chapter of inconsistencies. "Can it be lawful to handle the sword,"
asked Tertullian, "when the Lord Himself has declared that he who uses
the sword shall perish by it?" By disarming Peter, he stated, the Lord
"disarmed every soldier from that time forward." To Origen, Christians
were children of peace who, for the sake of Jesus, shunned the
temptations of war, and whose only weapon was prayer. The difficulty of
reconciling the profession of Christianity with the practice of war
constantly exercised the minds of the early Christians. St. Basil
advocated a compromise in the form of temporary exclusion from the
sacrament after military service. St. Augustine came to the conclusion
that the qualities of a good Christian and a good warrior were not
incompatible. Gradually the dilemma ceased to trouble the minds of
Christians as the needs of the State and citizenship of this world were
recognized. After some centuries the Church not only approved of war,
but herself became one of the most powerful instigators to military
conquest. The Crusades and the ceaseless wars of religious intolerance
became "holy" as the spiritual objection to bloodshed receded before the
triumphant demands of primitive passions.
Now, as heretofore, we have episcopal reminders of the blessings of war.
"May it not be," wrote the Bishop of London soon after the outbreak of
the war in 1914, "that this cup of hardship which we drink together will
turn out to be the very draught which we need? Has there not crept a
softness over the nation, a passion for amusement, a love of luxury
among the rich, and of mere physical comfort among the middle class?"
He leaves the questions unanswered, and incidentally omits to dwell on
the shortcomings of the poor in the direction of softness and luxury. He
continues:
Not such was the nation which made the Empire, which crushed the
Armada, which braved hardships of old, and drove English hearts
of oak seaward round the world. We believe the old spirit is here
just the same, but it needed a purifying, cleansing draught to
bring it back to its old strength and purity again, and for that
second reason the cup which our Father has given us, shall we not
drink it?
Much has been said in justification of this view of war from the
biological point of view. Prussian militarists are experts in the
exposition of similar theories. But from the Christian point of view the
complacency with which the world-tragedy is put down as a "purifying,
cleansing draught" is somewhat disconcerting. Dean Inge, writing in the
_Quest_ in the autumn of 1914, shows himself to be a disciple of the
same school:
We see the fruits of secularism or materialism in social
disintegration, in the voluntary sterility and timorous
acquisitiveness of the prosperous, and in the recklessness
and bitterness of the lower strata. A godless civilization is
a disease of which nations die by inches. I hope that this
visitation has come just in time to save us. Experience is a
good school, but its fees are terribly high!
Were we, then, really so bad that "this visitation" was needed to save
us from voluntary sterility (by imposing compulsory?) and the other
delinquencies enumerated by the Dean? The nature of the punishment
hardly fits the crime. Moreover, such a conception of war as a
wholesome corrective is practically indistinguishable from the
panegyrics of the extreme militarists whom we are out utterly to
destroy. "God will see to it," wrote Treitschke, "that war always recurs
as a drastic medicine for the human race." "War," wrote General von
Bernhardi, "is a biological necessity of the first importance, a
regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed
with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow which
excludes every advancement of the race, and, therefore, all real
civilization." "A perpetual peace," said Field-Marshal von Moltke, "is a
dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is one of the elements of
order in the world established by God. The noblest virtues of men are
developed therein. Without war the world would degenerate and disappear
in a morass of materialism." Many perplexed souls have turned to the
Church for guidance during this time of destruction and sorrow, and the
directions given have often increased the perplexity. The Bishop of
Carlisle expressed the opinion that if we were really Christians the war
would not have happened. Archdeacon Wilberforce and Father Bernard
Vaughan stated that killing Germans was doing service to God. Many who
have suffered at the hands of the Germans will be inclined to agree, but
the trouble from the point of view of the Christian ethic is not removed
by such a simple solution. We cannot but suspect that German prelates
have been found who have seen in the killing of women and children by
air-raids on London a service to the German God. Dr. Forsyth, in _The
Christian Ethic of War_, tells us that "war is not essentially killing,
and killing is here no murder. And no recusancy to bear arms can here
justify itself on the plea that Christianity forbids all bloodshed or
even violence." He reminds us that Christ used a scourge of small cords,
and that he called the Pharisees "you vipers," and Herod "you fox." "If
the Christian man live in society," he tells us, "it is quite impossible
for him to live upon the _precepts_ of the Sermon on the Mount. But also
it is not possible at a half-developed stage to live in actual relations
of life and duty on its _principle_ except as an _ideal_." The Roman
form of internationalism he regards "as not only useless to humanity
(which the present attitude of the Pope to the war shows) but as
mischievous to it."
It is strange that whilst the war has caused a number of ordained
representatives of the Christian Church to declare that practical
Christianity is an impossibility and the Sermon on the Mount a beautiful
but ineffective ideal, it has brought agnostics and heathen to a
conviction that socialized Christianity is the sovereign remedy for the
national and international disease. They have reached the conclusion
that the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is the revolutionary leaven
for which the world is waiting. In his preface on _The Prospects of
Christianity_, Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that he is "as sceptical and
scientific and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere." This
assurance is intended to help us to regain breath after the preceding
pronouncement:
I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader;
and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and
Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the
world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out
of the world's misery but the way which would have been found by
Christ's will if He had undertaken the work of a modern practical
statesman.
This is one of the outstanding mental phenomena of the war: sceptics and
thinkers have begun to examine Christianity as a practical way of
social salvation. There is a tendency to re-examine the gospel, not with
intent to lay stress on historical weakness or points of similarity with
other religions, but with the poignant interest which men lost in the
desert display towards possible sources of water. It may appear as a
coldly intellectual interest in some who are wont to deal with the
tragedies of life as mildly amusing scenes in a drama of endless
fatuity. But the coldness is a little assumed. There are others who do
not attempt to disguise that their whole emotional life is stirred to
passionate protest and inquiry, who, though Christians by profession and
duly appointed ministers of God, call for a recommendation of
Christianity and the establishment of a social order based on the
principles of life laid down by Jesus Christ. In _The Outlook for
Religion_, Dr. W. E. Orchard condemns the way of war as the complete
antithesis of the way of the Cross. "How can people be so blind?" he
cries. "Has all the ethical awakening of the past century been of so
little depth that this bloody slaughter, this hellish torture, this
treacherous game of war can still secure ethical approval?"
Perhaps the great majority of the clergy deserve the indictment of
rationalists. Mr. McCabe can prove his case by citing the exceptions.
After all, the accusation is neither new nor original. Voltaire set the
tune. "Miserable physicians of souls," he exclaimed, "you declaim for
five quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no
word on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces."
Voltaire's powers of satire were roused by the spectacle of the
different factions of Christians praying to the same God to bless their
arms. The element of comicality in this aspect of war is greatly
outweighed by that of pathos. Those who earnestly pray to God to lead
them to victory must at any rate be firmly convinced that their cause is
one of which God can approve. No believer would dare to invoke the
blessing of God upon a cause which his conscience tells him is a mean
and sordid enterprise. Voltaire's quarrel was really with the faith in
war as a means of determining the intentions of the Divine Will. Success
in war has been held, and is held, by Christians to be a sign of the
favour of the Almighty. Bacon expounded this view to the satisfaction of
coming generations when he referred to wars as "the highest trials of
right" when princes and States "shall put themselves on the justice of
God for the deciding of their controversies, by such success as it shall
please Him to give on either side." The Germans have nauseated the world
by their incessant proclamations that they are the favoured and chosen
of God. The good old German God has vied with Jehovah of the Israelites
in stimulating and sustaining the will to war.
Those atheists to whom all war is an abomination and entirely
irreconcilable with the highest human attributes have found complete
unanimity in their repudiation of the idea of a presiding God of
Battles in the dissenting objections to war expressed by Quakers,
Christadelphians, Plymouth Brethren, and other sects of Christianity.
There can be no doubt that the faith in war, and in the Divine guidance
of war, is receding. The new conception of God, for which humanity is
struggling, will be one entirely different from the jealous and cruel
Master of Bloodshed to whom man has paid homage in the dark ages of the
past. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realization
of its antisocial and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose
which unites Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics,
and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the
interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future
free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women
want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has
been born which will prove stronger than all the passion for war which
has overwhelmed us in the past. President Wilson seeks a peace identical
with the freedom of life in which every people will be left free to
determine its own polity and its own way of development, "unhindered,
unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful."
Statesmen see the ultimate hope for a free humanity in a change of
heart. Mr. Asquith outlines the slow and gradual process by which a real
European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and
established and enforced by a common will, will be substituted for
force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances,
and a precarious equipoise. Mr. Lloyd George insists that there must be
"no next time." Viscount Grey warns us that if the world cannot organize
against war, if war must go on, "then nations can protect themselves
henceforth only by using whatever destructive agencies they can invent,
till the resources and inventions of science end by destroying the
humanity they were meant to serve." Leagues of nations are proposed,
organization for peace on a scale commensurate with the past
organization for war is recognized as the principal task of
international co-operation.
This new revolt against war is inseparable from the religious revival of
the time. The word "revival" conjures up memories of less strenuous
times, when men were concerned with smaller problems, and uninspired by
the bitter experience of the present--Spurgeon thundering in his
Tabernacle, Salvation Army meetings, small gatherings in wayside
villages, at which howling sinners were converted and revivalists
counted their game by the dozen. The present revival is something for
which the past provides no analogy. It is not concerned so much with
individual salvation as with the salvation of the race and the world.
The petty sins and shortcomings which brought men to the confessional
and to the stool of repentance lose importance when compared with the
awful omissions which we now recognize as the cause of the calamities
which have befallen us. It is not only the existence of war that is
rousing the conscience. War is seen to be but a symptom, a horrible
outbreak of malignant forces, which we have nurtured and harboured in
times of peace. These forces permeate the very structure of society. A
new and fierce light beats on our slums, our industrialism, on the old
divisions of class and quality, on the standards of comfort and success.
Poverty, sickness, and child mortality--the whole hideous war of Mammon
through which millions of our fellow-creatures are condemned to the
perpetual service of Want--can no longer conveniently be left outside
the operations of our religious consciousness.
One thing is certain: we can no longer be satisfied with a religion
which pays lip-service to God, and offers propitiating incense to His
wrath, whilst it ignores the misery and the suffering of those who have
no reason to offer thanksgiving. Religious profession and religious
action will have to be unified. The sense of social responsibility is
slowly but surely taking the place of the anxiety to assure one's own
salvation. Some churches are empty, dead; they have no message for the
people, no vision wherewith to inspire the young. They might with
advantage close, and their clergy be employed upon some useful national
service. Ritual and incantations are doubtless useful aids to religious
worship and the necessary quietude of mind, but they are losing their
hold over souls to whom religious life has become a matter of social
service. These are of the order spoken of by Ernest Crosby:
None could tell me where my soul might be.
I searched for God, but God eluded me.
I sought my brother out--and found all three.
The number of "unbelievers" is growing. There are certain doctrines
which we cannot believe because they violate our reason, or our sense of
justice and fair play. Centuries ago it may have been possible to
believe them: that is no concern of ours. To each age its own mind and
its own enlightenment. What is more disquieting to the rulers of
orthodoxy is that we do not care, that we cannot believe in certain
doctrines. Doctrines are at a discount just now. The Church may quarrel
over Kikuyu, or the Apostolic Succession, or the Virgin Birth, or marvel
at the new possibility of a canon of the Church of England preaching a
sermon in the City Temple. We feel that it is infinitely more important
that a few experiments in practical Christianity should be imposed on
the world. Religion in the past has been conceived as essentially a
matter of suppressing the intellect, submitting to oppression and
injustice, learning to bear patiently the inflictions of Providence.
Religion in the future will demand all the attention which our feeble
intellect can offer it, and the conscious and willing co-operation of
mankind in the realization of God's plans for a regenerated world.
Whilst the Churches addicted to ritualism and literalism decline, the
Brotherhood movement gains in force and influence. Men meet to give
united expression to their religious impulses. They meet for prayer and
worship, but never without immediate bearing on some great social
question or object. Opinions are freely expressed. Heterodoxy in details
of faith is rampant, and is no obstacle to Christian fellowship. To the
Sunday afternoon and evening gatherings of the Brotherhood flock the
many to whom the Bible is still a source of spiritual food, and who
demand a plain and practical interpretation of its teachings. An
impromptu prayer, in which the keynote is the loving fatherhood of God,
and its bearing on the brotherhood of man, precedes a homely address or
sermon, closely packed with allusions to social and political questions.
Or the address is entirely secular; a downright unbeliever has been
invited to give the audience the benefit of his knowledge or experience,
in connection with some great movement for the betterment of the world.
There is a disinclination to criticize anybody's religious views,
provided he shows by his acts and life that he is part of the new
Ministry of Humanity. Here we have the pivot of the change which is
overtaking the forms of religious expression.
Men are no longer content to regard this world as a hopeless place of
squalor and sin, as intrinsically and incurably wicked, as an abode
which cannot be mended and which must, therefore, be despised and
forsaken in spirit, even before the time when it has to be forsaken in
body. The possible flawlessness of an other-worldly state no longer
compensates for the glaring faults of this. This is no sign of the
weakening of the spiritual hold on reality. It is a sign of the
spiritualization of the values of life. It is a sign that we begin to
understand that we _are_ spirits here, now, and everywhere, that we see
that time in this world and the way we employ it have a profound
bearing on eternity. There is no reason, in the name of God or man, why
we should be content to let this world remain a place of torment and
foolishness, if we have reached a point when we can see the better way.
There is a certain type of religious mind which dreads the idea of
social reconstruction, on the assumption that we shall not long for
heaven if conditions here below are made less hellish.
There is also a type of churchman whose finer sensibilities are sorely
tried by the secular occupations of nonconformity in general. If once or
twice in their lives they should stray amongst Congregationalists,
Baptists, or Methodists, they come away disgusted at the brutal
directness with which social evils are exposed in the light of the word
of the Lord. They complain of the general lack of finesse and Latin; the
licence of the pulpit has usurped the reverence of the altar. It is
perfectly true that statements are sometimes made in nonconformist
pulpits which are bald and offensive to the ear of scholarly
accomplishment. But the complaint of secularization is singularly inept.
Nothing could be more secular in the way of complacent acceptance of the
worldly reasons for leaving awkward questions alone than the attitude
of this type of critic.
The future life of Christianity is safely vested in the _free_ Churches.
The freedom will be progressive, and may possibly embrace a vista of
unfettered interpretation and application of Christian knowledge which
will be as remote from the dogmatism of to-day as is our present
attitude from the intolerance which kindled the Inquisition and made
possible the night of St. Bartholomew. Religious intolerance has already
lost three-fourths of its hold on faith. Catholic will now slaughter
Catholic without the stimulus to hostility afforded by heretical
opinions. Protestants are not restrained from injuring each other by the
common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of
intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the
religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the
degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can
afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial
aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own
souls and unmistakably hear His call to action.
Some will see in the decay of intolerance an indication of the general
evaporation of Christian articles of faith, and the possible loss of
identity in some new form of religion. There is no danger. No religion
can live in opposition to the evolution of the human spirit. It must be
sufficiently deep to meet the most exacting need of individual religious
experience, and it must be sufficiently broad and elastic to correspond
to the ever-changing phenomena of social evolution. Christianity has
this depth and this breadth. Two parallel lines of its development are
clearly discernible at the present time. One is the transubstantiation
of faith in social service; the other is a demand for individualized
experience of spiritual realities. It is becoming more and more
difficult to believe a thing simply because you are told you ought to
believe it, or because your father and grandfather believed it.
Authority in matters religious is being superseded by exploration. He
who feels with Swinburne that
Save his own soul he has no star,
and he for whom space is peopled with living souls mounting the ladder
to the throne of God, share the desire to experience the truth.
Mysticism is passing through strange phases of resurrection. Its modern
garb is made up of all the hues of the past, and, in addition, contains
some up-to-date threads of severely utilitarian composition. The number
of those who claim direct experience of spiritual verity as against mere
hearsay is greater than ever. The discovery of the soul is attracting
students of every description. The powers of suggestion, and the
creative possibilities of the subconscious mind, have opened up new
fields of religious experiment and adventure. The art of controlling the
mind, so as to make it immune against the depredations of evil thought,
or fear, or worry, is pursued by crowds of amateur psychologists who
delight in the happy results. They are learning to live in tune with the
infinite or cultivating optimism with complete success. To the objection
that they live in an artificial paradise they reply that thought is the
essence of things, and that they are but carrying into practice the
oft-repeated belief that we _are_ such stuff as dreams are made of.
"Religion," says Professor William James in _The Varieties of Religious
Experience_, "in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human
egoism. The Gods believed in--whether by crude savages or by men
disciplined intellectually--agree with each other in recognizing a
personal call." How could it be otherwise? The solitariness of each
human soul is the first fact in religious consciousness. Altruism and
communion with other souls are perforce attained through concern with
the state of the ego. The spiritual egoism which demands pure thought,
peace wherein to gather impressions of goodness, beauty, and truth, time
for the analysis of psychic law, direct knowledge which is proof against
the disease of doubt, is, after all, the most valuable contribution
which the individual can make to society. The people who are now greatly
concerned with the exact temperature of their own minds are, at any
rate, to be congratulated on having made the discovery, which is
centuries overdue, that hygiene of the soul is more important than
hygiene of the body.