ON GOING TO CHURCH
ON GOING TO CHURCH
Oct. 28, 19—
My dear Alexa,—
Some commonplace person has said that the really important part of a woman’s letter is always in the postscript. It pains me to recognise how often the commonplace is also the true. It is the postscript of your pleasant letter that I must answer to-day. “Ought I to go to church?” you ask, and I can’t think why you say “ought.” “Ought” is a word which you know irritates me. It suggests Ethical Societies and their preposterous hymns. It raises questions of “right and wrong,” and I feel that at my age one should be done with questions of that disturbing kind. And the worst of it is I don’t quite know what you mean, for you may mean one of two things. It may be a very little question or a very big one you are putting. Well, I will try to deal with both. If youmean ought you to go to church on Sunday just now, when you are staying with correct people who go themselves, then I answer most emphatically “Yes.” To begin with it is a mere act of politeness. You might as well ask “Ought I to dress for dinner?” But it is something more than that. To stay away from church when your host and his friends go is to challenge after-luncheon controversy, to invite a religious polemic. It is to advertise in the most vulgar and objectionable way possible your irreligion, or, if not that exactly, at least your religious doubts. It is to make yourself prominent and prickly.
But I can’t believe you mean that. A child of mine may have prickles, but I am happily confident that she would carefully conceal them. What I think you do mean is, “Is it wise, in order to make the best of life, to cultivate the religious emotions?” That was it, wasn’t it? “Ought I to go to church?” was only your succinct and symbolical way of putting it. It was neatly put, and I congratulate you, Alexa.
Well, it is a big question, as I said, but one that is comparatively easy to answer, forthe answer is obvious. It may take a long time answering but that is the worst of the obvious: it always does take such a long time stating, whereas the non-obvious may generally be put into an epigram. Who are the nicest people you know, Alexa; the people you like best to talk to; the people whose judgment you most rely on; the gayest people; the people who have the art of treating serious things lightly and light things with a becoming seriousness; theall roundpeople; the people whose opinion you would most value of a poem, a novel, a symphony, a landscape; the people whose taste you trust? Think now, are they not in almost every case people with some sort of religious belief? Or, to put it otherwise, have you ever met a really delightful Atheist, man or woman? You have met many worthy Atheists, I know, persons whose moral code was as conspicuous as a red nose, whose admirable qualities stuck out of them like hat-pins, persons you are almost bound in common decency to respect; but have they been delightful? Were you not always conscious of awantin them somewhere, just as youare conscious of something lacking in a person who has no ear for music, or who does not like olives?
The religious instinct, the craving to get into touch with something outside the material world, beyondthe things we seeor apprehend with any of our five senses is born in us just like any other instinct. The history of mankind is proof positive of the fact. We have never yet caught a primitive man—most savages are degenerates they say; but, depend upon it, if ever we do we shall find him going “to church,” as you would put it. Even if we didn’t, even if it could be demonstrated beyond possibility of doubt that our arboreal ancestor knew naught of religious emotion, but was contented with his wives and his cocoanuts, it would be no disproof of my assertion thatwe, the people of 19—, are born with the religious instinct. There are exceptions of course, freaks, just as there are unfortunates born without drums to their ears and without a liking for the scent of tonkin beans; but we need not bother about them. You, my child, have drums to your ears, you keep a tonkin bean in your glove-box, and you have the religious instinct.The question I am answering, remember, is: oughtyou, Alexa, to go to church? In other words, then, it amounts to this: ought you to suppress an instinct? It is a question surely which answers itself. The pleasures of life consist in the gratification of instincts, either inherited or cultivated. To suppress an instinct, then, or to allow it to atrophy by disuse, is to shut oneself off from an opportunity of pleasure, to narrow the range of one’s emotions and one’s intellect, to diminish the number of one’s sensations; it is to be incomplete, and if you are incomplete, you cannot be delightful, Alexa. Your favourite Heine says somewhere that a charming woman without religion is like a beautiful flower without perfume. He was always right when he wrote of women. So am I.
But I think I hear you asking, is it true that the religious emotions are necessarily always pleasurable? Was it pleasure that St Simeon Stylites felt upon his pillar? Does the missionary experience a delightful thrill while the savage is skinning him alive? Well, I am not sure. I am inclined to think that St Simeon did enjoy that cold eminence of his, at any rate more than he was capable ofenjoying anything else. As for the missionary, I did meet one once who had been partially skinned, and strangely enough, he was just on the eve of starting to pay another visit to the interesting island folk who had flayed him; so we must presume it was not so bad after all. But even were it otherwise, my reply would be that persons like St Simeon have cultivated their religious emotions overmuch, and have paid insufficient attention to the other sides of their nature. They are like gluttons, or drunkards, or profligates, or the musically mad. They are religious debauchees. To spend all one’s time in religious exercises is as bad, and as foolish in its way, as to be perpetually playing the piano: it is wasting your own life and making yourself a nuisance to your neighbours. Prayer is good, my child, but really I think I would as soon see you always on your head as always on your knees. There is a line of a hymn which speaks of Heaven as a place
“Where congregations ne’er break upAnd Sabbaths have no end.”
“Where congregations ne’er break upAnd Sabbaths have no end.”
“Where congregations ne’er break upAnd Sabbaths have no end.”
“Where congregations ne’er break up
And Sabbaths have no end.”
but that was written, we may be sure, by a religious debauchee. He was a glutton, thatfellow. Now, in this, as in all other things, I would have my daughter be an epicure—not a greedy pig. Talking of Epicurus, by the way, I feel sure that if Epicurus were alive in London to-day he would attend the services in the Chapter House of the New Cathedral almost daily. Yes, and not as a mere listener to music: he would absorb the atmosphere of the place; he would be of the most devout. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, isn’t it?—and in the eupeptic tranquillity that follows. You can put the thing to a practical and a personal test if you will. Go, sit as much by yourself as you can in some great church—a cathedral for choice, of course; choose some corner where the light is broken by a stained-glass window—the glass must not be of date later than the end of the sixteenth century—and stay there quietly until after the service ends. Let the music of the organ, the clear voices of the choir boys, the penetrating odour of the incense, work their will upon you. Surrender yourself wholly, uncritically, to the influence of the place, and then, when it is all over, and you are the last to leave, or the last but one, say—for it were well, itwere perfect if, as you cross the chancel, you should see one wimpled nun “breathless in adoration” before the altar—write and ask me again, if you can, ought you to go to church!
Ah, but you, or some other girl who, unlike you, is a little agnostic Philistine, might say, those emotional experiences are æsthetic, not religious. It is the music itself that thrills, not the devotion that the music seeks to express; it is the particles of the incense that titillate the nostrils, not the odour of prayer that penetrates to the soul. Not a bit of it, Alexa, that is a callow observation worthy only a Hall of Science lecturer. Listen to exactly the same music played by the same hands, sung by the same voices, in the Queen’s Hall, and see if the emotional effect upon yourself is in any sense the same. It will charm you, of course, but there will be something missing—and that something is the satisfaction of the religious instinct, the response of the Unseen to our craving for relations with it. Yes, but the church itself, the building, the pointed arches, the clustered columns, the groined roof—have not all these much to do with the psychologicaleffect? Of course they have. But then the church was builded of men who had cultivated their religious instincts: men who believed, who felt: the building fits the religious idea as perfectly as I hope your latest frock fits your frame, my kiddie. What is a great cathedral but the religious emotion expressed in stone?
“And yet—it mayn’t be true,” I hear you mutter, with a little sceptical tremor of the lips. I don’t quite know what you mean by “it,” and I don’t greatly care. To define “it,” would require a big book, wouldn’t it? It has already required big libraries full of big books—and still the foolish squabble. There It is all the time. So we will let that question pass. What is true, what is a fact as palpable as, more palpable than, the improvement in the Strand, is the existence in us, in you, of the religious instinct—of a craving for personal relations with the Unseen, as I said. Not to seek to gratify that were as foolish as to refuse to listen to a Beethoven sonata because you feel doubtful whether Beethoven ever lived—whether all his music were not written by another gentleman of the same name.
Your mother asks me to tell you that she thinks you ought sometimes to write to her. “Ought,” and again “ought” and always “ought” in this beast of a world!
Your devoted and truly religious
Father.