There is then little conscious and articulate Christianity at the front,
and yet there are profoundly Christian characteristics in what men are and
do and endure, who have never known or do not understand or have forgotten
the Christian religion. What, then, is this strangely honoured and yet
neglected thing? Does it exist? Is it there for men were they to awake to
it?
This utterly searching war justifies the critical temper which passes
previous allegiances and acceptances under revision and judgment. I may be
forgiven, then, for saying that I do not think that Christianity as at
present expressed and presented to men in the Church (in the widest sense
of the word) is _prima facie_ that which can win and possess them. It
would be a big task and unsuited to the conditions under which I write to
argue this out. What needs discussion is how much of natural religion has
been absorbed into the accumulated deposit from the past which we call
traditional Christianity, with the effect of disguising and overlaying in
it those specifically Christian elements, which make Christianity not only
a salvation from sin or from hell, but from the morbid and even
contemptible in religion. Those elements can never be clearly abstracted
and used by themselves, for Christianity was not a thing rounded and
completed, and deposited upon the world _in vacuo_, but was as a seed
sown, which grows by drawing into itself the nourishment of soil and
atmosphere. There always must be elements of natural religion interfused
with the Christian religion, for though not evolved out of natural
religion, but rather coming to it as a deliverance, Christianity is the
crown and fulfilment and corroboration of the good and the true in natural
religion. It is not a question of clear separation and abstraction, but of
distinction, emphasis, and proportion. I believe that things not
characteristically Christian have acquired a disproportionate place in our
religion as handed down to us.
I suggest (but will not work it out here) that many of the hymns in use
are evidence of this, and that is why so often they do not ring true. I
also believe that an unhistorical use of the Bible has proved a distorting
influence. From early Christian days Scripture, which is a story of a
process and growth containing many stages and imperfections, has been
treated as something timeless and absolute. In particular, the partial
answers to the problem of suffering to which the Jews in their development
were led, have been made to bear weights heavier than they can sustain.
Some of the Psalms, for instance, over-emphasise the connection between
righteousness and immunity from misfortune. They can be used to justify a
calculating and self-saving religion which is below the level of Christ's
religion. A soldier, recently wounded on the Somme, handed to me at a
dressing-station a small copy of the 91st Psalm as his religious handbook.
Yet by itself the 91st Psalm, though a wonderful expression of trust in
God, promises a security to which our Lord, and others akin to Him in
spirit, have not put their seal. He did not ask--He resisted the
temptation to ask--that no evil should happen unto Him, nor that angels
should bear Him in their hands lest He should hurt His foot against a
stone. He would not have men set their face in the day of battle in the
assurance that, though a thousand should fall beside them and ten thousand
at their right hand, the same lot would not come nigh them.
I think, too, that Christianity fails to make its characteristic appeal
through the Church, owing to two prevalent "isms"--ecclesiasticism and
subjectivism--both of which may be said to be the being primarily occupied
in religion with something other than God. I doubt whether any
Church-party advantage can be scored by any one in this matter. Roughly
speaking, the weakness of Catholic Christianity is to get involved in the
little things of "mint and anise and cummin"; whilst the weakness of
Protestantism is to become absorbed in the luxuries of one's own religious
experiences. The upshot of either is the same, namely, to be very
religious, and yet to forget the living God. I remember being very much
startled by an eminently pious Anglo-Catholic undergraduate at Oxford
saying to me, "The fact is, I am not interested in God the Father." It is
unwise to argue from one instance, but I seem to see there a symptom of a
widespread and tragic estrangement of institutional Christianity from the
mind of Christ. But I doubt whether things are much better on the other
side of the ecclesiastical street, where so often the worship of God has
downgraded into sitting and listening to sentimental music on Pleasant
Sunday Afternoons. Single instances are misleading, but I can never
dismiss the belief that there is something radically wrong with the world
of religion of which the representative was a Chapel, in my old parish at
Leeds, that indulged in a "fruit-banquet" on Good Friday. Right through
organised Christianity of all kinds there is, I think, a great absence of
the real Christian thing.