The first and chief reflection that occurs to any man who does thus seriously examine the relation of the war to theism is that, after all, it is not so easy to disentangle theology from the crude old doctrines which our more liberal divines think they have abandoned. They tell us that they do not believe in a vindictive Deity, they disdain the doctrine of eternal punishment, they smile at many of the Judaic conceptions of Jehovah in the Old Testament. God is the all-holy and benevolent ruler of the universe. They refuse to believe that the souls of sinners and unbelievers are tortured for ever after death, and trust the whole scheme of things to the love and justice of God.
The grave difficulty of this enlightened theology, indeed of all theology, is the immense amount of pain and evil in the universe, and this mighty war we are considering puts it in a very acute form. It isamusing to look back on some of the lines of apologetics in recent years. There was a school of people, following some "profound" religious thinker, who held that evil was "only relative." They made the wonderful discovery that everything real is good, in the metaphysical sense, and evil is unreal. Evil, they said, is merely the negation, the falling-short, of good; and you do not ask for the creator or cause of a negative thing. More recently a school endeavoured to come to their assistance with the discovery that pain does not really exist at all. One did not need to know philosophy or science in order to realise that a sensation of pain is just as positive and real a thing as a sensation of pleasure; or that, although death isonlythe negation of life, one is really entitled to ask why one's dear child is thus "negated" at the age of six or twelve. Then there came this new school with its discovery that pain does not exist. Death, of course, is an entry into a more glorious life beyond; pain is an illusion to be banished by resolute thought. These childish symposia were interrupted every few years by some disastrous earthquake, the sinking of a great liner, an epidemic of disease, a famine, and so on; but the pious philosophers bravely struggled on. One may trust that the war has reduced them to silence, and that we need not linger over them.
Then there was the school which sought desperately to find good in evil. A man or woman is stricken with disease. Very often it brings with it a softening, an improvement, of character; either in the patient or in the nurses, or in both. Our religious philosophers fancied they caught in this a glimpse of the divine plan: cancer was an instrument of righteousness in the hands of the Almighty, the bacillus of tuberculosiswas a moral agency. They detected cases in which adverse fortune had sobered and softened a man: the finger of Providence. In France there was a very considerable return to the Catholic Church, and recovery of its power, after the disastrous war of 1870. In the south of Italy there is always much less sexual freedom for a time after an earthquake has buried a few tens of thousands under the ruins of their houses. I would undertake to fill a quarto volume with instances of good things which arose out of or followed upon evil experiences. We saw that the present war is being examined in the same respect. There are "great spiritual opportunities": hundreds of thousands of young men are being compelled (by the authorities) to go to church who had not been for years; the different denominations are fraternising as they never did before; the churches are rather fuller than they had been of late: charity is awakened on a prodigious scale; zeal for an ideal (the violated peace of Belgium) is dragging men even from our slums to the colours. Here again one could at least fill a moderate treatise with the things achieved; and beyond them all is the unuttered vision of the crowded churches at the triumphant close of the war, perhaps that long-coveted religious revival.
There is no doubt whatever that this theory of the war will be assiduously pressed when nature has drawn her green mantle once more over the blackened area of the war and our hearts are lifted up by thought of victory. It is already being urged, and I would add a little to the comments I have already passed on it.
The clergy would do well to realise that, whatever virtue this theory may have in soothing the minds and dissolving the doubts of their followers, to an outsiderit seems monstrous. In the first place, it includes no sense of proportion, and amounts to a colossal untruth. We must surely take into account the amount of evil inflicted and the amount of good that ensues. Take sickness, for instance. One would imagine that, if Christians seriously believe that illness is sent by God to achieve certain salutary modifications of character, they ought strenuously to oppose the modern determination to reduce disease to a minimum. They do not, and would, on the contrary, soon reduce to silence any religious crank who proposed it. They know perfectly well that the cases of "spiritual advantage" from illness bear no proportion whatever to the amount of suffering in the world. Slight but painful illnesses rarely have any beneficent effect on character; very frequently the reverse. Any large city, at any given moment, is racked with pains which do but give rise to curses, or a polite equivalent. Most of the irritation and perversion of character is due to morbid influences. And for every case in which a long illness issues in some signal advance of character, a hundred others could be quoted in which the illness was an unmitigated calamity. So it is with bereavement and with adversity of fortune. Look honestly into the experience of any class of the community, and ask in whatproportionof cases narrowness of means, especially after comfort, brings a "spiritual advantage."
So it is above all with this war. Any man who thinks that the awful perversion of the character of a great European people, the death of such vast numbers in such painful circumstances, the ruin of further millions, and all the innumerable ugly results of a great war, were worth bringing about in order to secure a few spiritual advantages has neither senseof proportion nor sense of decency nor sense of humour. The theory would be too repulsive if it were put in this plain form, and it is more usual merely to point out these good results and hint that war is not absolutely and in every respect an evil. As if any person ever said that it was. The point is simple, and ought not to be obscured. A few incidental advantages do not reconcile us to this colossal misery, suffering, and waste, and do not in the slightest degree alleviate the position of the man who thinks that God directed human events to this awful consummation. If an earthly ruler employed such agencies to educate his subjects, with such an extraordinary disproportion between the suffering inflicted and the results attained, what should we think of him?
The parallel reminds us that of infinite wisdom we expect infinitely more than of a human ruler. Once unintelligent nature had a crude, wasteful, hard method of producing new and higher types of life. Man, having intelligence, produces the same result without waste or suffering. We expect immeasurably higher procedure of such an intelligence as Christians ascribe to God. One can understand the man who says that the plan of such an intelligence might be beyond human ken, but I am discussing the opinions of people who contend that they bring it within human ken. In fact, there is no need here to remind us of the mysteriousness of the ways of an infinite intelligence. If the war was designed for certain practical uses, such as those we have had suggested by various divines, one may reply at once that a more brutal and unjust way of attaining those ends could not have been devised. It is almost impossible to conceive any man seriously entertaining the notion.Yet all the jubilation and thanksgiving that will follow the war, all the supplication that accompanies its fortunes to-day, and the whole teaching of Christian theology, imply that God did direct the political movements and military ambitions which have culminated in the war. Even a human statesman could have devised a less terrible method of attaining any end that has yet been conceived for the war. The idea of the war as a punishment is quite logical and intelligible, though five hundred years out of date. But the idea of the war as a medicinal or an educative process has neither logic nor intelligibility, and does not even attain that consistency with modern ethical sentiments which it seeks. The colossal amount of suffering inflicted on innocent people and on children puts it entirely out of court.
Thirdly, this theory, as I said, raises the question whether the end justifies the means. Here we have another illustration of the way in which Christian dogma keeps the Christian conscience in many matters behind the ethical sentiment of the age. Many liberal divines would express genuine repugnance at Archbishop Carr's view of the war; yet some of the most liberal of these divines and laymen are almost as backward in another direction. They justify the world-process through which we are struggling on the ground that it will, we hope, issue in a nobler order of things: of the war, in particular, that hope is entertained, and to the war, accordingly, this theory of justification is applied. That is a case of the end justifying the means. Christian thinkers are advancing so rapidly and erratically that in some cases we are not clear whether the writer does or does not regard God as infinite in power and intelligence. We mayignore these few cases. The vast majority emphatically hold that view. In their regard we can say only what has been said a hundred times. Whether you speak of the world-process in general or any particular cruel phase of it, such as this war, you maintain that God chose, out of many conceivable ways, the one way that is marked by cruelty and suffering. An infinite God is not so confined in the choice of means. And just as we say of the world-process in general, that to build the sunnier lives of a remote generation on the sufferings of this and earlier generations implies a grave injustice tous, so we must say of the war. No spiritual advantages to those who survive will reconcile us to the suffering and the loss of those who fell in the tragic combat. I speak impersonally. It happens that I have no near relatives of military age, and neither I nor any near relative is likely to suffer by the war. But when I brood over the agony of the less fortunate millions, over the harrowing experience of Belgians, Poles, and Serbs, over the whole ghastly orgy of blood and tears in Europe, I feel unutterable disdain of these paltry efforts to justify the ways of God to man.
Let us look a little deeper into the matter. No doubt the plain statement that God "sent" or caused this war will excite a certain repugnance in many Christian minds. They will prefer to say that God "permitted" it. Man has "free will," and it is the plan of providence to give a certain play to this free will. When man has bruised his shins—more frequently the shins of other people—God may, on being supplicated sufficiently, issue his veto and put matters right. I am quite acquainted, from a severe theological education, with the more learned language in which this theory is expressed by theologians, but Iprefer to deal with it as it exists in the words of most preachers and the minds of most Christians.
It would be impossible here to deal at any length with the doctrine of free will. Unless you conceive it in some novel and irrelevant sense, as Professor Bergson does, it is a very much disputed thing amongst the experts whose business it is to inform us on the subject—our psychologists. The majority of modern psychologists seem to reject it altogether. On the other hand, no theologian has ever yet reconciled it in any intelligible scheme with the supposed omnipotence of God. But it is not necessary to enter into these abstruse considerations. Let us take the matter in the concrete.
We look back to-day on a long series of processes and circumstances which culminate in the war. There is the whole history of Germany for a hundred and fifty years inspiring the German people with a bias toward aggressive war; there are the economic and geographical circumstances which, at the end of the nineteenth century, begin to make it think again of aggressive war; there is the overflowing population, bred by order of the clergy who stupidly condemn an artificial restriction of births; there is the coincident trouble of Austria with the Slavs, of England with its subject peoples, and so on. In the eyes of the careful student a hundred lines of circumstance and development have led to this war. The melodramatic idea that it all springs from the free will of the Kaiser, or of a group of soldiers and statesmen, need not be seriously considered. Moreover, even when we introduce the personal element—and the personality of the Kaiser has had a very considerable influence—it is foolish to throw the whole burden on free will.The mood and outlook and ambition of the Kaiser take their colour from his notoriously morbid nervous frame. In a word, you have a mighty concurrence of movements, whether acts of will or otherwise, converging in all parts of Europe toward this war. Was God indifferent to the whole of those movements?
Those movements are particularly traceable in Europe during the last fourteen years. Before that there was a similar concurrence of movements eventuating in the South African War; and in the meantime a series of processes and circumstances had given us the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan-Turkish War and the Mexican War. So we might go over the wars of the nineteenth century and all earlier wars. The "permissiveness" or indifference of the ruler of the universe grows amazingly. In the meantime we had mighty catastrophes like the sinking of theTitanicand other ships, the earthquakes at Messina and elsewhere, famines and epidemics and floods in various places, and great numbers of murders, railway and other accidents, etc. We begin to askwherethe ruling of the universe comes in at all, and, as far as human events go, all that we can gather in the way of reply is that sometimes individuals who pray very fervently get their diseases healed or their coffers filled; and even these claims do not pass rational inquiry.
Now here is the precise difficulty of the unbeliever, and this present tragedy makes it acute. We ask our neighbour, or seek in some learned theological treatise, what are the indications of this government of the universe, and we are told about the making of stars and the decoration of flowers and the putting of instincts into animals or pretty patterns on their skins. But when we point out that the really important thing in our part of the universe is this human life of ours, imperfectly protected as yet against disease and malice (which is largely disease) and natural forces, the theologian has no clear evidence to produce. Even the evidence he draws from stars and flowers and peacocks' tails and sunsets, with which he is, as a rule, very imperfectly acquainted, is, of course, heatedly disputed, and the proper authorities on these subjects are, on the whole, not well disposed toward his interpretation. But we need not consider that here. Where we should most logically expect the hand of Providence is in the human order, because in that order catastrophe is infinitely more important, in view of man's capacity for pain. Yet it is precisely in regard to this order that the theologian is vaguest and least satisfactory. He talks grandly of God moving every atom in the universe, counting the hairs of our heads, numbering (but not preventing) the fall of the sparrows, and so on; but when we ask for the evidence of God's concern with contemporary human events he is very vague if they are good events, and, if they are evil, he hastily disclaims any interference of the Deity. Some of our more advanced theologians are claiming that the finest improvement they have made in their science is to have brought God fromwithoutthe universe (where no theologian had ever put him) and make himimmanentin it. But they seem just as incapable as the others to trace his interposition in human events.
Theologians still maintain a valiant and stubborn fight against scientific men, but they do not fight historians. They are very keen on maintaining the influence of God over atoms and stars and roses and birds, but not half so keen to vindicate it in the lifeof man. The story of the world,ourworld, may be divided into three chapters: a chapter describing the moulding of the globe and the rocks, a chapter describing the slow evolution of the plants and animals, and a chapter describing the antics and fortunes of man. Some may surrender the first chapter to science, some the second chapter, but it looks as if they all surrender the third. They have long been accustomed to surrender the early part, and very much the longer and more laborious part, of man's story to natural forces, or the devil. Then there was a melodramatic notion that God, after the lapse of hundreds of thousands of years, began to take an interest in one very small people and kept revealing things to it, and smiting its enemies, until Christianity was given to the world. History tells the story in a totally different way. We find the stream of moral and religious evolution flowing steadily on nineteen hundred years ago, much as we do to-day. At this point, of course, the theologian does make a struggle with the historian. In proportion to the imperfectness of his culture and the backwardness and conservatism of his Church, he fights for miraculous interpositions in human events nineteen hundred years ago. But we need not delay to examine that difference of opinion, because the later period suffices for my purpose.
A few theologians, not well acquainted with history, see another miraculous interposition in the fourth century, when Christianity was established; and the Roman Catholic—in the intellectual rear, as usual—believes in hundreds of miraculous interpositions, in small matters, as late as the year 1914. But in order to take a broad view of the matter we may leave these controversies with the more reactionary on one side.The history of Europe for the last fifteen centuries at least is now entrusted to able laymen, and it has been purged of divine interpositions. Innumerable myths and legends, often based on what are now acknowledged to be spurious documents, have been cast out of the science, and we are presented with a quite continuous and purely natural sequence of events. Religious historians like Bishop Creighton or Lord Bryce do not find their periods broken by divine interpositions; the writers of the Cambridge History do not occasionally arrest us before some great event and warn us that the chain of human causation seems to be obscure or discontinuous. There are, of course, problems of history, but they are not obscurities which, like the obscure places in science, tempt the theologian to enter and claim a divine interposition. The story is from beginning to end—to use Nietzsche's phrase—"human, all too human." On the whole, as it has been hitherto written, it is a story of wars, and, though patriotic piety puts its gloss on the issue of a war here and there, the historian does not find any serious problem in them. No French historian will now claim divine action in the Napoleonic wars, and assuredly few of us are prepared to see the finger of God in the fortunate issue of Prussia's many campaigns since Frederick the Great.
Whatever we may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more elementof miracle or revelation in his action than when he discovers the use of steam or of aluminium or of the spectroscope. His mind expands and his ideals rise. It is a little incongruous to suppose that some infinitely wiser and affectionate parent was looking on all the time and giving no assistance. In the dialogue between Mephistopheles and God which Goethe prefixes to hisFaust, the devil obviously scores. In the sight of such an intelligence man must have made a pretty fool of himself during the last 1500 years. We human beings are more charitable. Take the whole story as the gradual development of human intelligence and emotion under unfavourable political conditions, hampered by a despotic and perverse clergy, and it seems natural enough.
This is the impression one gets from history, and the nearer history is to our own time and the better we know it, the less it suggests a divine guidance. There is something parochial or rural about the average Christian way of looking at events. One day the German Christian goes to church to thank God for driving the Russians out of East Prussia; the next day the English Christian thanks the same God for killing or wounding 20,000 Germans at Neuve Chapelle—with the help of 350 guns. Yet such things as these are the only claims we have offered to us of the action of God in human events. Neither the steps that man takes onward nor the steps that he takes backward are ascribed to divine influence. All that is claimed is that when a ship goes down, for instance, he saves the saved, and "permits" the rest to be drowned; when a war has been raging for a few months by his "permission," he puts a stop to it when one army is worn out. The unbeliever is reallyentitled to a good deal of sympathy for his inability to follow this tortuous reasoning with confidence. One cannot entirely blame him for being more interested in the heart of man than in the petals of a rose.
These considerations are, of course, not novel. I am only applying to this special case of the war a difficulty that has been discussed in all ages, and has been acutely felt by very able religious thinkers. How a group of bishops can sit down to write, in very deliberate and elegant language, that such a calamity as this makes the soul more sensible of "the approach of Christ" is one of the many little mysteries of the clerical mind. It has precisely the opposite effect in any logical mind. When the way of life is smooth, and our nation or home is prospering, we may be genially disposed to think that God is near and is looking after us as well as the sparrows. But when a black storm bursts suddenly and disastrously on us; when the earth shakes their roofs on ten thousand of our fellows, or a great ship strikes a rock and pours a laughing crowd suddenly into the lap of death; when vast provinces are laid desolate by war, and we see the tens of thousands clasping the hand of their loved ones for the last time, it seems rather uncanny that this should suggest to any person the approach of Christ. To very many people it is a confirmation of the general impression they get from the world-process and the story of man: that these great forces deploy and interlace and build up and destroy without the slightest intervention from without.
In our time, we must remember, this difficulty had already been enormously increased. St. Augustine, who felt the problem acutely in the prime of his intelligence, had really a very much lighter task thanthe modern divine. He had merely to suggest why evil was permitted in the narrow world he knew; and he had the great advantage of being able to appeal to a primitive sin and primitive punishment of the race. The problem became more serious when original sin, or at least the notion that the race might justly be damned for one man's fault, was abandoned. It became graver still when science discovered the tombs of inhabitants of this globe who had lived during millions of earlier years, and showed that the very law of their life and progress was struggle against evil. Every attempt to minimise the struggle of those earlier ages has failed. At a time when there was no possibility of "spiritual advantage" there was acute consciousness of pain, the struggle and suffering were prodigious. Theistic literature of the last half century, growing more weary and more wistful in each decade, reflects the increasing difficulty. If any man can see in this war a relief of the difficulty, and not an appalling accentuation and illustration of it, he must be gifted with a peculiar type of mind and emotion. It is more probable that an increasing number will conclude that, if God is indifferent to these things, they will be indifferent to him. Professor William James, in hisVarieties of Religious Experience, declared that the only gods the men of the new generation would recognise would be gods of some use to them. The war does not encourage the chances of the Christian God.
A few modern religious thinkers seem to imagine that they have found some relief by devising the formula that God's plan is to "co-operate with man," and in those modern advances which I have freely admitted they see indications of this co-operation.This new formula is not a whit better than the other phrases which have, at various stages, been regarded by religions people as profound thoughts. In the recent history of moral progress we have, as a rule, a minority of high-minded men and women struggling to impress their sentiments on the inert majority. The new theologian is not daunted in the application of his theory by the fact that a large proportion of these pioneers did not believe in God at all, so I will not discuss that aspect; though no doubt the plain man will find it interesting to trace how, in the earlier and more difficult days of modern humanism, so few of the reformers were Christian ministers and so many Rationalists. From the historical point of view, however, we find this line of development quite intelligible. We find, for instance, Robert Owen (a great Rationalist) advocating the substitution of arbitration for war nearly a century ago, and we discover the earlier sources of Owen's enthusiasm in English Radicals like Godwin, who were affected by the early French Revolutionaries, who had been influenced by Rousseau, and so on. It is a quite natural evolution of ideas, as they find a congenial soil in each generation in certain types of temperament. But where are the traces or what was the nature of God's co-operation with these men? Looking to their generally heterodox character and the hostility of the Churches to them, the idea is not without humour; but, even if we reconcile ourselves to this peculiar feature, anything in the nature of positive evidence of divine action is wholly lacking, and we can understand the whole process without it. The theory is merely a desperate and unfounded assertion of men who are determined that God shall not be left out.
There is a further grave difficulty. One would imagine that the kind of paternal affection which is ascribed to God would have induced him to intervene at an earlier stage. The kind of father who co-operates with the more gifted and ambitious of his children, and does nothing for the less gifted and sluggish, is a narrow-minded and narrow-hearted man. Affection turns rather to those who cannot help themselves, or who need judicious and constant inspiration. This view we are considering is even less flattering to God, because the aspiring children of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem able to dispense with his co-operation, while the ignorant and priest-ridden children of earlier ages could do little of themselves. The theologians who have found this new formula are of the more liberal school. They do not attribute all the blunders and crimes and failures of the Middle Ages to free will, to a sheer and deliberate obstinacy in clinging to evil. They realise the overpowering nature of the environment and the drastic discouragement by the clergy of anything like novelty or initiative in ethics. It was then that man needed God, if there is a God. But, on this theory, God argued with the academic wisdom of a medieval theologian; he concluded that medieval men were quite capable of originating modern ideas, and he would not co-operate until they did. The theory is preposterous in every respect.
Finally, we have the very large class of candid or of hopelessly puzzled Christians who give up the matter as a mystery. They do not understand how this ruling of the universe which they seem to see clearly in stars and flowers should become so obscure or disappear altogether in the human order. Theyrealise that, if this war were an isolated occurrence, they might imagine God holding his hand for a season, for some reason unknown to us; but they know that it is not an isolated occurrence: it is part of the human order of things. It has been preceded by other wars at intervals of every few years, and war itself is only one of a series of catastrophes and calamities that splash the human chronicle with innocent blood. They give it up, sorrowfully, and find a thin consolation in learned formulæ about the impossibility of a finite mind understanding an infinite mind, and so on: which give, as I say, thin consolation, for one may at least see that an infinite benevolence ought not to act worse than a moderate human benevolence.
Now if there were any very strong evidence of divine ruling outside the human order, we might find a certain amount of logic in this position. The mystery of a God who moves the stars and inspires the bees, yet leaves man to his own unhappy impulses (after putting those impulses in him), would be, one imagines, painful enough; but if there were irresistible evidence that God does move the stars and quicken the bird and beast, we might be compelled to reconcile ourselves to that unhappy dilemma. There is, however, no such irresistible evidence. This is not the place to examine such evidence as is adduced. I must be content to recall the fact that it is all highly controverted; that theologians tear to pieces each other's "proofs" of the existence of God; and that a large and increasing body of cultivated men and women discard the evidence entirely. So that, in the last resort, the situation is this: on the one hand we have a number of very disputable suggestions, which are growing fainter in proportion as science investigates these matters, ofdivine action in stars and rocks and reptiles, and on the other hand we have a stupendous mass of suffering, starting millions of years ago at the very birth of consciousness and piled up mountains high in this year 1915, which no thinker has ever yet reconciled with the notion of a divine ruling of the life of man. This is a very grave and plain situation, and if the clergy have nothing more to say about it than to borrow from an ancient Hebrew certain offensive gibes at the unbeliever, or to offer us the kind of apologies we examined in the last chapter, one must conclude that they do not realise the situation. The war has terribly accentuated the most terrible difficulty they ever had to face. Whether there is intelligence manifested in nature is, after all, an academic question which does not profoundly stir the modern world. Whether there is benevolence, a moral personality, reflected in the course of man's history is the much more important question. And this appalling calamity will induce many to take a more candid view of the world-process and conclude that, as far as the critical eye can see, man's world seems to be left entirely to his own efforts, to his own crimes and blunders and aspirations.
If the observations I have made in the preceding chapters are even approximately just, the hope which many of the clergy express, that there will be a religious revival at the close of the war, is very singular. No doubt it means, on the whole, that some advantage to religion will be sought in the flood of genial and generous emotion which will surge through the country. In Germany and Austria, one imagines, religion will have a rough experience. The people who wrote and repeated constantly, "Gott strafe England"—which, by the way, is another proof that the general German attitude is theological rather than humanist—will have a few serious questions to put to the clergy, as well as to their secular rulers. In France, despite the reports of interested people, there will be little change. The nation, being overwhelmingly Rationalistic, relied on its 75-centimetre guns rather than on prayer, and will find its wisdom justified. But in England and Russia, and in the backward Slav countries, there will be mighty flag-waving in Church, and no doubt a great number of not very thoughtful people will conclude that the clergy and the Y.M.C.A. and the Salvation Army have behaved very nicely over the whole affair, and there will be, for a time, an increased attendance at church.
We may suppose that this emotional storm will notlast long, and the nation will settle down to face the bill, the empty chairs at home, and the disorganisation of its industries. Then will arise the questions I have been endeavouring to answer in this little book. The clergy behaved very well during the war, short of volunteering in any conspicuous number for active service; but what is the sense of this lofty message of "peace on earth and good-will among men" which never produces any result? The Churches are fairly eager to join in the work of peace now that it is being promoted by large associations of laymen; but where, in the name of heaven, were they during these "ages of faith" which they bemoan? God may conceivably have been at work somewhere among the batteries or the infantry of the Allies—it is so very difficult to analyse these things—but we should be infinitely more grateful if he had asserted his power earlier and spared us all the bloodshed. He may be a very stern schoolmaster, teaching us a valuable lesson by means of this war; but we were really quite open to conviction if he had sent us the lesson in a more humane form. A great many good people may have derived spiritual advantages from the war, but the price was stupendous, and we would rather they got their spiritual advantages in another way.
These questions and reflections must surely arise, and they will lead to larger reflections. Men will perceive the antithesis I pointed out between all that is claimed for Christianity in Europe and the actual condition of Europe; between the supposed luminous traces of the finger of God in the non-human world and the complete absence of them from the human world. From the samples of clerical eloquence which we have examined, we can hardly suppose that theclergy will have great success in meeting the inquirers. An enormous proportion of their followers, of course, will not ask questions, or will be satisfied with anything in the nature of an answer. I heard a group of men discussing the subject in a rural ale-house, and the most intelligent man in the group, to whom, as an educated visitor, the natives looked up with respect, said: "War is God's way of purifying and bracing nations from time to time." This sort of stuff pacifies hundreds of thousands: like the stuff that Archbishop Carr found it possible to put before his Australian Catholics. But inquiry and reflection grow among the adherents of the Churches, and, although the Press generally refuses to bring books of this character to the notice of the public, and clergymen often stoop to the most despicable means to exclude them from bookstalls and shops, they seem to find a fairly large public to-day. Thinking is as needful an exercise for the mind as work is for the body, and the only plausible ground on which you can seek to suppress thinking about Christianity is the fear that it will not be good for Christianity.
Then we shall have the next and inevitable question: What would you put in the place of Christianity? Young men in various parts of the country hurl that question at one as if it were really very serious, putting an end to all dispute. Any person who is quite candid and sincere about these matters can find the material for an answer easily enough. Take France. Forty years ago the nation was overwhelmingly Christian; to-day it is overwhelmingly non-Christian. It has not put anything in the place of Christianity, and has prospered remarkably. There is a legacy of what is called vice which comes down from earlier religioustimes, but any person who cares to examine criminal and other statistics, the only positive tests of a nation's health, will find that France has been extraordinarily successful without Christianity and without putting anything in its place. There are, it is true, moral lessons in its schools, but I would not claim that they are much responsible: the system is imperfect, and the teachers not well equipped. Take our ally Japan. The moral discipline of the nation, which, in spite of some recent deterioration through Western influence, is admirable, does not rest on religious foundations. Take London or any metropolis of modern Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those cities in more religious times.
This experience might be enlarged indefinitely, but one or two instances will suffice for my purpose. The soundness of these instances which I quote I have established elsewhere, and the general truth to which I refer may be sufficiently gathered from the words of the clergy themselves. The rhetorical way in which they characterise our times is more or less typical of the carelessness of their judgments and the strength of their prejudices. One group of clerical writers, which generally includes the reigning Pope, speak in the darkest terms of our age and suggest that a sensible degeneration has followed the decrease of the influence of the Churches. Another group, considering the remarkable spread of idealism in our generation, the growing demand for peace, justice, and sobriety, claim that this moral progress, which they cannot deny, isdue to some tardy recognition of the spirit of Christ: a strange contention, seeing that our age is less and less willing to hear the words of Christ and ascribes its sentiments to entirely different inspiration. Hence there are a few who frankly admit that the idealism of modern times is to them a rebuke and a mystery. One of these more sensitive religious writers once confessed to me that the fact that the times became better while the influence of Christianity grew less was to him a perplexing truth.
The really honest social student, who does not measure his age by his prejudices, but fashions his theories according to the carefully ascertained facts, will try to discover the causes of this phenomenon. In those wide and varied areas where it is observed, we cannot say that anything has taken the place of Christianity. The Press sometimes flatters itself that it has taken the place of the pulpit, but opinions will differ in regard to its efficacy as a moral agency. On the whole, it is too apt to reflect the moral sentiments of the more reactionary, who are generally the most self-assertive, and it has no moral, as distinct from political, leadership. Then there are Ethical and kindred societies which hold "services" of a humanitarian character, and are to many people a substitute for the Christian Churches. Their influence is, however, restricted to a few thousand people in the whole country, and signs are not wanting that their usefulness will be only transitory. The experience of any careful observer is that the mass of people who cease to attend church desire and need no substitute whatever for Christianity. The Rationalist literature which many of them read is, as a rule, of a high idealist character; but here again the influence is very restricted. No organised influence is at work to any great extent as a successor to Christianity, yet it is indubitable that, as Christian influence wanes, the temper of the age improves.
This improvement must have an adequate cause, and it would be merely another form of crude social reasoning and of sectarian prejudice to say, in the rich language of the older anti-clericals, that breaking "the fetters of superstition and priestcraft" led of itself to such a result. But this sanguine rhetoric does contain or obscure a certain truth. In plain human language, when you prevent a man from relying on the old traditional inspirations, he may for a time be tempted to act without inspiration. In the matter of his dealings with his fellows it is an undeniable fact that, on the whole, he has not been thus tempted. It is absurd to heap up all the contemporary instances of corruption in trade and politics, looseness in domestic life, and so on, unless you make a similar study of the vices and crimes of an earlier and more Christian generation, and carefully compare the two. It is not a question whether there is evil in our generation; it is a question whether there is more or less evil than in earlier generations. I must be pardoned for reiterating this, because, although this comparison is essential for forming an accurate judgment on the moral effect of the decay of Christianity, it is rarely instituted with the least pretence of rigour. I have sufficiently studied it in earlier works (especiallyThe Bible in Europe), and will not repeat the facts. Cotter Morison, whom I quoted on an early page, was wrong in his expectation. The change from Christian to humanist inspiration is taking place without disorder and with increasing advantage.
The solution of this apparent problem is really not obscure. If the genuine basis of human conduct needed an elaborate search—if it had to be revealed by a Deity or laboriously established by moral theologians or moral philosophers—no doubt the age of transition would be an age of disorder, and a very comprehensive educational organisation would be needed. But the true basis of human conduct is simple. There are, of course, Rationalists who feel that some very abstruse "science of ethics" has to be constructed as the solid foundation of conduct; but this has as little relation to the conduct of ordinary men as the learned pedants of the science of prosody have to ordinary speakers of prose. Experience is the real base and guide of conduct, and it forces itself on every man and woman, even on the child. "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you" is the first principle of morals; and to inculcate it you need neither the thunders of Jupiter nor the impressive abstractions of a science of ethics: nor do you need any moral genius or philosophical skill to discover it. It is a rule of life that suggests itself spontaneously. It is a natural and prompt expression of the fact that our life is social: our acts have the closest relation to others besides ourselves. Now and again, perhaps, a man is tempted to assert his own personality, or seek his own gratification, in such a way as to ignore his fellows; but he is usually arrested before long by the simple experience that he himself suffers from the actions of others just as they may suffer from his conduct. It is a lesson of life which one needs no power of analysis to learn.
And the chief reason why the abandonment of the old doctrines is proceeding without any moraldegeneration is that this experience was really always the basis of general morality. We need not question—it would be absurd to question—that refined natures have received moral aid from their belief in the presence of God, or in a desire to please God by accepting the law of virtue as a declaration of his will; though we must be equally candid in admitting that men and women of this nature have not been observed to deteriorate when they sacrifice their religious beliefs, as thousands of them have done. On the other hand, we will hardly question that numbers of people of coarser nature have been deterred from evil-doing by dread of supernatural punishment. It is, however, notorious in the moral history of Europe that these religious beliefs have been consistent with a vast amount of transgression of the decalogue: more than we witness in any civilised country in our own time. How, then, are we to discover what were the real springs of conduct in the mass of ordinarily decent people? It seems to me that the only accurate method is to avoid theories and consider people in the flesh. Do our Christian friends—did we ourselves in Christian days—refrain from lying, dishonesty, injustice, cruelty, and injury, solely or mainly because God forbids them or will punish them? I have not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its human and social value.
The only line of the decalogue about which there is likely to be any dispute in this regard is that putting restraint on sexual relations. I have not to considerhere a subject so remote from my immediate interest, and will observe only that any act which hurts either an individual or the social interest will as plainly come under a humanitarian law as the practice of lying: acts which inflict no injury and have been forbidden only on mystic grounds are not likely to remain on the moral code of the future. But I am concerned here with a definite issue, and need discuss general morality only in so far as that issue is affected.
Here, at least, the way of the humanitarian is plain. Sermons on the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God have been totally ineffective to prevent war and abolish militarism. There is something incongruous in the introduction into a modern peace-meeting of some clerical speaker who talks unctuously about the great promise and precept of Christianity. The meeting itself, being held nineteen centuries after the promise was made, is a sufficient indication of its futility. No progress was made or seriously attempted in the work of peace until a genuine human passion was substituted for that empty phraseology. The brotherhood of men was, in the Christian sense of that phrase, too abstruse and precarious a conclusion to be of use in such a struggle. The plain fact is that it was of no use, and is of no use to-day. There is, indeed, reason to think that we should make more progress if we entirely discarded figures of speech like "the brotherhood of men." The fact that we are all children of God, or children of Eve, or children of some Tertiary anthropoid, does not very obviously impose on us the duty not to take up arms in an international quarrel.
The ultimate basis of morality is, as Schopenhauer said, sympathy, though in an advanced social orderthis sentiment approves itself to the intellect, and its requirements may be precisely formulated by reason. One is not sure whether there will not be more morality in the world when the word "morality," with all its mystic entanglements, is discarded, and we speak plainly of social law. Violence, the infliction of pain and injustice, is one of the most obvious infractions of social law, quite apart from any religious commandments. Its social evil is so obvious that the community has, at an early date in its development, elaborated a special machinery for restraining it, and has imposed penalties in this world, whatever it thinks about the next. There may be questions raised, and one can understand people who are confined to a religious environment feeling a genuine concern, about other sections of moral law; but it would be obviously absurd to think that a humanitarian ethic would fail here. There have been attempts in modern times to question the validity of ethical law altogether. In so far as this movement aims at stripping moral law of its mysticism and fearlessly investigating its traditional content, it is admirable and will grow; but in so far as these moral rebels would resent restraint of any kind, and pronounce the freedom of every individual impulse, they seem to overlook a factor of great importance—the impulse of retaliation. A pretty state of society we should have if such a theory were generally, or largely, carried into practice.
But these are academic vagaries, like those of the mystic or the moral theologian. Whatever be the future fortune of Christian legends, men are not likely to sacrifice the peace and security of social life to such theories of freedom any more than they are likely to expose property to a general scramble. The instinctof sympathy is now growing deeper in every century. Most of the great improvements of social life (in its widest sense) during the nineteenth century, which we have inherited, were due to that development of sympathy. It matters not whether the reformer was Christian or non-Christian—Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale or Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill—the impulse was sympathy with suffering fellow-humans. All the hope of improvement in the twentieth century looks to a continued growth of that sentiment. It becomes a veritable passion in certain natures, as long as there are large and cruel evils to redress; and this passion of a few leading spirits, communicating something of its fire to the colder mass, is the great cause of progress. Surely that is the correct interpretation of the progressive life of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? Men realised that to cultivate sympathy because it was enjoined by religion was a more or less mercantile procedure: it was worth cultivating for its own sake.
Here we have the reply to those who, unfamiliar with any but their own religious environment, ask what place there will be for sympathy in an intellectual or nationalistic age. It is a very grave error to suppose either that our age is becoming less emotional or that Rationalism has no place for emotions. In pursuing its task during the nineteenth century Rationalism was an intensely emotional movement. Mr G. K. Chesterton, in hisVictorian Age in Literature, speaks of J. S. Mill's "hard rationalism in religion" and "hard egoism in ethics." Like very many other statements in that lamentable book, these are inexplicably unjust. Mill was so far from being "hard" in religion that he ended his days in a kind of sentimental theism; he was so far from being a "hard egoist" in ethics that he declared that he would burn in hell for ever rather than lie at the supposed bidding of a Deity. Robert Ingersoll, the most popular Rationalist of that age, was—I judge from his private letters, not his ornate speeches—a man of the most tender and fine sentiment. It is simply ludicrous to suppose that, because we do not admit emotion to be a test of the accuracy of statements of fact (as all religious dogmas claim to be), we do not find any room for emotion in life. Is the whole of man's life an affirmation about reality or criticism of such affirmation? This supposed "hardness"—I detest these vague phrases, but one knows what is meant—of the Rationalist temper is one of the strangest myths the clergy have invented.
Reason not merely approves, but enjoins, the cultivation of sentiment. When the sentiment in question is one that shows a power of transforming life and impelling men to struggle against pain and evil, reason applauds it as one of the most valuable forces we can cultivate. Such, plainly, is the sentiment of sympathy. We look back to-day with horror on the industrial and social condition of England in the earlier part of the nineteenth century: the burdened lives and few gross pleasures of the workers, the horrible cellar-homes of the poor, the ghastly treatment of child-workers, the stupid and brutal herding of criminals, the tragedies of asylums and workhouses, the fearful political corruption and despotism, the subjection of women, the revolting proportions of the birth-rate and death-rate. We have still much to do to redeem our civilisation from medieval errors, but when one contemplates the social revolution that human sympathy has brought about in the life of England, one feelsthat this, and not the long-futile teaching of Christianity, is the hope of the future. Christian preaching of virtue has been individualistic. Even in our time the clergy hesitate and are divided in face of social problems which plainly involve moral principles. But the humanitarian ethic is essentially social, and this passion of sympathy is its chief root.
We wish, then, not to substitute any creed or organisation for Christianity, but to sweep away these primitive or medieval speculations about life, and let the human mind and human heart increasingly devote themselves, directly, to human interests. In discussing the question of peace and war, the application is obvious. We enclose or dispatch the murderer, lest some fresh grave act of violence be perpetrated. We agree that the violent and premature termination of a life is the most serious transgression of social law that a man can perpetrate. Next to it we put rape, mutilation, the destruction of a man's home or fortune; all acts, in a word, that come nearest to it in threatening or causing the greatest desolation. Yet we have suffered, age after age, that every few years all these acts should be gathered into one mighty outrage and showered upon whole populations. The time will come when men will read with bewilderment the things that have been written about warfare in the nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. The men of clear judgment and sound emotion of some coming age will see anguish rising, as vapour does from some tropical sea, from our vast battle-fields. They will read of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for Horses, and a hundred such institutions, and they will find contributors to these institutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands of men writheunder hails of shrapnel, and crowds of homeless women and children fly in terror before the unavoidable calamities or the superfluous brutalities of war. They will see a generation shaken and shuddering as the ghastly picture is daily unfolded before it, and they will see that same generation in a few months grow dully indifferent to, if not actively supporting, the military system which invariably brings these horrors every few years upon the world. They will read of social aspiration spreading through our civilisation, and statesmen regretting that want of funds alone prevents them from remedying our social ills; and they will read how Europe in one year wasted in butchery the resources that might have renovated its disfigured civilisation, and the next year complacently shouldered its military burden, its annual waste of a thousand millions sterling, with the prospect of a costlier war than ever.
In face of this situation the question, What would you put in place of Christianity? is a mere mockery. One can see some pertinence and use in the question: How shall we induce the Christian Churches to employ their still great resources in helping to bring on the reign of peace? But it is not to them that we now look for redemption. It is to the humanitarian spirit, the clearer reason, of our age. I have described the situation in terms of emotion, because thus it spontaneously rises before me; but it may be recorded in terms of pure reason. We maintain in Europe a machinery for settling international quarrels which costs us more than a thousand millions sterling annually, while we could erect at a cost of a few thousands annually an efficient machinery for dealing with those quarrels, and for a few millions we could add themachinery for carrying out its decisions. We boast that our civilisation is founded on justice; yet, of the two types of machinery for adjusting quarrels, we retain the one that is the least possible adapted for securing the triumph of justice and discard the one that is pre-eminently fitted to secure it. We flatter ourselves that we rise above the savage in enjoying security of life and property, and we retain this system though we know that, periodically, it will invade life and property on a scale that surpasses the experience of the savage as much as a Dreadnought surpasses a canoe.
It is just as easy to state our situation in terms of reason as in terms of sentiment: it would not be easy to say in which guise it is ugliest. Let us talk no more nonsense about needing religion to help us to get rid of this atrocious nightmare. It drives both reason and sentiment to the brink of insanity. Both protest against it with every particle of their energy. Why Christianity failed to protest against it in fifteen hundred years may or may not be obscure; but there is no obscurity whatever about the probable effect on militarism and war of a cultivation of reason and sympathy.[3]
Many a reform has been actually retarded by the use of rhetoric. An outpour of vehement language seems to release, both in the speaker and in the assenting audience, a part of that energy which ought to issue in action. It has been one of the grave blunders of the Churches that they thought their function ended with the eloquent announcement that men werebrothers. We must be more practical. Now, while the imagination of the world is filled with the horrors of war, and sympathy is ready to fire us with a mighty energy, is one of the great opportunities of peace. One may trust that, after this experience, the Churches will awaken to the implications of their moral doctrine and set to work to impress it emphatically and repeatedly, as a moral duty, on their followers. It is, however, not impossible that, with all their scoutmasters and chaplains and services of thanksgiving for victory, a very large part of the clergy will find themselves so closely allied with militarism when the war is over, so confused in their appreciation of what it has done for us, that they will continue to mumble only general principles and halting counsels. In any case, in the cities and large towns of this kingdom, where are found the effective controllers of our destiny, the majority do not any longer sit at the feet of the clergy. Precise statistical observation has shown this.
Let us remember that the one task before us is to inspire themajorityin each civilised nation with a determination that the system shall end. The only practical difficulty of considerable magnitude is the economic difficulty: the disorganisation of the industrial world by suppressing war-industries and large standing armies. It is, however, foolish to regard this as an obstacle to disarmament, since—to put an extreme case—it would be more profitable to a nation to maintain these men in idleness than run the risk of another war. For disarmament itself what is needed is that half a dozen, at least, of the great Powers shall agree to submitallquarrels to arbitration, and reduce their armies to the proportions of an international police, at the service of the international tribunal andfor use (under its permit) against lower peoples who turn aggressive. No one doubts that this can be done when the Powers agree to do it. But for one reason or other, which I need not discuss, the Governments will probably not do this until a majority of the electorate indicate a resolute demand for it. The immediate task is to secure this majority by education; and the work of education will be best conducted by vast non-sectarian peace-organisations. The mixture of futile Christian phraseology and genuine humanitarian interests in some of these movements has been hitherto a grave disadvantage. The movement has been compelled to split into sectarian branches, and has proportionately lost efficacy. If the clergy insist on winning prestige for themselves, or respect and recognition for their doctrines, by acting in these bodies, they are again hampering the work of reform. A great national agitation, linked with similar agitations in other lands, avoiding Christian formulæ as well as anti-Christian reproaches, will alone secure the object.
I confess—with ardent hope that I may be wrong—that I expect no immediate realisation of the reform. It may take years, even after the grim lesson that militarism has given us, to inspire the majority of our people with an unsleeping and irresistible demand, and the work will grow more arduous as the memory of the hardships of the war fades. On the day on which I write this I have listened to the conversation, in a train, of a wealthy, refined, and cultivated Churchwoman. "I said to my son when he set out," she observed, with a laugh, to her neighbour, "that it was far better for him to get shot than to die of diphtheria or something at home." If that sentiment, thatobtuseness to the massive horrors of war even when a son was involved, is widespread, the outlook is dark. One fears that it is not very promising.
The lady I quote would read these pages, if she could constrain herself to do so, with a genuine shudder. Abandon Christianity! She would volubly reel off the eloquent forecasts of the doom of society which she has heard from a hundred pulpits. Meantime she is one of the gravest obstacles (as a type of her class) to the removal from society of one of its most crushing burdens and most criminal usages. To me her class illustrates the limitations of Christianity, and it confirms me in the belief that we shall make more rapid progress without it. She was a lady of keen sympathies and of great activity for others: the kind of woman who, as she would put it, practised her Christianity. Yet in face of this mighty disorder she showed at once the failure of Christianity and the reason of it. Her genuine human sympathy was directed by an ancient and outworn code of duties. Where Christianity had delivered no clear message, the expanding of her sympathy was barred. War was part of the established order of things. She could even cheat her maternal sentiment with thin fallacies, because they reconciled her to what the Church had not condemned. She had never seen the vision of peace, never grasped the comparatively easy alternative to war.
This, in general terms, is what one means by the expectation that a surrender of Christian doctrines will certainly not check the growth of sympathy, and is more likely to promote it. It will direct itself spontaneously to departments of suffering to which the Church had not directed it. But we should befoolish to rely on this free growth and spontaneous application of sympathy. It must be cultivated: our generation must be educated to a sense of its value. As far as the child is concerned, the need is plain. Children do not merely have veins of cruelty; they have, as comparative psychology knows, the blood and impulses of primitive man. The general impulse of a healthy boy is to exact an eye for an eye: the impulse which it is the supreme care of a modern State to curb in its citizens. To educate such children in military history, whether of ancient Jews or medieval Englishmen or modern Germans, is, as William II knows, the best means of maintaining war. As to the New Testament, its language is not addressed to children, its sentiments are often so obviously impracticable that it defeats the end of education, and its precepts and counsels are so emphatically based on a disputable reward in heaven that their ethic savours of a risky commercial speculation. We must abandon "Bible lessons," and teach children to be human.
But for the work of education to end when the child leaves the school is one of the crudities of our elementary civilisation. The human material is just becoming fit for the efforts of the educator when the child leaves school, yet from that moment we leave it to the casual and largely pernicious influences of its environment. Some day, perhaps, our education department will be more seriously concerned about the youth and the adult than about impressing a few facts of history and geography on the memory of the child: even if it did no more than organise and direct the innumerable foundations and voluntary organisations which actually exist, and bring them into living and practical contact with our splendid museums andlibraries and art-collections, a vast amount could be done in the education of the adult. Meantime a persistent, comprehensive, intensely earnest propaganda of peace is needed. Since I wrote a little work on those lines in 1899 I have had fifteen years' experience of preaching the gospel of peace, and know well how convincing are its arguments and how little it has to overcome except inertia. We need only to help the imagination of the mass of people; to put clearly before them the comparative easiness and the incalculable value of the change. Christianity has not tried and failed; it has not even tried. It has wasted its resources in generalities which have proved wholly futile. We must speak as men to men; and men will be more open to conviction when we plead that, not the supposed commands of a Galilean preacher of nineteen hundred years ago, but their own highest and most sacred instincts, bid them lay down their arms and inaugurate the age of international peace.