume with
ever-increasing avidity. They seek romance--and find it--in a complex
murder case, in stories of crime which seem to the fastidious sordid
and disgusting, in stories dependent in their appeal upon sudden
vicissitudes of fortune, in which chance or resolution are always
breaking down the insupportable sequences of cause and effect. That a
man shall reap as he has sown, that to-morrow shall be as yesterday,
that inevitable law shall bind and control the revolt of human passion
against circumstance--these are the affirmations of moralist and
philosopher against which the popular spirit is in continual rebellion.
Rebellion will endure so long as the human will affirms itself free,
and passion can draw its inspiration from some fire beyond the
boundaries of the world. That fire descends in the Divine fury of all
revolutions; which burn up and suddenly consume the civilisation which
has become orderly and comfortable and weary of it all. It descends
also when to some remote obscure human being, set in the enormous city,
life suddenly acquires significance and high meaning, in utter devotion
to a person or a cause.
To such the optimism and rejoicing of Jefferies or Morris is as much
an enigma as the questionings and denials of Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr.
Bernard Shaw. They experience no exultation in Nature because they
are cut off from the experience of Nature. They are untroubled by
the question of the goal of the industrial process because their
own particular part in it--the daily labour, the maintenance of
the home, the occasional recreation of Saturday Sport or Sunday
Excursion--absorbs all their available energies. “In June 1902,”
says Mr. Ensor, “the writer piloted four crippled workmen from a
working-class district in Manchester about some grounds on the edge of
the suburbs, and put to them a practical flower catechism. Three of
them, be it noted, had, before the events which left them cripples,
enjoyed high wages and relative prosperity. None of them knew or could
name forget-me-nots, daisies, dandelions, clover, pansies, or lilies
of the valley, three of them were baffled by a poppy, the fourth felt
confident that it was ‘a rose.’”[26] Of what avail, to such a company,
to proclaim the exultation of the pageant of Summer, or the joy in old
walled gardens under the apple trees “at the right time of the year.”
And the crowd which grows delirious over the spectacle of the football
contests, and frankly sets itself to enjoyment, in its own jolly
fashion, in the Election scrimmage or on an August Bank Holiday, is not
likely to find either inspiration or sadness in the problem of what is
to be the fate of the human race when economic stability is finally
secured.
Among all of these--and they comprise in all classes the overwhelming
majority--the place of a Philosophy or a Literature must be taken by a
Religion. And the question of the survival of a Religion--in the most
liberal interpretation of the term--is the question of the survival
of any extra-material ideal in the civilisation of the twentieth
century. In this, the last of our researches into “the Condition of
England,” generalisation is more than ever difficult. Religions which
appear dead are so often discovered to be only sleeping, variations
in faiths and devotions are so frequent between youth and age, a dark
fortune and a bright, that it is quite impossible to accept any mere
superficial demonstration of development or decay. Statistics of
church-going, varying from generation to generation, such as those of
a recent census in London, may indicate a fluctuation in faith, or
an alteration in social custom. Impressions of individual observers,
such as the researches of Mr. Charles Booth and his assistants
into the religious life of the Capital, may at the best be the
impressions gathered from various separated workers set in the midst
of silent untestifying millions. In every age the sterner moralist
has proclaimed a national apostasy, and witnessed with astonishment a
world repudiating its ancient pieties. In every age the prophecy of
immediate collapse has been falsified by the events of history. More
than a hundred and fifty years ago the least sensational of all great
Christian apologists declared that in England “it is come, I know
not how, to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much a
subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be
fictitious.” “And accordingly,” he continues in famous words, “they
treat it as if, in the present age, this was an agreed point amongst
all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a
principal subject of mirth and ridicule as it were, by way of reprisals
for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.” Yet
the “pleasures of the world” find themselves still interrupted by a
faith which, with its grave dug and its epitaph set up, unexpectedly
refuses to expire. Any variation or section of it, whose end has been
confidently predicted, will suddenly flare up again into violent
life and upset all the calculations of its undertakers. In 1830 “the
acutest characters of the time,” says Mr. Wilfred Ward, “considered
that the Church of England was on its death-bed.” “It was folding its
robes,” was Mozley’s verdict, “to die with what decency it could.”
“The Church as it now stands,” wrote Arnold, “no human power could
save.” But to-day on any impartial judgment the “Established Church”
whatever gains or losses it may have received in the long struggle
with indifference and unbelief, would never be threatened with any
such suggestions of immediate destruction. Sidney Smith in 1827 could
plead for toleration to Roman Catholics not because they were strong
but because they were weak. The power of the Papacy was obviously a
dead thing, in the future so conspicuously to become impotent, that he
could exhort his fellow-countrymen to some charity towards a forlorn
and piteous supplicant. “There is no Court of Rome,” he could assert,
“and no Pope. There is a waxwork Pope and a waxwork Court of Rome.
Popes of flesh and blood have long since disappeared. The follies of
one century,” he proclaimed, “are scarcely credible to that which
succeeds it; what will be said of all the intolerable trash which is
issued forth at public meetings of ‘No Popery’? If the world lasts till
1927, this childish nonsense will have got out of the drawing-room and
passed through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen.” “If the world
lasts till 1927,” there will probably be still orators of “No Popery,”
and scornful critics of the same. But he would be a rash prophet to-day
who would endorse Sidney Smith’s argument for toleration of a Pope and
Court of Rome as being “waxworks,” when these “waxworks” have revealed
themselves, in the interval, so amazingly alive.
Yet I think there can be no doubt that apart from any questions of
future revival, present belief in religion, as a conception of life
dependent upon supernatural sanctions or as a revelation of a purpose
and meaning beyond the actual business of the day, is slowly but
steadily fading from the modern city race. Tolerance, kindliness,
sympathy, civilisation continually improve. Affirmation of any
responsibility, beyond that to self and to humanity, continually
declines. Life therefore gradually ceases to be influenced or coloured
by any atmosphere of “other worldliness.” Present disabilities find
no compensation in the hope of a future redress, which makes the
present endurable. The general standard of humanitarian sentiment is
probably higher in the cities than ever before, certainly exhibiting
immense advance from that in the rude squalid barbarism of the
submerged eighteenth-century life, or the vast penury and discontent
of the early nineteenth. But a “background” was implied or assumed
practically by the whole population, in these troublous days. Men
lived as the beasts, and as the beasts perished. Yet few of them
would have definitely denied that there existed a Creator and there
awaited for them a judgment. The “Atheist” was as unpopular a figure
as the Republican; and the sacking of the house of a “Unitarian” as
congenial an occupation as a “No Popery” riot. To-day that “background”
has vanished. The Churches are extraordinarily active, endeavouring
in this way and in that to influence the lives of the people. Their
humanitarian and social efforts are widely appreciated. Their definite
dogmatic teachings seem to count for little at all. They labour on
steadily amid a huge indifference. The very material of their appeal is
vanishing. Fear which is the beginning of wisdom no longer terrifies a
society which sees orderly arrangements everywhere accepting the secure
as the normal. It cannot believe that, even if any future world exists
at all--of which existence it is becoming increasingly doubtful--that
future world will not in essence re-establish the decencies and
commonplaces of the modern city state. There is less material therefore
to-day for the appeal--to the general--of the revivalist preacher, with
which Wesley and Whitefield changed the face of eighteenth-century
England. The fleeing from the city of Destruction, the crying out
against the “burden” of sin, the vision of the flames of hell flaring
close to the Celestial City, represent an apparatus of experience that
is alien to the present. “Religion,” was Dolling’s testimony from
Poplar, “has, so to speak, gone to pieces. There is no opposition. We
do not care enough to oppose. God is not in any of our thoughts: we
do not even fear Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we
have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to. Heaven has no
attraction, because we should be out of place there. And Hell has no
terrors.”
And although this fading of the background is perhaps less manifest
in country than in town, and less in the industrial provinces than in
the capital, its effect can be apprehended amongst all classes of the
community and throughout the whole of the modern world. The meaning
is gone from phrases which are still repeated, whose significance is
becoming historical merely. The tide is ebbing within and without the
Churches. The drift is towards a non-dogmatic affirmation of general
kindliness and good fellowship, with an emphasis rather on the service
of men than the fulfilment of the will of God. Most modern activities
of the great religious bodies are coming more and more to enlarge
themselves into efforts towards social or humanitarian reforms. Even
the noisy warfare between the various denominations may be interpreted
less as a sign of secure vitality than as evidence of uncertain
position; a struggle excited less by confidence than by foreboding.
Whirlpools of brave and often feverish energy are maintained amid the
prevailing indifference. The children are everywhere persuaded to
attend the centres of religious teaching; everywhere, as they struggle
to manhood and womanhood in a world of such doubtful certainties,
they exhibit a large falling away. The sternness and severity and
compelling claims of the ancient injunctions to repentance and an
ordered life become replaced by a general sense of vague and misty
optimism, in which the former beliefs are less definitely denied than
put aside as negligible and irrelevant to the business of the day.
“The great bulk,” is one general verdict of Mr. Booth’s investigation,
“seem to be incapable of attaining to that pressing sense of sin
which is the common basis not only of these but of most other forms
of Christian teaching.” “Those who have any definite convictions,”
testifies a hospital chaplain, “are few and far between: they have for
the most part put religion deliberately out of their lives, and dislike
to be reminded of it.” Another observer finds “a very great variety
of aim, but an almost universal sense of disappointment.” “All have
empty churches,” is the sweeping verdict over one large industrial
borough, “and the general attitude of the people is that of complete
indifference.” “Those of the poor who attend religious services,” is
another general verdict, “are mostly bought.” “They take their religion
lightly,” is perhaps the final word upon twentieth-century England,
“and are much inclined to believe that it will all come right in the
end.”[27]
These changes amongst the wealthy and prosperous are perhaps
negligible; because--with of course many exceptions--in no society have
“they that have riches” ever entered but hardly into the kingdom of any
God. But among the Middle Classes--the centre and historical support
of England’s Protestant creed--the drift away is acknowledged by all
to be conspicuous--by friend as well as by enemy. The country is here
following the town; and amongst the industrial people the prophecy of
Taine thirty years ago would appear to be fulfilling itself to-day: “By
an insensible and slow backward movement, the great rural mass, like
the great urban mass, is gradually going back to Paganism.”
It is a European movement, conspicuous even to the superficial
observer. At intervals there are efforts at diagnosis, even random
efforts at cure. Missions and revivals produce transitory tides
invigorating the older faiths--like the Catholic reaction in France
after the disasters of 1870, or the rise of the Salvation Army a little
later in the great towns of England. Despite such rallies, however,
the process continues. It continues without violence, continuously,
steadily, as a kind of impersonal motion of secular change. It is the
passing of a whole civilisation away from the faith in which it was
founded and out of which it has been fashioned. Mr. Hueffer, in his
_Spirit of the People_, tells the story of a neighbour who after a late
evening service in the village church suddenly discovered that he no
longer believed in the immortality of the soul. And that is typical of
the change in the world of to-day. It is not becoming atheist. It is
ceasing to believe, without being conscious of the process, until it
suddenly wakes up to the fact that the process is complete.
Most attempted explanations fall into the quite natural error of
ascribing the indifference towards the enterprise of the Churches of
the English city populations to those particular elements of their
teaching or action which they regard as pernicious. In examination
of these mysterious multitudes which have collected in the new towns
it is always possible to find anything that one desires--drunkenness
and temperance, happiness and misery, aspiration and indifference,
cowardice and courage. This is specially true when the observer seeks
to penetrate beneath the surface and to examine the actual spiritual
beliefs and apprehensions accepted by large masses of men whose
thoughts on such subjects are never clearly expressed. A few years
ago a number of the religious leaders of this country collected in a
symposium their explanation of this change.[28] And the replies are
very characteristic in their reference of causes to things which are
disliked or denied. Dr. Horton, from his study at Hampstead, opines
that drink is the chief cause of the indifference to Christianity of
the working classes. He would add also absence of good preaching. He
judges from the crowds which come to hear the good preacher, that
preachers of similar power would draw similar crowds beneath every
pulpit. But it is just as possible, and perhaps more demonstrable by
experience, that the good preacher only attracts the preacher-loving
class from the bad preachers, without substantially recruiting the
class from the indifferent outside. The water is decanted from bottle
to bottle without increasing its bulk. And drink certainly does not
separate from religion the Scotch or Irish in their own land, or the
Irish in the great cities of England and America. Nor is there any
particular reason why drunkenness should exercise a more general
estrangement than the other, more respectable of the deadly sins. Mr.
Silas Hocking, again, dislikes war and sacerdotalism. He therefore
announces that the Church’s alliance with war and sacerdotalism are
the cause of the modern falling away from religion. But the Church
and war have lived in some condition of mutual tolerance for nineteen
centuries. And as in his vision Christianity practically ceased to
exist, “since in the early centuries it became corrupted by paganism,”
we may assume that here also some friendly agreement had been possible
beforetime, which might not be impossible to-day.
Many social reformers very frequently ascribe the abandonment of
the churches by the working classes to the fact that the Church has
been the Church of a class, filled with respectabilities and caste
distinctions, and hostile to the newer movements for the collective
welfare of labour. Such reformers, that is to say, eagerly desire
that the Church should abandon the stiff and formal ways of its class
traditions, should become more friendly and universal in its appeal,
and should concern itself actively and intelligently with the problems
of poverty and social discontent. But it would seem impossible to
assume that such a transformation of organised Christianity would
bring back the people to the spiritual affirmation of their fathers.
Letters frequently appear in the newspapers, alike pathetic and
passionate, from those who have been sweated by “Christian” employers,
or have been offended by hearing clergymen openly supporting “wars of
aggression” or opposing the franchise and free libraries. But there is
no evidence--because in the nature of things such evidence cannot be
forthcoming--to prove that the correspondents or the crowd represented
by them would be accepting the enormous affirmations of Theism or of
Christianity if all these things were suddenly changed.
Again, many good men have perhaps too fatuously discovered and
proclaimed that there is “no hostility to Christ” amongst the working
men. One observer in the symposium above quoted can find satisfaction
in the fact that a crowd of men flung up their caps and cheered His
name on Tower Hill. “Such straws show which way the wind blows.”
Such “straws” show nothing more than any noise and excitement have
shown since the day of the riding into Jerusalem, or the scene in
the Judgment Hall of Pilate. Why should any one to-day be “hostile
to Christ”? And what relationship has such vague toleration or
applause to anything in the nature of a vital and compelling
faith? All such sentiment belongs to the same class as that of the
comfortable householder, leading a life of respectable and benignant
self-indulgence, who will inform you in a burst of confidence that his
religion is that of the “Sermon on the Mount,” or one “of willingness
to do good.” There is no more common illusion than the interpretation
of ethical judgment as spiritual affirmation. To all such advocates
of an inexacting standard Christianity appears as a rule of common
life, which has been somehow evaded or destroyed. But Christianity
is something widely different from a rule of common life. It is a
creed, not a system of morals. Religion is an attempt at some ultimate
assertion concerning the being and purpose of the world. No tolerance
of the virtues specifically Christian or admiration of a life lost in
the distant centuries can guarantee that creed’s validity, or restore a
faith which appears to be slipping over the visible horizon of mankind.
There is morality without faith; kindliness and devotion with no
“consciousness of a divine inheritance or of the sin by which it is
lost.” Such is the testimony of Canon Barrett, from thirty years’
experience of every class in English society. The people of East London
especially are better mannered, better dressed, more respectable, more
sober than the people of a previous generation. But they have “less
idealism,” “less superstition.” “Joy” is in consequence lacking. Life
is more respectable, less vivid. The salt of life is somehow losing
its savour. Whatever scale of value is represented by the outlook upon
larger spiritual kingdoms is vanishing. And the scale is in consequence
contracting, truncated. “The desertion of the churches and the somewhat
undignified efforts of the churches to attract congregations are
equally the outward signs of spiritual failing.”
Here is the kernel of the whole matter. Ethical advance is
accompanied (as it seems) by spiritual decline. It was the process
which so perplexed Mr. Gladstone more than half a century ago.
Growth of morality is coincident with decline in religion. Violent
controversialists still endeavour to demonstrate the opposite,
exhibiting murders, thefts, and adulteries accompanying the
introduction of secular education or the disestablishment of a Church.
On a large survey the facts do not bear such an interpretation. The
work of civilisation steadily advances. The vision of a universe beyond
or behind the material steadily fades.
* * * * *
My effort here is confined to diagnosis, not prophecy. And prophecy
concerning religion is of all forecasts the most impossible. For never
is it safe to assume that any piece of solid ground may not suddenly
flare and tremble, or any common bush commence to burn with fire.
Remembering the historic failures in similar ages of rationalism, the
contemptuous dismissal by Tacitus, in a kind of footnote, of the faith
which was to transform the world, he would be rash who asserted that
even to-day and in this secure civilisation there may not be the seed
growing which will survive when this very society shall have vanished
from the earth. My own belief is that the so-called intellectual
difficulties of belief are to-day less operative amongst the masses of
mankind than certain other changes which are powerful in modern life.
I should put in the forefront of these the creation of the towns, with
their machinery and their confusion; the condition of labour within
their boundaries; and the establishment of security and order in the
present “Roman Peace” which has come upon the western races of Europe.
The result, as Dolling saw it amongst his people in East London, is
a life universally dull, decorous, decent. Nor can we estimate what
developments may originate from such a condition of uniform comfort and
acquiescence. General Booth in his Salvation Army, the most remarkable
spiritual product of the present age, has shown how the inspiration may
come in a sudden flaming up of the incalculable elements of the soul
of man, amongst seemingly drab and unimportant people; with a craving
for self-immolation, and the intrusion into commonplace accepted ways
of the vision of blood and fire. The fruit and duration of such a state
are equally difficult to foresee. Sidgwick concluded at the end of his
days that “humanity would never acquiesce in a godless world.” “If
they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts,” was Carlyle’s
fierce comment, “all or most of them, there will be seen for some
length of time, perhaps for several centuries, such a world as few
are dreaming of.” The first experiment on a large scale of society
organised on a positive basis came to a premature end: through the
intrusion of Christianity and the advent of the barbarian. The second
seems about to be established. It should prove an interesting study to
any observer possessing the felicity of seeing alike its commencement
and its close. But it is not impossible that the same two disturbing
elements--the advent of the barbarian, intrusion of Christianity--may
once again prevent the realisation, upon adequate scale and through any
substantial period, of life seeking comfort in a rational society.