Religion Now

I

I WRITE only of the state of Religion in England, as I know it. None but Americans can tell how far what I say is true also of their country. Some of it is likely to be true, since we belong to the same western society and our religious needs are the same; but it may interest Americans to learn the points of difference.

In England, now, there is a great, desire for belief, satisfied by no existing church or sect. There are still Rationalists, who continue to prove that what is said in the Book of Genesis about the creation of the world is not true; but they are a little negative sect by themselves. Even the fun has died out of their activities; they have lost the joy of audacity. We all know what they continue to prove; and our desire is to believe, not to disbelieve; but what?

Many varieties of Christianity offer us belief; but not one of them satisfies us. They all have their convinced believers, but they do not win the ablest, or the most naturally religious, among us. These do not reject Christianity; they do not think that the Christian effort of feeling, of thought, of conduct, which has been maintained now for nearly tw'o thousand years, has been futile or mistaken; but they are not content with any present statement of the Christian faith. For these statements seem to them not to be serious enough; they are like our modern Gothic churches, cumbered with the superfluous ornament of the past. What we

need. is not toy-shop Gothic, but a building of our own thought in which we can be at home. All existing forms of Christianity seem to wear fancy dress, and wre are not comfortable in it. Yet we would not be cut off from the Christian tradition; for we believe, far more than our fathers did, that the truth is hidden in it; but it remains, for us, hidden.

The war has increased the desire for belief, not only in the weak, who seek consolation at all costs, but also in the strong, who see that science has not made us wise about the nature of the universe or our own nature. We know in our hearts that not only the Germans, but all of us, have been fools: wre have believed something sillier than the silliest version of Christianity, namely, that mankind was advancing toward perfection by some mechanical process called evolution. This process we thought of as imposed on us by the nature of things; all we had to do was not to impede it by faith in anything else. To the prosperous, it is always flattering to believe in the survival of the fittest: they survive, and so they are the fittest. If the master-fact of life is the struggle for life, they are succeeding in that struggle. The universe favors them, and they are content to be its puppets.

But now this struggle for life, as practised by the Germans, has turned into a struggle for death. They, most of all nations, were content to be the puppets of the universe; they made their will subject to the mechanism of things; and that mechanism has betrayed them. When we fought against them, we rebelled against the whole doctrine of the struggle for life; we affirmed the will of man, the will for righteousness; and, now that we have won, we are less than ever content to believe that we have survived because we are the fittest. For those whom we loved best have died for us; and we do not believe that they died because they were less fit than ourselves. They fought and died, not for us alone, nor for England alone, but for a universe of meaning; and what is the meaning of it?

Before the war it was a commonplace to sneer at the Christian doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, the doctrine of the Redemption. In our shallowness and comfort, we said that it was immoral; but now we know that the world is saved, and faith in the universe is preserved, by vicarious sacrifice. It is just because those who died for us, and for mankind, were better, not worse, than ourselves, that we begin to believe passionately in the meaning of the universe. For if it were a mechanism, whence comes that passion which sent the best joyfully to death? ‘Yet a little while and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.’ These words begin to have meaning for us; not as spoken by one man, or God, to his disciples, but as spoken by all our dead to us. They live because they died for us; and we live a life of meaning because of their sacrifice. Our logic of justice, by which a man pays for himself alone, is not the logic of God, as Christ said long ago. The universe is better than that: it is of such a nature that men can redeem each other and die for each other. So we begin again to believe that Christ did indeed die for us.

And we see that there is a surprising, unfathomed wisdom in the Christian faith. By ourselves we could never have discovered it, with all our knowledge of the mechanism of the stars. The way of our knowledge is not the way toward that wisdom. We made machines that would tear our best in pieces; we devised new and more horrible crosses for them; and on the cross they convince us that our power is only for destruction, and our wisdom foolishness. ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’; that is the best that can be said for us, no less than for the Germans. And now we wish to know what we do. Nothing is stranger than the contrast between our disorder, impotence, and bewilderment in peace, and our power, resolution, and discipline in war. We made many mistakes; but our will was one and clear; and we accomplished it — I mean, not England alone, but all of us together. And there was this contrast, because in war we knew what we wished to do, and in peace we do not. Victory is a single aim, easily conceived and unanimously desired; but what is the aim of life? We have a thousand different answers; and many never even ask themselves the question. No nation, no parliament, asks it. No church answers it now, in terms that convince. And yet we believe that there is an answer that we can find; millions of us believe that Christ found it, if only we can understand his words and reëxpress them in our own. What we need is, to find the aim and to agree on it, all together; then we shall accomplish it, as we have accomplished victory, but with a greater joy and without the sacrifice of our best.

That, I believe, is the religious state of mind of the most naturally religious in my country. If it is less intense in yours, it is because you have suffered less, and because, perhaps, you have not been so foolish. Our old world has an intense life because of its enormities. In Europe, for many centuries, all the problems have forced themselves upon both thinkers and actors. We live crowded together among the glories and failures of the past; we hate and love extremely; there is instant retribution for our sins. It is but fifty years since we began to admire the success of Prussia, and to say in our hearts that her bloodand-iron creed was true and Christianity false. And now she has disproved it, at a cost to herself, and to us, that you cannot by any effort of sympathy imagine. Or perhaps some of your old men, who remember your own war, can imagine it. But then your people was a simple people. It has not gone a-whoring after strange gods, nor had it said in its heart that there was no God. All the peoples of Europe have said that in their hearts, and now they know that in saying it they went a-whoring after the Prussian idol. Prussia is but the drunken helot for us all; we too had our temples of Baal, our Ahabs and Jezebels; but where is the Temple of the true God?

II

There is, to begin with, the Roman Catholic Church. Its defect is that it belies its name and is no longer Catholic. Among the educated, only certain peculiarly minded people find themselves able to belong to it. It remains Catholic for the uneducated; and that is why we are all drawn toward it. For the Catholic element, the Catholic desire in it, is of the greatest value; and we know that there is truth in it. But it is a truth of feeling rather than of intellect. The educated man must attain to that feeling by a process which most educated men now will not accept. They will not accept certain postulates which seem to them arbitrary, chief among them the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope. It does not matter that the Pope in practice is seldom infallible; that no one knows quite certainly when he is infallible. It is the doctrine that matters; for it is the doctrine of authority. You must make a certain surrender, not merely of yourself but of your highest values, if you are to enter into that Catholicity. You must become a pragmatist, saying that that is truth which works; and that the Church, out of its immemorial experience, knows better than you do what does work.

That is a surrender which only certain peculiarly minded people can now make. According to my observation, it is made usually by those who are aware of some weakness in themselves which they despair of conquering. I speak of converts, not of born Catholics. The Catholic Church would say, of course, that we all have some weakness which we cannot conquer without the help of God. That is true, and the Church is a kind, wise physician; but it offers you a perpetual rest-cure. It will never admit that you are well. The doctors themselves are valetudinarians; and they talk always the language of the sickroom. It is through your weakness that they draw you into their home, and it remains a home for the weak. Grant that they are often cured; but not by any means of a kind of hypnotism which must always continue. The Church, in fact, prefers hypnotism to psycho-analysis. And the wisest and bravest minds are turning to psycho-analysis, away from hypnotism. They would encourage the will rather than subdue it. They have trust in the mind of man, of every man, if only it can know itself. The Roman Church believes in a universal mind; but delegates it to a spiritual despot.

Next, there is the Church of England. It is both the glory and the shame of that Church that it does not really exist : it is always in process of becoming. The question now is, can it attain to existence? In the Church of England there are creeds; but there is no one, no body even, to interpret them. There is an organization; but no one, no body even, to govern it, except the State, which clearly is not the Church. The most real and impassioned part of the Church rejects the authority of the State. The English Catholic, or High Churchman, asserts that his Church is a church, and therefore subject to no authority outside itself. But he too cannot find the authority within it. He says that the Church of England is part of the Catholic Church; but this the Roman denies; and the Catholic Church of the English Catholic has no actual existence, even for him, since there is no actual man, or body of men, whom he will obey. It is perhaps in process of becoming, but it does not come.

So at present English Catholicism is an inn rather than a home. Those who accept it are passing on, either to Roman Catholicism or to some greater freedom. But often they remain in the inn, because there is no Catholic freedom to be found. Yet, among the English Catholic clergy, if not the laity, there is the hope and the promise of a Catholic freedom. They do believe utterly in Christianity and try to practise it. They try to make the Church of England the church of the poor, and often they succeed. The charge that their Catholicism is a silly game and make-believe is false. In their ritual is the return of the sense of beauty; only they have not yet made it quite their own. In their faith is the return of Christianity; only they cannot yet quite express it, and cling to old formulæ so that they may not lose hold of it. They think themselves conservatives; but they will not find their true faith until they become revolutionaries in thought, as they often are in politics. If they can do that, still keeping the Christian tradition, they will conquer England, so far as it can be conquered by faith.

The rest of the Church of England is either clinging to the unvenerable past of the Reformation — that is the LowChurch party;or it is looking to a future not yet seen — that is the Modernists. The Low-Church party now merely maintains its existence — and hardly that. It has piety, but nothing else, and its piety is rather domestic than divine. It believes in individual salvation; and all living religion knows that is impossible. If we are to be saved, we must be saved all together. A man who would be content with his own individual salvation does not know what salvation is. And the Low-Church party does not know what salvation is. It is doomed because it has a wrong notion of salvation. No religion now can satisfy us which is not Catholic; and the religion of the Low Church is not Catholic.

As for the Modernists — they too are not Catholic yet. But it is unfair to criticize them as a whole, because they are not a whole. They consist merely of a number of individuals, often able and sincere, who are thinking about religion individually. The Modernist Churchman wishes to remain in the Church, not for the sake of his salary, but because he loves the Church and believes in it. He no more wishes to leave it than a man wishes to deny his mother if he is forced to criticize her. This affection of the Modernist — an affection almost natural — is not understood by those who cry that he ought to leave the Church. To him the Church is still a most important part of religion. He is a member of it, as he is an English citizen; and he thinks that he has a right still to live within it and to attempt to work those changes upon it which he desires. He is not bound to leave it because he does not believe every article of its creeds. He knows, as a matter of fact, that no one does believe them all literally; and no authority has laid down exactly which of them must be believed, and which may be taken not to mean what they say, or to mean nothing at all. He is no more a traitor than an Englishman is a traitor to his country if he wishes England to be a republic, yet still takes off his hat when ‘God save the King’ is played.

But the weakness of the Modernists is this — that most of them are critical rather than creative; and they are apt to harbor theories merely critical and produced by the destructive criticism of a past generation. For instance, there is a notion that Christ himself was possessed with the belief that the world was coming to an end very soon, and that all his teaching was controlled by that belief — that it is the key to all his sayings. If that is so, whatever truth he uttered was an accidental result — a by-product — of his delusion. The notion itself is an example of the scientific method misapplied. It is of the same nature as the notion that all the content of the human mind may be explained as a more or less disguised expression of the sexual instinct. Both notions make of religion itself an illusion ; they are part of the great assumption that all is illusion in the human mind except some quite primitive and valueless force. Whatever we value is a by-product of this force. Things never are what they seem to us when we hope and believe, but only what they seem to us when we are in the mood to talk scandal about the universe. Christ himself was a kind of dervish, possessed by some unconscious national or racial instinct which made him condemn the Roman world into which he was born. He inherited this instinct, and gave an accidentally beautiful and passionate expression to it. When he said that we are to take no thought for the morrow, he did not mean a real faith or a real philosophy; he meant only that there was not going to be any morrow — which was untrue.

Now the Modernists have taken notions of this kind too seriously; they have not been able to explode them with the secure wit of faith. They have not clearly seen the difference between constructive and destructive criticism; they have not seen that the defect of modern Christianity, whether Roman or English Catholic, is that it has not enough dogma. They still cling to the notion that Christianity must be made acceptable by ridding itself of dogma. But if Christianity is to prevail now, it must do so, not by expressing a number of good intentions so vaguely that anyone can agree to them. It must convince us that the universe is of a certain nature, and that we have to live according to that nature. The Roman or the English Catholic now can be considered orthodox, and yet hold utterly unchristian beliefs about the nature of the universe and of man. For instance, an English Roman Catholic peer lately wrote to the Times to say that, since man was a fighting animal, it was absurd to dream of a league of nations. Yet, because he believes in the Virgin Birth and the infallibility of the Pope, he is held to be orthodox. His Church does not tell him that man is not a fighting animal, and that it is the duty of men, as Christians, to believe in a league of nations and to work for it. That is why I say that the churches have not enough dogmas, while many of the dogmas they cling to are irrelevant, since they do not prevent those who hold them from believing faithless nonsense about the nature of the universe and of man.

The Modernist has not seen this; he has been content to attack the doctrine of the Virgin Birth negatively, as being merely historically untrue — not as being philosophically or religiously untrue, or at least irrelevant. He has not a Christian faith of his own, more passionate and more precise, to offer instead of the part-obsolete and altogether too vague faith of the churches. So he too fails to overcome the world, in spite of his learning, his sincerity, and his patience.

I do not know how it is with you in America, but in England all churches and sects fail to convince because not one of them can achieve a harmony between the rich and the poor, the ignorant and the educated, a harmony both of belief and of action. The Roman Church, as I have said, is often the church of the poor, and of those prosperous and educated people who have some weakness for which they seek a cure. But it is not the church of the great mass of the naturally religious, both rich and poor, because of its insistence on authority, and also because it offers no political hopes to the world. It tells men, or inclines them, to be content with the status quo, whatever it may be. Having always its own politics, it is not interested in the politics of mankind. They are, to it, secular; but Christianity will not be itself until it insists that no politics are secular, that the political aim of mankind is to establish Christ’s Kingdom of Heaven here and now on earth, and in all human institutions. This it can do only by insisting that the universe and man are of a certain nature, which it must define and express both with precision and with passion. Early Christianity prevailed because it brought an immense hope into the world; Christianity can prevail now only if it renews that hope in the terms of our own time and in relation to our problems. At present no church and no sect does that.

There is the Salvation Army; but it is possible only for the poor. It is evangelical in the old sense, offering men individual salvation. It can, and does, cure them of drink, but there is no philosophy in it, no political hope. It talks of the Blood of Jesus, but not of the nature of the universe. Its one aim is immediate rescue — a noble aim, no doubt, but altogether hand-to-mouth. It is concerned with what it shall do to comfort an overworked charwoman; it has no faith by which it can change the world so that charwomen shall not be overworked.

As for those Christian sects which we call Nonconformist, they have many merits, but they are, one and all, declining. They know, themselves, that the future is not with them. In England there is a social difference between them and the English and Roman churches, which does not exist in America. Because of that difference they are not Catholic; but they fail to be Catholic because the poor, no less than the rich, avoid them. They are altogether of the middle class; and the middle class, of all others, is now the least likely to produce a religion. It is conscientious, often intelligent, but ashamed of itself and afraid of other classes. It lacks beauty, passion, intellectual conviction ; and its religion, in all its minute varieties, suffers from the same lack. The Nonconformist sects become more negative, more merely social, every day. They have been and still are political; but their politics is class and not religious politics. They are liberal in a mild way, but possessed by a fear of labor; their chief defect is that they are selfsatisfied, and no one else is satisfied with them. They are, in fact, like the Church of Laodicea.

Lastly, there are the new sects, most of which we have got from America: Christian Science, Theosophists, New Thought, Spiritualists or Spiritists. Not one of these, of course, is Catholic; most of them, however full of good works, do not even try to appeal to the poor. A few of the poor are Spiritualists, or Spiritists, because they enjoy the notion of intercourse with the dead; but they have not enough tune or energy to be Christian Scientists. That is a religion for those who have time to make a good job of themselves, to turn themselves into works of art.

No one can doubt the achievements of Christian Science. It has a right to the word science, in that, unlike all the churches, even the Roman Catholic, it does teach a science, a technique, of life, and one that actually works. It says, ‘Live thus and thus, not merely so that you may go to heaven, but so that you may live well here and now, judged by any actual standard.’ It has, in fact, some understanding of Christ’s doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven; but, for it, the Kingdom seems to be altogether within us. It would, of course, deny this; but in practice it does seem to be guilty of the heresy of mere immanence without transcendence. The Christian Scientist believes, like the follower of the New Thought, in the Christ in himself; and he tries to educate, to draw out, that Christ — a task for which he needs much leisure and pains. That is the weak point of his faith. I cannot imagine Michelangelo, or Beethoven, or Christ himself, as a Christian Scientist. They were too much absorbed in the Kingdom of Heaven outside themselves to be always thinking of it within themselves. Christian Science does provide a cure, but it is a self-cure. The great passionate lovers of the world, the great Catholics, might have lived more seemly lives if they had tried to cure themselves; but they would never have done what they did do. The Christian Scientists save, and do not spend themselves; their aim is to make beautiful works of art of themselves; but the great lovers make works of art of something else.

Perhaps Christian Science was born in too prosperous a society; anyhow it seems too prosperous and too satisfied a religion to prevail in England now. It is a kind of Salvation Army for the wellto-do who suffer from nerves. I would not sneer at them or at the faith that cures them; but it is not and cannot be Catholic until it aims at working a change, not only on the inner minds of individuals, but on the whole order of society.

III

‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness; and all other things shall be added unto you.’ That saying is the essence of Catholic religion, the religion never yet realized. Also, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.’ But these new faiths of technique are concerned, not so much with the Kingdom of Heaven, as with the very best of the things that shall be added. I read lately a tract, not of Christian Science, but of one of the New Thought sects. It began, well enough, by saying that we must try to find the Christ in ourselves. But then, suddenly, it let the cat, that is the self, out of the bag. If you find the Christ in yourself, it said, you can achieve whatever you wish to achieve—health, power, wealth. Trust the Christ in yourself, and you can do all things. It is one side of the doctrine of Christ, but only what he said in his passionate, exultant, humorous way. By faith you can move mountains; but the important thing is, not to move the mountains, but to have the faith; and if you try to have the faith so that you may move the mountains, you will not have it. You may hypnotize yourself, but you will not see the Kingdom of Heaven. You may be a success, but you will not be a Catholic. Besides, the people who do succeed thus are not attractive to others. We may wish for their success, but we do not wish to be like them. A Catholic faith would draw us through our desire to be like those who hold it.

As for the Theosophists: their doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and of Karma, has this defect, that it is devised to explain things, and to justify the ways of God to man. Things are what they are — the very iniquities of the world are what they are — because we are paying, or being paid, for the past. The Theosophists profess to make their faith out of the best of all religions, to have reached, by an eclectic process, the permanent religion of mankind. But nothing could be more contrary to the most profound and surprising part of Christ’s teaching than this doctrine of Karma. According to the doctrine of Karma, the essence of God is justice; he has devised a universe in which everything has to be paid for, in which the past rules the present, causation controlling spirit as it controls matter. But, according to Christ, God transcends justice, and spirit can free itself, can become part of the utter freedom of the Kingdom of Heaven. God is not a judge, nor has he made a fixed, rigid, systematic universe. He has given to man a creative power, by which he can free himself of the past and rise into the eternal life of the present. Christ did not preach a doctrine of Karma; He said, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee. Cease to trouble about them. Sin no more; be a new man.’ And He told men to make a new world by forgiveness, which is forgetting the past in each other. He told them to judge not, so that they might be like God, who does not judge. But these sayings of his have not been taken seriously, because men have not seen the philosophy in them, the profound, difficult view of the nature of the universe and of life which they imply.

The effort of the Theosophists to find justice in the universe, as we see it, is based upon the conception of a static universe, with its future all involved in its past. In that conception there is no hope for the wicked, the weakling, the degenerate. As they have been, so they will be; the best they can do is to consent to their evil fate because it is the result of their own past. But Christ says there is not justice in the universe, because its future is not involved in its past, because it is free and growing, because all life, in so far as it is life, shares in the spontaneity of God. Faith is seeing reality, not with the eyes or always, but at heaven-sent moments which rule the life of faith. And, in this reality seen by faith, there is no payment or punishment or law imposed from outside, but an infinite possibility for all men, because, having life, they have their share in the spontaneity of God. They are not what they have been, but what they are trying to become. The Grace of God, if we will to accept it, is supreme and omnipotent in us; and it comes to us, not as a reward for past virtue, but because we will to accept it now. Above all, we must not consent to the iniquities of this life as being part of the divine order. There is no divine order, in the old materialist sense of causation and law. What is divine is the creative power, which can give to man a new nature and a new world to live in — the power that is within him if he will see it without him.

Compared with this faith, Theosophy, like the old scientific determinism, is retrograde. Indeed, it does express the old scientific determinism in a religious form. It is a kind of Calvinism orientalized. But the religious effort of our time is to escape utterly from all kinds of determinism, to see the nature of man imaginatively, in terms of spirit, in terms of our highest values. And we are beginning to be aware that Christianity has maintained that effort for nearly two thousand years, with many failures and perversities, but not utterly in vain. In the nineteenth century the great advance in scientific knowledge seemed to cut the present mind of man off from its past. It was assumed that, before that knowledge came, men could not think rightly about anything.

Religion, and even art, belonged to the childhood of the human mind; philosophy was a vain effort to discover what could not be discovered. But now men were at last discovering what could be discovered; they saw a new earth, and no heaven, and were immensely complacent over their own disillusionment.

Well, the war has cured us of that complacency. The new earth is but the old one, the mind of man is as blind, as bloody, as superstitious, as ever. The Germans, whom we all hailed as the leaders of the new age, have reverted to a pre-Christian mythology. Their God is a tribal Jahveh, and they are the chosen people, though they assert it in a new scientific jargon.

There are some who say that Christianity has failed, as if it were likely to succeed when men did not believe in it. Certainly it has failed to make men believe in it; and that failure is absolute, if we hold that Christianity is something revealed once for all two thousand years ago. But to hold that, is to misunderstand Christ himself. He professed to be a visionary, that is to say, one who saw the truth, as other men see a cow in a field; and his aim was to make men see this truth. He could not reveal it in a series of statements, any more than one could reveal a cow to those who had not seen it. All that He said was an effort to make men see it, to give them his own vision. So we can now try to attain to his vision, undiscouraged by the failures of the past. For these very failures, implying as they do efforts constantly renewed, prove that for two thousand years men have not been able to escape from the belief that Christ had a vision, that his Kingdom of Heaven was a fact which He really beheld with his inner sight, and that we can behold it also.

In England, now, faith means more and more faith in the Kingdom of Heaven, as a fact which can be seen, as an order to which man, by his own effort and the Grace of God, can belong. The words ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ are constantly used by the religious as containing some meaning which has to be discovered. There is a great impatience with the churches because they have not discovered, or even tried much to discover, what those words mean. Their old dogmas say nothing about the Kingdom of Heaven, and therefore seem to be irrelevant. They are for the most part concerned with some state of being not our own; but Christ says that the Kingdom of Heaven can be seen, and we ourselves can become part of it here and now. In that doctrine is the missing element of Christianity, the reason why it has failed always to be itself. The Christian Scientists supply part of that doctrine; they tell us that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us; but the whole of it has not yet been grasped by them or by any church. The question remains, which no one yet can answer, whether any existing church has the energy to grasp it, to free itself from its own past, to proclaim the truth that Christianity is yet to be discovered by all the powers of man’s mind, and to be practised by all the energy of his will. If not, we may dare to predict that a new Church will arise and destroy the old ones. But, in England, it certainly has not arisen yet.