Religion and Civilization

IT is a common enough thing nowadays to find it maintained that what we must have is more religion. No end of bright and clever people say that, by word of mouth and in articles and books. It is not always clear exactly what they mean by it. A careful study of these numerous utterances leads one to the observation that by religion they generally mean a spirit of respectable geniality and law-abiding humanitarianism. There must be no dogma in it, they usually tell us; it must speak as one of the scribes and in no wise with authority. One draws the impression that there must be no ritual in it, either, or very little. It is rather the sort of thing which people feel who listen, in an atmosphere of respectability, to urgings that we should all help one another to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful. And we are told that if we all drink of this thin and somewhat saccharine spiritual beverage a wonderful thing is going to happen. We are going to preserve civilization.

I should like to devote a few paragraphs to the saying of two things: first, that this sort of genial good-humor is not religion, but quite another thing, of which we have too much already and not too little; and second, that the purpose of real religion is not to save society but to do something infinitely more worth while.

A wise and Christian woman who teaches in a New England college has described, in words bitter but searching, this modern thing which masquerades as religion. It is ‘suavemannered,’ she says, ‘pleasant-voiced; endangering nothing in particular; an ornament of the Sunday pew; devoted to good causes in proportion to their remoteness; intent upon promoting safe philanthropies and foreign missions, but, as far as affairs at home are concerned, ignorant alike of the ardors of the mystic or the heroisms of the reformer; cheerfully assuming that whatever is innocently agreeable is religious . . . careless dependence upon an affectionate God; a domestic religion, calculated to make life pleasant in the family circle, and curiously at ease in Zion.’

It is a harsh quotation, but not much exaggerated.

What is wrong with this very modern, humanitarian, nontheological, nonliturgical religion is not difficult to see. What makes it banal, what makes it to many people and especially to young people often a bit of a bore, is that its devotees actually suppose that man himself is the centre of the universe. It is more truly anthropomorphic than even the most crude savage superstition. Superstition tells people to worship a God who is like man. This new conception of religion bids us worship man himself.

It is a faith for people without a sense of humor, devoid of imagination. Science has long ago upset the notion which our fathers naively had, that physically everything — sun, moon, and stars — revolves around the earth. At such an idea the modern man smiles indulgently. But our fathers would have shouted aloud with body-filling laughter at the even more ludicrous notion held by the modern man, that spiritually everything — cherubim, seraphim, and God Himself—revolves around the human race. The older day knew better. Human life is fast-flying and full of uncertainty. Man is a child, searching for something of truth; brave and beautiful, it may be, and to be respected, but tragic and pathetic too. His life is a search for reality, for a love which cannot be satisfied by earthly things, or even by human affection. There is a meaning to things somewhere. There is Someone who can love and whom to know and to love is life. There is a Being behind and within and beyond the little that we see and feel. He alone can satisfy a man’s hungry heart. He it is who is Truth. He is the centre of all spiritual reality. To find Him is enough. To have all else and to miss Him is to find all else but dust and ashes. The search for Him is what life is for. To know God, who passes knowledge, that is to find one’s self.

All the religions of the earth have taught that much. From the days when the primitive savage knelt before some supposedly sacred tree or some possibly holy stone and thrilled at the thought that somewhere within created matter lay and vibrated a force, a power beyond his knowing, into contact with which he must somehow come, on through the ancient religions into the great faiths of Zoroastrianism and Brahminism and Buddhism and Mohammedanism and Judaism and Christianity, men everywhere have understood that God is all that really matters and that religion is the pathway by which they humbly and hungrily draw near that they may live. It has remained for the modern world to conceive of man as in himself constituting the sacred centre of things, and of God as a dear, helpful sort of maiden aunt whose chief business is to coddle the children. To say that God loves man is a wonderful thing in the mouth of the religious people of the ages, for it has meant that the creative Eternal had compassion upon man, His creature. There are a good many people nowadays who think it is a gracious act on their part to permit the Deity to love them at all.

In the name of the great mystical souls of the past, in the name of the millions of men and women who have sought humbly after God if haply they might a little find Him, it needs to be said that this anthropocentric, sentimental benevolence, which will have no teaching about the Eternal, no theology, but insists that God must be an amorphous influence surrounding and serving humanity, — which in its approaches toward God has little of awe, little of humble adoration, of mystery and solemnity, and reduces worship to the level of a pleasant Sunday at the club, — is not religion at all, but may very easily become mere pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, from which we ought to pray to be delivered just as much as from envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.

It may possibly be that this sort of lofty humanitarianism is destined to save the world. It seems hardly probable. The cult smacks somehow of the privileged classes. The great multitude of working people do not love humanity. They do not even think about humanity. They love their brothers and have compassion on one another. It is the man who is isolated from his brothers, by accident of class or misfortune of occupation, who goes in for the higher humanitarianism, loves the human race as such, and, usually, is fretfully impatient with human beings. However this may be, even supposing that humanitarianism, perfumed faintly with the odor of sanctity, is going to save the world, let us at least be honest enough not to call it religion, the high and humble search by man for God, or to ask that the Church devote her time and effort to its promotion.

A great new building in New York we are told is to be ‘a house of prayer for all people.’ Some have attacked this statement, saving that it is not for all people. However that may be, it is a house of prayer. It will not stand through the ages on the top of its high hill for the autoelevation of humanity by its own genial boot-straps. It is to be what every church ought to be — a house of prayer, where men and women shall in deep humility and with hungry hearts lift themselves up toward Him whom truly to know is the only life that matters. As David the king said of the ancient temple, ‘The palace is not for man, but for the Lord God.’ If to believe that God is infinitely greater than man, and more worth loving and seeking and knowing, be superstition to this age, then the Church must continue to be a house of superstition. The ages past and the ages to be have a different name for it. That God is all, and that man has as his chief end to know Him and to enjoy Him forever, is not superstition. It is religion. No baser coin can take its place in the high commerce of men.

It is quite natural that people who think man is the centre of the cosmos, and therefore of religion, should suppose that the end and aim of the Church is to save civilization, to preserve the social order. I am told that there are people who give wealth to the Church on the supposition that it will ensure the status quo. I have even been told that a few people have given money to build cathedrals with the notion that somehow they will be fortresses of social conservatism. It ought to be obvious enough that money so given constitutes a poor investment. The Church has not been successful hitherto, or indeed much interested, in preserving the status quo. Nor is it concerned with trying to overthrow the status quo. Why should it be?

The Church has seen several kinds of social order succeed one another, flower, rot, and die. The Roman social order was the first one. The Church was born into that. It was a militaristic worldempire, built on coercion and law. It rotted with selfishness and crumbled away. The Church went on. Then came the chaotic time of readjustment, and out of that emerged a feudal social order, at first more Christian than that which had been before and than any that has come after. It flowered and it withered and it died. And the Church kept right on. Then came a world built on private enterprise and trade. It lasted for about two centuries and a half and it became impossible and was supplanted, leaving behind it curious survivals like Jeffersonian democracy and the idealism of the 1840’s and that talk about the abstract freedom of man of which one still hears a bit. That Adam Smith sort of social order died, too, about a century ago. But the Church kept on.

Our present civilization is based upon capitalistic control of the stores of the earth and of the power-driven tool. It is developing at great speed, growing out of hand, pushing the mobs into the cavernous cities, taking from the individual the joy of craftsmanship, penalizing family life, and generally running amuck. It creaks and groans in labor disputes, smirks in divorce and misdirected sex, and occasionally crashes in world war. The Church of the living God did not make it. Man made it. Whether it can be tamed by its creators no one can be quite sure. It may prove a Frankenstein monster which turns to rend its makers. At any rate, everyone admits that the present social order is a bit shaky. The Church does not care whether it survives or not. If it perishes the Church will go right on, religion will go right on. God sitteth between the cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet. The great Ecclesia will stand on its heights long after capitalism has gone to join feudalism and imperialism and bolshevism and has been supplanted by some other interesting notion in the way of social order.

But, perhaps it may be asked, has the Church no social message at all? To be sure it has. Through the ages God has revealed with ever-increasing clearness that only those who love their fellow human beings can approach the glowing heart of God. ‘For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’ The prophet of old said that one must do justly and love mercy before he can walk humbly with his God; and that to do those three things is the whole duty of man. And Jesus Christ says that we shall love God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind, with all our power of loving, and that this will involve loving our neighbor as ourselves. You must love God and be loved of Him to have life mean anything, says the Church, and the experience of the ages gives agreement; and, in order to be acceptable with and by God, you must love men and women and little children.

That was ever the message of Jesus, who by His incarnation has made God comprehensible and lovable. You can search His sayings through and find no command to be humanitarian. You will find no urging that we should seek any such abstract impersonalities as the good and the true and the beautiful. You will find awe and reverence and humility both practised and prescribed toward the Eternal, and charity and human kindness and sacrifice and true affection both prescribed and practised toward men. You will search and search in vain for any pleas for the necessity of preserving civilization, that of His earthly day or that of any other day. To Him, if men would act humanly toward other men, and would humbly and reverently seek God, civilization would take care of itself. He knew that as long as any civilization made those two things easy and natural it would live, and that when it ceased to make them possible it would perish. That was all there was to that.

If our civilization continues to develop along lines of the sacred rights of property instead of along lines of the sacred rights of men, if control of wealth is given to people who lack imagination, if men are to be divided into masters and servants, capitalists and laborers, instead of united as brothers and friends, it will not be long before capitalism is as dead as the dodo bird, and a captain of industry will be as curious an antiquarian figure as a feudal knight in armor. It will not be the Church which overthrows. It will simply be another case of men who have defied the Lord and built a city on another than the Lord’s commanded bases. And as for preserving, as for keeping the ins in just because they are in, that surely is too much to ask. If civilization is decent it will not need the Church artificially to buttress it. If it is not decent it would be blasphemy for the Church to seek to preserve it.

We must not confound human destiny and contemporary civilization, with its ins and its outs and its classes and its settled order of things. Otherwise we may be in the foolish position of the imaginary bishop in one of Mr. Sitwell’s poems, who fell asleep in his garden one warm afternoon. While he slept there came the Judgment Day. The bishop woke to find the second housemaid going by in a robe of glorious iridescent silk with a crown of glory on her head. ‘I warned people,’ said the bishop, ‘that the first thing we knew we’d have bolshevism.’

Let us by all means have more religion, but let it be real religion—theocentric, awed, a thing of beauty and of deep humility. And let us not seek it for the sake of preserving civilization, that relatively unimportant incident. Let us seek it because we have lost our way, in a maze of sin and pride; because we are lonely and life is dull and the world’s gaudy baubles seem like tinsel; because God is our lost treasure; because we would be shriven; because we are children and the Father’s house is home; because we have too long been clever and self-sufficient; because Worldliness is drab and stupid; because we would eat again the bread of God and drink once more the purple wine of Heaven.