One day I said to Amroth, "What a comfort it is to find that there is no
religion here!"
"I know what you mean," he said. "I think it is one of the things that
one wonders at most, to remember into how very small and narrow a thing
religion was made, and how much that was religious was never supposed to
be so."
"Yes," I said, "as I think of it now, it seems to have been a game
played by a few players, a game with a great many rules."
"Yes," he said, "it was a game often enough; but of course the mischief
of it was, that when it was most a game it most pretended to be
something else--to contain the secret of life and all knowledge."
"I used to think," I said, "that religion was like a noble and generous
boy with the lyrical heart of a poet, made by some sad chance into a
king, surrounded by obsequious respect and pomp and etiquette, bound by
a hundred ceremonious rules, forbidden to do this and that, taught to
think that his one duty was to be magnificently attired, to acquire
graceful arts of posture and courtesy, subtly and gently prevented from
obeying natural and simple impulses, made powerless--a crowned slave; so
that, instead of being the freest and sincerest thing in the world, it
became the prisoner of respectability and convention, just a part of the
social machine."
"That was only one side of it," said Amroth. "It was often where it was
least supposed to be."
"Yes," I said, "as far as I resent anything now, I resent the conversion
of so much religion from an inspiring force into a repressive force. One
learnt as a child to think of it, not as a great moving flood of energy
and joy, but as an awful power apart from life, rejoicing in petty
restrictions, and mainly concerned with creating an unreal atmosphere of
narrow piety, hostile to natural talk and laughter and freedom. God's
aid was invoked, in childhood, mostly when one was naughty and
disobedient, so that one grew to think of Him as grim, severe,
irritable, anxious to interfere. What wonder that one lost all wish to
meet God and all natural desire to know Him! One thought of Him as
impossible to please except by behaving in a way in which it was not
natural to behave; and one thought of religion as a stern and dreadful
process going on somewhere, like a law-court or a prison, which one had
to keep clear of if one could. Yet I hardly see how, in the interests of
discipline, it could have been avoided. If only one could have begun at
the other end!"
"Yes," said Amroth, "but that is because religion has fallen so much
into the hands of the wrong people, and is grievously misrepresented.
It has too often come to be identified, as you say, with human law, as a
power which leaves one severely alone, if one behaves oneself, and which
punishes harshly and mechanically if one outsteps the limit. It comes
into the world as a great joyful motive; and then it becomes identified
with respectability, and it is sad to think that it is simply from the
fact that it has won the confidence of the world that it gains its awful
power of silencing and oppressing. It becomes hostile to frankness and
independence, and puts a premium on caution and submissiveness; but that
is the misuse of it and the degradation of it; and religion is still the
most pure and beautiful thing in the world for all that; the doctrine
itself is fine and true in a way, if one can view it without impatience;
it upholds the right things; it all makes for peace and order, and even
for humility and just kindliness; it insists, or tries to insist, on the
fact that property and position and material things do not matter, and
that quality and method do matter. Of course it is terribly distorted,
and gets into the hands of the wrong people--the people who want to keep
things as they are. Now the Gospel, as it first came, was a perfectly
beautiful thing--the idea that one must act by tender impulse, that one
must always forgive, and forget, and love; that one must take a natural
joy in the simplest things, find every one and everything interesting
and delightful ... the perfectly natural, just, good-humoured,
uncalculating life--that was the idea of it; and that one was not to be
superior to the hard facts of the world, not to try to put sorrow or
pain out of sight, but to live eagerly and hopefully in them and through
them; not to try to school oneself into hardness or indifference, but to
love lovable things, and not to condemn or despise the unlovable. That
was indeed a message out of the very heart of God. But of course all the
acrid divisions and subdivisions of it come, not from itself, but from
the material part of the world, that determines to traffic with the
beautiful secret, and make it serve its turn. But there are plenty of
true souls within it all, true teachers, faithful learners--and the
world cannot do without it yet, though it is strangely fettered and
bound. Indeed, men can never do without it, because the spiritual force
is there; it is full of poetry and mystery, that ageless brotherhood of
saints and true-hearted disciples; but one has to learn that many that
claim its powers have them not, while many who are outside all
organisations have the secret."
"Yes," I said, "all that is true and good; it is the exclusive claim and
not the inclusive which one regrets. It is the voice which says, 'Accept
my exact faith, or you have no part in the inheritance,' which is wrong.
The real voice of religion is that which says, 'You are my brother and
my sister, though you know it not.' And if one says, 'We are all at
fault, we are all far from the truth, but we live as best we can,
looking for the larger hope and for the dawn of love,' that is the
secret. The sacrament of God is offered and eaten at many a social meal,
and the Spirit of Love finds utterance in quiet words from smiling lips.
One cannot teach by harsh precept, only by desirable example; and the
worst of the correct profession of religion is that it is often little
more than taking out a licence to disapprove."
"Yes," said Amroth, "you are very near a great truth. The mistake we
make is like the mistake so often made on earth in matters of human
government--the opposing of the individual to the State, as if the State
were something above and different to the individual--like the old
thought of the Spirit moving on the face of the waters. The individual
is the State; and it is the same with the soul and God. God is not above
the soul, seeing and judging, apart in isolation. The Spirit of God is
the spirit of humanity, the spirit of admiration, the spirit of love. It
matters little what the soul admires and loves, whether it be a flower
or a mountain, a face or a cause, a gem or a doctrine. It is that
wonderful power that the current of the soul has of setting towards
something that is beautiful: the need to admire, to worship, to love. A
regiment of soldiers in the street, a procession of priests to a
sanctuary, a march of disordered women clamouring for their rights--if
the idea thrills you, if it uplifts you, it matters nothing whether
other people dislike or despise or deride it--it is the voice of God for
you. We must advance from what is merely brilliant to what is true; and
though in the single life many a man seems to halt at a certain point,
to have tied up his little packet of admirations once and for all, there
are other lives where he will pass on to further loves, his passion
growing more intense and pure. We are not limited by our circle, by our
generation, by our age; and the things which youthful spirits are
divining and proclaiming as great and wonderful discoveries, are often
being practised and done by silent and humble souls. It is not the
concise or impressive statement of a truth that matters, it is the
intensity of the inner impulse towards what is high and true which
differentiates. The more we live by that, the less are we inclined to
argue and dispute about it. The base, the impure desire is only the
imperfect desire; if it is gratified, it reveals its imperfections, and
the soul knows that not there can it stay; but it must have faced and
tested everything. If the soul, out of timidity and conventionality,
says 'No' to its eager impulses, it halts upon its pilgrimage. Some of
the most grievous and shameful lives on earth have been fruitful enough
in reality. The reason why we mourn and despond over them is, again,
that we limit our hope to the single life. There is time for everything;
we must not be impatient. We must despair of nothing and of no one; the
true life consists not in what a man's reason approves or disapproves,
not in what he does or says, but in what he sees. It is useless to
explain things to souls; they must experience them to apprehend them.
The one treachery is to speak of mistakes as irreparable, and of sins as
unforgivable. The sin against the Spirit is to doubt the Spirit, and the
sin against life is not to use it generously and freely; we are happiest
if we love others well enough to give our life to them; but it is better
to use life for ourselves than not to use it at all."