Now that we are discussing the general question of individual conduct,
it will be convenient to take up again and restate in that relationship,
propositions already made very plainly in the second and third chapters.
Here there are several excellent reasons for a certain amount of
deliberate repetition. . . .
All the mystical relations of chastity, virginity, and the like with
religion, those questions of physical status that play so large a part
in most contemporary religions, have disappeared from modern faith. Let
us be as clear as possible upon this. God is concerned by the health and
fitness and vigour of his servants; we owe him our best and utmost; but
he has no special concern and no special preferences or commandments
regarding sexual things.
Christ, it is manifest, was of the modern faith in these matters, he
welcomed the Magdalen, neither would he condemn the woman taken in
adultery. Manifestly corruption and disease were not to stand between
him and those who sought God in him. But the Christianity of the creeds,
in this as in so many respects, does not rise to the level of its
founder, and it is as necessary to repeat to-day as though the name
of Christ had not been ascendant for nineteen centuries, that sex is
a secondary thing to religion, and sexual status of no account in
the presence of God. It follows quite logically that God does not
discriminate between man and woman in any essential things. We leave our
individuality behind us when we come into the presence of God. Sex is
not disavowed but forgotten. Just as one’s last meal is forgotten--which
also is a difference between the religious moment of modern faith and
certain Christian sacraments. You are a believer and God is at hand
to you; heed not your state; reach out to him and he is there. In the
moment of religion you are human; it matters not what else you are,
male or female, clean or unclean, Hebrew or Gentile, bond or free. It
is AFTER the moment of religion that we become concerned about our state
and the manner in which we use ourselves.
We have to follow our reason as our sole guide in our individual
treatment of all such things as food and health and sex. God is the
king of the whole world, he is the owner of our souls and bodies and all
things. He is not particularly concerned about any aspect, because he is
concerned about every aspect. We have to make the best use of ourselves
for his kingdom; that is our rule of life. That rule means neither
painful nor frantic abstinences nor any forced way of living. Purity,
cleanliness, health, none of these things are for themselves, they are
for use; none are magic, all are means. The sword must be sharp and
clean. That does not mean that we are perpetually to sharpen and clean
it--which would weaken and waste the blade. The sword must neither be
drawn constantly nor always rusting in its sheath. Those who have had
the wits and soul to come to God, will have the wits and soul to find
out and know what is waste, what is vanity, what is the happiness that
begets strength of body and spirit, what is error, where vice begins,
and to avoid and repent and recoil from all those things that degrade.
These are matters not of the rule of life but of the application
of life. They must neither be neglected nor made disproportionally
important.
To the believer, relationship with God is the supreme relationship. It
is difficult to imagine how the association of lovers and friends can
be very fine and close and good unless the two who love are each also
linked to God, so that through their moods and fluctuations and
the changes of years they can be held steadfast by his undying
steadfastness. But it has been felt by many deep-feeling people that
there is so much kindred between the love and trust of husband and wife
and the feeling we have for God, that it is reasonable to consider the
former also as a sacred thing. They do so value that close love of mated
man and woman, they are so intent upon its permanence and completeness
and to lift the dear relationship out of the ruck of casual and
transitory things, that they want to bring it, as it were, into the very
presence and assent of God. There are many who dream and desire that
they are as deeply and completely mated as this, many more who would
fain be so, and some who are. And from this comes the earnest desire to
make marriage sacramental and the attempt to impose upon all the world
the outward appearance, the restrictions, the pretence at least of such
a sacramental union.
There may be such a quasi-sacramental union in many cases, but only
after years can one be sure of it; it is not to be brought about by
vows and promises but by an essential kindred and cleaving of body and
spirit; and it concerns only the two who can dare to say they have it,
and God. And the divine thing in marriage, the thing that is most like
the love of God, is, even then, not the relationship of the man and
woman as man and woman but the comradeship and trust and mutual help
and pity that joins them. No doubt that from the mutual necessities of
bodily love and the common adventure, the necessary honesties and helps
of a joint life, there springs the stoutest, nearest, most enduring and
best of human companionship; perhaps only upon that root can the best of
mortal comradeship be got; but it does not follow that the mere ordinary
coming together and pairing off of men and women is in itself divine or
sacramental or anything of the sort. Being in love is a condition that
may have its moments of sublime exaltation, but it is for the most part
an experience far down the scale below divine experience; it is often
love only in so far as it shares the name with better things; it is
greed, it is admiration, it is desire, it is the itch for excitement,
it is the instinct for competition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is
adventure, it is jealousy, it is hate. On a hundred scores ‘lovers’
meet and part. Thereby some few find true love and the spirit of God in
themselves or others.
Lovers may love God in one another; I do not deny it. That is no reason
why the imitation and outward form of this great happiness should be
made an obligation upon all men and women who are attracted by one
another, nor why it should be woven into the essentials of religion.
For women much more than for men is this confusion dangerous, lest a
personal love should shape and dominate their lives instead of God. “He
for God only; she for God in him,” phrases the idea of Milton and of
ancient Islam; it is the formula of sexual infatuation, a formula quite
easily inverted, as the end of Goethe’s Faust (“The woman soul leadeth
us upward and on”) may witness. The whole drift of modern religious
feeling is against this exaggeration of sexual feeling, these moods of
sexual slavishness, in spiritual things. Between the healthy love
of ordinary mortal lovers in love and the love of God, there is
an essential contrast and opposition in this, that preference,
exclusiveness, and jealousy seem to be in the very nature of the former
and are absolutely incompatible with the latter. The former is the
intensest realisation of which our individualities are capable; the
latter is the way of escape from the limitations of individuality. It
may be true that a few men and more women do achieve the completest
unselfishness and self-abandonment in earthly love. So the poets and
romancers tell us. If so, it is that by an imaginative perversion they
have given to some attractive person a worship that should be reserved
for God and a devotion that is normally evoked only by little children
in their mother’s heart. It is not the way between most of the men and
women one meets in this world.
But between God and the believer there is no other way, there is nothing
else, but self-surrender and the ending of self.