Has, then, a force, or a teaching that is capable of excess, no use?
If you look back at the histories of peoples, at the histories of their great wars, their movements, their enthusiasms, you will find that on one side or another, usually on both, religion has been invoked to their aid. For one side or for both the enthusiasm has been declared to be a religious enthusiasm, the war a religious war, the awakening of thought a religious awakening. The gods fought for the Greeks before Troy as the saints did for the Spaniards against the Huns, as the Boers expected the Almighty to fight in South Africa to-day. The intellectual revolt of the Teuton against the mental leading-strings of the Latins became a conflict of religion, as did the political conflict of the Puritans againstthe Stuart Kings. It has been religion always, if possible, that has been called on to lend strength and enthusiasm to the fighters to attempt forlorn hopes, to carry out far-reaching reforms, to dare everything for the end.
There is one great exception.
In the conflict that broke out in France at the end of the last century, that storm which swept before it the breakwaters of a world and changed mediæval Europe into that of to-day, religion was not the motive power. Those six hundred men of Marseilles "who knew how to die" were sustained by no religious belief. Those armies which affronted the world in arms had no celestial champions in their ranks. Those iconoclasts, who broke down the barriers that made the good things of the world a forbidden city to all but a caste, had no religious doctrine to work by.
Indeed, it may be said that it was quite the reverse, that the war of the Revolution was against religion; but I doubt if that is quite the truth. That the war was against the priests is in great measure true, but it was because of their support to the nobles, because of their connection with worldly abuses, because of their irreligion, that they were attacked. Religion, too, suffered, it is true, but only incidentally and for a time. Andanyhow, you cannot get force out of a negation. But however this may be, the point as far as I am now concerned is not material; for all I want here to assert is that the enthusiasm which acted as a breath of life to the half-dead millions of France was not a religious enthusiasm. It never even assumed at any time a religious basis. It was not an enthusiasm of God, but of Humanity, and the war cry was "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." It was a revolt of the bond against the gaoler, of the spoiled against the ravishers; it was the assertion of the absolute equality and liberty of man.
Looking back at that turmoil now from the security of a hundred years it is easy to scorn these enthusiasts. We can point to their excesses, to the horrible crimes that were committed, and ask where was Liberty then; to their wars, and ask in vain for the Fraternity; to their proscription of whole classes made in the name of Equality. The excesses are so black, so prominent, that it is even possible sometimes to forget the great vitalising and regenerating effect of that enthusiasm.
It is easy, too, now that all is past, to criticise the very war cry itself. Liberty, we say! Yes, liberty is good—in moderation and according to circumstances. All liberty is not good. Childrenmust be under government, they cannot be quite free. They have to be directed in the right way. And peoples, too, and classes who have fallen behind in the race, who are unable to live up to the higher standards of greater nations, they cannot be free. Then the citizen of a great nation must in many matters resign his liberty for better things. Liberty is good, in moderation, and so are Equality and Fraternity, but they are not absolute truths. To cry them aloud, as did the Revolutionists of France, to insist upon them in season and out of season, is to fall into an error almost as great as their opponents'. We have little doubt now that in every well-ordered state there must be inequality, submission to masters as well as freedom, and that there are many people it is quite undesirable to fraternise with. Truth lies in the mean.
And yet consider, does truth always lie in the mean? There were the peasants of France ground into the very earth, denied any sort of equality with the nobles, any sort of liberty at all, hopelessly unable to fraternise with anyone. To breathe into them the breath of life, to rouse them from their deadly lethargy to a furious enthusiasm, to fill their hearts so full that they would go forward and never cease till they had won, that was the eminent necessity. The difficultieswere so immense, the arms of the people so weak, the chains so rivetted into their souls that only from a furious and uncontrollable impulse could any help be obtained. If the philosopher had gone to these dry bones of men, thrashing the ponds all night to prevent the frogs annoying their seigneur by croaking, sowing for others to reap, raising up sons to be slaves, and daughters to be worse than slaves—if he had gone to them and said, "My friends, you are ground down too much; you want a little more freedom—not too much, but some; you require more equality—not complete, for the perfect state requires certain inequalities, but more than you have; you require also a modicum of fraternity," what would he have effected? That level-headed philosopher would be saying the truth doubtless, and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, as the Revolutionists understood it, were impossibilities, therefore untruths; but what would he have effected? Would his "truth" have freed the slaves, have burst their chains; have restored sunlight to a continent, as the exaggeration did? Never imagine it. It may be that in the mean lies truth, but in exaggeration lies motive power. It was in the glorious dreams, the beautiful imaginings, the surgings of the heart that arose from that war cryLiberté, Egalité, Fraternité, that the strengthlay. There is no strength in the mean. It is the enthusiasts that make the world move. If they have been guilty of half the misery, they have achieved half the joy of the world. And therefore consider again, before you brand beliefs and the teachings and enthusiasms as untruths, because they are exaggerations, because they are unworkable as they stand. WhatisTruth and Untruth? Is not truth also to be judged by its results? May not what is an untruth now have been a living truth then? Have we reduced truth to measure? If, therefore, this which is an exaggeration now was then a necessary revivifying truth may there not be others like it? Consider the conditions of the world into which the Buddha preached first the teaching of peace, of purity, of calm, of holiness. It was a world of unrest, of fierce striving, of savage passions, expressed to their full. It was a world wherein these were virtues worshipped to exaggeration. It was a world without balance, and to redress this balance there came the Buddha with his teaching of the rejection of all the glories of the world, the teaching of the cult of the soul, the aspiration after peace, and beauty, and rest.
As was the world to whom the Buddha preached so was the world to whom the Christpreached six hundred years later. Their codes of conduct were the same. Against violence they taught resignation, against the search for glory they taught renunciation; they opposed pride with meekness, struggle with calm, success in this world by happiness in the next. They came to redress the balance of the world; they came to make men hope. And therefore it is impossible to take their codes by themselves and consider them, to reject them because they do not express the exact truth. What is to be considered is not that code alone, but the purpose it came to fulfil. The codes of Buddha and of Christ are exaggerations, that is true; they cannot be lived up to in their entirety, that is also true. Taken alone they are impossible; that is true. Are they then untrue, useless, valueless guides to conduct?
Not quite so. For man is so built that he requires an exaggeration. If you would persuade him to go with you a mile you must urge him to come two; if you would have him acquire a reasonable freedom you must create in him an enthusiasm for unreasonable freedom; if you would have him moderate his passions he must be adjured to wholly suppress them.
And therefore, it may be, do these codes of Buddha and Christ live. Not because they areabsolutely true, not because they furnish an ideal mode of life, not in order to be fully accepted, but because they are exaggerations that balance exaggerations; and out of the mean has come what is worth having; because they have an effect which the exact truth would not have in the masses of men.
They have been truth, because their results were true.
But the world is growing older, it is learning many things. Never again can we hear that cry ofLiberté, Egalité, Fraternité, the enthusiasms of a nation for its ideals. These ideals were true then, they were true because their work was true. But their work is done; men's eyes are open now, we do not require such exaggerations to move us to our work. They were in themselves but half truths. It required the violent assertions of inequality, of slavery, to make up a whole truth. With one has died the necessity for the other.
And so it may be with the codes of Buddhism and Christianity. They were true in their day, because they had their work to do. To have any effect at all they had to be enormous exaggerations; to earn any respect or attention they had to be proclaimed as perfect, as divine. But now, with the dying of the old brutalities, with thegrowth of civilisation, of humanity, and culture, the old savage exaggerations are dying out. The world is more refined, more effeminate, more clear-sighted. It says to itself, "These codes, if divine and perfect, must be capable of being implicitly obeyed; but they cannot be obeyed, and therefore they are not divine."
And in the increased civilisation we feel less the need of a teaching of gentleness; our nature is no longer too coarse; it may be it is going the other way, that the softening process is going too far, and that our need is a new savagery. And above all we hate exaggeration. To minds capable of thought, of reason, and of culture, exaggeration on one side is no excuse for exaggeration on the other. We are changing from the older men who required enthusiasms to drive them and violent exaggerations to cause them to move. We like exactitude.
These codes were made for rougher days than ours. They were true then. They are not true now—not true, at least, to the more thoughtful. But that they were true once, that the world owes to them its rescue from the exaggeration of the passions, we must never forget. They were truths while opposed. When opposed no longer they become false and fall. An exaggeration can only be useful as long as it is notperceived to be so. Set up two beams against each other, they are savagery and the purist codes. While one stands so does the other, and they make an equilibrium. But take away one and straightway the other must fall too. One cannot stand alone.
"I have been lent your book 'The Soul of a People,'" said a lady to me, "but I have only had time so far to read the dedication. Do you know what I exclaimed?"
"I cannot even guess," I replied.
"I said, 'How very scientific.' Do you know what I meant?"
As my dedication is to the Burmese people, and only says I have tried always to see their virtues and forget their faults, as a friend should, I was quite unable to see where the science came in, and I said so.
"It is Christian Science," she told me.
Then she proceeded to tell me much about this Christian science, that it was the science of looking at the best side of things, that it cured the body by mind, despair by hope, darkness by light, solitude by a sense of the companionship of God (good). She had proof in her own family of whata change it can bring to the unhappy. It was, she said, all new, and discovered by Mrs. Eddy.
This was not, of course, the first I had heard of this strange cult. It has been in the air for some time past. Mostly it has been jeered at as an absurdity by those who have looked only at the extraordinary claims it makes, at the intellectual fog it offers as thought, at the childishness and inconsequence of whatever conceptions could be picked out of the maze of words; and up till then it had seemed to me but another of those misty foolishnesses that amuse people who have nothing else to do.
But when a case of real benefit, of benefit I could see and understand, was offered me in proof of its value, it seemed to me worth while to consider what there was in this teaching, to see what sense lay in this apparent senselessness, and to what want this new science appealed.
I have mentioned elsewhere in this book—it is a fact that comes to one who has been in the East many years very strongly—the aimless pessimism that is so prevalent in England and Europe. I am not here concerned with its cause. Mainly, perhaps, it is due to the rise of a great class of middle and upper-middle people who have no object in life. They have by inheritance or acquirement enough money to live upon, and the struggle forlife passes them by. They have no necessity to work, and they are not endowed with the brain or energy necessary to take to themselves some object or pursuit. Their minds and sympathies have never been trained by necessity. They have fallen out of the great world of life and passion into eddies and backwaters. They have become flabby, both bodily, mentally, and emotionally, and, conscious of their own uselessness, they have fallen into the saddest pessimism. They are not blasé, because they have never tasted the realities of life; they have few friends, because they have no common interest to bind them to others. Their lives are monotonies, and their thoughts and speech are a prolonged whine. They are perpetually searching and never finding, because they know not what they seek. Most of them are women, but there are men also. I do not mean that all Christian Scientists are from the ranks of the unemployed. It is recruited also from those who with larger needs for emotion find the circumstances of ordinary life too narrow for them, from the over nervous and weak of all classes. But the majority are, I think, of those who do nothing.
They turn to the established religions, vaguely hoping for the emotional stimulus they need, but they fail to find it.
I am not quite sure why. One Christian Scientist assured me that Mrs. Eddy had discovered, all out of her own mind, that God was Love, and that was why Christian Science was so successful. This was a lady who had gone to church regularly all her life. Yet she supposed this a new discovery! A strange but not at all solitary instance of what I have so often found, that the immense majority who call themselves Christians have never tried to realize what their religion is. Many others have told me that they are "Christian Scientists" for other allied reasons. But no doubt the great attraction of Christian Science is in its doctrine, that bodily ills can be cured by mental effort, the assertion that evil exists only in the mind. This is, of course, nothing new. Faith healing has been common in all stages of the world, has allied itself to all religions. There is the standing example of Lourdes to-day, there was the relic worship of the middle ages, the pilgrimages and washings in sacred pools. It is common all over the world. The good effects attributed, and often truly, to charms and magic are but another instance of it. A great deal of the sickness and unhappiness of the world has always been purely the result of a diseased thought acting upon the body. The great antidote the world has always offered tothis evil has been work. In daily work, in the necessity for daily effort, in the forced detachment of mind it brings on, in the interest that a worker is obliged to take in his work lest he fail, or even starve, lies the great tonic. And to this has been always added the belief in some religious rite, or in charms.
But these resources are closed to the unhappy class that I am writing of. They need not work. They never have worked at anything, and know not how to do it. Even from childhood their brains have been relaxed and their interests narrowed. Yet a great interest is a necessity for all men and women. But consider the lives of these people, especially of the women, how terrible it is. There is nothing they care for, nothing. One day of monotony is added to another for ever. Marriage and children may dissipate it for a time, may give them the interest they require, but it does not last long. Love fades into indifference, the children grow up. They no longer need care and thought, and there is nothing else. Dull, blank misery descends upon them as a garment never to be lifted.
And if the love be a disappointment, a tragedy, then what help is there anywhere? "Let me die," she cries, "and be done with it. Life isnot worth living." The world is horrible, because they see the world through glasses dimmed with their own misery.
To them comes Mrs. Eddy and says, "All the evil you feel, the mental sickness, the bodily sickness, is imaginary. Face your evils in the certainty that they are but bogies and they will flee before you. You shall again become well and strong, and life shall be worth living."
It is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Pain and sickness are real things, and the empire of the mind over the body is very limited. Still, there is an empire and it must never be forgotten. The healthy-minded—those who work, who live their lives, who love and hate, and fight, and win and lose, to whom the world is a great arena—will laugh at Mrs. Eddy. They need not this teaching which is half a truth and half a lie. They see the false half only because they need not the true half. And the others, the mental invalids, they see the true half and not the false. It isalltrue to them, and itmustbe all true to be of use, for power lies in the exaggeration, never in the mean. This is the secret of "Christian Science." We have in our midst a terrible disease, growing daily worse, the disease of inutility, which breeds pessimism, and Mrs. Eddy's doctrine of the imaginary nature of evilis good for this pessimism. The sick seize it with avidity because they find it helps their symptoms, and in the relief it affords to their unhappiness they are willing to swallow all the rest of the formless mist that is offered to them as part of their religion.
I do not know that "Christian Scientists" differ greatly from believers in other religions in this point. It is an excellent instance of how one useful tenet will cause the acceptance of a whole mass of absurdities and even make them seem real and true. Christian Science has come as the quack medicine to cure a disease that is a terrible reality, and it is of use because it contains in all its mélange one ingredient, morphia, that dulls the pain. But the cure of this disease lies elsewhere than in Christian Science, than, indeed, in any religion.
I have given a chapter to this "Science," not because it appears to me that it is ever likely to become a real force or of real importance, but because it illustrates, I think, the reason of the success or otherwise of all religions. It exhibits in exaggerated form what is the nature of all religions.
They come to fulfil an emotional want, or wants that are imperative and that call for relief. And they succeed and persist exactly as they ministerto these emotional wants. The emotion that requires religion is always a pessimism of some form or other, a weariness, a hopelessness. And the religion is accepted because it combats that helplessness and gives a hope. All religions are optimisms to their believers.
A great deal of foolishness may be included in a faith without injury to its success. Doctrine, theory, scientific theology, may be as empty and meaningless as it is in Christian Science, and still the faith will live. And the central idea must be exaggerated. It must be so exaggerated that to outsiders it appears only an immense falsehood. It is so in all the religions. Truth lies in the mean, power in the extreme. They are opposed as are freewill and destination, as are God and Law.
There is one complaint that all Europeans make of the Burmese. It matters not what the European's duties may be, what his profession, or his trade, or his calling—it is always the same, "the Burmans will not stand discipline." It is, says the European, fatal to him in almost all walks of life. For instance, the British Government tried at one time in Burma to raise Burmese regiments officered by Europeans, after the pattern of the Indian troops. There seemed at first no reason why it should not succeed. The Burmans are not cowards. Although not endowed with the fury of the Pathan or the bloodthirsty valour of the Ghurka, the Burman is brave. He will do many things none but brave men can do; kill panthers with sharpened sticks, for instance, and navigate the Irrawaddy in flood in canoes, with barely two inches free board. He is, in his natural state in the villages, unaccustomed to any strictdiscipline. But then, so are most people; and if the levies of the Burmese kings were but a mob, why, so are most native levies. There seemeda priorino reason why Burmese troops should not be fairly useful. And the attempt was made. It failed.
And so, to a greater or less extent, all attempts to discipline the Burmans in any walk of life have always failed. Amongst the police—which must, of course, be composed of natives of the country—discipline, even the light discipline sought to be enforced, is always wanting. And good men will not join the force, mostly because they dislike to be ruled. In the mills in Rangoon labour has been imported from India. Not that the Burman is not a good workman—he is physically and mentally miles above the imported Telugu—but he will not stand discipline. It is the same on the railways and on the roads, and the private servants of almost all Europeans are Indian. The Burman will not stand control, daily control, daily order, the feeling of subjection and the infliction of punishment. Especially the infliction of punishment. He resents it, even when he knows and admits he deserves it.
Is, then, the Burman impatient of suffering? He is the most patient, the most cheerful of mortals. I who have seen districts ruined byfamine, families broken up and dissolved, farms abandoned, cattle dying by the thousand, I know this. And in the famine camps, where tens of thousands lived and worked hard for a bare subsistence, was there any inability to bear up, any despondency, any despair? There was never any. Such an example of cheerfulness, of courage under great suffering, could not be surpassed. Yet if you fine your servant a few annas out of his good pay for a fault he will admit he made, he will bitterly resent it and probably leave you. It is Authority, Personality, that the Burmans object to. And the whole social life of the people, the whole of their religion, shows how deeply this distaste to Personal Authority enters into their lives.
There is no aristocracy in Burma. There has never been so. There has, it is true, always been a King—that was a necessity; and his authority, nominally absolute, was in fact very limited. But beside him there was no one. There were no lords of manors, no feudalism, no serfage of any kind. There was a kind of slavery, the idea of which probably came into Burma with the code of Manu, as a redemption of debt. At our conquest of Upper Burma it disappeared without a sign, but it was the lightest of its kind. The slave was a domestic servant at most, more usually amember of the family; the authority exercised over him or her was of the gentlest, for with the dislike to submit to personal authority there was an equally great dislike to exercising it. The intense desire for power and authority over others which is so distinguishing a mark of western people does not obtain among the Burmese. It is one of our difficulties to make our subordinate Burmese magistrates and officers exercise sufficient authority in their charges. This dislike, both to exercising and submitting to authority, is instinctive and very strong.
In western nations, more especially the Latin nations, who made Christianity, it is the very reverse. There is in us both the desire and ability to govern and the power to submit readily to those who are above us. We rejoice in aristocracies, whether of the Government or of the Church. We organise all our institutions upon that basis. We have a rigid Government, such as no Orientals have dreamt of, least of all the Burmese. We revere rank instinctively. We like to have masters. Personal submissiveness is in our eyes an excellent quality. We know that to declare a man to be a faithful servant is a great praise. In our lives as in our religions, lord and servant express a continued relationship. And from this quality, this instinct of discipline,this innate power both of governing and submitting to governance, come the forms of government and our success in trade and in many other matters.
It would, however, be quite outside the point of this chapter to discuss all the results of these differences and their effect for good and bad. To the European the Burman, with his distaste for authority, appears to be unfitted for the greater successes of life. To the Burman the European's desire for authority appears to result in the slavery of the many to the few, in the loss of individual liberty and the contraction of happiness. Either or both, or neither, may be true. It is here immaterial, for all I wish to point out and to emphasise is that whereas the Burman, who is a Buddhist, dislikes all personal authority instinctively, the western Christians, more especially the Latin peoples, on the contrary crave after it. The Burman's ideal is to be independent of everyone, even if poor, to have no one over him and no one under him, to live among his equals. But in western countries the tendency is all to divide the world into two classes, master and man, to organise—which means, of course, authority and submission—and to make obedience one of the greatest of virtues.
Now consider their faiths. The Christian hasa personal God. He owes to that God unquestioning obedience and submission. Man may praise God and thank Him, but not do the reverse. Man owes to God reverence, one of the greatest of the virtues. And the Churches are all organised in the same way. The authority of God becomes the authority of the Pope, the Tsar, the Bishops, the priests. The amount of submission and reverence due to the priests of Christianity may vary in different countries, but it is always there, and the reverence due to God never alters.
Do you think such a system of religion would be bearable to a Burman? To him neither reverence nor submission to Personality, whether God or priest or master, is an instinctive beauty. He acknowledges neither God nor priest, and he avoids masters as much as possible. His nature does not lead him to it. He revolts against Personality. Courage under the inevitable he has to the greatest extent. If he suffer as the result of a law he has nothing but cheerful acceptance, even if he do not understand it. If he can see his suffering to be the result of his own mistakes he will bear it with resignation, and note that in future he should be more careful. But that he should bepunished, that rouses in him resentment, revolt. He would cry to God, Why do you hurtme? You need not if you do not like; You are all-powerful. Cannot you manage otherwise than by causing so much pain to me and all the world? There are other feelings caused by a Personality, many other feelings than that of submission. There is defiance, bitterness. Did not Ajax defy the lightning? If a man or a boy looking at the world discovers in it more misery than happiness, more injustice than justice, of what sort will be his feelings to the Author of it all?
I fear that if the Burman accepted a Personal All-powerful God and then looked at the state of the world, his attitude towards that Personality would not be all admiration and reverence. Indeed, they have often told me so.
But before Law, before Necessity. You cannot revolt against the inevitable. Passion is useless. The suffering which would be resented from a Personality is borne with courage as an inevitable result. You may be of good courage and say, "It is my fault, my ignorance; I will learn not to put my hands in the fire and so not be burnt." But if you suppose a God burnt you without telling you why, without giving you a chance, what then? Is this hard to understand? I do not know, but to me it is not so. For I can remember a boy, who was much as these Burmans are, who found authority hard to bear, punishmentvery difficult to accept; who remembered always that the punishment might have been omitted, who thought it was often mistaken and vindictive. For if you are almost always ill, and find for days and weeks and months that very little mental exertion is as much as you are capable of, how much do you accept the justice of being called "idle," "lazy," "indolent," and being kept in to waste what little mental strength you have left in writing meaningless impositions? There is more. It is a Christian teaching, a lesson that is frequently enforced in children, that all their acts are watched by God. "He sees me now." "God is watching me." How often are not these written in large words on nursery walls? And do you think that there are not some natures who revolt from this? To be watched—always watched. Cannot you imagine the intense oppression, the irritation and revulsion, such a doctrine may occasion? "Cannot I be left alone?" And when he learns that there is another belief—that he is not being watched, that he is not a child in a nursery, but a man acting under laws he can learn—cannot you imagine the endless relief, the joy as of emancipation from a prison? That it is so to many people I know, the feeling that law means freedom, but I also know that to others it is not. "Law, this rigid law," said the French missionary priest with a sigh whenwe were discussing the matter, "it makes me shudder. It seems to me like an iron chain, like a terrible destiny binding us in. Ah, I never could believe that. But a God who watches over us, who protects us, who is our Father, that is to me true and beautiful. Who will help you if not God? Under Law you must face the world alone. No!" and he shuddered, "let us not think of it. I cannot abide the idea." And how many are like him?
Do you think that such feelings can be changed? Do you think that he who thinks Law to be freedom will ever be argued or converted into Theism? It can never be. Such beliefs are innate, they are instincts far beyond reason or discussion, to be understood only by those who have felt them.
There is the instinct for God which rules almost all the West and India. There is the instinct against God and for Law which rules the far East. You cannot get away from either, you cannot prove either or disprove it. They are instincts, and they influence not only the religious beliefs but the whole lives of the peoples.
It is easy to see how in Europe the instinct for Personality has influenced all history. In moderation its effects have been all for good; it binds people into nations, it enables the weaker andmore ignorant to accept willingly the leadership of the better. It has manifested itself with us even to-day in the respect and reverence and affection we have all felt for our Queen, who has so lately left us. And in its excess it has been wholly evil. It has led us to irresponsible monarchs, to the terrible tyranny of the French aristocracy, that required the whirlwind of a Revolution to efface. In the blind worship for Napoleon in his later days it drove the nation to terrible suffering. This desire for Personality has writ its effects large upon the history of the West, more especially in Latin nations.
And in Burma the want of this instinct is also written deeply in the history. There has been with them no enthusiasm for persons, no idealisation of individuals. There is no inborn desire for rulers and masters, for obedience and submission.
The effect of the instinct is writ largely in their history. They have no aristocracy, they have no feudality, there are neither masters nor men. They cannot organise or combine. The central Government was incredibly weak. There is nothing that strikes the Burman with such surprise as the unvaried obedience of all officials to a faraway government. But I am now concerned with effects, only causes. I have wished to show why a Burman believes in Law and not in God, thatit arises from an instinct against overpowering Personality, an innate dislike to the idea. It is never to him Truth. It makes him unhappy even to hear of it. He could never accept it as a truth, for truth is that which is in accord with our hearts.
Yet the Burman whose ideal is Law is not quite without the instinct of Personality. He also prays sometimes, and you cannot pray to nothing. Far down in his heart there is also the same instinct that rules the West, but it is weak. It finds its vent now and then despite his faith. And in the West the idea of Law is rising. It is new, but not less true for that. It rises steadily hand in hand with science, and it, too, will find its vent despite the faith.
When the scientific theologian declares that God is not variable, that He has no passions, no anger, no vengeance, that He is bound by immovable righteousness and is not affected by prayer, cannot you see the idea of Law? No one would have said this a hundred years ago. It is growing in him; it is there, even if he do not recognise it as such, and sore havoc it makes with the old theologies.
The instinct of generalisation made many gods into one God; the instinct of atonement obliged the sub-division of God; to be explained only byan incomprehensible formula. And now there is arising a third instinct—that of Law. It is weak yet, but it is there. When it becomes stronger either Personality must disappear or else a still more incomprehensible creed must be formulated to reconcile the three ideas. But what is truth? Are they all true?
It is Sunday to-day in the little Italian town, and they have been holding a procession. I do not know quite what was the reason of the procession; it is the feast day of the patron of the Church, and it is connected in some way with him, but quite how no one could tell me. It was the custom, and that sufficed. It was not a very grand procession, for the town is small, but there was the town band playing at the head, and there were girls in twos singing and priests, also in pairs, singing, and there were banners and a crucifix. This last was just like any other crucifix you may see; there was the pale body of Christ upon the cross, with His wounds red with blood, there was the tinsel crown over the head, there was upon the face the look of suffering. It was like any other crucifix in a Catholic country, not a work of art at all. It was gruesome, and to the unbeliever repulsive and unpleasant. But all thepeople uncovered as it passed, and many looked to it with reverence and worship.
But indeed Catholic countries are full of such crucifixes. They are upon the hills, they are beside the roadsides, they are in all the churches, they are in every Catholic household, there is very often one worn upon the person.
Throughout Italy, throughout all Catholic countries, there are only two representations of Christ—as a babe with the Virgin Mary and crucified upon the cross. It was in Italy that Western Christianity arose and grew, it was in Italy that it became a living power, it was in Italy that it acquired consistency, that it was bound together by dogmas and crystallised in creeds. And still, after nineteen hundred years, it is Italy that remains the centre of the Christian world. There is no Christian church so great, so venerable, so imposing as the Church of Rome. It lasts unchanged amid the cataclasms of worlds. And this people whose genius made Christianity, whose genius still rules the greater part of it, what are their conceptions of Christ? What part of His life is it that has caught their reverence and adoration, what side is it of His character that appeals to them, what is the emotion that the name of Christ awakens in these believers?
Of the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ I have written in another chapter. It is of the crucifix I wish to write here. Why is it that of the life of Christ this end of His is considered the most worthy to be in continual remembrance?
I confess that when I climb the hill and see the dead Christs upon their crosses shining white against the olive gardens, when I see His agony depicted in the churches, when I see the people gaze upon Him sacrificed, my memory is taken back to other scenes.
There is a scene that I can remember in a village far away against the frontier in our farthest East. It was a little village that was once a city, but decayed; it was walled with huge walls of brick, but they are fallen into mounds; it had gateways, but they are now but gaps; and a few huts are huddled in a corner where once a palace stood.
It is the custom in this village that every year at a certain season white cocks are to be sacrificed at the gates. There is as may be some legend to explain the custom, but it is forgotten. And yet are the cocks sacrificed each year.
There is the memory, too, of the goat I saw killed in India years ago as I have described.And there are other memories—memories of what I have seen, of what I have read. For this ceremony of sacrifice is the very oldest of all the beginnings of religion. It is akin to prayer, it is at the root of all faiths; we can go no further back than sacrifice. Where it began religion had commenced. Far older than any creed, arising from the dumb instincts of human kind, it is one of the roots of faiths.
Therefore, when I see this image of God, the Son sacrificed to God the Father, I seem to behold the highest development of this long story. Sacrifice, it has always been sacrifice. It has been small animals—goats and fowls and pigeons; it has been greater and more valuable beasts—cattle and horses. It has been man. How often indeed has it been man: Abraham leading Isaac to the sacrifice, the Aztecs sacrificing in Mexico, the Druids in Britain, the followers of Odin, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the early Hindus, can you find a faith that has not sacrificed? Sometimes it has been single victims, sometimes hecatombs of slaughtered slaves. It has been sacrifice by priests, it has been self-sacrifice, as Curtius or as those who threw themselves before the car of Juggernauth. Everywhere there has been sacrifice; it is one of the roots of faiths, it arouses the emotion that has helped to make allreligions. And in Christianity it has reached its zenith, for it is no longer an animal, no longer even a man—it is a God, the Son of God who is self-sacrificed to God. In what manner this awakens the emotions of man the following extract will show. It is from "The Gospel of the Atonement," by the Venerable J. Wilson.
"The law that suffering is divine, [Greek: to kalon pathein], is verified in the experience of the soul. Now Christ's death is the supreme instance of that law. The power of Gethsemane and Calvary, in the light of such a law, needs no explanation. They open the heart as nothing else ever did. We know that whatever reservations we make for ourselves, whatever our own shrinking from utter self-sacrifice, Christ, living in perfect accordance with the laws of spiritual health and perfection, could not do other than die. Thus without any thought of payment or expiation, with no vestige of separation of the Son from the Father, we see that the death on the Cross demonstrated that the human and divine know but one and the same law of life and being. Thus it is that the death of Christ, the shedding of His blood, has been, and ever will be, regarded by theologians, as well as by the simple believers, as the way of the atonement. Via crucis via salutis."
The scientific theologians tell me when I ask that this parade of the sacrifice of Christ is to recall to men how much they should love Christ. That He so loved them that He gave Himself a victim for their salvation. The crucifix, the incessant preaching of the death of Christ, the sacrament of the Communion, is to cause us to love Him as to do what He taught us. That it does have some such effect no one can doubt—on Latin people. But on others?
To some it seems that if you try to reason at all about it, the emotion awakened might be, nay should be, otherwise. In those not instinct with one emotion the first impression awakened is disgust at the parade of death and blood; the second, horror at the God who could demand such a sacrifice, who could not be pacified but by the execution in circumstances of shame of His own Son. They shrink from it. It is no matter of reason. Do you think one who felt so could be argued out of his horror or a Christian out of his devotion? They are instinctive feelings which nothing will change. And yet in a very small way even the Buddhist has the instinct of sacrifice. For I remember that when the fowls were killed inside the city gate and their blood ran upon the ground the people looked just as these Italian people looked. The emotion was the same inkind, and it was not either love for the fowls or wonder at the demand of the spirits that moved them. And so when the slaves were sacrificed beneath the oaks, was it gratitude to the slaves that was evoked? And in the self-sacrifice at the car of Juggernauth? It may be sometimes that gratitude may be added, but this is not the root emotion. The instinct of sacrifice has its roots much deeper than this, quite apart from this; and, with perhaps only one exception—Buddhism—all religions have practised it. Christianity performs no more sacrifices now, but all its churches, in all their varieties weekly at the great sacrament of the Communion, commemorate—nay, it is claimed in a measure recreate—this sacrifice of the Son to the Father. Sacrifice is of the very root of this religion. It is far older than any creed. The Jews knew of sacrifice two thousand years before the day of Christ, the Celts sacrificed slaves ages before that.
But it may be said these crosses, these crucifixes, are peculiar to Catholic countries. You do not see them in North Germany, in England, in America. Teutonic nations do not parade this sacrifice. No, they do not, for it does not appeal to them so much as to the nations of Southern Europe. Sacrifice was not unknown to the Teutons and the Northern people, but itnever reached the height it did further South. It has been the Latin peoples who in this as in other matters went to extremes. It was the Greeks who sacrificed Iphigenia, who had the festival of the Thargalia; it was Rome which produced Curtius and others who sacrificed themselves. It was the Romans who sacrificed thousands in the Coliseum. It is in the tumuli of Celtic peoples where we find the cloven skulls of slaves.
Sacrifice has appealed always more to the Latin then and now; and therefore you see the crucifix in Latin countries, but not with us. Still, we are not free from the emotion. We have the sacrament of Communion; the Atonement appeals to us also. The passions that are strong in the Latin peoples are weak with us, yet they exist. The instincts are the same. When executions were public our people thronged to see them. Death has always a peculiar attraction, quite apart from any idea connected with it. It is such a wonderful thing the taking of life, so awe-inspiring, that it has appealed always to men; especially in the west.
In the East that has accepted Buddhism, especially in Burma, it is much less so. They have, it is true, the usual pleasure and curiosity in seeing blood and death. And occasionally you comeacross some petty sacrifice like that of the fowls mentioned above; but the instinct is comparatively weak. It has never, even before they were Buddhists, been general, and never extended even to cattle. The sacrifice of a man (remember, I say sacrifice, not execution), would be absolutely abhorrent to them, how much more so that of a God? They have not the instinctive recognition of any beauty in it. Therefore, for this amongst other reasons, the Burmese reject Christianity.
But to the Western instinct this sacrifice and this atonement is wonderful and beautiful. It appeals to us. The old instinct is satisfied.
Therefore, amongst other reasons, Christians cling to the Atonement, and to make that sacrifice the greatest possible it must be the sacrifice of God, and as God can only be sacrificed to God the Christian God must be a multiple one. To postulate as the Mahommedan does, God is God, would destroy the depth of the Atonement. Hence arises the creed, the attempt to reconcile two opposed instincts. There is one God—that is an instinct, arising from our generalising power; there must be at least two Gods to explain the Atonement, and so we have the Father and the Son.
For of the three Godheads only these two are real to most people. There is God the Ruler, the Maker of the world, and there is Christ. These are both very real to all Christians. They are prayed to individually, they are worshipped separately, they are clear conceptions. But is there any clear conception of the Holy Ghost as a distinct personality? Is He ever cited separately from the others? Has He any special characteristics? There are, for instance, many pictures of God, and many more of Christ—are there any of the Holy Ghost? This Third Person of the Trinity appeals to no instinct, and is only an abstraction in popular thought. When the Creed was framed it was necessary to include the Holy Ghost because He is mentioned in the New Testament. He has remained an abstraction only. But the other two Godheads are realities, because they appeal to feelings that are innate. They are the explanation of these feelings.
Thus do creeds arise out of instincts. It is never the reverse. Postulate God the Father as All-Powerful, All-Merciful, and see if by any possibility you can work out the Atonement or see any beauty in it. Can anyone see aught but horror in this Almighty demanding the sacrifice of His Son? You cannot. But granted thatAtonement and sacrifice have to you an innate beauty of their own, and the dogma of a multiple Godhead easily follows. There are creeds built on ceremonies, and ceremonies upon instincts: ceremonies are never deduced from creeds.
The only other form in which the Christ is presented to popular adoration is as a baby in the Madonna's arms. Out of all the life of Christ, all the varied events of that career which has left such a great mark upon the Western world, only the beginning and the end are pictured. Christ the teacher, Christ the preacher, the restorer of the dead to life, the feeder of the hungry, the newly arisen from the grave, where is He? The great masters have painted Him, but popular thought remembers nothing of all that. There is Christ the sacrificed and Christ the infant with His mother. To the Latin people these two phases represent all that is worth daily remembrance. There are crucifixes and Madonnas in every hill side, by every road, at the street corners, in every house, and of the rest of the story not a sign.
What is the emotion to which the Madonna appeals? Why do she and her Child thus live in Latin thought?
There are historians who tell us that the worship of the Madonna was introduced from Egypt. She is Astarte, Queen of Heaven, the Phœnician goddess of married love or maternity, she is the Egyptian Isis with her son Horus. It is a cult that was introduced through Spain, and took root among the Latin people and grew. There is no question here of Christ, they say; it is the goddess and her son.
It has also absorbed the worship of Venus and Aphrodite. Venus was the tutelary goddess of Rome, she was the goddess of maternity, of production. It was not till the Greek idea of beauty in Aphrodite came to Rome and became confounded with the goddess Venus that her status changed. She was the goddess of married love, she became later the emblem of lust. But it was she who purified marriage to the old Roman faith; she was the purifier, the justifier, the goddess of motherhood, which is the sanction of love and marriage.
It may be that all this is true. It may be possible to trace the worship back through the various changes to Astarte, Ashtoreth, to Isis, to older gods, maybe, than these. All this may betrue, and yet be no explanation. The old gods are dead. Why does she alone survive? What is the instinct that requires her, that pictures her on the street corners, that makes her worship a living worship to-day?
And why is it that she appeals not at all to the Teutonic people? Where are her pictures in Protestant Germany, in England, in Scotland, in America? Do you ever hear of her there? Do the preachers tell of her, the picture makers paint her, the people pray to her? Such a worship is impossible. And why? What is the answer that to-day gives to that question? Is the answer difficult? I think not, for it is written in the hearts of the people, it is written in the laws they have made, in the customs they adhere to, in the oaths they take, in their daily lives.
Consider the Roman laws of two thousand and more years ago, the French laws of to-day. What is there most striking to us when we study them? It is, I think, the cult of the family.
The Roman son was his father's slave. He could not own property apart from the father, he could not marry without leave, his father could execute him without any trial. Family life lay outside the law; not Senate, nor Consul nor Emperorcould interfere there. The unit in Rome was not the man, but the family.
As it was so it is. The laws are less stringent, but the idea remains. A man belongs not to himself but to his people, to his father and to his mother. In France even now he has to ask their leave to marry. The property is often family property, and his family may restrain a man from wasting it.
There is no bond anywhere stronger than the family bond of the Latin peoples. In mediæval Rome, even often in Rome of to-day, all the sons live with their father and mother even if married. It is the custom, and, like all customs that live, it lives because it is in accord with the feelings of those who obey it.
A man belongs to his family, he clings to it; he is not an individual, but part of an organism.
And although in law it is the father who is the head, it is the father who is the lawgiver, the ruler, is it really he who is that centre, that lode-star, that holds the family together? I think it is not so. It is the mother who is the centre of that affection which is stronger than gravity. We laugh when a Frenchman swears by his mother. But he is swearing by all that he holds most sacred. No Latin would laugh at such a matter. Because he could understand, and wedo not. To everyone of Latin race there comes next to God his mother, next to Christ the Madonna, who is the emblem of motherhood.
The Latins do not emigrate. They hate to leave their country. And if they do, if necessity drive them forth, are they ever happy, ever at rest till they can see their way to return? The Americans tell us that Italians are the worst immigrants because they will not settle; because they send their pay to their parents in the old country, and are never happy till they themselves can return. We call it nostalgia, we say it is a longing for their country. It is that and more. It is a longing for their family, their blood. They cling together in a way we have no idea of.
Does an Englishman ever swear by his mother, does he yearn after her as the Latins do from a far country? Does the fear of separation keep our young men at home? It is always the reverse. They want to get away. The home nest tires them, and they would go; and once gone they care not to return, they can be happy far away. The ties of relationship are light and are easily shaken off, they are quickly forgotten.
Italian labourers and servants give some of their pay always as a matter of course to their parents. It is a natural duty. And in Latincountries there are no poorhouses. They could not abide such a theory any more than could the Indians. It would seem to a Latin an impossibility that any child would leave his parents in a workhouse. Poor as they might be they would keep together. The great bond that holds a family together is the mother, always the mother. We can see this in England too, even with our weaker instinct. The mother makes the home and not the father.
And now are we not finding that sanction we were searching for? If the Madonna, the type of motherhood, appeals to all the people, men and women, is there not a reason? It is an instinct. These images and pictures of the Madonna sound on their heart-strings a chord that is perhaps the loudest and sweetest; if second to any, second only to that of God. God as father, God as mother, God as son and sacrifice, here is the threefold real Godhead of the Latins.
But with us the family tie is slight, the mother worship is faint. Our Teutonic Trinity is God the Father, God the Son, and now later God the Law. These are the realities.
For with us conduct is more and emotion is less than with the peoples of the South.
Of all aspects of religion none is so difficult to understand as the relation of religion and conduct. It is ever varying. There seems to be nothing fixed about it. What does conduct arise from? It takes its origin in an instinct, and this instinct is so strong, so imperious, so almost personal, that of all the instincts it alone has a name. It is conscience.
By conscience our acts are directed.
There are scientific men who tell us that our consciences are the result of experience, partly our own, but principally inherited. That if conscience warns us against any course of action it is because that has been experienced to result in misfortune. It is an unconscious memory of past experiences. Conscience is instinctive, and not affected by teaching to any great extent; and that conscience is the main guide of life no one will deny.
But do the voices of conscience and of God, as stated in the sacred books, agree?
When the savage sees a god in the precipice and is afraid of him, there is no question of right or wrong. Not that the savage has no code of morals. He has a very elaborate one. But it is usually distinct from his religion. What virtue did Odin teach? None but courage in war. Yet the Northmen had codes of conduct fitted to their stage of civilisation. The Greeks had many gods. They had also codes of morals and an extensive philosophy, but practically there was no connection. In fact, the gods were examples not of morality but of immorality. It was the same with the Latins and with all the Celts. Their religions were emotional religions, their codes of conduct were apart, although even here you see now and then an attempt to connect them. And when the Latin people took Christianity and formed it, they put into their creeds no question of conduct. You believed, and therefore you were a Christian. The results of bad conduct would be annulled by confession, and the sinner would receive absolution. To a Latin Christian a righteous unbeliever who had never done anything but good would in the end be damned, whereas the murderer who repented at the last would be saved. "There is more joy in heavenover one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance."
Is the inference that the Latin peoples were wickeder than others? I doubt it. They initiated all European civilisation, and trade and commerce, and law and justice. Probably the highest examples of conduct the world has known have been Latins. They had and have the instinct of conduct, they had and have consciences as good as other people, but only they do not so much connect conduct and religion. You can be saved without conduct.
The Jews, on the contrary, had no instinct of conduct apart from religion. In the Ten Commandments conduct, if it have the second place, has yet the larger share. Righteousness was the keynote of their belief, and if the only righteousness they knew was little better than a noble savagery, it was the best they could do. They included every form of conduct in their religion—sanitary matters, caste observances, and business rules. The Hindu goes even further in the same line. Everything in life is included in his religion.
When in the Reformation the Teutonic people threw off the yoke of Rome, a yoke which was not only religious but political and social, one of their principal arguments against RomanCatholicism was the abominations that had crept in. I think it would be difficult to assert that the people who revolted were in morals generally any better than those they seceded from. Good men in the Latin Church saw equally the necessity for reformation. But bad morals did not seem to them so destructive to faith as it did to the Teutons. There was this difference, that whereas the Latin could and did conceive of religion apart from conduct, the Teuton, like the Jew, could not do so. With the Latin they were distinct emotions, with the Teuton they were connected. One of the principal aspects of the Reformation is the restoration of morality to religion, the abolition of indulgences, of confession and absolution, the insistence on conduct in religious teachers.
The morality of Christ?
The remarkable fact is that it was not the morality of Christ at all. The Reformation was never in any way a revival of the code of the Sermon on the Mount or the imitation of Christ. To a certain extent it went further away from Christ than the Latins. For instance, the Latin priests imitate Christ in being unmarried, the Protestant pastors married. When Calvin burnt Servetus he was not returning to the tenets of the New Testament, and whatthought had the Puritans or the French Huguenots, the most masterful of men, of turning the other cheek?
Protestantism was a return of conduct to religion, but it was not Christ's conduct. It was rather the Old Testament code softened by civilised influence that was revived. It was a revolt against excessive emotionalism, and was, in fact, a combination of two creeds tempered as to conduct by the conduct of the day.
So it continues to-day. The Latin's idea of religious conduct is the imitation of Christ, and when a Latin cultivates religious conduct that is what he does. He becomes a priest or monk, poor, celibate, self-denying and unworldly. But conduct to him is not the great part of religion that it is to a Teuton. With us conduct is the greatest part; the mystical and ceremonious part has decreased, in certain sects almost disappeared. Confession disappeared, and with it absolution from priests. Conduct is part of religion, and the code of conduct to be followed is that which conscience bids, and the code of conscience is, scientific men tell us, the result of experience, personal and inherited. Practically, what conscience tells us to do is what suits the circumstances of the day.
Therefore we may say that the religion of theLatins is mainly emotional, that of the Teutons half emotional and half conduct; and then we come to the Buddhist, which is nearly all conduct.
The Latin would say of an unbeliever, "He cannot be saved; faith is the absolute necessity, and faith even at the last moment by itself is sufficient." The Teuton would say, "I do not know. To be a good man, even if an unbeliever, is very much; it may be that God will accept him."
And the Buddhist? He has no doubt at all. Conduct is everything. Believe what you like as long as you act well. To be a Buddhist is best because there you have the way of life set clearly before you, and it is easy for you to follow. But any man can be saved if he act aright. Conduct iseverything. In fact, Buddhism in its inception was in one aspect a revolt against excessive emotionalism, that of the ascetics, and it maintains that attitude to-day.
Or, to put it another way: Roman Catholicism is all emotion, Protestantism is half emotion, Buddhism is the suppression of emotion. These are the theories. And the facts? What effect does this difference make on the lives of the peoples?
It may have some effect. There is sometimes action and reaction. These different views of the relation of religion and conduct come from the instincts of the people, and being held and taught they in turn affect the people. But how much? Personally, I believe very little.
A man's daily conduct is regulated by quite other factors. If the effect was great we should find Buddhists the least criminal of peoples, the Teutons a medium, and the Latins without any idea of conduct at all. But this is certainly not true. The Burman is greatly given to certain crimes, the outcome of his stage of civilisation.
And I have great doubts whether the Protestants generally can show any superiority over the Latins when the circumstances are considered. Are the English Roman Catholics less honest than Protestants in the same class? Are sceptics more criminal than religious people? The inclusion of conduct in religion is astonishingly varied. Some peoples cannot be born or come to maturity, or marry, or die without religion; others do not allow religion to have any part in these matters. But the fact remains that, though conduct may be included more or less in every religion, no religion has a code of conduct for daily life. Priests and monksapart, the codes of conduct are not taken from religion.
But it must not be forgotten that neither Christianity nor Buddhism professes to provide a code of conduct for this life. Judaism knew no future life, and its aim was therefore to ensure success in this. That is the reward offered to the righteous—success for them and their children. There is no hint that this life is not good and worth living, that love and wealth are not good things. On the contrary, they are held out as the reward of the godly. The Judaic code was a good and workable one for its age. But Christianity and Buddhism declare that this life is not good; that it is, in fact, absolutely wicked and unhappy, and that therefore all worldly pleasures and successes are to be eschewed as snares. The codes given are ways to reach heaven, they are by no means codes for ordinary life. Followed to their meaning, every Christian ought to be a monk or nun and every Buddhist the same.
But this teaching of the evil of life is one that no one but a few fanatics accept in its fulness, and heaven or Nirvana are ideas that do not appeal to most men. In Latin and Buddhist countries a few with their higher spiritual powers take their faiths very seriously,but the majority try to make the best of both worlds. In Protestant countries no one at all accepts the doctrine of the worthlessness of life. With the immense majority of men of all nations life is held to be a great and beautiful thing, to be used to its best advantage. The Latins with their keener logic, seeing that the code of Christ is for the next world, not for this, and therefore fit only for monks and nuns and not for men of the world, divorce conduct from religion. Protestants, rejecting the code of Christ for men of the world equally with the Latins, yet feeling a need for a code of conduct, adopt the best current code of the day and call that "Christian conduct." Thus are working religions built up. One religion is all conduct, another half, another hardly at all—in theory. But in fact, for ordinary life, is there any difference between the code of a Latin, a Teuton, or a Buddhist? There is hardly any. Codes of life vary very little, and that variation is due never to religious influences, but always to the stage of civilisation and mental development and the environments. In Scotland and North Germany it is common for peasant girls to have a baby first and marry afterwards. A Hindu or a Burman would be horrified at such a thing, just as a better classScotchman or German would be. But to the people who do it there is no immorality. How do you explain this from religion?
Conduct is an instinct. It evolves according to the civilisation and idiosyncrasy of the people. It is influenced by many causes. People, for instance, who are not pleased by acting call theatres wrong, and so on. Experience is also a factor. And the connection of conduct with religion varies. Some people make it a great part of their religion just as sanitary and social measures are included, other peoples make it less prominent. But conduct does not proceed from religious creeds any more than prayer or confession does. It may be slowly influenced by religious teaching, but it has its own existence, and religious teaching is only one of many influences.