As the President sat down and Vane rose to his feet, quite a tumult of
mingled applause, "hear, hears," hissings and hootings rose up from the
strangely assorted audience.
Vane faced the half-delighted, half-angry throng with the perfect
steadiness of a man who has decided upon a certain course and means to
pursue it at all hazards. Curiosity reduced one portion of the audience
to silence, and a respectful anticipation the other. In the sea of faces
before him, Vane recognised several that were familiar to him. His
father, Carol, Dora, Ernshaw and Rayburn were there as a matter of
course. Several clerics, high and low, Anglican and Nonconformist, were
dotted about the audience, some with folded arms and frowning brows as
though they were expecting the worst of heresies, others smiling in
bland and undisguised contempt, believing that they had come to see one
of their own cloth, who had already made himself an even more
disagreeable subject of reflection to them than even the infidels in
whose house the magic of Vane's sudden fame had brought them together,
do that which would make it impossible for him to again commit such an
offence in the pulpit of an English church.
For a moment or two there was a hush of intense silence of mental
suspense and expectation as Vane faced his audience and looked steadily
about him before he began to speak, and when he did begin, the silence
changed to an almost inaudible murmur and movement which is always the
sign of relaxed tension among a large body of human beings.
His first words were as unconventional as they were unexpected.
"Brother men and sister women; some of you, like myself, believe in God,
in the existence of an all-wise, over-ruling Providence, which shapes
the destinies of mankind, and yet at the same time allows each man and
woman to work out his or her own earthly destinies for good or ill, as
he or she chooses--by reason or desire, by inclination or passion--and
we also believe in the efficacy of the sacrifice which was consummated
on Calvary. There are others listening to me now to whom these beliefs
are merely idle dreams, the inventions of enthusiasts, or the deliberate
frauds of those who brought them into being and imposed them by physical
force upon those who had no means of resistance, for their own personal
and political ends.
"I have not come here to make any attempt to settle these differences
between us. As a priest of the Church, I wish, with all my soul, that I
could. As a man, I know that I can't. But there is one ground at least
upon which we can meet as friends, whatever our opinions may be as
regards religion and theology--two terms which, I think every one here
will agree with me, are very far from meaning the same thing."
"As a priest of the Church, I cannot hear that without protest!" cried a
tall, high-browed, thin-featured, deep-eyed clergyman, springing to his
feet in the middle of the hall. "If theology, the Science of God, does
not mean the same thing as religion, the word religion has no meaning.
More dangerous, I had almost said more disgraceful, words never fell
from the lips of a man calling himself a priest of the Church of God."
The last sentence was spoken in a high, shrill voice, which rose above
the angry murmurs which came from all parts of the hall, but these Vane
silenced in a moment, by holding up his hand and smiling as some of the
audience had never seen a man smile before.
"I am glad," he went on, in slow, very distinct tones, "that such an
objection has been raised so early by a brother priest. It will help us
to understand each other more clearly, and so I will try to answer him
at once. The difference between religion and theology is the difference
between the whole and the part; but theology is not a science, for there
is no science of the Infinite. It is only the study of the many
different conceptions which men of all nations and races have formed as
to the nature of the over-ruling Power of the universes--of all the
attempts to solve the insoluble and to answer the unanswerable.
"There are two sayings, one Arabian and one Italian, which I hope I may
quote without offence. One is, 'God gives us the outline of the picture,
we fill it in. We cannot change the outline, but we are responsible for
every stroke of the brush. In the end God judges the picture.'
"The other was the saying of a famous Italian artist, 'Children and
fools should not see work half done.'
"Now let us grant for the sake of argument that there is a Creator, and
therefore a scheme of creation. How much can we, dwellers upon a world
which is but as a grain of sand washed hither and thither by the
tide-flow of the ocean of Infinity, know about the workings of the Will
in obedience to which, as some of us believe, that tide ebbs and flows
through the uncounted ages of Eternity, and over the measureless expanse
of Infinity? Faced with such a colossal problem as this, must we not all
confess ourselves to be but as children and fools, since we do not and
cannot see even half of the work, but only an immeasurably tiny fragment
of it? For this reason I feel justified in saying that those who deny
the existence of the Divine Architect of the universe and those who
claim to know all about His plans, are, at least, equally mistaken.
"But that, although I have been glad of the opportunity of saying it, is
not quite what I came here to say, and, therefore, we will drop that
part of the subject. Last Sunday I preached a sermon which--I say it
both with wonder and gladness--has produced a very much wider and deeper
effect than I could have hoped it would do. That was a sermon preached
in a Christian church to a congregation, which, at least, professed and
called itself Christian. To-night I am going to ask you to listen to a
secular sermon preached from the same text. It will be very brief,
because I know that you have a custom, and a very good one, of following
discourses with discussion, and as I am going to raise a few distinctly
controversial subjects, I want to leave plenty of our available time
over for the discussion.
"The theme of my sermon last Sunday at St. Chrysostom's may be summed up
in one word--Honesty. The essence of the Sermon on the Mount is just
honesty. I suppose everyone here has read it, and therefore you will
remember that from beginning to end there is not a word of dogma in it.
In other words it is absolutely untheological. Perhaps this fact, a very
important one, has never struck some of you before. When the Master
preached that sermon, he, as I believe, deliberately left out every
reference to dogma or doctrine, creed or church, so that men, whatever
their belief, their nation or their race, could equally accept it as a
universal rule of life and conduct.
"Some of us here believe in miracles, some do not. I do, and, so
believing, I think that the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest of all
miracles. It is a greater thing to preach a doctrine to which all honest
men, coming whithersoever they may from the ends of the earth, will and
must subscribe if they _are_ honest--a doctrine which is true for all
time and for all men, than to cleanse the leper or to raise the dead to
life.
"I will ask you to let me put this point in another way, and in a
certainly more attractive form. Let me read you the expression of this
universal truth in the words of two English poets separated from each
other by more than two hundred years of time and many mountain ridges
and deep valleys of changing thought and opinion:
"Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
"Thou great First Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good,
And that myself am blind.
"Yet gave me, in this dark estate,
To see the good from ill;
And, binding nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will.
"Those lines are from Pope's immortal poem 'The Universal Prayer'; these
are from Rudyard Kipling's 'Hymn Before Action.'
"High lust and froward bearing,
Proud heart, rebellious brow--
Deaf ear and soul uncaring,
We seek Thy mercy now!
The sinner that forswore Thee,
The fool that passed Thee by,
Our times are known before Thee--
Lord, grant us strength to die!
"For those who kneel beside us
At altars not Thine own,
Who lack the lights that guide us,
Lord, let their faith atone!
If wrong we did to call them,
By honour bound they came;
Let not Thy wrath befall them,
But deal to us the blame!
"Those, perhaps, are the most solemn and deep-meaning words that have
been written or spoken since Jesus of Nazareth preached the Sermon on
the Mount, and the inner sense, as I read it, is the same. In life, in
death, be honest with yourself, with your brother-man and your
sister-woman, and with your God if you believe in one.
"Last Sunday in the pulpit I quoted the words of Colonel Ingersoll, 'God
cannot afford to damn an honest man.' That phrase has always seemed to
me a marvellous mixture of blasphemy, ignorance, and sound common sense.
From my point of view it is blasphemous, because it is the utterance of
the atom trying to understand the universe. It is ignorant, because it
is impossible for that human atom who uttered it to form any adequate
conception of the infinitely great whole of which he was an infinitely
small part. And yet, humanly speaking, it is the soundest and hardest of
common sense. If God is honest He must respect honesty, no matter
whether it is the honesty of belief, or of disbelief, always supposing
that the belief and the disbelief _are_ honest.
"The man who calls himself a Christian and does not conduct his daily
life in accordance with the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, is one
of two things--a fool who cannot understand the meaning of plain words,
or a knave, who, for many reasons, which most of my hearers will
understand, pretends to be that which he is not. I may remind you here
that knavery is not by any means confined to the limits of what is
conventionally termed criminality. For every crime that puts a man or a
woman into prison, there are a hundred others committed in every-day
life with absolute impunity, and yet they are just as serious, and they
merit a similar if not a heavier punishment than those which the law
punishes with social degradation and the miseries of penal servitude.
"I wonder whether it has occurred to any of you who are listening to me
now--whether you are Christians, professed or real, atheists or
agnostics--to ask yourselves if, under the present conditions of what we
are pleased to call civilization, an honest world would be possible, and
that, I may say, is just the same thing as asking whether Christians can
or cannot live their lives in accordance with the teachings of Him who
went about doing good? Of course we all call ourselves honest, and some
of us really believe that we are. At any rate, most of us would feel
very much insulted if any one else told us that we were not. But are
we? Let us put our pride in our pockets for a moment and try to answer
that pregnant question. Honesty, like many other terms, of which
immorality is one, has, through its conventional use, acquired a very
restricted and therefore a quite unreal meaning. We have, by some
vicious process of thought, got accustomed to call a man or a woman who
transgresses the social law in a certain direction immoral, and in the
same way we have come to apply the word dishonesty to practices which
mean stealing or the attempt to steal property of a concrete form.
"But I think you will all agree with me that both these words have come
to be used in a sense which is so narrow, that it destroys their
original meaning. For every man or woman who transgresses the social law
and is therefore called immoral--of course after being found out--there
are a hundred or more who break the moral law every hour of their waking
lives. All of you, no doubt, possess bibles. Read the 27th and 28th
verses of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, and you
will understand what I mean.
"But there is another immorality than this, and, as I believe, a greater
immorality, for this, so far as it concerns our sister women, is often
not immorality at all. It is the surrender of a feeble nature to a
pitiless necessity, the necessity to live, the only alternative, in too
many cases, to self-murder. There is another immorality infinitely worse
than this, which when, as we Christians believe, the hosts of men are
ranged before the Bar of Eternal Justice will spell damnation, hopeless
and irrevocable, and that is the immorality which means a dishonesty
that deliberately deceives--not always for the purpose of gain, for this
kind of dishonesty is generally practised by those whom, to put it
plainly, it would not pay to steal.
"A French philosopher once said that there is that within the heart of
every man which, if known, would make his dearest friend hate him. That,
I am afraid, is true, not only of men but of women. It is not the fault
of the men or the women; it is due simply to artificial conditions of
life and to the individual ignorance and stupidity which make reform
impossible. Until what we call civilised and Christian Society can make
up its mind to conduct its personal, its national, and its international
affairs on the broad and simple lines laid down in the Sermon on the
Mount, no man can afford to be quite honest. In other words, if
Christendom would be really Christian, it would also be honest; honest
with itself and with its God, with the God whom it now only pretends to
worship, saying loudly, 'Lord, Lord,' and doing not the things which He
saith!
"It would not matter--and this I say with all reverence and with a full
sense of my responsibilities as a Priest of the Church--it would not
matter whether Society called itself Christian or not, as long as it was
honest."
"That is absolute atheism and blasphemy!" exclaimed a well-known
Nonconformist preacher, springing up and holding his hands out towards
the platform. "The man who could speak those words cannot be either a
Christian or a minister of the Gospel. I call upon the speaker to be
honest now, honest with himself and us, and confess that he is not a
Christian, and therefore unworthy to be a preacher of any Christian
creed."
A storm of mingled expressions of approval and assent burst out from
every part of the crowded hall. Vane stood immovable and listened to it
with a smile hovering round his lips. The President rose at once and
said:
"I must remind the reverend gentleman who has made this interruption--an
interruption which, if made in a church or a chapel, would render him
liable to imprisonment--is entirely out of order. We welcome discussion,
but it must come in its proper place. We cannot tolerate interruption,
and we won't."
The rebuke was too just and too pointed not to be felt, even by the
bigot who had deserved it. He sat down, and when the thunder of applause
which greeted the President's brief but pregnant interlude had died
away, Vane went on without a trace of emotion in his voice:
"I cannot say that I am sorry that that interruption was made, because
it makes it possible for me to ask whether there is really any
difference between Christianity and honesty?"
Again he was interrupted, this time by half the audience getting on to
its feet and cheering. The other portion sat still, and the units of it
began to look at each other very seriously. Vane was, in fact, bringing
the matter down to a most uncomfortably fine point. He made a slight
motion with his hand, and his hearers, having already recognised the
true missionary, or bringer of messages to the souls of men, instantly
became silent and expectant.
"If Christianity is not honest, or if honesty is not, for all practical
purposes, the same thing as Christianity, then so much the worse for
Christianity or for honesty as the case may be. A religion which is not
honest is not a religion. Honesty which is not a religion--that is to
say a tie between man and man--is not honest. That, I think, is a
dilemma from which there is no escape."
There was another burst of applause, this time almost universal, which
the President did not attempt to check. A few members of the audience
looked even more uncomfortable than before, but by the time Vane was
able to make himself heard again it was quite plain that the great
majority of his audience, believers and unbelievers, were heart and soul
with him.
"That," he went on, with a laughing note in his voice, "shows me that we
have got on to friendly territory at last, on to the ground of our
common humanity. I said just now, before my friend in the audience
diverted my attention to another and very important point, most of us
would feel very much insulted if anyone told us that we were not honest.
We should jump to the conclusion that such a statement was the same
thing as calling us thieves or swindlers; but that is not the question.
Honesty is not by any means confined to commercial dealings. It has a
social meaning and a very far reaching one too, for, as a matter of
fact, the man or woman who deceives another in the smallest detail of
life is not strictly honest, because it is impossible to be strictly
honest without at the same time being strictly truthful.
"It has been said that half the truth is worse than a lie. It is, I
think, a greater sin to tell half the truth than a deliberate and
comprehensive lie, for it is possible to tell a lie with an honest, if
mistaken purpose; and yet the business of the modern world is mainly
conducted by half-truths. Everyone tries to deceive the person he is
doing business with to some extent. It is not altogether his fault, for
he knows that if he didn't do so, the other man would deceive him, and
so get the better of the bargain. That is the way of the world, as it is
called, and a very bad way, and, as we believe, a very unchristian way
it is.
"Still, it is impossible to blame the trader and the man of commerce for
this. The real fault, the real sin, is not individual, it is
collective--the guilt properly belongs to Society. Men do not descend to
these mean subterfuges and these despicable trickeries merely to make
money, to pile on hundreds on hundreds and thousands on thousands. In
their hearts all the best of them despise the methods by which they are
forced to earn their incomes and make their fortunes; but the penalties
which the laws of Society place on honesty are so tremendous that a
really honest man will deliberately sacrifice his own honour rather than
incur them. That is a very serious thing to say, and yet it is the
literal truth, and the most pitiable part of the matter is that he
commits these sins of unscrupulousness and dishonesty chiefly for the
sake of his wife and children. The social penalties of honesty would
fall most heavily on them. Their houses and their luxurious furniture,
their carriages and their horses, their costly clothing and precious
jewels would be theirs no longer; in a word, they would become poor, and
Society has no place for people if they are poor, whatever else they may
be.
"To put the question in another way, a tiger seeking for its prey and
slaying it ruthlessly when it has found it is not a pleasant subject for
contemplation, but before we blame the tiger we must remember that
somewhere at home in the jungle there is a Mrs. Tiger and some little
tigers who have to be fed somehow. The tiger's methods of killing for
food are merciful in comparison with the methods of many men who already
possess enough to give the ordinary comforts of decent life to those who
are depending upon them, and yet go on deceiving and swindling, for
deception in commerce is swindling, in order to obtain those
superfluities of life which are absolutely necessary to keep up what is
called position in Society.
"I do not say that wealth and comfort would be impossible in an honest
world; there is no reason why they should be, but they would be gained
in greater moderation and by different methods. For instance, if Society
could and would change its standards of honesty and morality, the force
of public opinion would soon make crime impossible, save among the
mentally and morally diseased, who would, of course, be treated in the
same merciful but relentless fashion as we now treat what we call our
criminal lunatics.
"It will of course be quite impossible for me to treat this vast subject
in anything like detail in a single address, and therefore I shall
content myself with having thrown out these few suggestions, and leave
the development of it to those who will, I hope, take part in the
discussion.
"But one word more in conclusion. Your President has called me a
missionary, a missionary to the rich. That is the mission which I have
taken on myself, and therefore I gladly accept the title, all the more
gladly because it comes from one who, while he differs from me
absolutely on every theological point which I believe essential to
salvation, has proved his faith by giving me that title and by uttering
a prayer which has, I hope, already been heard by Him to whom all hearts
are open, and from whom no secrets are hid."
When Vane sat down there burst out a storm of applause, through which
not a few hisses, mostly from clerical lips, pierced shrilly. Yet, few
and simple as his words had been, it was quite evident that they had
gone straight to the hearts of the majority of his audience.
The President rose when the applause subsided, and, after a brief
speech, in which he frankly admitted that if all teachers of the
Christian faith were like Vane Maxwell, and if there were no other sort
of Christianity than his, there would be very little of what too many
Christians call infidelity in the world, gave the usual notice that the
meeting was now open for discussion.
Then the storm burst over Vane's devoted head. By a sort of tacit
agreement the Secularists left the attack to the clergy. As a matter of
fact they had practically no cause for dispute with Vane. On the
contrary they delighted in the frankness of his expression of his
belief, and the uncompromising fashion in which he had denounced and
repudiated that unchristian form of Christianity which, as the President
had put it, was responsible through its hypocrisy and double-dealing
with God and man for all the honest unbelief, and all the scoffing and
scepticism, which it pretended to deplore. So the Secularists sat still
and silent, enjoying hugely the series of bitter attacks that were made
on Vane by cleric after cleric, Anglican and Nonconformist, for close on
a couple of hours. Vane took it all very quietly, now smiling and now
looking grave almost to sadness, and when the last speaker had exhausted
his passion and his eloquence, and the President asked him to reply, he
got up and said in slow but grave and very clear tones:
"I have no reply to make to what I have heard, save to say that I have
heard with infinite sorrow from the lips of clergymen of every
denomination and shade of opinion a series of statements which not one
of them could justify from the teachings of Him who preached the Sermon
on the Mount. There is no other criterion of Christian faith and
doctrine than is to be found in the New Testament, and from the first
verse in the Gospel according to St. Matthew to the last in Revelations
there is not one word which contradicts what I have spoken, or which
supports what they have said.
"That is a serious thing to say, but I say it with full knowledge and
with perfect faith. I mean no personal offence. That would of course be
impossible under the circumstances; but it is also quite impossible for
me, after saying what I have said here and elsewhere, to argue seriously
with those who are by profession teachers and preachers of the
revelation of Jesus Christ--of the message of God to man by God
incarnate in the flesh--and who are yet able to reconcile in their own
souls the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth and the doings of twentieth
century Christianity. We have heard the words infidel and infidelity
used many times to-night. There is no infidelity in honest unbelief;
and, sorrowfully as I say it, I still feel it my duty to say it, that
there is more real infidelity inside the churches than there is outside,
for the worst and most damnable of all infidelities is that which says
with its lips 'Lord, Lord,' and does not with its heart and its hands do
that which He saith."
There was a little silence, a silence of astonishment on the one part of
the audience and of absolute stupefaction on the part of the other. Then
the storm of applause broke out once more, but there was no hissing
mingled with it this time. About a score of black-clad figures rose pale
and silent amidst the cheering throng and walked out. Their example was
followed by most of the West End Christians, including her ladyship of
Canore and her husband and daughters, whose curiosity had been more than
amply satisfied. The cheers changed from enthusiasm to irony as the
irregular procession moved towards the doors, and an irreverent
Secularist at the back of the hall jumped on his seat and shouted, with
an unmistakable Old Street accent:
"Got a bit more than you came for, eh? Hope you've enjoyed your lordly
selves. Don't forget to say your prayers to-night. You want a lot of
converting before _you'll_ be Christians. I've 'alf a mind to put up one
for you to-night myself, blowed if I 'aven't."
Then the applause changed to laughter, hearty and good-humoured, and
when the President had proposed the usual vote of thanks to the
lecturer, and Vane had accepted his invitation to give a series of
addresses at the halls of the Society throughout the country, the most
memorable meeting on record at the Hall of Science came to an end.