The Episcopal Church, at the late Triennial Convention, took up and
determined to make a more vigorous effort to deal with the problem
presented by the irreligion of the poor and the dishonesty of
church-members. It is an unfortunate and, at first sight, somewhat
puzzling circumstance, that so many of the culprits in the late
cases of fraud and defalcation should have been professing
Christians, and in some cases persons of unusual ecclesiastical
activity, and that this activity should apparently have furnished no
check whatever to the moral descent. It is proposed to meet the
difficulty by more preaching, more prayer, and greater use of lay
assistance in church-work. There is nothing very new, however,
about the difficulty. There is hardly a year in which it is not
deplored at meetings of church organizations, and in which solemn
promises are not made to devise some mode of keeping church-members
up to their professions, and gathering more of the church-less
working-classes into the fold; but somehow there is not much
visible progress to be recorded. The church scandals multiply in
spite of pastors and people, and the workingmen decline to show
themselves at places of worship, although the number of places of
worship and of church-members steadily increases.
We are sorry not to notice in any of the discussions on the subject
a more frank and searching examination of the reason why religion
does not act more powerfully as a rule of conduct. Until such an
examination is made, and its certain results boldly faced by church
reformers, the church cannot become any more of a help to right
living than it is now, be this little or much. The first thing which
such an examination would reveal is a thing which is in everybody's
mind and on everybody's tongue in private, but which is apt to be
evaded or only slightly alluded to at ecclesiastical synods and
conventions--we mean the loss of faith in the dogmatic part of
Christianity. People do not believe in the fall, the atonement, the
resurrection, and a future state of reward and punishment at all, or
do not believe in them with the certainty and vividness which are
needed to make faith a constant influence on man's daily life. They
do not believe they will be damned for sin with the assurance they
once did, and they are consequently indifferent to most of what is
said to them of the need of repentance. They do not believe the
story of Christ's life and the theory of his character and
attributes given in the New Testament, or they regard them as merely
a picturesque background to his moral teachings, about which a
Christian may avoid coming to any positive conclusion.
No man who keeps himself familiar with the intellectual and
scientific movements of the day, however devout a Christian he may
be, likes to question himself as to his beliefs about these matters,
or would like to have to define accurately where his faith ended and
his doubts began. If he is assailed in discussion by a sceptic and
his combativeness roused, he will probably proclaim himself an
implicit and literal acceptor of the gospel narratives; but he will
not be able to maintain this mental attitude alone in his own room.
The effort that has been made by Unitarians and others to meet this
difficulty by making Christ's influence and authority rest on his
moral teachings and example, without the support of a divine nature
or mission or sacrifice, has failed. The Christian Church cannot be
held together as a great social force by his teaching or example as
a moral philosopher. A church organized on this theory speedily
becomes a lecture association or a philanthropic club, of about as
much aid to conduct as Freemasonry. Christ's sermons need the touch
of supernatural authority to make them impressive enough for the
work of social regeneration, and his life was too uneventful and the
society in which he lived too simple, to give his example real power
over the imagination of a modern man who regards him simply as a
social reformer.
This decline of faith in Christian dogma and history has not,
however, produced by any means a decline in religious sentiment, but
it has deprived religion of a good deal of its power as a means of
moral discipline. Moral discipline is acquired mainly by the
practice of doing what one does not like to do, under the influence
of mastering fear or hope. The conquest of one's self, of which
Christian moralists speak so much, is simply the acquisition of the
power of doing easily things to which one's natural inclinations
are opposed; and in this work the mass of mankind are powerfully
aided--indeed, we may say, have to be aided--by the prospect of
reward or punishment. The wonderful results which are achieved in
the army, by military authority, in inspiring coarse and common
natures with a spirit of the loftiest devotion, are simply due to
the steady application by day and by night of a punishing and
rewarding authority. The loss of this, or its great enfeeblement,
undoubtedly has deprived the church of a large portion of its means
of discipline, and reduced it more nearly to the __rôle_ of a
stimulater and gratifier of certain tender emotions. It contains a
large body of persons whose religious life consists simply of a
succession of sensations not far removed from one's enjoyment of
music and poetry; and another large body, to whom it furnishes
refuge and consolation of a vague and ill-defined sort in times of
sorrow and disappointment. To these persons the church prayers and
hymns are not trumpet-calls to the battle-field, but soothing
melodies, which give additional zest to home comforts and luxuries,
and make the sharper demands of a life of the highest integrity less
unbearable. Nay, the case is rather worse than this. We have little
doubt that this sentimental religion, as we may call it, in many
cases deceives a man as to his own moral condition, and hides from
him the true character and direction of the road he is travelling,
and furnishes his conscience with a false bottom. The revelations of
the last few years as to its value as a guide in the conduct of life
have certainly been plain and deplorable.
The evil in some degree suggests the remedy, though we do not mean
to say that we know of any complete remedy. Church-membership ought
to involve discipline of some kind in order to furnish moral aid. It
ought, that is to say, to impose some restraint on people's
inclinations, the operation of which will be visible, and enforced
by some external sanction. If, in short, Christians are to be
regarded as more trustworthy and as living on a higher moral plane
than the rest of the world, they must furnish stronger evidence of
their sincerity than is now exacted from them, in the shape of plain
and open self-denial. The church, in short, must be an organization
held together by some stronger ties than enjoyment of weekly music
and oratory in a pretty building, and alms-giving which entails no
sacrifice and is often only a tickler of social vanity. There is in
monasticism a suggestion of the way in which it must retain its
power over men's lives, and be enabled to furnish them with a
certificate of character. Its members will have to have a good deal
of the ascetic about them, but without any withdrawal from the
world.
How to attain this without sacrificing the claims of art, and
denying the legitimacy of honestly acquired material power, and, in
fact, restricting individual freedom to a degree which the habits
and social theories of the day would make very odious, is the
problem to be solved, and, it is, no doubt, a very tough one.
General inculcation of "plain living" will not solve it, as long as
"plain living" is not defined and the "self-made man" who has made a
great fortune and spends it lavishly is held up to the admiration of
every school-boy. The church has been making of late years a gallant
effort to provide accommodation for the successful, and enable them
to be good Christians without sacrificing any of the good things of
this life, and, in fact, without surrendering anything they enjoy,
or favoring the outside public with any recognizable proof of their
sincerity. We do not say that this is reprehensible, but it is easy
to see that it has the seeds of a great crop of scandals in it.
Donations in an age of great munificence, and horror of far-off or
unattractive sins, like the slaveholding of Southerners and the
intemperance of the miserable poor, are not, and ought not to be,
accepted as signs of inward and spiritual grace, and of readiness to
scale "the toppling crags of duty."
The conversion of the working-classes, too, it is safe to say, will
never be accomplished by any ecclesiastical organization which sells
cushioned pews at auction, or rents them at high rates, and builds
million-dollar churches for the accommodation of one thousand
worshippers. The passion for equality has taken too strong hold of
the workingman to make it possible to catch him with cheap chapels
and assistant pastors. He will not seek salvation _in forma
pauperis_, and thinks the best talent in the ministerial market not
a whit too good for him. He not unnaturally doubts the sincerity of
Christians who are not willing to kneel beside badly dressed persons
in prayer on the one day of the week when prayer is public. In fact,
to fit the Protestant Church in this country to lay hold of the
laboring population a great process of reconstruction would be
necessary. The congregational system would have to be abandoned or
greatly modified, the common fund made larger and administered in a
different way. There would have, in short, to be a close approach to
the Roman Catholic organization, and the churches would have to lose
the character of social clubs, which now makes them so comfortable
and attractive. Well-to-do Christians would have to sacrifice their
tastes in a dozen ways, and give up the expectation of aesthetic
pleasure in public worship. There cannot be a vast Gothic cathedral
for the multitude in every city. The practice of the church would
have to be forced up to its own theory of its character and mission,
which would involve serious collision with some of the most deeply
rooted habits and ideas of modern social and political life. That
there is any immediate probability of this we do not believe. Until
it is brought about, its members must make up their minds to have
religious professions treated by some as but slight guarantees of
character, and by others as but cloaks of wrong-doing, hard as this
may be for that large majority to whom they are an honest expression
of sure hopes and noble aims.