that polygamy, slaughter of prisoners of war, and blood sacrifices,
including human sacrifices, are divinely appointed institutions; and
this means that it will not allow the Bible to be introduced in schools
otherwise than as a collection of old chronicles, poems, oracles, and
political fulminations, on the same footing as the travels of Marco
Polo, Goethe’s Faust, Carlyle’s Past and Present and Sartor Resartus,
and Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust. Also the doctrine that our life in
this world is only a brief preliminary episode in preparation for
an all-important life to come, and that it does not matter how poor
or miserable or plague ridden we are in this world, as we shall be
gloriously compensated in the next if we suffer patiently, will be
prosecuted as seditious and blasphemous.
Such a change would not be so great as some of us fear, though it
would be a cataclysm if our present toleration and teaching of these
doctrines were sincere. Fortunately it is not. The people who take them
seriously, or even attach any definite meaning to the words in which
they are formulated, are so exceptional that they are mostly marked
off into little sects which are popularly regarded as not quite sane.
It may be questioned whether as much as one per cent of the people
who describe themselves as members of the Church of England, sending
their children to its baptismal fonts, confirmation rite, and schools,
and regularly attending its services, either know or care what they
are committed to by its dogmas or articles, or read and believe them
as they read and believe the morning paper. Possibly the percentage
of Nonconformists who know the Westminster Confession and accept it
may be slightly larger, because Nonconformity includes the extreme
sects; but as these sects play the most fantastic variations on the
doctrine of the Catechism, Nonconformity covers views which have been
violently persecuted by the Church as blasphemous and atheistic. I am
quite sure that unless you have made a special study of the subject
you have no suspicion of the variety and incompatibility of the
British religions that come under the general heading of Christian. No
Government could possibly please them all. Queen Elizabeth, who tried
to do it by drawing up thirtynine articles alternately asserting and
denying the disputed doctrines, so that every woman could find her own
creed affirmed there and the other woman’s creed denounced, has been a
complete failure except as a means of keeping tender consciences and
scrupulous intellects out of the Church. Ordinary clergymen subscribe
them under duress because they cannot otherwise obtain ordination.
Nobody pretends that they are all credible by the same person at the
same moment; and few people even know what they are or what they mean.
They could all be dropped silently without any shock to the real
beliefs of most of us.
A Capitalist Government must inculcate whatever doctrine is best
calculated to make the common people docile wage slaves; and a
Socialist Government must equally inculcate whatever doctrine will
make the sovereign people good Socialists. No Government, whatever
its policy may be, can be indifferent to the formation of the
inculcated common creed of the nation. Society is impossible unless
the individuals who compose it have the same beliefs as to what is
right and wrong in commonplace conduct. They must have a common creed
antecedent to the Apostles’ creed, the Nicene creed, the Athanasian
creed, and all the other religious manifestoes. Queen Mary Tudor and
Queen Elizabeth, King James the Second and King William the Third,
could not agree about the Real Presence; but they all agreed that it
was wrong to rob, murder, or set fire to the house of your neighbor.
The sentry at the gate of Buckingham Palace may disagree with the
Royal Family on many points, ranging from the imperial policy of the
Cabinet, or the revision of the Prayer Book, to which horse to back
for the Derby; but unless there were perfect harmony between them as
to the proper limits to the use of his rifle and bayonet their social
relation could not be maintained: there could be neither king nor
sentry. We all deprecate prejudice; but if all of us were not animated
sacks of prejudices, and at least nine-tenths of them were not the same
prejudices so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices
but call them common sense, we could no more form a community than so
many snakes.
This common sense is not all inborn. Some of it is: for instance, a
woman knows without being told that she must not eat her baby, and
that she must feed it and rear it at all hazards. But she has not
the same feeling about paying her rates and taxes, although this is
as necessary to the life of society as the rearing of infants to the
life of humanity. A friend of mine who was a highly educated woman,
the head of a famous college in the north of London, fiercely disputed
the right of the local authority to have the drainage of the college
examined by a public sanitary inspector. Her creed was that of a
jealously private lady brought up in a private house; and it seemed
an outrage to her that a man with whom she was not on visiting terms
should be legally privileged to walk into the most private apartments
of her college otherwise than at her invitation. Yet the health of the
community depends on a general belief that this privilege is salutary
and reasonable. The enlargement of the social creed to that extent is
the only way to get rid of cholera epidemics. But this very able and
highly instructed lady, though still in the prime of life, was too old
to learn.
The social creed must be imposed on us when we are children; for it is
like riding, or reading music at sight: it can never become a second
nature to those who try to learn it as adults; and the social creed, to
be really effective, must be a second nature to us. It is quite easy to
give people a second nature, however unnatural, if you catch them early
enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that
cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood
and not contradicted in the child’s hearing. Now that you are grown
up, nothing could persuade you that it is right to lame every woman
for life by binding her feet painfully in childhood on the ground that
it is not ladylike to move about freely like an animal. If you are the
wife of a general or admiral nothing could persuade you that when the
King dies you and your husband are bound in honor to commit suicide
so as to accompany your sovereign into the next world. Nothing could
persuade you that it is every widow’s duty to be cremated alive with
the dead body of her husband. But if you had been caught early enough
you could have been made to believe and do all these things exactly
as Chinese, Japanese, and Indian women have believed and done them.
You may say that these were heathen Eastern women, and that you are a
Christian Western. But I can remember when your grandmother, also a
Christian Western, believed that she would be disgraced for ever if she
let anyone see her ankles in the street, or (if she was “a real lady”)
walk there alone. The spectacle she made of herself when, as a married
woman, she put on a cap to announce to the world that she must no
longer be attractive to men, and the amazing figure she cut as a widow
in crape robes symbolic of her utter desolation and woe, would, if you
could see or even conceive them, convince you that it was purely her
luck and not any superiority of western to eastern womanhood that saved
her from the bound feet, the suttee, and the hara-kiri. If you still
doubt it, look at the way in which men go to war and commit frightful
atrocities because they believe it is their duty, and also because the
women would spit in their faces if they refused, all because this
has been inculcated upon them from their childhood, thus creating
the public opinion which enables the Government not only to raise
enthusiastic volunteer armies, but to enforce military service by heavy
penalties on the few people who, thinking for themselves, cannot accept
wholesale murder and ruin as patriotic virtues.
It is clear that if all female children are to have their minds formed
as the mind of Queen Victoria was formed in her infancy, a Socialist
State will be impossible. Therefore it may be taken as certain that
after the conquest of Parliament by the proletariat, the formation
of a child’s mind on that model will be prevented by every means
within the power of the Government. Children will not be taught to
ask God to bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our
proper stations, nor will they be brought up in such a way that it
will seem natural to them to praise God because he makes them eat
whilst others starve, and sing while others do lament. If teachers
are caught inculcating that attitude they will be sacked: if nurses,
their certificates will be cancelled, and jobs found for them that do
not involve intercourse with young children. Victorian parents will
share the fate of Shelley. Adults must think what they please subject
to their being locked up as lunatics if they think too unsocially; but
on points that are structural in the social edifice, constitutional
points as we call them, no quarter will be given in infant schools. The
child’s up-to-date second nature will be an official second nature,
just as the obsolete second nature inculcated at our public schools and
universities is at present.
When the child has learnt its social creed and catechism, and can read,
write, reckon, and use its hands: in short, when it is qualified to
make its way about in modern cities and do ordinary useful work, it
had better be left to find out for itself what is good for it in the
direction of higher cultivation. If it is a Newton or a Shakespear it
will learn the calculus or the art of the theatre without having them
shoved down its throat: all that is necessary is that it should have
access to books, teachers, and theatres. If its mind does not want
to be highly cultivated, its mind should be let alone on the ground
that its mind knows best what is good for it. Mentally, fallow is as
important as seedtime. Even bodies can be exhausted by overcultivation.
Trying to make people champion athletes indiscriminately is as idiotic
as trying to make them Ireland Scholars indiscriminately. There is no
reason to expect that Socialist rule will be more idiotic than the rule
which has produced Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and Squeers.
82
SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES
How far a Socialist State will tolerate a Church in our sense at all
is a pretty question. The quarrel between Church and State is an old
one. In speculating on it we must for the moment leave our personal
churchgoings and persuasions out of account, and try to look at the
question from the outside as we look at the religions of the east;
or, to put it bookishly, objectively, not subjectively. At present,
if a woman opens a consulting room in Bond Street, and sits there in
strange robes professing to foretell the future by cards or crystals
or revelations made to her by spirits, she is prosecuted as a criminal
for imposture. But if a man puts on strange robes and opens a church
in which he professes to absolve us from the guilt of our misdeeds,
to hold the keys of heaven and hell, to guarantee that what he looses
or binds on earth shall be loosed and bound in heaven, to alleviate
the lot of souls in purgatory, to speak with the voice of God, and
to dictate what is sin and what is not to all the world (pretensions
which, if you look at them objectively, are far more extravagant
and dangerous than those of the poor sorceress with her cards and
tea leaves and crystals), the police treat him with great respect;
and nobody dreams of prosecuting him as an outrageous impostor. The
objective explanation of his immunity is that a great many people do
not think him an impostor: they believe devoutly that he can do all
these things that he pretends to do; and this enables him and his
fellow priests to organize themselves into a powerful and rich body
calling itself The Church, supported by the money, the votes, and the
resolution to die in its defence, of millions of citizens. The priest
can not only defy the police as the common sorceress cannot: he has
only to convince a sufficient number of people of his divine mission
to thrust the Government aside; assume all its functions except the
dirty work that he does not care to soil his hands with and therefore
leaves to “the secular arm”; take on himself powers of life and death,
salvation and damnation; dictate what we shall all read and think;
and place in every family an officer to regulate our lives in every
particular according to his notions of right and wrong.
This is not a fancy picture. History tells us of an emperor crawling
on his knees through the snow and lying there all night supplicating
pardon from the head of a Church, and of a king of England flogging
himself in the cathedral where a priest had been murdered at his
suggestion. Citizens have been stripped of all their possessions,
tortured, mutilated, burned alive, by priests whose wrath did not spare
even the dead in their graves, whilst the secular rulers of the land
were forced, against their own interest and better sense, to abet them
in their furious fanaticism.
You may say that this was far off or long ago; that I am raking up old
tales of Canossa, of Canterbury in the middle ages, of Spain in the
fifteenth century, of Orange bogies like Bloody Mary and Torquemada;
that such things have not been done in England since the British
parliamentary government cut off Archbishop Laud’s head for doing them;
and that popes are now in greater danger of being imprisoned, and
priests and monks of being exiled, by emperors and republicans alike,
than statesmen of being excommunicated. You may add that the British
State burnt women alive for coining and for rebellion, and pressed
men to death under heavy weights for refusing for their wives’ and
children’s sake to plead to charges of felony, long after priests had
dropped such methods of dealing with heretics.
But even if women were still burnt at the stake as ruthlessly as
negroes are today by lynching mobs in America, there would still be a
struggle between Church and State as to which of them had the right
and power to burn. Who is to be allowed to exercise the great powers
that the Government of a modern civilized State must possess if its
civilization is to endure? The kings have subjugated the barons; the
parliaments have subjugated the kings; democracy has been subjugated by
plutocracy; and plutocracy is blindly provoking the subjugated Demos to
set up the proletarian State and make an end of Capitalist Oligarchy.
But there is a rival power which has persisted and will persist through
all these changes; and that is Theocracy, the power of priests
(sometimes called parsons) organized into Churches professing to derive
their authority from God. Crushed in one form it arises in another.
When it was organized as the Church of Rome its abuses provoked the
Reformation in England and Northern Europe, and in France the wrath of
Voltaire and the French revolution. In both cases it was disarmed until
its power to overrule the State was broken, and it became a mere tool
of Plutocracy.
But note what followed. The reaction against the priests went so far
in Britain, Switzerland, Holland, and America that at the cry of No
Popery every Roman Catholic trembled for his house and every priest for
his life. Yet under Laud and the Star Chamber in England, and Calvin
in Geneva, Theocracy was stronger than ever; for Calvin outpoped all
the popes, and John Knox in Scotland made her princes tremble as no
pope had ever done. But perhaps you will say again “This was long ago:
we have advanced since them”. So you have always been told; but look
at the facts within my own recollection. Among my contemporaries I can
remember Brigham Young, President Kruger, and Mrs Eddy. Joseph Smith,
Junior, was martyred only twelve years before I was born. You may never
have heard of Joseph; but I assure you his career was in many respects,
up to the date of his martyrdom, curiously like that of Mahomet, the
obscure Arab camel driver whose followers conquered half the world,
and are still making the position of the British Empire in Asia very
difficult. Joseph claimed direct revelation from God, and set up a
Theocracy which was carried on by Brigham Young, a Mormon Moses, one of
the ablest rulers on record, until the secular Government of the United
States became convinced that Mormon Theocracy was not compatible with
American Democracy, and took advantage of the popular prejudice against
its “plurality of wives” (polygamy) to smash it. It is by no means dead
yet; but for the moment its teeth, which were sharp, are drawn; and its
place in the struggle is occupied by The Church of Christ Scientist,
founded by an American lady (who might have been yourself) named Mrs
Eddy. I often pass two handsome churches of hers in London; and for all
I know there may be others that are out of my beat there. Now unless
you happen to be a Mormon or a Christian Scientist, it is probable
that you think about Mrs Eddy exactly as a Roman lady in the second
century a.d. thought about the mother of Christ, and about Joseph
Smith as an English lady in the Middle Ages thought about “the accurst
Mahound” You may be right or you may be wrong; but for all you know
Mrs Eddy a thousand years hence may be worshipped as the Divine Woman
by millions of civilized people, and Joseph Smith may be to millions
more what Mahomet now is to Islam. You never can tell. People begin by
saying “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” and end by saying “Behold the
Lamb of God!”
The secular Governments, or States, of the future, like those of the
present and past, will find themselves repeatedly up against the
pretensions of Churches, new and old, to exercise, as Theocracies,
powers and privileges which no secular Government now claims. The
trouble becomes serious when a new Church attempts to introduce new
political or social institutions, or to revive obsolete ones. Joseph
Smith was allowed to represent himself as having been directed by
an angel to a place where a continuation of the Bible, inscribed on
gold plates, was buried in the earth, and as having direct and, if
necessary, daily revelations from God which enabled him to act as an
infallible lawgiver. When he found plenty of able business women and
men to believe him, the Government of the United States held that their
belief was their own business and within their own rights as long as
Joseph’s laws harmonized with the State laws. But when Joseph revived
Solomonic polygamy the monogamic secular Government had to cross
swords with him. Not for many years did it get the upper hand; and its
adversary is not dead yet.
Mrs Eddy did the opposite: she did not introduce a new institution; but
she challenged one of the standing institutions of the secular State.
The secular State prescribed pathogenic inoculations as preventives of
disease, and bottles of medicine and surgical operations, administered
and performed by its registered doctors and surgeons, as cures; and
anyone who left a child or an invalid for whom she was responsible
undoctored was punished severely for criminal neglect. Some governments
refused to admit uninoculated persons into their territories. Mrs Eddy
revived the practice prescribed by St James in the New Testament,
instructing her disciples to have nothing to do with bottles and
inoculations; and immediately the secular government was at war with
Christian Science and began to persecute its healers.
This case is interesting because it illustrates the fact that new
Churches sometimes capture the secular government by denying that
they are Churches. The conflict between Mrs Eddy and the secular
governments was really a conflict between the Church of Christ
Scientist and the new Church of Jenner and Pasteur Scientists, which
has the secular governments in its pocket exactly as the Church of
Rome had Charlemagne. It also incidentally illustrates the tendency
of all Churches to institute certain rites to signalize the reception
of children and converts into the Church. The Jews prescribe a
surgical operation, fortunately not serious nor harmful. The Christian
Churches prescribe water baptism and anointing: also quite harmless.
The babies object vociferously; but as they neither foresee the rite
nor remember it they are none the worse. But the inoculations of the
modern Churches which profess Science, with their lists of miracles,
their biographies of their saints, their ruthless persecutions,
their threats of dreadful plagues and horrible torments if they are
dis-obeyed, their claims to hold the keys of mortal life and death,
their sacrifices and divinations, their demands for exemption from all
moral law in their researches and all legal responsibility in their
clinical practice, leave the pretensions of the avowed priests and
prophets nowhere, are dangerous and sometimes deadly; and it is round
this disguised Church that the persecutions and fanaticisms of today
rage. There is very little danger of a British Parliament persecuting
in the name of Christ, and none at all of its persecuting in the name
of Mahomet in the west; but it has persecuted cruelly for a century
in the name of Jenner; and there is a very serious danger of its
persecuting the general public as it now persecutes soldiers in the
name of Pasteur, whose portrait is already on the postage stamps of the
resolutely secularist (as it imagines) French Republic. In the broadest
thoroughfare of fashionable London we have erected a startling brazen
image of the famous Pasteurite surgeon Lord Lister, who, when the
present age of faith in scientific miracles has passed, will probably
be described as a high priest who substituted carbolic acid for holy
water and consecrated oil as a magic cure for festering wounds. His
methods are no longer in fashion in the hospitals; and he has been
left far behind as a theorist; but when the centenary of his birth was
celebrated in 1927, the stories of his miracles, told with boundless
credulity and technical ignorance in all the newspapers, shewed that he
was really being worshipped as a saint.
From this, I invite you to note how deceptive history may be. The
continual springing up of new Churches has always forced secular
governments to make and administer laws to deal with them, because,
though some of them are reasonable and respectable enough to be left
alone, and others are too strongly represented in Parliament and in
the electorate to be safely interfered with, a good many of which you
have never heard defy the laws as to personal decency and violate the
tables of consanguinity to such an extent that if the authorities did
not suppress them the people would lynch them. That is why tribunals
like the Inquisition and the Star Chamber had to be set up to bring
them to justice. But as these were not really secular tribunals, being
in fact instruments of rival Churches, their powers were abused, the
new prophets and their followers being restrained or punished, not
as offenders against the secular law, but as heretics: that is, as
dissenters from the Church which had gained control of the secular
government: the Church of Rome in the case of the Inquisition, and the
Church of England in the case of the Star Chamber.