But first let me write a few words here about those who hold a kind
of intermediate faith between the worship of the God of Youth and the
vaguer sort of Christianity. There are a number of people closely in
touch with those who have found the new religion who, biased probably
by a dread of too complete a break with Christianity, have adopted a
theogony which is very reminiscent of Gnosticism and of the Paulician,
Catharist, and kindred sects to which allusion has already been made.
He, who is called in this book God, they would call God-the-Son or
Christ, or the Logos; and what is here called the Darkness or the Veiled
Being, they would call God-the-Father. And what we speak of here as
Life, they would call, with a certain disregard of the poor brutes that
perish, Man. And they would assert, what we of the new belief, pleading
our profound ignorance, would neither assert nor deny, that that
Darkness, out of which came Life and God, since it produced them must be
ultimately sympathetic and of like nature with them. And that ultimately
Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from death by him, would
be reconciled with God the Father.* And this great adventurer out of the
hearts of man that we here call God, they would present as the same with
that teacher from Galilee who was crucified at Jerusalem.
* This probably was the conception of Spinoza. Christ for
him is the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and
chiefly in the mind of man. Through him we reach the
blessedness of an intuitive knowledge of God. Salvation is
an escape from the “inadequate” ideas of the mortal human
personality to the “adequate” and timeless ideas of God.
Now we of the modern way would offer the following criticisms upon this
apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion. Firstly,
we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the veiled being nor
about that being’s relations to God and to Life. We do not recognise any
consistent sympathetic possibilities between these outer beings and our
God. Our God is, we feel, like Prometheus, a rebel. He is unfilial. And
the accepted figure of Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in
the tone of our worship. It is not by suffering that God conquers death,
but by fighting. Incidentally our God dies a million deaths, but the
thing that matters is not the deaths but the immortality. It may be he
cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross
or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock. These may be necessary
sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in
themselves bring victory. They may be necessary, but they are not
glorious. The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-drenched
figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, “My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?” these things jar with our spirit. We little men
may well fail and repent, but it is our faith that our God does not fail
us nor himself. We cannot accept the Christian’s crucifix, or pray to
a pitiful God. We cannot accept the Resurrection as though it were an
after-thought to a bitterly felt death. Our crucifix, if you must have
a crucifix, would show God with a hand or a foot already torn away from
its nail, and with eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a
face without pain, pain lost and forgotten in the surpassing glory of
the struggle and the inflexible will to live and prevail. . . .
But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible the
wounds, so long as he does not droop. God is courage. God is courage
beyond any conceivable suffering.
But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns the
figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the figure of
God, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for divine action. The
figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think of it as being no
more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man who proclaimed the
loving-kindness of God and the supremacy of God’s kingdom over
the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of his pain and
exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes something altogether
distinct from a theological symbol. Immediately that we cease to
worship, we can begin to love and pity. Here was a being of extreme
gentleness and delicacy and of great courage, of the utmost tolerance
and the subtlest sympathy, a saint of non-resistance. . . .
We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of non-resistance. We are
the militant followers of and participators in a militant God. We can
appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle being upon
whose nobility the theologians trade. But submission is the remotest
quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is the completest
inversion of his likeness as we know him. A Christianity which shows,
for its daily symbol, Christ risen and trampling victoriously upon a
broken cross, would be far more in the spirit of our worship.*
* It is curious, after writing the above, to find in a
letter written by Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to that
pertinacious correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby,
almost exactly the same sentiments I have here expressed.
“If I could fill the Crucifix with life as you do,” he says,
“I would gladly look on it, but the fallen Head and the
closed Eye exclude from my thought the idea of glorified
humanity. The Christ to whom we are led is One who ‘hath
been crucified,’ who hath passed the trial victoriously and
borne the fruits to heaven. I dare not then rest on this
side of the glory.”
I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern spirit
in a tract, “The Call of the Kingdom,” by that very able and subtle,
Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who declares that under the
vitalising stresses of the war we are winning “faith in Christ as an
heroic leader. We have thought of Him so much as meek and gentle that
there is no ground in our picture of Him, for the vision which His
disciple had of Him: ‘His head and His hair were white, as white wool,
white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire: and His feet like
unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His
voice was as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand
seven stars; and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and
His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength.’”
These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing how
clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without Christianity.