And while I am dealing with rationalists, let me note certain recent
interesting utterances of Sir Harry Johnston’s. You will note that while
in this book we use the word “God” to indicate the God of the Heart,
Sir Harry uses “God” for that idea of God-of-the-Universe, which we have
spoken of as the Infinite Being. This use of the word “God” is of late
theological origin; the original identity of the words “good” and “god”
and all the stories of the gods are against him. But Sir Harry takes up
God only to define him away into incomprehensible necessity. Thus:
“We know absolutely nothing concerning the Force we call God; and,
assuming such an intelligent ruling force to be in existence, permeating
this universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of millions of
planets, we do not know under what conditions and limitations It works.
We are quite entitled to assume that the end of such an influence is
intended to be order out of chaos, happiness and perfection out
of incompleteness and misery; and we are entitled to identify the
reactionary forces of brute Nature with the anthropomorphic Devil of
primitive religions, the power of darkness resisting the power of light.
But in these conjectures we must surely come to the conclusion that
the theoretical potency we call ‘God’ makes endless experiments, and
scrap-heaps the failures. Think of the Dinosaurs and the expenditure of
creative energy that went to their differentiation and their well-nigh
incredible physical development. . . .
“To such a Divine Force as we postulate, the whole development and
perfecting of life on this planet, the whole production of man, may
seem little more than to any one of us would be the chipping out, the
cutting, the carving, and the polishing of a gem; and we should feel as
little remorse or pity for the scattered dust and fragments as must the
Creative Force of the immeasurably vast universe feel for the DISJECTA
MEMBRA of perfected life on this planet. . . .”
But thence he goes on to a curiously imperfect treatment of the God
of man as if he consisted in nothing more than some vague sort of
humanitarianism. Sir Harry’s ideas are much less thoroughly thought out
than those of any other of these sceptical writers I have quoted. On
that account they are perhaps more typical. He speaks as though Christ
were simply an eminent but ill-reported and abominably served teacher of
ethics--and yet of the only right ideal and ethics. He speaks as though
religions were nothing more than ethical movements, and as though
Christianity were merely someone remarking with a bright impulsiveness
that everything was simply horrid, and so, “Let us instal loving
kindness as a cardinal axiom.” He ignores altogether the fundamental
essential of religion, which is THE DEVELOPMENT AND SYNTHESIS OF THE
DIVERGENT AND CONFLICTING MOTIVES OF THE UNCONVERTED LIFE, AND THE
IDENTIFICATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH THE IMMORTAL PURPOSE OF GOD.
He presents a conception of religion relieved of its “nonsense” as the
cheerful self-determination of a number of bright little individuals
(much stirred but by no means overcome by Cosmic Pity) to the Service
of Man. As he seems to present it, it is as outward a thing, it goes as
little into the intimacy of their lives, as though they had after proper
consideration agreed to send a subscription to a Red Cross Ambulance or
take part in a public demonstration against the Armenian Massacres, or
do any other rather nice-spirited exterior thing. This is what he says:
“I hope that the religion of the future will devote itself wholly to the
Service of Man. It can do so without departing from the Christian
ideal and Christian ethics. It need only drop all that is silly and
disputable, and ‘mattering not neither here nor there,’ of Christian
theology--a theology virtually absent from the direct teaching of
Christ--and all of Judaistic literature or prescriptions not made
immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by the
confirmation of science. An excellent remedy for the nonsense which
still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter Monson’s
‘Service of Man,’ which was published as long ago as 1887, and has since
been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in its well-known
sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton’s ‘Man and the Bible.’
Similarly, those who wish to acquire a sane view of the relations
between man and God would do well to read Winwood Reade’s ‘Martyrdom of
Man.’”
Sir Harry in fact clears the ground for God very ably, and then makes a
well-meaning gesture in the vacant space. There is no help nor strength
in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the “Service of Man”
is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an hypocrisy in the
undisciplined prison of the mortal life.