1
One of the indisputable things about the war, so far as Britain and
France go--and I have reason to believe that on a lesser scale things
are similar in Italy--is that it has produced a very great volume of
religious thought and feeling. About Russia in these matters we hear
but little at the present time, but one guesses at parallelism. People
habitually religious have been stirred to new depths of reality and
sincerity, and people are thinking of religion who never thought of
religion before. But as I have already pointed out, thinking and feeling
about a matter is of no permanent value unless something is _thought
out_, unless there is a change of boundary or relationship, and it an
altogether different question to ask whether any definite change is
resulting from this universal ferment. If it is not doing so, then the
sleeper merely dreams a dream that he will forget again....
Now in no sort of general popular mental activity is there so much froth
and waste as in religious excitements. This has been the case in all
periods of religious revival. The number who are rather impressed, who
for a few days or weeks take to reading their Bibles or going to a new
place of worship or praying or fasting or being kind and unselfish, is
always enormous in relation to the people whose lives are permanently
changed. The effort needed if a contemporary is to blow off the froth,
is always very considerable.
Among the froth that I would blow off is I think most of the tremendous
efforts being made in England by the Anglican church to attract
favourable attention to itself _apropos_ of the war. I came back from
my visit to the Somme battlefields to find the sylvan peace of Essex
invaded by a number of ladies in blue dresses adorned with large
white crosses, who, regardless of the present shortage of nurses, were
visiting every home in the place on some mission of invitation whose
details remained obscure. So far as I was able to elucidate this
project, it was in the nature of a magic incantation; a satisfactory end
of the war was to be brought about by convergent prayer and religious
assiduities. The mission was shy of dealing with me personally, although
as a lapsed communicant I should have thought myself a particularly
hopeful field for Anglican effort, and it came to my wife and myself
merely for our permission and countenance in an appeal to our domestic
servants. My wife consulted the household; it seemed very anxious to
escape from that appeal, and as I respect Christianity sufficiently
to detest the identification of its services with magic processes, the
mission retired--civilly repulsed. But the incident aroused an uneasy
curiosity in my mind with regard to the general trend of Anglican
teaching and Anglican activities at the present time. The trend of my
enquiries is to discover the church much more incoherent and much less
religious--in any decent sense of the word--than I had supposed it to
be.
Organisation is the life of material and the death of mental and
spiritual processes. There could be no more melancholy exemplification
of this than the spectacle of the Anglican and Catholic churches at the
present time, one using the tragic stresses of war mainly for pew-rent
touting, and the other paralysed by its Austrian and South German
political connections from any clear utterance upon the moral issues of
the war. Through the opening phases of the war the Established Church
of England was inconspicuous; this is no longer the case, but it may be
doubted whether the change is altogether to its advantage. To me this
is a very great disappointment. I have always had a very high opinion of
the intellectual values of the leading divines of both the Anglican and
Catholic communions. The self-styled Intelligentsia of Great Britain
is all too prone to sneer at their equipment; but I do not see how
any impartial person can deny that Father Bernard Vaughn is in mental
energy, vigour of expression, richness of thought and variety of
information fully the equal of such an influential lay publicist as
Mr. Horatio Bottomley. One might search for a long time among prominent
laymen to find the equal of the Bishop of London. Nevertheless it is
impossible to conceal the impression of tawdriness that this latter
gentleman's work as head of the National Mission has left upon my mind.
Attired in khaki he has recently been preaching in the open air to the
people of London upon Tower Hill, Piccadilly, and other conspicuous
places. Obsessed as I am by the humanities, and impressed as I have
always been by the inferiority of material to moral facts, I would
willingly have exchanged the sight of two burning Zeppelins for this
spectacle of ecclesiastical fervour. But as it is, I am obliged to trust
to newspaper reports and the descriptions of hearers and eye-witnesses.
They leave to me but little doubt of the regrettable superficiality of
the bishop's utterances.
We have a multitude of people chastened by losses, ennobled by a common
effort, needing support in that effort, perplexed by the reality of evil
and cruelty, questioning and seeking after God. What does the National
Mission offer? On Tower Hill the bishop seems to have been chiefly busy
with a wrangling demonstration that ten thousand a year is none too
big a salary for a man subject to such demands and expenses as his
see involves. So far from making anything out of his see he was, he
declared, two thousand a year to the bad. Some day, when the church
has studied efficiency, I suppose that bishops will have the leisure
to learn something about the general state of opinion and education in
their dioceses. The Bishop of London was evidently unaware of the almost
automatic response of the sharp socialists among his hearers. Their
first enquiry would be to learn how he came by that mysterious extra two
thousand a year with which he supplemented his stipend. How did he earn
_that?_ And if he didn't earn it---! And secondly, they would probably
have pointed out to him that his standard of housing, clothing, diet and
entertaining was probably a little higher than theirs. It is really no
proof of virtuous purity that a man's expenditure exceeds his income.
And finally some other of his hearers were left unsatisfied by his
silence with regard to the current proposal to pool all clerical
stipends for the common purposes of the church. It is a reasonable
proposal, and if bishops must dispute about stipends instead of
preaching the kingdom of God, then they are bound to face it. The sooner
they do so, the more graceful will the act be. From these personal
apologetics the bishop took up the question of the exemption, at the
request of the bishops, of the clergy from military service. It is
one of our contrasts with French conditions--and it is all to the
disadvantage of the British churches.
In his Piccadilly contribution to the National Mission of Repentance and
Hope the bishop did not talk politics but sex. He gave his hearers the
sort of stuff that is handed out so freely by the Cinema Theatres, White
Slave Traffic talk, denunciations of “Night Hawks”--whatever “Night
Hawks” may be--and so on. One this or another occasion the bishop--he
boasts that he himself is a healthy bachelor--lavished his eloquence
upon the Fall in the Birth Rate, and the duty of all married people,
from paupers upward, to have children persistently. Now sex, like diet,
is a department of conduct and a very important department, but _it
isn't religion!_ The world is distressed by international disorder, by
the monstrous tragedy of war; these little hot talks about indulgence
and begetting have about as much to do with the vast issues that concern
us as, let us say, a discussion of the wickedness of eating very new and
indigestible bread. It is talking round and about the essential issue.
It is fogging the essential issue, which is the forgotten and neglected
kingship of God. The sin that is stirring the souls of men is the sin of
this war. It is the sin of national egotism and the devotion of men to
loyalties, ambitions, sects, churches, feuds, aggressions, and divisions
that are an outrage upon God's universal kingdom.
2
The common clergy of France, sharing the military obligations and the
food and privations of their fellow parishioners, contrast very vividly
with the home-staying types of the ministries of the various British
churches. I met and talked to several. Near Frise there were some barge
gunboats--they have since taken their place in the fighting, but then
they were a surprise--and the men had been very anxious to have their
craft visited and seen. The priest who came after our party to see if
he could still arrange that, had been decorated for gallantry. Of course
the English too have their gallant chaplains, but they are men of the
officer caste, they are just young officers with peculiar collars; not
men among men, as are the French priests.
There can be no doubt that the behaviour of the French priests in this
war has enormously diminished anti-clerical bitterness in France. There
can be no doubt that France is far more a religious country than it
was before the war. But if you ask whether that means any return to the
church, any reinstatement of the church, the answer is a doubtful
one. Religion and the simple priest are stronger in France to-day; the
church, I think, is weaker.
I trench on no theological discussion when I record the unfavourable
impression made upon all western Europe by the failure of the Holy
Father to pronounce definitely upon the rights and wrongs of the war.
The church has abrogated its right of moral judgement. Such at least
seemed to be the opinion of the Frenchmen with whom I discussed a
remarkable interview with Cardinal Gasparri that I found one morning in
_Le Journal._
It was not the sort of interview to win the hearts of men who were ready
to give their lives to set right what they believe to be the greatest
outrage that has ever been inflicted upon Christendom, that is to
say the forty-three years of military preparation and of diplomacy by
threats that culminated in the ultimatum to Serbia, the invasion of
Belgium and the murder of the Vise villagers. It was adorned with a
large portrait of “Benoit XV.,” looking grave and discouraging over his
spectacles, and the headlines insisted it was “_La Pensee du Pape._”
Cross-heads sufficiently indicated the general tone. One read:
_“Le Saint Siege impartial... Au-dessus de la bataille....”_ The good
Cardinal would have made a good lawyer. He had as little to say about
God and the general righteousness of things as the Bishop of London. But
he got in some smug reminders of the severance of diplomatic relations
with the Vatican. Perhaps now France will be wiser. He pointed out
that the Holy See in its Consistorial Allocution of January 22nd, 1915,
invited the belligerents to observe the rules of war. Could anything
more be done than that? Oh!--in the general issue of the war, if you
want a judgement on the war as a whole, how is it possible that the
Vatican to decide? Surely the French know that excellent principle of
justice, _Audiatur et altera pars_, and how under existing circumstances
can the Vatican do that...? The Vatican is cut off from communication
with Austria and Germany. The Vatican has been deprived of its temporal
power and local independence (another neat point)....
So France is bowed out. When peace is restored, the Vatican will perhaps
be able to enquire if there was a big German army in 1914, if German
diplomacy was aggressive from 1875 onward, if Belgium was invaded
unrighteously, if (Catholic) Austria forced the pace upon (non-Catholic)
Russia. But now--now the Holy See must remain as impartial as an
unbought mascot in a shop window....
The next column of _Le Journal_ contained an account of the Armenian
massacres; the blood of the Armenian cries out past the Holy Father to
heaven; but then Armenians are after all heretics, and here again the
principle of _Audiatur et altera pars_ comes in. Communications are not
open with the Turks. Moreover, Armenians, like Serbs, are worse than
infidels; they are heretics. Perhaps God is punishing them....
_Audiatur et altera pars_, and the Vatican has not forgotten the
infidelity and disrespect of both France and Italy in the past. These
are the things, it seems, that really matter to the Vatican. Cardinal
Gasparri's portrait, in the same issue of _Le Journal_, displays a
countenance of serene contentment, a sort of incarnate “Told-you-so.”
So the Vatican lifts its pontifical skirts and shakes the dust of
western Europe off its feet.
It is the most astounding renunciation in history.
Indubitably the Christian church took a wide stride from the kingship of
God when it placed a golden throne for the unbaptised Constantine in
the midst of its most sacred deliberations at Nicaea. But it seems to
me that this abandonment of moral judgements in the present case by the
Holy See is an almost wider step from the church's allegiance to God....
3
Thought about the great questions of life, thought and reasoned
direction, this is what the multitude demands mutely and weakly, and
what the organised churches are failing to give. They have not the
courage of their creeds. Either their creeds are intellectual flummery
or they are the solution to the riddles with which the world is
struggling. But the churches make no mention of their creeds. They
chatter about sex and the magic effect of church attendance and simple
faith. If simple faith is enough, the churches and their differences are
an imposture. Men are stirred to the deepest questions about life and
God, and the Anglican church, for example, obliges--as I have described.
It is necessary to struggle against the unfavourable impression made by
these things. They must not blind us to the deeper movement that is in
progress in a quite considerable number of minds in England and France
alike towards the realisation of the kingdom of God.
What I conceive to be the reality of the religious revival is to be
found in quarters remote from the religious professionals. Let me give
but one instance of several that occur to me. I met soon after my return
from France a man who has stirred my curiosity for years, Mr. David
Lubin, the prime mover in the organisation of the International
Institute of Agriculture in Rome. It is a movement that has always
appealed to my imagination. The idea is to establish and keep up to date
a record of the food supplies in the world with a view to the ultimate
world control of food supply and distribution. When its machinery has
developed sufficiently to a control in the interests of civilisation of
many other staples besides foodstuffs. It is in fact the suggestion and
beginning of the economic world peace and the economic world state, just
as the Hague Tribunal is the first faint sketch of a legal world state.
The King of Italy has met Mr. Lubin's idea with open hands. (It was
because of this profoundly interesting experiment that in a not very
widely known book of mine, _The World Set Free_ (May, 1914), in which I
represented a world state as arising out of Armageddon, I made the
first world conference meet at Brissago in Italian Switzerland under the
presidency of the King of Italy.) So that when I found I could meet Mr.
Lubin I did so very gladly. We lunched together in a pretty little room
high over Knightsbridge, and talked through an afternoon.
He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone; he could be made to look
like Gladstone in a caricature, and he has that compelling quality of
intense intellectual excitement which was one of the great factors in
the personal effectiveness of Gladstone. He is a Jew, but until I had
talked to him for some time that fact did not occur to me. He is in very
ill health, he has some weakness of the heart that grips him and holds
him at times white and silent.
At first we talked of his Institute and its work. Then we came to
shipping and transport. Whenever one talks now of human affairs one
comes presently to shipping and transport generally. In Paris, in Italy,
when I returned to England, everywhere I found “cost of carriage”
was being discovered to be a question of fundamental importance. Yet
transport, railroads and shipping, these vitally important services in
the world's affairs, are nearly everywhere in private hands and run
for profit. In the case of shipping they are run for profit on such
antiquated lines that freights vary from day to day and from hour to
hour. It makes the business of food supply a gamble. And it need not be
a gamble.
But that is by the way in the present discussion. As we talked, the
prospect broadened out from a prospect of the growing and distribution
of food to a general view of the world becoming one economic community.
I talked of various people I had been meeting in the previous few weeks.
“So many of us,” I said, “seem to be drifting away from the ideas of
nationalism and faction and policy, towards something else which is
larger. It is an idea of a right way of doing things for human purposes,
independently of these limited and localised references. Take such
things as international hygiene for example, take _this_ movement. We
are feeling our way towards a bigger rule.”
“The rule of Righteousness,” said Mr. Lubin.
I told him that I had been coming more and more to the idea--not as a
sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and directing idea, the
structural idea, of all one's political and social activities--of the
whole world as one state and community and of God as the King of that
state.
“But _I_ say that,” cried Mr. Lubin, “I have put my name to that.
And--it is _here!_”
He struggled up, seized an Old Testament that lay upon a side table.
He stood over it and rapped its cover. “It is _here_,” he said, looking
more like Gladstone than ever, “in the Prophets.”
4
That is all I mean to tell at present of that conversation.
We talked of religion for two hours. Mr. Lubin sees things in terms of
Israel and I do not. For all that we see things very much after the same
fashion. That talk was only one of a number of talks about religion
that I have had with hard and practical men who want to get the world
straighter than it is, and who perceive that they must have a leadership
and reference outside themselves. That is why I assert so confidently
that there is a real deep religious movement afoot in the world. But
not one of those conversations could have gone on, it would have ceased
instantly, if anyone bearing the uniform and brand of any organised
religious body, any clergyman, priest, mollah, of suchlike advocate of
the ten thousand patented religions in the world, had come in. He would
have brought in his sectarian spites, his propaganda of church-going,
his persecution of the heretic and the illegitimate, his ecclesiastical
politics, his taboos, and his doctrinal touchiness.... That is why,
though I perceive there is a great wave of religious revival in the
world to-day, I doubt whether it bodes well for the professional
religions....
The other day I was talking to an eminent Anglican among various other
people and someone with an eye to him propounded this remarkable view.
“There are four stages between belief and utter unbelief. There are
those who believe in God, those who doubt like Huxley the Agnostic,
those who deny him like the Atheists but who do at least keep his place
vacant, and lastly those who have set up a Church in his place. That is
the last outrage of unbelief.”