between Churches and States for the powers of government, yet the
States do not disentangle themselves from the Churches, because the
members of the secular parliaments and Cabinets are all Churchmen of
one sort or another. In England this muddle is illustrated by the
ridiculous fact that the bishops of the Church of England have seats as
such in the House of Lords whilst the clergy are excluded as such from
the House of Commons. The Parliaments are the rivals of the Churches
and yet become their instruments; so that the struggle between them
is rather as to whether the Churches shall exercise power directly,
calling in the secular arm merely to enforce their decisions without
question, or whether they shall be mere constituents of the Parliaments
like any other society of citizens, leaving the ultimate decisions to
the State. If, however, any particular Church is powerful enough to
make it a condition of admission to Parliament, or of occupation of the
throne or the judicial bench, or of employment in the public services
or the professions, that the postulant shall be one of its members,
that Church will be in practice, if not in theory, stronger than it
could be as a Theocracy ruling independently of the secular State. This
power was actually achieved by the Church of England; but it broke down
because the English people would not remain in one Church. They broke
away from the Church of England in all directions, and formed Free
Churches. One of these, called the Society of Friends (popularly called
Quakers), carried its repudiation of Church of England ecclesiasticism
to the length of denouncing priests as impostors, set prayers as an
insult to God (“addressing God in another man’s words”), and church
buildings as “steeple houses”; yet this body, by sheer force of
character, came out of a savage persecution the most respected and
politically influential of religious forces in the country. When the
Free Churches could no longer be kept out of Parliament, and the
Church of England could not be induced to grant any of them a special
privilege, there was nothing for it but to admit everybody who was a
Christian Deist of any denomination. The line was still drawn at Jews
and Atheists; but the Jews soon made their way in; and finally a famous
Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, broke down the last barrier to the House
of Commons by forcing the House to accept, instead of the Deist oath,
a form of affirmation which relieved Atheists from the necessity of
perjuring themselves before taking their seats. We are now accustomed
to Jewish Prime Ministers; and we do not know whether our Gentile
Prime Ministers are Atheists or not, because it never occurs to us to
ask the question. The King alone remains bound by a coronation oath
which obliges him to repudiate the Church of many of his subjects,
though he has to maintain that Church and several others, some not even
Christian, in parts of the Empire where the alternative would be no
Church at all.
When Parliament is open to all the Churches, including the Atheist
Churches (for the Positivist Societies, the Ethical Societies, the
Agnostics, the Materialists, the Darwinian Natural Selectionists, the
Creative Evolutionists, and even the Pantheists are all infidels and
Atheists from the strict Evangelical or Fundamentalist point of view),
it becomes impossible to attach religious rites to our institutions,
because none of the Churches will consent to make any rites but their
own legally obligatory. Parliament is therefore compelled to provide
purely civil formalities as substitutes for religious services in the
naming of children, in marriage, and in the disposal of the dead. Today
the civil registrar will marry you and name your children as legally as
an archbishop or a cardinal; and when there is a death in the family
you can have the body cremated either with any sort of ceremony you
please or no ceremony at all except the registration of the death after
certification of its cause by a registered doctor.
As, in addition, you need not now pay Church rates unless you want to,
we have arrived at a point at which, from one end of our lives to the
other, we are not compelled by law to pay a penny to the priest unless
we are country landlords, nor attend a religious service, nor concern
ourselves in any way with religion in the popular sense of the word.
Compulsion by public opinion, or by our employers or landlords, is,
as we have seen, another matter; but here we are dealing only with
State compulsion. Delivered from all this, we are left face to face
with a body of beliefs calling itself Science, now more Catholic than
any of the avowed Churches ever succeeded in being (for it has gone
right round the world), demanding, and in some countries obtaining,
compulsory inoculation for children and soldiers and immigrants,
compulsory castration for dysgenic adults, compulsory segregation and
tutelage for “mental defectives”, compulsory sanitation for our houses,
and hygienic spacing and placing for our cities, with other compulsions
of which the older Churches never dreamt, at the behest of doctors and
“men of science”. In England we are still too much in the grip of the
old ways to have done either our best or our worst in this direction;
but if you care to know what Parliaments are capable of when they
have ceased to believe what oldfashioned priests tell them and lavish
all their natural childish credulity on professors of Science you
must study the statute books of the American State Legislatures, the
“crowned republics” of our own Dominions, and the new democracies of
South America and Eastern Europe. When all the States are captured by
the proletariat in the names of Freedom and Equality, the cry may arise
that the little finger of Medical Research (calling itself Science) is
thicker than the loins of Religion.
Now what made the oldfashioned religion so powerful was that at its
best (meaning in the hands of its best believers) there was much
positive good in it, and much comfort for those who could not bear
the cruelty of nature without some explanation of life that carried
with it an assurance that righteousness and mercy will have the last
word. This is the power of Science also: it, too, at its best has done
enormous positive good; and it also at its highest flight gives a
meaning to life which is full of encouragement, exultation, and intense
interest. You may yourself be greatly concerned as to whether the old
or the new explanation is the true one; but looking at it objectively
you must put aside the question of absolute truth, and simply observe
and accept the fact that the nation is made up of a relatively small
number of religious or scientific zealots, a huge mass of people who
do not bother about the business at all, their sole notion of religion
and morality being to do as other people in their class do, and a good
many Betwixt-and-Betweens. The neutrals are in one sense the important
people, because any creed may be imposed on them by inculcation during
infancy, whereas the believers and unbelievers who think for themselves
will let themselves be burnt alive rather than conform to a creed
imposed on them by any power except their own consciences. It is over
the inculcation, involving the creation of that official second nature
which we discussed in the preceding chapter, that the State finds
itself at loggerheads with the Churches which have not captured it.
Take a typical example or two. If any society of adults, calling itself
a Church or not, preaches the old doctrine of the resurrection of the
body at a great Last Judgment of all mankind, there is no likelihood
of the municipality of a crowded city objecting. But if a survival of
the childish idea that a body can be preserved for resurrection by
putting it into a box and burying it in the earth, whereas reducing it
to ashes in two hours in a cremation furnace renders its resurrection
impossible, leads any sect or Church or individual to preach and
practise intramural interment as a religious duty, then it is pretty
certain that the municipality will not only keep such preaching out
of its schools, but see to it that the children are taught to regard
cremation as the proper way of disposing of the dead in towns, and
forcibly prevent intramural interment whether pious parents approve of
it or not.
If a Church, holding that animals are set apart from human beings by
having no souls, and were created for the use of mankind and not for
their own sakes, teaches that animals have no rights, and women and men
no duties to them, their teaching on that point will be excluded from
the schools and their members prosecuted for cruelty to animals by the
secular authority.
If another Church wants to set up an abattoir in which animals will be
killed in a comparatively cruel manner instead of by a humane killer in
the municipal abattoir, it will not be allowed to do it nor to teach
children that it ought to be done, unless, indeed, it commands votes
enough to control the municipality to that extent; and if its members
refuse to eat humanely slaughtered meat they will have to advance, like
me, to vegetarianism.
When the question is raised, as it will be sooner or later, of the
reservation of our cathedrals for the sermons of one particular
Church, it will not be settled on the assumption that any one Church
has a monopoly of religious truth. It is settled at present on the
Elizabethan assumption that the services of the Church of England ought
to please everybody; and it is quite possible that if the services
of the Church of England were purified from its grosser sectarian
superstitions, and a form of service arrived at containing nothing
offensive to anyone desiring the consolation or stimulus of a religious
ritual, the State might very well reserve the cathedrals for that form
of service exclusively, provided that, as at present, the building were
available most of the time for free private meditation and prayer.
(You may not have realized that any Jew, any Mahometan, any Agnostic,
any woman of any creed or no creed, may use our cathedrals daily to
“make her soul” between the services.) To throw open the cathedrals to
the rituals of all the Churches is a physical impossibility. To sell
them on capitalist principles to the highest bidders to do what they
like with is a moral impossibility for the State, though the Church
has sold churches often enough. To simply make of them show places
like Stonehenge, and charge for admission, as the Church of England
sometimes does in the choir, would destroy their value for those who
cannot worship without the aid of a ritual.
There is also the Russian plan of the State taking formal possession
of the material property of the national Church, and then letting it
go on as before, with the quaint difference that the statesmen and
officials, instead of posing as devout Churchmen, sincerely or not,
as in England, solemnly warn the people that the whole business is a
superstitious mummery got up to keep them in submissive slavery by
doping them with promises of bliss after death if only they will suffer
poverty and slavery patiently before it. This, however, cannot last. It
is only the reaction of the victorious proletariat against the previous
unholy alliance of the Church with their former oppressors. It is mere
anti-clericalism; and when clericalism as we know it disappears, and
Churches can maintain themselves only as Churches of the people and not
as spiritual fortresses of Capitalism, the anti-clerical reaction will
pass away. The Russian Government knows that a purely negative attitude
towards religion is politically impossible; accordingly, it teaches the
children a new creed called Marxism, of which more presently. Even in
the first flush of the reaction the Soviet was more tolerant than we
were when our hour came to revolt. We frankly robbed the Church of all
it possessed and gave the plunder to the landlords. Long after that we
deliberately cut off our Archbishop’s head. Certainly the Soviet made
it quite clear to the Russian archbishop that if he did not make up his
mind to accept the fact of the revolution and give to the Soviet the
allegiance he had formerly given to the Tsar, he would be shot. But
when he very sensibly and properly made up his mind accordingly, he was
released, and is now presumably pontificating much more freely than the
Archbishop of Canterbury.
So far, I have dealt with the Churches objectively and not with
religion subjectively. It is an old saying: the nearer the Church the
farther from God. But we must cross the line just for a paragraph or
two. A live religion alone can nerve women to overcome their dread of
any great social change, and to face that extraction of dead religions
and dead parts of religions which is as necessary as the extraction of
dead or decaying teeth. All courage is religious: without religion we
are cowards. Men, because they have been specialized for fighting and
hunting whilst women, as the child-bearers, have had to be protected
from such risks, have got into the way of accepting the ferocities
of war and the daring emulations of sportsmanship as substitutes for
courage; and they have imposed that fraud to some extent on women. But
women know instinctively, even when they are echoing male glory stuff,
that communities live not by slaughter and by daring death, but by
creating life and nursing it to its highest possibilities. When Ibsen
said that the hope of the world lay in the women and the workers he was
neither a sentimentalist nor a demagogue. You cannot have read this far
(unless you have skipped recklessly) without discovering that I know as
well as Ibsen did, or as you do, that women are not angels. They are as
foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to
life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes
a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced
to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is
to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.
But the homicidal heroes are often abject cowards in the face of new
ideas, and veritable Weary Willies when they are asked to think. Their
heroism is politically mischievous and useless. Knowing instinctively
that if they thought about what they do they might find themselves
unable to do it, they are afraid to think. That is why the heroine has
to think for them, even to the extent of often having no time left to
think for herself. She needs more and not less courage than a man;
and this she must get from a creed that will bear thinking of without
becoming incredible.
Let me then assume that you have a religion, and that the most
important question you have to ask about Socialism is whether it
will be hostile to that religion. The reply is quite simple. If your
religion requires that incomes shall be unequal, Socialism will do
all it can to persecute it out of existence, and will treat you much
as the government of British India treated the Thugs in 1830. If your
religion is compatible with equality of income, there is no reason on
earth to fear that a Socialist Government will treat it or you any
worse than any other sort of government would; and it would certainly
save you from the private persecution, enforced by threats of loss of
employment, to which you are subject under Capitalism today, if you
are in the employment of a bigot.
There is, however, a danger against which you should be on your guard.
Socialism may be preached, not as a far-reaching economic reform, but
as a new Church founded on a new revelation of the will of God made by
a new prophet. It actually is so preached at present. Do not be misled
by the fact that the missionaries of Church Socialism do not use the
word God, nor call their organization a Church, nor decorate their
meeting-places with steeples. They preach an inevitable, final, supreme
category in the order of the universe in which all the contradictions
of the earlier and lower categories will be reconciled. They do not
speak, except in derision, of the Holy Ghost or the Paraclete; but they
preach the Hegelian Dialectic. Their prophet is named neither Jesus nor
Mahomet nor Luther nor Augustine nor Dominic nor Joseph Smith, Junior,
nor Mary Baker Glover Eddy, but Karl Marx. They call themselves, not
the Catholic Church, but the Third International. Their metaphysical
literature begins with the German philosophers Hegel and Feuerbach,
and culminates in Das Kapital, the literary masterpiece of Marx,
described as “The Bible of the working classes”, inspired, infallible,
omniscient. Two of their tenets contradict oneanother as flatly as
the first two paragraphs of Article 27 of the Church of England. One
is that the evolution of Capitalism into Socialism is predestined,
implying that we have nothing to do but sit down and wait for it to
occur. This is their version of Salvation by Faith. The other is that
it must be effected by a revolution establishing a dictatorship of the
proletariat. This is their version of Salvation by Works.
The success of the Russian revolution was due to its leadership by
Marxist fanatics; but its subsequent mistakes had the same cause.
Marxism is not only useless but disastrous as a guide to the practice
of government. It gets no nearer to a definition of Socialism than as
a Hegelian category in which the contradictions of Capitalism shall
be reconciled, and in which political power shall have passed to
the proletariat. Germans and Clydeside Scots find spiritual comfort
in such abstractions; but they are unintelligible and repulsive to
Englishwomen, and could not by themselves qualify anyone, English,
Scotch, or German, to manage a whelkstall for five minutes, much less
to govern a modern State, as Lenin very soon found out and very
frankly confessed.
But Lenin and his successors were not able to extricate the new
Russian national State they had set up from this new Russian
international (Catholic) Church any more than our Henry II or the
Emperor who had come to Canossa were able to extricate the English
State and the medieval Empire from the Church of Rome. Nobody can
foresee today whether the policy of Russia in any crisis will be
determined on secular and national grounds by the Soviet or by the
Third International on Marxist grounds. We are facing the Soviet as
Queen Elizabeth faced Philip of Spain, willing enough to deal with
him as an earthly king, but not as the agent of a Catholic Theocracy.
In Russia the State will sooner or later have to break the temporal
power of the Marxist Church and take politics out of its hands, exactly
as the British and other Protestant States have broken the temporal
power of the Roman Church, and been followed much more drastically
by the French and Italian States. But until then the Church of Marx,
the Third International, will give as much trouble as the Popes did
formerly. It will give it in the name of Communism and Socialism,
and be resisted not only by Capitalists but by the Communists and
Socialists who understand that Communism and Socialism are matters for
States and not for Churches to handle. King John was no less Christian
than the Pope when he said that no Italian priest should tithe and
toll in his dominions; and our Labor leaders can remain convinced
Socialists and Communists whilst refusing to stand any foreign or
domestic interference from the Third International or to acknowledge
the divinity of Marx.
Still, our Protestant repudiation of the authority of the new Marxist
Church should not make us forget that if the Marxist Bible cannot be
taken as a guide to parliamentary tactics, the same may be said of
those very revolutionary documents the Gospels. We do not on that
account burn the Gospels and conclude that the preacher of The Sermon
on the Mount has nothing to teach us; and neither should we burn Das
Kapital and ban Marx as a worthless author whom nobody ought to read.
Marx did not get his great reputation for nothing: he was a very great
teacher; and the people who have not yet learnt his lessons make most
dangerous stateswomen and statesmen. But those who have really learnt
from him instead of blindly worshipping him as an infallible prophet
are not Marxists any more than Marx himself was a Marxist. I myself
was converted to Socialism by Das Kapital; and though I have since had
to spend a good deal of time pointing out Marx’s mistakes in abstract
economics, his total lack of experience in the responsible management
of public affairs, and the unlikeness at close quarters of his typical
descriptions of the proletariat to any earthly working woman or of the
bourgeoisie to any real lady of property, you may confidently set down
those who speak contemptuously of Karl Marx either as pretenders who
have never read him or persons incapable of his great mental range. Do
not vote for such a person. Do not, however, vote for a Marxist fanatic
either, unless you can catch one young enough or acute enough to grow
out of Marxism after a little experience, as Lenin did. Marxism,
like Mormonism, Fascism, Imperialism, and indeed all the would-be
Catholicisms except Socialism and Capitalism, is essentially a call
to a new Theocracy. Both Socialism and Capitalism certainly do what
they can to obtain credit for representing a divinely appointed order
of the universe; but the pressure of facts is too strong for their
pretensions: they are forced to present themselves at last as purely
secular expedients for securing human welfare, the one advocating
equal distribution of income, and the other private property with free
contract, as the secret of general prosperity.
83
CURRENT CONFUSIONS
I could go on like this for years; but I think I have now told you
enough about Socialism and Capitalism to enable you to follow the
struggle between them intelligently. You will find it irritating
at first to read the newspapers and listen to the commonplaces of
conversation on the subject, knowing all the time that the writers
and talkers do not know what they are writing and talking about. The
impulse to write to the papers, or intervene in the conversation to set
matters right, may be almost irresistible. But it must be resisted,
because if you once begin there will be no end to it. You must sit
with an air of placid politeness whilst your neighbors, by way of
talking politics, denounce the people they do not like as Socialists,
Bolshevists, Syndicalists, Anarchists, and Communists on the one side,
and Capitalists, Imperialists, Fascists, Reactionaries, and Bourgeois
on the other, none of them having an idea of the meaning of these words
clear enough to be called without flattery the ghost of a notion.
A hundred years ago they would have called one another Jacobins,
Radicals, Chartists, Republicans, Infidels, and even, to express
the lowest depth of infamy, Co-operators; or, contrariwise, Tories,
Tyrants, Bloated Aristocrats, and Fundholders. None of these names hurt
now: Jacobins and Chartists are forgotten; republics are the rule and
not the exception in Europe as well as in America; Co-operators are as
respectable as Quakers; Bloated Aristocracy is the New Pauperism; and
the proletariat, with its millions invested in Savings Certificates
and Savings Bank deposits, would not at all object to being described
as having money “in the funds”, if that expression were still current.
But the names in the mouths of the factions mean nothing anyhow. They
are mere electioneering vituperation. In France at elections the
Opposition posters always exhort the electors to vote against Assassins
and Thieves (meaning the Cabinet); and the Government posters “feature”
precisely the same epithets, whilst the candidates in their own homes
call their pet dogs Bandits when pretending to scold them. It all means
nothing. They had much better call each other Asses and Bitches (they
sometimes do, by the way), because everyone knows that a man is not
an ass nor a woman a bitch, and that calling them so is only a coarse
way of insulting them; whereas most people do not know what the words
Bolshevik, Anarchist, Communist, and so forth mean, and are too easily
frightened into believing that they denote every imaginable extremity
of violence and theft, rapine and murder. The Russian word Bolshevik,
which has such a frightful sound to us, means literally nothing more
than a member of a parliamentary majority; but as an English epithet
it is only the political form of Bogey or Blackguard or the popular
Bloody, denoting simply somebody or something with whom the speaker
disagrees.