based upon the personal example and teaching of Christ, is too
individualist to be in accordance with Society as at present
constituted. Institutional Christianity, on the other hand, has
obviously transferred its allegiance in certain matters of moral
guidance from Christ to Cæsar; and claims that those matters have
been left for Cæsar to decide. I heard it argued, for instance,
quite recently, by a Roman Catholic, that as Christendom in all ages
had tolerated war, all question of conscientious objection thereto
by a Catholic falls to the ground. The answer of the Christian
individualist, I conceive, would be, that Christendom also tolerated
torture for the extraction of truth, and slavery for the extraction
of labour; and that, nevertheless, the conscientious objection
of resistant minorities succeeded, in spite of the supineness of
Christendom, in placing those monstrosities outside the pale of
civilized convention. No doubt while those devices flourished
under the countenance of Mother Church, Christians opposed to their
abolition would have cried then, as they cry now about war, “How are
you to do without them? How can you extract truth from an unwilling
witness, or labour from a subjugated race, except by compulsion and
force?” The answer to that apparently insoluble problem now stands
written in history--a history which has not eliminated untruth from
the witness-box, or indolence from the labour market; yet torture and
slavery alike have ceased to be practical politics, except where the
State still answers with regard to war as it used to answer with regard
to these: “I cannot do without.” There, in their last real stronghold,
unaffected by Christian ethics, slavery and torture still stand.
But we have to remember that the State’s claim, if we accept it as a
binding principle, comes much closer home to us than it would do if
it arose only in time of war. Military service, once we are in it,
involves us in such things as the firing at Peterloo on defenceless
citizens, in the murder under superior orders of Sheehy Skeffington;
in the shooting, if we are ordered to shoot them, of conscientious
objectors--men who are themselves sworn not to take life. Military
service, loyally rendered in Tsarist Russia, involved the riding down,
the sabring to death, and the drowning of those meek crowds who stood
before the Winter Palace in January, 1905, asking for their “Little
Father” to come and speak to them words of comfort.
These are things unfortunately which Christians cannot do with a
good conscience, but which the State for its safety may say that it
requires. Let those of us who agree with the State’s claim to our
personal service, irrespective of conscience, do our utmost to separate
it from the weakening effects which true and genuine Christianity is
bound to have on it.
THE SALT OF THE EARTH
(1918)
It is a curious commentary upon the confusion of tongues which has
descended upon us in our efforts to build towers reaching to Heaven,
that you would have been misled had I given this address its true
title. Had I called it “the Value of Purity” most of you would have
imagined that I was going to speak of what is usually called--with such
strange one-sidedness--the “social evil”; just as we call the liquor
traffic “the Trade.” You would have thought, probably, that I was
going to speak about Regulation 40 D, or some other aspect of the sex
problem with which the word “purity” has become conventionally allied.
It would, indeed, be one-sided in the other direction, to exclude
such considerations from the scope of so embracing a theme; but my
intention is rather to disencumber the word “purity” from the narrow
and puritanical meaning to which it has become limited; and the “Salt
of the Earth” does bring us nearer by its salutary implication to what
purity should really mean.
For if purity is not a good sanitary principle of fundamental
application to all ethical problems alike, it is merely a pious fad
which may easily become a pious fraud--a religious tenet pigeon-holed
by crabbed age for the affliction of youth. To departmentalise it in
a particular direction leads to impurity of thought; for we destroy
the balance of life and degrade its standards if we do not use our
moral weights and measures consistently in all relations alike. And
if you allow a particular implication of purity to impose its claim
in a society whose impurity in other directions makes it entirely
impracticable, then you are reducing your social ethics to mere
pretence and mockery; and honest youth will find you out, and will turn
away from your religions and your ethical codes with the contempt which
they deserve.
Is not that what is actually happening--more apparently to-day,
perhaps, than ever before? Has not that departmental code to which I
refer broken down and become foolish in the eyes of honest men and
women, largely because purity is nowhere established in the surrounding
conditions of our social life?
What is the true aim of social life and social organisation in regard
to the individual? What claim has it upon his allegiance if it does
not offer the means of self-realisation and self-fulfilment equally to
all? And suppose, instead of doing this in a large majority of cases,
it does the reverse: starves his imagination, reduces his initiative,
cripples his development, makes practically impossible (at the time
when desire awakes and becomes strong) the fulfilment of his nature
instinct for mating; how does the claim stand then? If you can only
offer him marriage conditions which are themselves impure, unequal laws
which are themselves a temptation, houses incompatible with health
or decency, wages insufficient for the healthy support of home, and
wife, and children; if that, broadly speaking, has been the marriage
condition which society offers to wage-earning youth, what right has it
to babble about “purity” in that narrower and more individual relation,
while careless to provide it in its own larger domain?
If you have employments--such as that of bank-clerk or
shop-assistant--which demand of those engaged a certain gentility of
dress and appearance, but offer only a wage upon which (till a man
is over thirty) domestic establishment at the required standard of
respectability is quite impossible--if that is the social condition
imposed in a great branch of middle-class industry--if you tolerate
that condition and draw bigger profits from your business, and bigger
dividends from your investments upon the strength of it--what right
have you to demand of your victims an abstinence which is in itself
unnatural and penurious, and therefore impure?
Yet what proportion of sermons, think you, have been preached
during the last hundred years in churches and chapels against that
great social impurity of underpaid labour, and underfed life which
have between them done so far more to create prostitution than any
indwelling depravity in the heart of youth? Thwarted life, and sweated
labour, those have been the makings of the “social evil,” so called;
and they lie at the door of an impure system which has made its money
savings at the cost of a great waste of life.
That particular instance, which I refer to merely in passing, has to
do with our ordinary application of the word purity. But I want to
show how all social purity really hangs together, and how, unless
you have a great fundamental social principle pure throughout,
corruption will carry infection from one department to the other,
making useless or impracticable any ideal of purity which you try to
set up in one particular direction. If you do--to put it plainly and
colloquially--the doctrine won’t wash; honest minds will find out that
the part is inconsistent with the whole.
What, then, is the whole social ideal which lies at the root of the
modern State? Is it pure, or is it impure? Is it the true “Salt of the
Earth” which, if equally applied, will benefit all nations and all
peoples alike: those to whom, in President Wilson’s phrase, we wish to
be just, and those to whom we do not wish to be just? Does any modern
State really present within its own borders, and in its treatment of
all classes and interests, an example which, if extended, would make
the world safe for Internationalism--an end which I am inclined to
think is more important than making it safe for Democracy?
The phrase “Salt of the Earth,” which I have taken to illustrate the
meaning and value of social purity, has come to us from that wonderful
compendium of ethical teaching known to Christians as the “Sermon
on the Mount”; that body of coherent, consistent, and constructive
doctrine from which Christianity--so soon as it had allied itself with
Cæsar and the things of Cæsar--made such haste to depart. And the
whole process of that departure was (from the pure ethical standard of
the Sermon on the Mount) a process of adulteration--of impurity--an
adaptation of a spiritual ideal to a secular practice of mixed motives.
But the process really began earlier. It began in the attempt to
identify the God of the Sermon on the Mount with Jahveh, the tribal God
of Hebrew history. And in that attempted identification (incompatible
ethics having to be reconciled) ethics became confounded.
The Rabbinical training of St. Paul, the Hebraistic tendencies of the
early Christian Church (whose first device was to proselytize the Jews
on the old nationalistic assumption that they were the Chosen People),
all combined to give an impure vision of God to the followers of the
new faith. The nationalism of Judaism corrupted the internationalism
of the Day of Pentecost; and the primitive Mosaic code uttered from
Sinai, and adapted to the mission of racial conquest there enjoined,
stultified the teaching of Calvary.
The two were incompatible; yet, somehow or another, the Christian
Church had to evolve an ethic which embraced both. And it did so
through allegiance to the State, and the setting-up of a compromise
between things secular and things spiritual which has existed ever
since.
You can see for yourselves which of the two is to-day the more
recognised and observed among nations which call themselves Christian.
The old tenets of Judaism--based on the Mosaic law and summed up in the
saying, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”--can be observed
by any one to-day in practical entirety with the full approval of the
State. A strict observance of the Sermon on the Mount, and a practical
belief in the teaching of Calvary land a man in prison or may even
render him liable to be shot.
Rightly or wrongly he is regarded as a danger or a weakness to the
modern State. Personally, I think that he is rightly regarded so; for I
do not see how the modern State could exist if everyone were a sincere
believer in that great peace-offensive, the Sermon on the Mount, and in
its great practical exposition, the Death on Calvary. The only thing I
am in doubt about is whether the modern State is the better alternative.
Christianity, sincerely and whole-heartedly practised, might have
strange social results; it might, on the other hand, be unexpectedly
pleasant and workable. But of one thing I feel quite sure; it would
not--as humanity is at present constituted--be practised by any but a
very small minority; and it would have to work entirely without State
aid. But that minority would fulfil, for the purposes of demonstration,
the condition which, I think, is necessary for all great ethical
adventures: it would be pure and unadulterated. It would succeed or
it would fail standing upon its own feet and not upon Cæsar’s, not
relying on mixed motives or compromise, but on a single principle--the
principle of loving your neighbour as yourself, and converting him
from evil ways by a process of peaceful penetration. And being--and
remaining, a decisive minority in the world’s affairs, its part therein
would resemble the part played by salt in the chemical sanitation of
the soil out of which grow the clean or the unclean things of earth
which feed or which poison us.
And that is the first point which I ask you to consider; the
extraordinary value to society, and to the whole evolution of the human
race of minorities holding extremist opinions--so extreme that they do
not seem at the present day to be practical politics--and yet having a
chemic influence (which would not be otherwise obtainable) for bringing
into being the mind of to-morrow, which has always been, all down the
ages, the work of minorities, and generally of persecuted minorities.
For the Salt of the Earth is only one single constituent, which enables
a better standard of life to become established where the virtue
of its presence is felt. Salt is not, and cannot be, the general
constituent of life; its essence always remains a minor quantity, and
yet quite definitely it affects the generality of things around it.
But in itself it is an extreme, an uncompromising element; its most
striking characteristic is its saltness.
It would be foolish, therefore, to blame it for not being sweet, or for
not being acid, or for not being capable of taking the place of beef or
mutton in the dietary of the human race, or for not making the whole
human race in its own image. (The only person I ever heard of who was
turned into an image of salt was Lot’s wife; and as a human being it
made her entirely useless). And yet, as, quite literally, the substance
salt has helped the earth to become habitable, and the human race to
become human, so has that symbolic salt of the earth, helped the human
race to become humane, and to envisage (though not to obey) a new ethic
of conduct based upon an ideal conception of the brotherhood of man.
It was the extreme expression of a new and higher moral plane to which
evolution is only gradually bringing us. Had it started upon compromise
it would have been useless. Its special value was, and still is, in
its uncompromising enunciation of a principle which we still regard as
impracticable.
But it had, at least, when it was first uttered, this degree of
practicability--it appealed to men’s minds; and it has gone on
appealing to them ever since.
Had it been uttered to neolithic man, it would have been merely
unintelligible, with no imaginable relation to the experiences of
life; whereas it has a very obvious relation now. Earth was then
in the toils not of a moral but of a physical problem, demanding
a straightforward physical solution; and the salting of the earth
consisted then very largely in the indomitable courage and obstinacy
with which man--the crude struggling biped--stood up against the larger
and more powerful forms of life which barred the way of his advance
toward civilisation--just as previously, the salting of the earth
(the preparing it for a higher form of life) depended upon the huge
and uncouth antediluvian monsters which devoured and trod down the
overwhelming growths of marsh and jungle.
And from that first salting of the earth, lasting through so many
ages, it is no wonder that much of the old physical recipe still
survives; and that the history of civilisation has shown us a process
in which ruthless extermination by war was regarded as the best means
of establishing God’s elect upon earth. The doctrine that force is a
remedy, or a security for moral ends, dies a slow death in the minds
of men. Institutional Christianity has, by its traditions and its
precepts, done all it could to keep it alive. We still have read to us
in our churches--for our approving acceptance--a proposition made by
the Children of Israel to a neighbouring tribe, precisely similar to
that made five years ago by Germany to Belgium. And the inference left
on the minds of Christian congregations, generation after generation,
has been that God quite approved of it (and of the ruthless devastation
which followed) as a means for making his chosen people the salt of the
earth.
It is not without significance that the Christian Church all down
the ages has allowed that sort of teaching to enter the minds of the
common people. It is not without significance that the common people
five years ago rose superior to their Bible-teaching, and regarded its
reproduction in the world of to-day as a moral outrage.
And yet if the world’s affairs, and its racial problems are to be
solved by physical force, it was a perfectly consistent thing to do;
and the inconsistency lies in our moral revolt against it.
The truth is, of course, that we are in a period of transition. We are
indignant with people who regard successful force as a justification
for wrong; but we are almost equally indignant with those who will not
regard it as a remedy for wrong. And we are slow to see that while the
school of justification by force remains rampant in the world, there
may be some chemic value for the spiritual development of the human
race in the school which denies the efficacy of remedy by force. Yet
is it not possible that as the past belongs to the one, so the future
may belong to the other?
When we started upon this war we declared that it was a war to end war;
and it was quite a popular thing to say that if it did not result in
the ending of war, then the cause of the Allies would stand defeated.
But that was only another way of saying that we should suffer defeat
if in the near future the whole world were not converted to the point
of view of the conscientious objector. But that would have been a very
unpopular way of putting it, so it was not said.
Surely this sort of contradiction in which war lands us is only another
proof that we are in an age of transition. Transition makes consistency
difficult.
But the inconsistency, which conditions of war bring into prominent
reality, lies embedded in our social system (which is itself a
compromise between two incompatible principles)--the Will to Love and
the Will to Power; and there will always be that inconsistency till
the world has definitely decided whether Love or Power is to form the
basis of our moral order. It has not decided it yet. In our own country
(leaving out all question of foreign relations) we have not decided it
yet.
It is the condition of impurity resulting from that indecision--and
permeating more or less the whole of our social organisation--which I
ask you now to consider.
How it came about is really not difficult to explain. When primitive
man began to develop the rudiments of society (the group, or the herd)
he did so mainly for self-preservation. In the struggle for existence
coordinated numbers gave him a better chance; and giving him a better
chance of life, they gave him also a better chance of self-development
and self-enjoyment. But into that early society man brought not only
his social instincts but his predatory instincts as well. And while the
group helped him to prey more effectively on those left outside, it did
not prevent him from preying in a certain measure on those within. The
exceptionally strong man had an exceptional value in his own tribe; and
he exacted an exceptional price for it--in wives, or in slaves captured
in war, or in the division of the spoil. It was the same, as society
developed, with the exceptionally resourceful leader; brain began to
count above muscle; and the men of exceptional ability acquired the
wealth. And you know perfectly well, without my going further into
detail, that out of the price exacted within the community (whose broad
interests were in common) separate and conflicting interests arose; the
interest which secured political control exacted from all the dependent
interests an unfair price for its services; and wherever slavery was an
established part of social development, man did not love his neighbour
as himself, he only loved him as his chattel.
You may take a big jump through history, from primitive to feudal, from
feudal to modern times; and you will still find the same interests
strong in every state, using their inherited control of wealth, of
organisation, and of law, to extract advantage to themselves from the
weaker, and the less educated members of the community; and always
doing it in the name of the commonwealth--the strength and stability
of the State. Only the other day (in a State as advanced as any
in its democratic faith and its doctrine of equality for all--the
United States of America) the moment there was a temporary breakdown
in the legal safeguards against child-labour--there was a great
organised rush in certain States of conscripted child-labour into
industry--conscripted not by the State but by capital, exploiting the
increased need of the wage-earning classes brought about by the raised
prices of war.
The men who do that kind of thing (and they are men of great power
and influence in the State) still only love their neighbours as their
chattels, and still take advantage of all forms of law, or absence of
law, to keep established as far as they can the conditions of social
slavery. You may say that a thing like that lies outside the law, or
that it is an abuse which legislation has not yet overtaken and put an
end to; but what is more important and more significant is that it is
an abuse which public opinion in those States where it was done had
not overtaken and put an end to, or not merely put an end to, but made
impossible. It makes it impossible for a black man over there to marry
a white woman; and if it can do the one it can do the other.
But what are those people doing? They are merely reflecting in their
own personal affairs an ideal which lies engrained in every State which
puts self-interest above the interest of the whole human race. And
that, in our present transitional stage, is the standpoint of every
country to-day. In our heart of hearts we still hold Nationalism more
important than Internationalism. And “my country right or wrong” is
still for some people the last word in morality; rather than admit
their country to be in the wrong they will let morality go.
In that matter, indeed, the world to-day seems to be divided into
two schools. There is one school which so exalts the idea of the
State as to say that the State can do no wrong: that if morality and
State-interest conflict morality must go under, or rather that morals
only exist to subserve State-interests,--and being a State-product, the
State has the right to limit their application. We are fighting to-day
against a race which is charged with having taken up that attitude;
and the pronouncements of some of its most distinguished writers, as
well as certain methods which it has employed in war, seem to bear
out the charge. But when it comes to war, that particular school of
State-ethics gives itself away by protesting that the other States
which are in hostile alliance against it are behaving very wrongly
indeed--though by its own doctrine (States being above morals) they are
incapable of wrong. It cannot stick to its own thesis.
But what are we to say if that other school, which admits that the
State can do wrong; but is not going to allow the State to be punished
for doing wrong if that State happens to be its own? It is not
that this school does not believe in punishment; it believes in it
enthusiastically, rapturously, so long as it is directed against the
wrong-doing of some other State. Punishment is good for other States,
when they do wrong; without punishment the justice of God would not
be satisfied. But for their own particular State punishment is bad,
and is no longer to be advocated. And so you may say--looking back in
history--that your country was quite wrong in waging such and such a
war; but patriotism forbids the wish in that case that right should
have prevailed and the justice of God been satisfied.
Now that school was very vocal in England during the Boer War; and I
daresay during the Opium War with China; and I daresay, also, during
the American War of Independence--very loud that we were in the wrong;
but not at all admitting, for that reason, that it would be good for us
to be beaten. But I think it should be one of our proudest boasts that,
in the long run (not immediately--not perhaps for a generation or two)
the political and moral good sense of this country goes back upon the
teaching of that school. I believe that on the whole we are glad that
we were beaten in the war with America; and that we are glad we were
beaten because we were in the wrong. And, perhaps, some day--not yet,
for our fear of the Yellow Race is still greater than our fear of any
white race you can name--but, perhaps, some day we may be sorry that we
were not beaten to a standstill in our opium war with China. (I see,
incidentally, that to-day we are addressing a sharp remonstrance to
the Chinese Government, because it is now doing that very thing which
we then compelled it to do at the point of the bayonet--permitting,
namely, the opium trade to be revived. That remonstrance only came,
however, after we had sold to China sufficient opium to last its
medical needs for 140 years!)