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Title: The War and the Churches
Author: Joseph McCabe
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THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES
by
JOSEPH McCABE
[Issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited]
London: Watts & Co. 17 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
1915
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PREFACE
The searching crisis through which the nation is passing must have the
effect of securing grave consideration for many aspects of our life and
institutions. We have already traversed the acute stage of suspense, and
are gradually becoming sensible of these wider considerations. It was
natural that for a prolonged period the disturbance of our economic
conditions, the anxiety for the safety of our nation in face of an
appalling menace, the personal concern of millions about the lives of
sons or brothers who have bravely responded to the call, should keep our
thoughts enchained to the daily or hourly fortunes of the field of
battle. Now that the initial disorder has been allayed and we have
attained a quiet and reasonable confidence in the issue, we turn to
other and broader aspects of this mighty event of our generation. How
comes it that the most enlightened century the world has yet seen should
be thus darkened by one of the bloodiest and most calamitous wars that
have ever spread their awful wings over the life of man? Where is all
the optimism of yesterday? Must we reconsider our reasoned boast that
our civilisation has lifted the life of man to a level hitherto
unattained? Is there something entirely and most mischievously wrong
with the foundations of modern civilisation?
A dozen such questions will press for an answer, but it will be granted
that one of the most urgent and most interesting of the many grave
considerations which the war suggests is its relation to the prevailing
creeds and standards of conduct. The war coincides with an advanced
stage of what is called the spread of unbelief. In each of the nations
of Europe which are engaged in this awful struggle complaints have been
made every year for the last two or three generations that Christianity
is losing its moral control of the white race. In the cities, especially
in the capitals, of Europe there has been a proved and acknowledged
decay of church-going; and, however much we may be disposed to think
that these millions who no longer attend church retain in their minds
the beliefs of their fathers, the slender circulation of religious
literature makes it plain that the vast majority of them do not, in
point of fact, receive either the spoken or written message of the
Christian Church. In the great cities--and it is undoubted that the life
of a nation is mainly controlled by its cities--there has been an
increasing reluctance to listen to the authoritative exponents of the
Christian gospel.
A number of the clergy have very naturally noticed and stressed this
coincidence. Prelates of high authority have, as we shall see, even
declared that the war is a scourge deliberately laid on the back of
mankind by the Almighty on account of this spreading infidelity. As a
rule, the clergy shrink from advocating a theory which has such grave
implications as this has, and they are content to submit the more
plausible suggestion, that the decay of the Christian standard of
conduct in the mind of a large proportion of our generation accounts for
this tragic combat of nations. A distinguished Positivist writer, Mr. J.
Cotter Morison, commenting in the last generation on the decay of
Christian belief, expressed some such concern in the following terms:
"It would be rash to expect that a transition, unprecedented for
its width and difficulty, from theology to positivism, from the
service of God to the service of Man, could be accomplished without
jeopardy. Signs are not wanting that the prevalent anarchy in
thought is leading to anarchy in morals. Numbers who have put off
belief in God have not put on belief in Humanity. A common and
lofty standard of duty is being trampled down in the fierce battle
of incompatible principles."[1]
It is true that in the work from which I quote[1] the learned, if
somewhat nervous, Positivist does not, by his masterly survey of the
moral history of Europe, afford us the least reason to think that we
have really deteriorated from the standard of conduct set us by earlier
generations, but his words do tend to press on our notice the claim of
many writers, clerical and non-clerical, that we are returning from
Christianity to Paganism, from a settled moral discipline to an
unhealthy moral scepticism. Can one entirely and safely reconstruct the
bases of personal and national conduct in one or two generations?
This very plain and plausible theory is, however, exposed to criticism
from other points of view. The clergy as a body are not at all willing
to concede that the decay of belief has spread as far as the theory
would suggest. In order to suppose that the life of Europe has, in a
matter of the gravest importance, been directed by a non-Christian
spirit, one must assume that at least the majority in each nation have
deserted the traditional creed. It is by no means conceded or
established that the fighting nations have ceased to be predominantly
Christian. Indeed, if we confine the awful responsibility for this
tragedy, as the evidence compels us, to Germany and Austria-Hungary, we
are casting it upon the two nations which have been the chief
representatives in Europe of the two leading branches of the Church.
Most assuredly no prelate of either country would admit that his nation
has ceased to be Christian or surrendered its life to non-Christian
impulses; and in our own country we have frequently been assured of late
years that the real power of Christianity was never greater.
Clearly these conflicting claims and this contrast of profession and
practice suggest a problem that deserves consideration. The problem
becomes the more interesting, and the plausible theory of non-Christian
responsibility is even more severely shaken, when we reflect that war is
not an innovation of this unbelieving age, but a legacy from the earlier
and more thoroughly Christian period. Had mankind departed from some
admirable practice of submitting its international quarrels to a
religious arbitrator, and in our own times devised this horrible
arbitrament of the sword, we should be more disposed to seek the cause
in a contemporary enfeeblement of moral standards. This is notoriously
not the case. Men have warred, and priests have blessed the banners
which were to wave over fields of blood, from the very beginning of
Christian influence, not to speak of earlier religious epochs. There is
assuredly a ghastly magnitude about modern war which almost lends it an
element of novelty, but the appearance is illusory. That intense
employment of resources which makes modern war so sanguinary tends also
to shorten its duration. No military struggle could now be prolonged
into the period of the Napoleonic wars; to say nothing of the Thirty
Years War, which involved the death, with every circumstance of
ferocity, of immensely larger numbers than could be affected by any
modern war. Nor may we forget that it is the modern spirit which has
claimed some alleviation of the horrors of the field, and that the
majority of the nations engaged in the present struggle have observed
the new rules.
These considerations show that the problem is less simple and more
serious than is often supposed, and I set out to discuss each of them
with some fullness. That the war has _no_ relation to the Churches will
hardly be claimed by anybody. Such a claim would mean that they were
indifferent to one of the very gravest phases of human conduct, or
wholly unable to influence it. Nor can we avoid the issue by pleading
that Christianity approves and blesses a just defensive war, and that,
since the share of this country in the war is entirely just and
defensive, we have no moral problem to consider. I have assuredly no
intention of questioning either the justice of Britain's conduct or the
prudence of the Churches in adapting the maxims of the Sermon on the
Mount to the practical needs of life. If and when a nation sees its life
and prosperity threatened by an ambitious or a jealous neighbour, one
cannot but admire its clergy for joining in the advocacy of an efficient
and triumphant defence. But this is merely a superficial and proximate
consideration. Not the actual war only, but the military system of which
it is the occasional outcome, has a very pertinent relation to religion;
the maintenance of this machinery for settling international quarrels in
an age in which applied science makes it so formidable is a very grave
moral issue. It turns our thoughts at once to those branches of the
Christian Church which claim the predominant share in the moulding of
the conduct of Europe.
But these questions of the efficacy of Christian teaching or the
influence of Christian ministers are not the only or the most
interesting questions suggested by the relation of the war to the
prevailing religion. The great tragedy which darkens the earth to-day
raises again in its most acute form the problem of evil and Providence.
More than two thousand years ago, as _Job_ reminds us, some difficulty
was experienced in justifying the ways of God to men. The most
penetrating thinker of the early Church, St. Augustine, wrestled once
more with the problem, as if no word had been written on it; and he
wrestled in vain. A century and a half ago, when the Lisbon earthquake
destroyed forty thousand Portuguese, Voltaire attempted, with equal
unsuccess, to vindicate Providence with the faint hope of the Deist.
Modern science, prolonging the sufferings of living things over earlier
millions of years, has made that problem one of the great issues of our
age, and this dread spectacle of _human_ nature red in tooth and claw
brings it impressively before us. Is the work of God restricted to
counting the hairs of the head, and not enlarged to check the murderous
thoughts in the human brain? Nay, when we survey those horrid stretches
of desolation in Belgium and Poland and Serbia, where the mutilated
bodies of the innocent, of women and children, lie amidst the ashes of
their homes; when we think of those peaceful sailors of our mercantile
marine at the bottom of the deep, those unoffending civilians whose
flesh was torn by shells, those hundreds of thousands whom patriotic
feeling alone has summoned to the vast tombs of Europe, those millions
of homes that have been darkened by suspense and loss--how can we repeat
the ancient assurance that God _does_ count the hairs of the head and
mark the fall of even the sparrows? Does God move the insensate stars
only, and leave to the less skilful guidance of man those momentous
little atoms which make up the brain of statesmen?
These are reflections which must occur to every thoughtful person in the
later and more meditative phases of a great war, when the eye has grown
somewhat weary of the glitter of steel and the colour of banners, when
the world mourns about us and the long lists of the dead and longer list
of the stupendous waste sober the mind. Something is gravely wrong with
our international life; and, plainly, it is not a question _whether_
that international life departs from the Christian standard, but _why_,
after fifteen hundred years of mighty Christian influence, it does so
depart. Is the moral machinery of Europe ineffective? One certainly
cannot say that it has not had a prolonged trial; yet here, in the
twentieth century, we have, in the most terrible form, one of the most
appalling evils which human agency ever brought upon human hearts. We
have to reconsider our religious and ethical position; to ask ourselves
whether, if the influence of religion has failed to direct men into
paths of wisdom and peace, some other influence may not be found which
will prove more persuasive and more beneficent.
J. M.
_Easter, 1915._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCHES 1
II. CHRISTIANITY AND WAR 25
III. THE APOLOGIES OF THE CLERGY 48
IV. THE WAR AND THEISM 70
V. THE HUMAN ALTERNATIVE 95
THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES
CHAPTER I
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCHES
The first question which the unprejudiced inquirer will seek to answer
is: How far were the Churches able to prevent, yet remiss in using their
influence to prevent, the present war? There is, unhappily, in these
matters no such thing as an entirely unprejudiced inquirer. Our
preconceived ideas act like magnets on the material of evidence which is
submitted to us, instinctively selecting what bears in their favour and
declining to receive what they cannot utilise. Nowhere is this more
conspicuous than in the field of religious inquiry, nor is it confined
to either believers or unbelievers. There has been too much mutual
abuse, and too little attention to the fact that the mind no less than
the mouth has its palate, its impulsive selections and rejections. One
can meet the difficulty only by a patient and full examination of the
pleas of both parties to a controversy.
And the first plea which it is material to examine is that, since it is
claimed that all the nations engaged in the war are Christian nations,
one may accuse them collectively of moral failure. From the earliest
days of the Christian religion it was the boast of those who accepted
it that it abolished all distinctions of caste and race. In the little
community which gathered round the cross there was neither bond nor
free, neither Greek nor Roman. This cosmopolitanism was, in fact, a
natural feature of religious movements at the time, and was due not so
much to their intrinsic development as to the political circumstances of
the world in which they spread. All round the eastern and northern
shores of the Mediterranean a great variety of races mingled in every
port and every commercial town, and it was the policy of the powerful
Empire which extended its sway over them all to overrule their national
antagonisms. When, in the earlier period, Jew and Greek and Egyptian had
maintained their separate nationalities, hostility to other races had
been a very natural social quality, an inevitable part of the spirit of
self-preservation in a race. When the great Empires had conquered the
smaller nationalities or the decaying older Empires, this mutual
hostility was moderated, and, as the vast movements of population which
marked the end of the old and the beginning of the new era filled the
Mediterranean cities with extraordinarily mixed crowds, mutual
friendship became the more fitting and more useful social virtue. A good
deal of the old narrow patriotism had been due to the fact that each
nation had its own god. In the new Roman world this theological
exclusivism broke down, and the priests of a particular god, scattered
like their followers among the cities of the eastern world, began to
seek a cosmopolitan rather than a nationalist following. In the temple
of each of the leading gods of the time--Jahveh, Serapis, Mithra, and so
on--people of all races and classes were received on a footing of
equality. The doctrine of the brotherhood of man spread all over that
cosmopolitan world.
When the old world, to the south and east of the Mediterranean, was
blotted out of history, and Europe in turn became a group of conflicting
nationalities, racial hatred was revived and in its political and social
aspects the doctrine of the brotherhood of man was virtually forgotten.
But the Christian Church had embodied that doctrine in its sacred
writing, and was bound to maintain it. In its ambition of a universal
dominion it was the direct successor of the Roman Empire. All the races
of Europe were to meet as brothers under the one God of the new world
and under the direction of his representatives on earth. It was this
change in the features of the world which gave a certain air of
insincerity to the Christian gospel. In the older days there had been
political unity with a great diversity of religions; now there was
religious unity spread over a great diversity of antagonistic political
bodies. Men were brothers from the religious point of view and, only too
frequently, deadly enemies from the political point of view. The discord
was made worse by the feudal system which was adopted. Even within the
same race there was no brotherhood. In effect the clergy as a body did
not insist that the noble was a brother of the serf, and did not exact
fraternal treatment of the serf. Thus the phrase, "the brotherhood of
man," which had been a most prominent and active principle of early
Christianity, became little more than a useless theological thesis.
The solution of the difficulty would, of course, have been for the
clergy, as the supreme representatives of the doctrine of brotherhood,
to apply that doctrine boldly to every part of man's conduct; to
pronounce that all violence and bloodshed were immoral, and to devise a
humane means of settling international quarrels. I will consider in the
next chapter why the Christian leaders failed even to attempt this great
reform. For the moment it is enough to observe that the conditions of
modern times favoured a fresh assertion of the doctrine of brotherhood.
Great as the power of sincere moral idealism has always been, the
historian must recognise that economic changes have had a most important
influence upon the development or acceptance of moral ideas. Just as in
earlier ages the development of forms of life was conditioned by changes
in their material surroundings, so man's moral development has been
profoundly influenced by industrial, commercial, and political changes.
The destruction of feudalism and the development of the modern worker
were notoriously not due to religious influence, yet they had an
important relation to religious doctrines. Once the new spirit had
asserted its right, the clergy recollected that all men are brothers
from the social as well as the religious point of view. Many of them,
and even some social writers of Christian views, maintain that the new
social order is itself based on or inspired by the religious doctrine of
brotherhood. This speculation is entirely opposed to the historical
facts, but it will easily be realised that when the workers had, in
their own interest, asserted afresh the doctrine of human brotherhood,
the Churches had a new occasion to preach it. How timid and tentative
that preaching was, and even is, we have not to consider here. On the
whole the brotherhood of men was re-affirmed by the Churches both in the
social and religious sense.
This situation makes more violent than ever the contrast between the
political and religious relations of men, and gives a strong _prima
facie_ case to the charge against the Churches which I am considering.
It is wholly artificial and insincere to say that men are brothers
socially and religiously, yet are justified in marching out in millions,
with the most murderous apparatus science can devise, to meet each other
on the field of battle. We condemn crime for social reasons. We have
relegated to the Middle Ages, to which it belongs, the notion that the
criminal is a man who has affronted society, and that society may take a
revenge on him. In the sane conception of our time the criminal is a
mischievous element disturbing the social order, and, in the interest of
that order, he must be isolated or put out of existence. It is not the
_guilt_, but the _social effect_, which we regard. And from this point
of view a single great war is far more calamitous than all the crime in
Europe during whole decades. It is estimated by high authorities that if
the present war lasts only twelve months it will cost Europe, directly
and indirectly, including the destruction of property and the loss to
industry and commerce, no less a sum than £9,000,000,000; and it will
certainly cost more than a million, if not more than two million, lives,
besides the incalculable amount of suffering from wounds, loss of
relatives, outrages, and the incidental damage of warfare. The time will
come when historians will study with amazement the wonderful system we
have devised in Europe for the suppression of breaches of the social
order at a time when we complacently suffer these appalling periodical
destructions of the entire social order of nations.
It is quite natural to arraign the Christian Churches in connection
with this disastrous outbreak. Unless they discharge the high task of
the moral direction of men, in international as well as in personal
conduct, they have no _raison d'être_. Few of them to-day will plead
that their function is merely to interpret to their fellows what they
regard as the revealed word of God. In face of the challenging spirit of
our time they maintain that they discharge a moral mission of such
importance that society is likely to go to pieces if Christianity is
abandoned. We therefore ask very pertinently where they were, and what
they were doing, during the months when the nations of Europe were
slowly advancing toward a declaration of war.
In examining the charge that, for some reason or other, they neglected
their mission at a crisis of supreme importance, we must recall that few
of us believed that a great war would occur until we actually heard the
declaration. No indictment of the clergy is valid which presupposes that
they are more sagacious or far-seeing than the rest of us. Yet, however
much we may have doubted the actual occurrence of war, we have known for
years, and have quite complacently commented upon, the danger that half
of Europe would sooner or later be involved in the horrors of the
greatest war in history. Now it is notorious that the Christian Churches
have done little or nothing, in proportion to their mighty resources and
influence, to avert this danger. No collective action has been taken,
and relatively few individuals have used their influence to moderate or
obviate the danger. The supreme head of the most powerfully organised
and most cosmopolitan religious body in the world, an institution which
has its thousands of ministers among each of the antagonistic peoples--I
mean the Church of Rome--gave his attention to minute questions of
doctrine and administration, and bemoaned repeatedly the evil spirit of
our age, but issued not one single syllable of precise and useful
direction to the various national regiments of his clergy in connection
with this terrible impending danger. The heads or Councils of the
various Protestant bodies were equally remiss. Here and there individual
clergymen joined associations, founded by laymen, which endeavoured to
maintain peace and to secure arbitration upon quarrels, and one Sunday
in the year was set aside by the pulpits for the vague gospel of peace.
But in almost all cases these movements were purely secular in origin,
and the few movements of a religious nature have been obviously founded
only to keep the idealism linked with a particular Church, have had no
great influence, and have been too vague in their principles to have had
any effect upon the growing chances of a European war. There is no doubt
that the Churches have remained almost dumb while Europe was preparing
for its Armageddon.
I speak of the clergy, but in our time the responsibility cannot be
confined to these. Even in the Church of England the laity have now a
considerable influence, and in the other Protestant bodies they have
even more power in the control of policy. No doubt the duty of
initiative and of work in such matters lies mainly with the more
leisured and more official interpreters of the Christian spirit, yet it
would be absurd to restrict the criticism to them. The various Christian
bodies, as a whole, have confronted a very grave and imminent danger
with remarkable indifference, although that danger could become an
actual infliction only by seriously immoral conduct on the part of some
nation. They saw, as we all saw, the vast armies preparing for the fray,
the diplomatists betraying an increasing concern about the relations
between their respective nations, the press embittering those relations,
and a pernicious and provocative literature inflaming public opinion. We
all saw these things, and knew that a war of appalling magnitude would
follow the first infringement of peace. Yet I think it will hardly be
controverted that the Churches made no serious effort to avert that
calamity from Europe. They were deeply concerned about unbelief, about
personal purity, about the cleanness of plays and books and pictures,
even about questions of social reform which a rebellious democracy
forced on them; but they took no initiative and performed no important
service in connection with this terrible danger.
That is the indictment which many bring against Christianity, and we
have now to consider the general defence. I will examine later a number
of religious pronouncements about the war, and will discuss here only a
few general pleas which are put forward as a defence against the general
indictment.
It is, in the first place, urged that the moral and humanitarian
teaching which the Christian Churches never ceased to put before the
world condemned in advance every departure from the paths of justice and
charity; that it was not the fault of Christianity if men refused to
listen to or carry into practice that teaching. But at no period in the
history of morals has it sufficed to lay down general principles.
Everybody perceives to-day, not only that slavery was in itself a crime,
but that it was essentially opposed to the Christian morality. Yet, as
no Christian teacher for many centuries ventured to apply the principle
by expressly denouncing slavery, the institution was taken over from
Paganism by Christian Europe and lasted centuries after the fall of the
Roman Empire. The Church itself had vast numbers of slaves, and later of
serfs, on its immense estates. Leo the Great disdainfully enacted that
the priesthood must not be stained by admitting so "vile" a class to its
ranks, and Gregory the Great had myriads of slaves on the Papal
"patrimonies." So it was with the demand for social reform which
characterised the nineteenth century. To-day Christians claim that their
principles sanctioned and gave weight to those early demands of reform,
yet their principles had been vainly repeated in Europe for fifteen
hundred years, and, when the people themselves at last formulated their
demands in the early part of the nineteenth century, it is notorious
that the clergy opposed them. The teaching of abstract moral principles
is of no avail. Man is essentially a casuist. Leave to him the
application of your principles, and he will adapt almost any scheme of
conduct to them. The moralist who does not boldly and explicitly point
the application of his principles is either too ignorant of human nature
to discharge his duty with effect or is a coward. The plain fact is that
the preaching of justice and peace throughout Europe has been steadily
accompanied by an increase in armaments and in international friction.
It had no moral influence on the situation.
A more valid plea is that we must distinguish carefully between the
nations which inaugurated the war and the nations which are merely
defending themselves, and we must quarrel with the Christian Churches
only in those lands which are guilty. It may, indeed, be pleaded that,
since each nation regards itself as acting on the defensive and uses
arguments to this effect which convince its jurists and scholars no less
than its divines, there is no occasion at all to introduce Christianity.
Most of us do not merely admit the right, we emphasise the duty, of
every citizen to take his share in the just defence of his country,
either by arms or by material contribution. Since there seems to be a
general conviction even in Germany and Austria that the nation is
defending itself against jealous and designing neighbours, why quarrel
with their clergy for supporting the war?
When the plea is broadened to this extent we must emphatically reject
it. There has been too much disposition among moralists to listen
indulgently to such talk as this. When we find five nations engaged in a
terrible war, and each declaring that it is only defending itself
against its opponent, the cynic indeed may indolently smile at the
situation, but the man of principle has a more rigorous task. Some one
of those peoples is lying or is deceived, and, in the future interest of
mankind, it is imperative to determine and condemn the delinquent. There
is no such thing as an inevitable war, nor does the burden of great
armaments lead of itself to the opening of hostilities. It is certain
that on one side or the other, if not on both sides, there is a terrible
guilt, and it is the duty of Christian or any other moralists, whether
or no they belong to the guilty nations, sternly to assign and condemn
that guilt. It is precisely on this loose and lenient habit of mind that
the engineers of aggressive war build in our time, and we have seen, in
the case of neutral nations and of a section of our own nation, what
chances they have of succeeding. They have only to fill their people and
the world at large with counter-charges, resolutely mendacious, and
many will throw up their hands in presence of the mutual accusations and
declare that it is impossible to assign the responsibility. That is a
fatal concession to immorality, and we must hold that in some one or
more of the combatant nations the Churches have, for some reason or
other, acquiesced in a crime.
The plea is valid only to this extent, that the guilty nations in this
case were notoriously Germany and Austria-Hungary, and therefore one
cannot pass any censure on British Christians for supporting the war. I
have in other works dealt so fully with the guilt of those two nations
that here I must be content to assume it. The general and incessant cry
of the German people, that they are only defending their Empire against
malignant enemies, must be understood in the light of their recent
history and literature. No Power in the world had given any indication
of a wish to destroy Germany; there were, at the most, a few
uninfluential appeals in England for an attack on Germany, but solely on
the ground that it meditated an attack on England, and the accumulated
evidence now shows that it did meditate such an attack. England did not
desire an acre of German ground. France had assuredly not forgotten
Alsace and Lorraine, but France would have had no support, and would
have failed ignominiously, in an aggressive campaign to secure those
provinces. On the other hand, an immense and weighty literature, which
is unfortunately very little known in England, has familiarised Germany
for fifteen years with aggressive ideas. The most authoritative writers
claimed that, as they said repeatedly, "Germany must and will expand";
and leagues which numbered millions of subscribers propagated this
sentiment in every school and village. A definite demand was made
throughout Germany for more colonies and a longer coast-line on the
North Sea; and it was in relation to this ambition that England, France,
and Russia were represented--and justly represented--as Germany's
opponents. England, in particular, was described as the great dragon
which watched at the gates of Germany and grimly forbade its
"development." It is in this sense that the bulk of the German people
maintain that their action is defensive.
In passing, let me emphasise this peculiar economic difference between
the four nations. Russia had a vast territory in which her people might
develop. France had no surplus population, and had a large colonial
field for such of her children as desired adventure abroad or would
escape the competition at home. England had, in Canada and Australasia
and South Africa, a magnificent estate for her surplus population. None
of these Powers had an economic ground for aggression. Germany was
undoubtedly in a far less fortunate position, and had an overflowing
population. Six hundred thousand men and women (mostly men) had to leave
the fatherland every year, and, as the colonies were small and
unsatisfactory, they were scattered and lost among the nations of the
earth. The proper attitude toward Germany is, not to gratify the cunning
of her leaders by superficially admitting that she was not aggressive,
but to understand clearly the very solid grounds of her desire for
expansion.
Into the whole case against Germany, however, I cannot enter here.
Familiar from their chief historical writers with the supposed law of
the expansion of powerful nations, convinced by their economists that
the country would soon burst with population and be choked by their own
industrial products unless they expanded, knowing well that such
expansion meant war to the death against France and England (who would
suffer by their expansion), the German people consented to the war.
Their official documents absolutely belie the notion that they were
meeting an aggressive England. But the Christians of Germany were
utterly false to their principles in supporting such a war. I do not
mean merely that they set aside the precept, or counsel to turn the
other cheek to the smiter, for no one now expects either nation or
individual to act on that maxim. They were false to the ordinary
principles of Christian morals or of humanity. Even if one were
desperately to suppose that, learned divines like Harnack were unable to
assign the real responsibility for the war, or that the whole of Germany
is kept in a kind of hot-house of falsehood, it would be impossible to
defend them. The Churches of Germany have complacently watched for
twenty-three years the tendency which William II gave to their schools;
they have passed no censure on the fifteen years of Imperialist
propaganda which have steadily prepared the nation for an aggressive
war; and they have raised no voice against the appalling decision that,
in order to attain Germany's purposes, every rule of morals and humanity
should be set aside. They have servilely accepted every flimsy pretext
for outrage, and have followed, instead of leading, their
passion-blinded people. It was the same in Austria-Hungary. Austrian and
Hungarian prelates have passed in silence the fearful travesties of
justice by which, in recent years, their statesmen sought to compass
the judicial murder of scores of Slavs; they raised no voice when, at
the grave risk of a European war, Austria dishonestly annexed Bosnia and
Herzegovina; they gave their tacit or open consent when Austria,
refusing mediation, declared war on Serbia and inaugurated the titanic
struggle; and they have passed no condemnation on the infamies which the
Magyar troops perpetrated in Serbia.
I am concerned mainly with the action or inaction of the Churches in
this country, but it is entirely relevant to set out a brief statement
of these facts about Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Christian religion
was on trial in those countries as well as here. It failed so
lamentably, not because there is more Christianity here than in Germany
and Austria, not because the national character was inferior to the
English and less apt to receive Christian teaching, but because the
temptation was greater. Until this war occurred, no responsible
traveller ever ventured to say that the German or Austrian character was
inferior to the British. It is not. But the economic difficulties of
Germany and the political difficulties (with the Slavs) of
Austria-Hungary laid a heavier trial on those nations, and their
Christianity entirely failed. Catholic and Protestant alike--for the two
nations contain fifty million Catholics to sixty million
Protestants--were swept onward in the tide of national passion, or
feared to oppose it.
One might have expected that at least the supreme head of the Roman
Church would, from his detached throne in Rome, pass some grave censure
on the outrages committed by Catholic Bavarians in Belgium or Catholic
Magyars in Serbia. Not one syllable either on the responsibility for the
war or the appalling outrages which have characterised it has come from
him. The only event which drew from him a protest--a restrained and
inoffensive remonstrance--was the confinement to his palace for some
days of my old friend and teacher, Cardinal Mercier! To the stories of
fearful and widespread outrage, even when they were sternly
authenticated, he was deaf. One knows why. If Germany and Austria fail
in this war, as they will fail, the Catholic bodies of Germany and
Austria, the strongest Catholic political parties in Europe, will be
broken. Millions of the Catholic subjects of Germany and Austria will
pass under the rule of unbelieving France or schismatical Russia. So the
supreme head of the Roman Church wraps himself nervously in a mantle of
political neutrality and disclaims the duty of assigning moral guilt.
On us in England was laid only the task of defending our homes and our
honour. It is in those other countries that we most clearly see
Christianity put to the test, and failing deplorably under the test. I
do not mean that there was no opportunity here for the Churches to
display their effectiveness as the moral guides of nations. In those
fateful years between 1908 and 1914, during which we now see so plainly
the preparation for this world-tragedy, they might have done much. They
did nothing. They might have seen, at least at the eleventh hour, the
iniquity of sustaining the military system, and have cast the whole of
their massive influence on the side of the promoters of arbitration. I
do not mean that any man should advocate disarmament, or less effective
armament, in England while the rest of the world remains armed. As long
as we retain the military system instead of an international court, the
soldier's profession is honourable, and the man who voluntarily faces
the horrors of the field is entitled to respect and gratitude. But in
every country there was an agitation for the _general_ abandonment of
militarism and the substitution of lawyers for soldiers in the
settlement of international quarrels. Had the Churches in every country
given their whole support to this agitation, and insisted that it is
morally criminal for the race as a whole to prolong the military system,
we might not have witnessed this great catastrophe.
Before, however, I press this charge against the Christian bodies, let
me discuss the third plea that may be urged in defence of the Churches.
It is the plea of those who are so eager to disclaim responsibility that
they are willing to allow an enormous decay of religious influence in
the modern world. You have repeatedly told us, they say to the
Rationalist, that Christianity has lost its hold on Europe. You speak of
millions who no longer hear the word of Christian ministers, but who
_do_ read Rationalist literature in enormous quantities. Very well, you
cannot have it both ways. Let us admit that the nations of Europe have
become non-Christian, and we cast on your non-Christian influence the
burden of responsibility for the war.
This language has been used more than once in England. It leaves the
speaker free to assume that in England, whose action in the war we do
not criticise, the nation remains substantially Christian, while in
Germany and Austria the Churches have lost more ground. Indeed, one may
almost confine attention to Germany. Profoundly corrupt as political
life has been in Austria-Hungary for years, there is no little evidence
in the official publications of diplomatic documents that at the last
moment, when the spectre of a general war definitely arose, Austria
hesitated and entered upon a hopeful negotiation with Russia. It was
Germany's criminal ultimatum to Russia which set the avalanche on its
terrible path. Now Germany is notoriously a land of religious criticism
and Rationalism. Church-going in Berlin is far lower even than in
London, where six out of seven millions do not attend places of worship.
It is almost as low as at Paris, where hardly a tenth of the population
attend church on Sundays. In other large towns of Germany the condition
is, as in England, proportionate. Almost in proportion to the size of
the town is the aversion of the people from the Churches.
It is absolutely impossible in the case of Germany to determine, even in
very round numbers, how many have abandoned their allegiance to
Christianity, though, when one remembers the enormous rural population
and the high proportion of believers in the smaller towns, it seems
preposterous to suggest that the country has, even to the extent of one
half, become non-Christian. But I am anxious to do justice to this plea,
and would point out that it is the educated class and the men of the
large cities who control a nation's policy. The rural population--the
general population, in fact--follows its educated leaders. Now there is
no doubt that in Germany, as elsewhere, this body of the population--the
middle class and the workers of the great cities--has very largely lost
the traditional belief. The workers of Berlin are solidly Socialistic,
which means very largely anti-clerical. And I would boldly draw the
conclusion that the responsibility for the war is shared at least
equally by Christians and non-Christians. The stricture I have passed on
the Churches of Germany is based on the fact that they, being organised
bodies with a definite moral mission, were peculiarly bound to protest
against the obvious political development of their country, and they
entirely failed to do so. But I should be the last to confine the
responsibility to them. Not only religious leaders like Harnack and
Eucken, but leading Rationalists like Haeckel and Ostwald, have
cordially supported the action of their country. So it was from the
first. Of that large class of men who may be said to have had some real
control of the fortunes of their country a very high proportion--I
should be disposed to say at least one half--are not Christians, or are
Christians only in name.
While we thus candidly admit that non-Christians as well as Christians
in Germany bear the moral responsibility, we must be equally candid in
rejecting the libellous charge that the principles, or lack of
principles, of the non-Christians tended to provoke or encourage war, in
opposition to the Christian principles. This not uncommon plea of
religious people is worse than inaccurate, since it is quite easy to
ascertain the principles of those who reject Christianity. In Germany,
as elsewhere, the non-Christians are mainly an unorganised mass, but
there are two definite organisations, which, in this respect, reflect or
educate the general non-Christian sentiment. These are the Social
Democrats, a body of many millions who are for the most part opposed to
the clergy, and the Monists, an expressly Rationalistic body. In both
cases the moral principles of the organisation are emphatically
humanitarian and opposed to violence, dishonesty, or injustice; in both
cases those principles are adhered to with a fidelity at least equal to
that which one finds in the Christian Churches. It is little short of
monstrous to say that the moral teaching of Bebel and Singer and
Liebknecht, or of Haeckel and Ostwald--all men of high moral
idealism--gave greater occasion than the teaching of Christianity to
this atrocious war. The Socialists, indeed, were the strongest opponents
of war and advocates of international amity in Europe. How, like the
Evangelical and the Christian Churches, they failed in a grave crisis to
assert their principles may be a matter for interesting consideration,
but it would be entirely dishonest to plead that the substitution of the
influence of Rationalists and Socialists for Christian ministers has in
any degree facilitated the war.
The Christian who regards all these non-Christian influences as "Pagan,"
and feels that a "return to Paganism" explains the essential immorality
of Germany's conduct, usually has a grossly inaccurate idea of Paganism.
Whatever may be said of sexual developments in modern and ancient times,
we shall see that the Roman writers held principles which most decidedly
made for peace and brotherhood and justice. In point of fact, the
majority of the German writers who have been responsible for the
education of Germany in war-like ideas have been Christians. The Emperor
himself, who is mainly responsible because of his deliberate
prostitution of German schools to militarist purposes since 1891, will
hardly be described as other than Christian; certainly every prelate or
minister in Germany would vehemently resent such a description.
Treitschke, who is probably the best known in England of the Imperialist
writers, definitely bases his appalling conception of life on Christian
principles, and claims that he is acting from a sense of the divine
mission of Germany. General von Bernhardi uses precisely the same
Christian language. But these are only two in a hundred writers who,
for more than half a century, have been educating Germany in aggressive
ideas, and, speaking from personal acquaintance with their works, I
should say that the overwhelming majority of them are Christians. Not a
single Socialist, and not a single well-known Rationalist, has
contributed to their pernicious gospel.
Probably the one German writer in the mind of those English people who
speak of Germany's return to Paganism is Friedrich Nietzsche. It is true
that Nietzsche was bitterly anti-Christian, and he has probably had a
greater influence in Germany, in spite of his strictures on the country,
than many seem disposed to allow. German booksellers have recently drawn
up a statement in regard to the favourite books of soldiers in the
field, and it appears that Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ is
second on the list--leagues ahead of the Bible. But to conclude from
this that the anti-moral doctrine of the Pagan Nietzsche is the chief
source of the outrages committed is one of those slipshod inferences
which make one despair of Christian literature.
In the first place, Goethe is even more popular with the troops than
Nietzsche, and, although Goethe too was a Pagan, his teaching was the
very antithesis of crime, violence, injustice, or hypocrisy. No nobler
human doctrine was ever set forth than in the pages of his _Faust_, the
first on this list of favourite books. In the second place, this fact at
once warns us of a circumstance which we might have taken for granted:
in the knapsacks of the overwhelming majority of the soldiers there are
no books at all. It is the minority who read; and it is quite safe to
assume that this thoughtful minority are not the minority who have
disgraced German militarism. Thirdly--and it should hardly be necessary
to make this observation--the sensitive and high-strung Nietzsche would
have regarded with shuddering horror these outrages which some
ignorantly attribute to his influence. It is indeed probable that, if he
still looked from his hill-top upon the fields of Europe, he would pour
out his most volcanic scorn upon the warring nations, and especially
upon Germany and Austria. In fine, it is necessary to remember that
Nietzsche was violently anti-democratic. For the mass of the people he
had only disdain, and it is folly to suppose that his aristocratic
philosophy has been accepted among them as a gospel.
Nietzsche has had a considerable influence on the more thoughtful
reading public in Germany, yet even here one has to make reserves in
charging him with a part in the preparation of the country for an
aggressive war. His peculiar art and temperamental exaggerations make it
impossible for any but a patient few to grasp his teaching accurately,
and are peculiarly liable to mislead the less patient. When, therefore,
he stresses--as most anti-Socialists do--the Darwinian struggle for
existence, when he assails the humanitarian and Christian doctrine of
helping the weak, when he calls into question the received code of
morals, and when he extols self-assertion and strength of will, his
fiery words do lend some confirmation, which he assuredly never
intended, to the Prussian ideal of a State. Nietzsche was too much
averse from politics to intend such an application of his teaching,
which is essentially individualistic, and he had nothing but contempt
for the bluster and philistinism of the Prussian State in particular. We
must admit, however, that in this unintentional way he contributed to
the formation of that German temper which led to the war. General von
Bernhardi's admiring references to his philosophy sufficiently show
this.
But Nietzsche's very limited influence on German thought cannot
reasonably be quoted as justification of the common saying that Germany
had deserted Christianity for Paganism. Had such a statement been made
before the war began, our divines would have indignantly repudiated it.
The truth is that all classes--Christian and non-Christian--have yielded
fatally to the pernicious interpretation which interested politicians,
soldiers, manufacturers, and Jingoistic writers have put on the real
economic needs of the country. Of the Socialist and Catholic parties, in
particular, the two most powerfully organised bodies in Germany, we may
say that, in deserting their ideals, they have been partly deceived into
a real belief that Russia and England sought their destruction, and they
have partly yielded to that very old and familiar temptation--the desire
to retain their numerical strength by compromising with their
principles. In justice to the Socialists it should be added that that
party has furnished the only men and journals in Germany to raise any
protest against the madness of the nation. One of the most repulsive
moral traits in Germany to-day is, even when we have made the most
liberal allowance for the painful and desperate circumstances of the
people, the astounding expression and cultivation of hatred. It has
transpired time after time that the _Vorwärts_ has protested against
this. Not once has it been reported that the religious press or
religious ministers have protested. The new phrase that is officially
sanctioned, "God punish England," is a religious phrase that no
Neo-Pagan could use. On the very day on which I write this page it is
reported that Socialists have protested in the Reichstag against the
official endorsement of outrages. We do not hear of any Christian
protest, from end to end of the campaign.
Yet I do not wish to disguise the fact that both Christians and
non-Christians share the guilt of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The real
difference between the two bodies appears when we take a broader view of
the war, and only in this way can any general indictment of Christianity
be formulated. Important as it is to determine the responsibility for
this war, it is even more important to conceive that the war is the
natural outcome of a system which Europe ought to have abolished ages
ago. We are not far from the time when, in spite of the official
teaching of the Churches, every Christian nation maintained the practice
of the duel which the Teutonic nations introduced fourteen centuries
ago. Although in Germany the Christian clergy have not the courage to
assert their plain principles in opposition to the Emperor's barbaric
patronage of the duel, the people of most civilised countries now regard
the duel as a crime. No one who surveys the whole stream of moral
development can doubt that a time is coming when war, the duel of
nations, will be regarded as an infinitely graver crime. The day is
surely over when sophists like Treitschke and callous soldiers like
Bernhardi could sing the praises of war. The pathetic picture drawn by
our great novelist of a worthless young lord lying at the feet of his
opponent touched England profoundly and hastened the end of the duel in
this country. If England, if the civilised world, be not even more
deeply touched by the descriptions we have read, week after week, of
tens of thousands of braver and more innocent men lying in their blood,
of all the desolation and sorrow that have been brought on whole
kingdoms of Europe, one will be almost tempted to despair of the race.
War is the last and worst stain of barbarism on the escutcheon of
civilisation.
The question of real interest is, therefore, the historical question.
Those of us who did not foresee this war until we were in the very
penumbra of the tragedy cannot complain that our Christian neighbours
did not foresee and prevent it. Those of us who feel that the
participation of our country is just and necessary may, with no strain
of imagination, conceive the men of other countries equally persuading
themselves that the action of their country is just and necessary. But
from the day when we awoke to an adult perception of the life of the
world we have been aware that the established system of settling
international quarrels was barbaric and might in any year lead to just
such a catastrophe. How comes it that such a system has survived fifteen
hundred years of profound Christian influence? Whatever we may think of
the clergy of to-day, with the more powerful clergy of yesterday we have
a grave reckoning. The Rationalist is a new thing in Europe. The very
name is little more than a century old, and until a few decades ago only
a few thousand would accept it. Not from such a new and struggling
movement do we ask why this military system has dominated Europe for
ages and has only in recent times been seriously challenged. During
those ages the Churches suffered none but themselves to pretend to a
moral influence over the life of the nations, nor were there many bold
and independent enough to make the claim. It is of the Churches we ask
why this appalling system has taken such deep root in the life of Europe
that it resists the most devoted efforts to eradicate it. It is not
_this_ war, but war, that accuses the Churches. We are entangled in a
system so widespread and so subtle that, when a war occurs, each nation
can persuade itself that it is acting on just grounds. It is the system
which interests us.
CHAPTER II
CHRISTIANITY AND WAR
The day will come when the student of human development will find war
one of the most remarkable institutions that ever entered and quitted
history. Civilisation took it over from barbarism; barbarism from the
savage; the savage from the beast. So we are accustomed to argue, but we
must make a singular reservation. The lowest peoples of the human
family, which seem to represent primitive man, do not wage war, and are
little addicted to violence. They seem by some process of natural
selection to have obtained the social quality of peacefulness and mutual
aid. There was, in a sense, a stage of primitive innocence. As, however,
these primitive peoples grew in numbers and were organised in tribes, as
they obtained collective possessions--flocks and pastures and hunting
grounds--they came into collision with each other, and all the old
pugnacity of the beast awoke. Skill, and even ferocity, in war became a
valuable social quality, and we get the stage of the savage. The
barbarian, or the man between savagery and civilisation, was still
compelled to fight for his possessions. He was usually surrounded by
fierce savage tribes. The civilised man in turn was surrounded by
savages and barbarians, and needed to fight. So through thousands of
years of development of moral sentiment and legal procedure the
primitive method of the beast has been preserved.
But I am not writing a history of warfare, and need not describe these
stages more closely, or examine the new sentiment of imperialist
expansion which gave civilisations a fresh incentive to develop methods
of warfare. The point of interest is to determine at what stage it might
have been possible for the moral element to intervene and bid the
warriors, in the name of humanity, lay down their arms; at what stage
the tribunal which men had set up to adjudicate between the quarrels of
individuals might have been enlarged so as to be capable of arbitrating
on the quarrels of nations.
Now this was plainly impossible in the early centuries of the present
era, and it is therefore foolish to ask why Pagan moralists did not do
what we expect Christian moralists to have done. I have already
mentioned, and have fully described elsewhere, how humanitarian
sentiments were generally diffused throughout the old Græco-Roman world.
There is not a phrase of the New Testament which has not a parallel
among the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The great
fusion of peoples in the Roman Empire begot a feeling of brotherhood,
and, by a natural reaction on years of vice and violence, there was a
considerable growth of lofty and tender, and often impracticable,
sentiments. Moralists urged men to avoid anger, to bear blows with
dignity, to greet all men as brothers, even to love their enemies. Plato
and Epictetus and Plutarch and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius urged these
maxims as forcibly as Christ did. The Stoic religion or philosophy,
which guided Emperors and lawyers, and had a very wide influence in the
Roman world, was intensely and quite modernly humanitarian. Its
principal exponents condemned slavery and promoted a remarkable spread
of philanthropy.
It was, however, not possible for the Stoics to condemn war. Some of the
more ardent and less practical humanitarians of the time did this, but
no alert Roman citizen could advocate the abolition of the legions. The
Empire was completely surrounded by barbarians who would rush in and
trample on its civilisation the moment the fence of spears was removed.
From the turreted walls in the north of England, where men watched the
Picts and Scots, to the deserts of Mesopotamia--from the banks of the
Danube and Rhine to the spurs of the Atlas--it was essential to maintain
those bronzed legions who guarded the civilised provinces from
marauders. With those outlying barbarians no treaty was possible or
sacred; no legal tribunal would have protected those frontiers from the
men who looked covetously on the fertile fields and comfortable cities
of the Roman provinces. From the first to the fourth century Rome
fought, not for its expansion, but for its preservation against these
increasing enemies; and it was the final intensification of the pressure
in the Danube region by the arrival of enormous hordes of barbarians
from Asia which precipitated the final catastrophe. Paganism had never
the slightest opportunity to abandon the military system, and only those
who are totally unacquainted with Roman history can wonder why it did
not make the attempt. It would have been a crime to abandon the
civilised provinces to barbarism.
This was the essential position of the Roman Empire: the civil wars of
the fourth century, by which its military system was abused, need not
be considered here. And the student of history must recognise with
equal candour that the new Christianity, which succeeded Paganism in the
fourth and fifth centuries, was equally powerless to abolish warfare.
What we may justly blame is that the triumphant Christianity of the
fourth century did not merely sanction the use of arms in defence of
civilisation; it employed them in its own interest. The earlier
Christians had exasperated the Romans by refusing to bear arms in the
service of the Empire, plain as the need was. To a slight extent this
was due to an aversion from the shedding of blood; for the most part
military service was refused because it was saturated with Pagan rites.
When the Empire became Christian, this objection was removed, and the
Christians freely entered the army. Unhappily, the Christian body
deteriorated with the new prosperity and base instincts were indulged.
It is an undoubted historical fact, recorded by St. Jerome himself, that
the election of Pope Damasus, his friend and benefactor, was accompanied
by bloody and fatal riots. From undoubted historical sources we know
that the Christian mob compelled the Prefect of Rome to fly from the
city, and there is very serious evidence (in a document written by two
Roman priests) that Damasus employed the swords and staves of his
supporters to secure his position. Damasus and subsequent Popes then
obtained or sanctioned the use of the Roman soldiers for the suppression
of heresy and schism and Paganism, and Christianity was installed by
violence throughout the Empire. In the Eastern Roman Empire things were
even worse. Violence became the customary device in the seething
religious quarrels of the time, and, literally, tens of thousands lost
their lives. The Byzantine or Greek Christianity entered upon a record
of crime and violence which disgraced it for many centuries.
This development did not augur well for the application of Christian
principles to warfare. We may, however, observe at once that for many
centuries the Roman Church had not the slightest chance of establishing
peace in Europe. The destruction of the Roman Empire and disbanding of
its armies made an entirely new situation in Italy. The Popes were, for
the most part, good men, but they did not dream at that time of
controlling the counsels of kings and dictating affairs of State. Even
the story of Pope Leo the Great overawing the King of the Huns, Attila,
and turning his army away from Italy, is a mere legend of medieval
writers, and is at variance with the nearer authorities. The northern
tribes themselves were to a great extent, and for some centuries, of the
Arian faith, and took no advice from Rome. In a word, it would be stupid
to expect Christian leaders of the early Middle Ages to press the cause
of peace. The northern peoples, who would in time form the nations of
Europe, were essentially violent and warlike, and would have recognised
no pacific counsels in that imperfect stage of their religious
development.
Where the historian may and must censure the Church is in its adoption
of militarism for its own purposes. Pope Gregory the Great found Italy
in a chaotic and pitiful condition, and no doubt he acted, on the whole,
rightly in organising its military defence. The more serious
circumstance was that he began to receive immense estates, as gifts or
legacies, in all parts of Italy as the property of the Roman Church, and
from that time either a Papal army or the employment of the army of
some friendly monarch was necessary in order to protect these estates.
With the confirmation and consolidation of these estates into a kingdom
under Charlemagne in the ninth century the Papacy completed its moral
aberration. Most of the Popes were still men of good character, and they
no doubt persuaded themselves that, since the income of these estates
was needed for the fulfilment of their spiritual task, it was proper to
defend them by the sword. But casuistry of this kind has never prospered
indefinitely, and few historians will doubt that this temporal
development led directly to that degradation of the Papacy which
rendered it unfit to exercise moral influence on Europe. The Papacy
became a princedom to attract the covetous and the ambitious, and the
line of Popes sank so low by the tenth century that the grossest
characters were able to occupy the chair of Peter at a time when the
nations of Europe were sufficiently advanced to be susceptible of a
sincere moral influence. The record of the Papacy, from the ninth
century to the nineteenth, contains on almost every page a bloody
struggle for the temporal power. The most religious and most eminent of
the Popes, such as Gregory VII and Innocent III, were the most prompt to
set in motion the machinery of war in defence of their territories or in
punishment of rebels against their authority. Not one of them was in a
position to bid kings disband their armies, or ever dreamed of enjoining
them to do more than observe a few days' truce or keep their swords from
each other in order to save them for the common enemy of Christendom.
It would be useless to speculate about the date when the new nations of
Europe had become sufficiently civilised to hear a gospel of peace. The
idea of superseding the military system of Europe by a juridical system
occurred to no Christian leader, and therefore we need not consider what
prospect it might have had of realisation. The Christian gospel of
meekness had become a mockery: even the great abbeys, in which the
gentler and more religious were supposed to be immured, had their
troops, and abbots and bishops, and very often Papal Legates, appeared
at the head of armies. Two Popes, John X and Julius II, marched
themselves at the head of their troops. Cardinals had their suites of
swordsmen, and the castles of the Roman aristocracy were at times strong
fortifications from which war of the most ferocious and unscrupulous
character was waged. Christendom was steeped in violence; only a gentle
saint or bishop here and there caught a futile vision of a world of
peace. Every man was armed against possible trouble with his neighbour;
every noble had his retainers and kept them well exercised; every prince
was free, as far as the spiritual authorities were concerned, to covet
and bloodily exact the lands of his neighbour. The noble, of either sex,
found supreme delight in jousts which the modern sentiment finds as
inhuman as a sordid quarrel of _Apaches_ over a mistress; the peasants
found a corresponding pleasure in the play of quarter-staves or the
combats of dogs and cocks.
It is, as I said, little use to speculate about the chances of a gospel
of humanity in such a world. The overwhelming majority of priests and
prelates made no effort whatever to restrain the prevailing violence.
The elementary duty of any profound moral agency was to protest without
ceasing, even if the protest was unavailing. It is not at all clear that
it would have been unavailing. The power of the Popes was beyond that
of any other hierarchy known to history, and at least the moral
education of Europe would have proceeded less slowly, and war would have
been abolished centuries ago, if there had been any serious, collective,
and authoritative enforcement of Christian principles. There was not,
and to this silence of the clergy during those long ages of their power
we owe the maintenance in Europe to-day of the regime of violence. They
were so far from enjoying moral inspiration in this respect that they
were amongst the first to bless the banners and swell the coffers of an
aggressive monarch, and they gave the military system a final
consecration by employing it repeatedly in the interests of the Church.
All that one can plead in mitigation of this deep historical censure of
the medieval Church is that the frontiers of Christendom were for
centuries threatened by the Turk and the Saracen. The old need of
protecting civilisation by arms had almost disappeared. Few and feeble
peoples remained outside the range of Christian civilisation after the
tenth century. Armies were maintained only in the interest of criminal
ambition or for the settlement of disputes which ought to have been
submitted to judges. The menace of the Turk, with his hostile religion,
was, of course, a just ground for armaments, but a few nations generally
bore the whole brunt of his onset. Whatever religious feeling may make
of the great Crusades, which drew to the east armies from all parts of
Europe, secular history must dismiss them as appalling blunders. The few
advantages they brought to European culture cannot seriously be weighed
against the terrible sacrifice of lives and the even more terrible
consecration of militarism. In a word, the menace of the Turk could
have been met admirably by such an arrangement as we are advocating in
Europe to-day: the maintenance of a small force by each nation for
common action, under the direction of a supreme legal tribunal, against
nations which would not obey the common law of peace. But we need not
seriously discuss the influence of the Turk on the system. The last
phases of the struggle, when the selfish nations and the ambitious
Papacy spent their time in idle mutual recrimination and left the
Hungarians and Poles to do all the work, justify us in dismissing that
element. Kings and republics maintained armies for purely selfish
purposes, for brutal aggression and defence against aggressors; and not
a prelate in Europe had any moral repugnance to the system, or ventured
to condemn it, especially as the Church used the same agency in defence
of its own temporal interests.
With the development of the Papal power and the advance of the peoples
of Europe the opportunity of peace became greater, but the spiritual
authority pledged itself more and more deeply to the military system.
The Popes aspired--as Gregory VII and Innocent III repeatedly state--to
control the temporal as well as the spiritual affairs of Europe, to
transfer crowns when they thought fit, to direct invasions and military
expeditions against any who questioned their authority. Hildebrand
boasts (_Ep._ vii, 23) that, when William of Normandy sent envoys to ask
Pope Alexander to sanction his unscrupulous invasion of England, and the
Papal Court was itself too sensible of the enormity to give its
sanction, he (Hildebrand) overbore the wavering Pope and forced him to
bless the enterprise; and, when he had in his turn mounted the Papal
throne, he vehemently claimed that his action had made England a fief
for ever of the Holy See! Gregory VII and Innocent III are the two
greatest and most sincerely religions of the medieval Popes, and they
carried the power of the Papacy to a height which excites the amazement
of the modern historian. But they were at the same time the most
militant of the Popes, and on the least provocation they set
armies--even the most barbaric and ferocious troops in Europe--in motion
to carry out their imperial commands. They arrogated the power of
deposing monarchs, and thus encouraged civil war and the ambitions of
neighbouring kings.
The rise of heresy and of protests against the corruption of the Papacy
was another very grave pretext of the Church to support the military
system. In the days of Gregory VII a body of Puritans known as the
Patareni spread over the north of Italy, and Rome encouraged a few
soldiers to lead armed mobs against them and drown their idealism in
blood. Innocent III has a more terrible stigma on his record. The
Albigensians, an early type of Protestants, were spreading in the south
of France, and the Pope sanctioned a "crusade"--an expedition, largely,
of looters and cut-throats--against them from all parts of France. The
appalling deceit practised by the Papal Legate and sanctioned by the
Pope, the ferocity of the campaign, and the desolation brought on one of
the happiest and most prosperous provinces of France, may be read in any
history of the thirteenth century. Tens of thousands of men, women, and
children were savagely put to death. And this was only the beginning of
the Papal war on heresy, which from the thirteenth century never ceased
to spring up in Europe until it won its right of citizenship in the
Reformation. Even more vehemently was war urged against the Moors, then
the most civilised people in Europe.
In face of this notorious history of Europe during the long course of
the Middle Ages it is now usual for Catholic apologists to plead that
the blood of the barbarian still flowed in the veins of the Christian
nations and men were not yet prepared to listen to the message of peace.
This plea cannot for a moment be admitted in extenuation of the Church's
guilt. The clergy had themselves no conception of the criminality of
war, and did not rise above the moral level of their age. Here and there
a saint or a prelate raised a feeble voice against the violence of men,
but we do not estimate an institution by the words of an occasional
member, especially if they are at variance with the official conduct and
the general sentiment. On the other hand, to boast that the clergy at
times enforced a temporary cessation of fighting (the "Truce of God")
only increases our appreciation of their guilt. The men who enforced
that Truce gave proof at once of their power and of their perception of
the un-Christian nature of warfare. But they were unwilling to condemn
outright a machinery which they might employ at any moment in defence or
advancement of their own interests. Had the Church been a serious moral
influence in Europe, had it been true to the message in virtue of which
it had grown rich and powerful, it would have protested unceasingly
against this reign of violence. It was not a great moral influence. The
grossness and illiteracy of the people, the appalling immorality of the
clergy and monks and nuns, and this almost entire failure to apply
Christian or ordinary human principles to the worst feature of the life
of Europe, are terrible offsets to the little good it achieved. Europe
was steadily educated and encouraged, century after century, in the
shedding of blood.
The Protestant is at times disposed to dismiss the whole sordid story
with the remark that this Roman Church was not Christianity at all. He
contrives to overlook the serious difficulty that, if the Roman Church
did not represent Christianity from the sixth century to the sixteenth,
there was, contrary to the promise of Christ, no Christianity in Europe
for a thousand years; and he surrenders all the wonderful art of the
Middle Ages (as he ought) to entirely non-Christian forces. That,
however, does not concern me here. The slightest recollection of history
would warn the Protestant that the Reformation brought no improvement
whatever, as far as this reign of violence is concerned. The forces set
up by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation fought each other for
some decades with the comparatively peaceful weapons of mutual abuse and
heated argument. When it was perceived that these weapons were of no
avail, there was the customary appeal to the sword. In the historical
documents which tell the life of Pope Paul IV we see the Papacy and the
Jesuits urging the Catholic princes to lead out their armies. Heresy was
to be extinguished in blood; and, seeing how many millions in the north
had by that time embraced the heresy, there can have been no illusion as
to the magnitude of the oceans of blood that would be required to drown
it. So Europe entered upon the horrors of the Thirty Years' War
(1618-1648), which put back the civilisation of Germany for more than a
hundred years and utterly ruined some of the small principalities. The
population of Bohemia alone fell from three millions to less than a
million. Nearly every nation in Europe was involved, and the war was
conducted with all the brutality of the older medieval warfare.
The fact that political as well as religious ambitions were engaged in
the Thirty Years' War does not affect my argument. In so far as
religious sentiment was responsible--and it will hardly be questioned
that it had a large share in the Thirty Years' War--we find a fresh
consecration by Christianity itself of the use of the sword. But the
main point we have to consider is that the new spiritual authorities
were no more inclined than the old to declare that warfare was opposed
to Christian principles. The last three centuries have been as full of
aggressive war as the three centuries which preceded, but there was no
protest by Christian ministers either in Protestant England and
Scandinavia or in Catholic France and Austria. It was the period when
the modern Powers of Europe were building up their vast dominions, and
no one who is acquainted with the story can have any illusion as to the
application to that process of what are now described as clear Christian
principles.
This is precisely the plaint of modern Germany. We seek, they say, to do
merely what England and France--it were indiscreet to mention
Austria--did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were
vigorous peoples with an impulse to expand and to extend their
civilisation over backward lands. They appealed solely to the right of
the sword, and all the Christian authorities in Europe--the bishops of
William and of Anne, the bishops of Louis XIV, the bishops of Peter the
Great--had not a single syllable to say against the right of the sword.
The various branches of the Christian Church were at that time
singularly unanimous in accommodating their principles to imperialist
and aggressive warfare. Now that you have obtained all that you
need--the aggrieved Teuton says--now that I in turn would expand and
colonise, you discover that this imperialist aggression is supremely
opposed to Christian principles.
On some such meditations, in part, the German bases his conviction of
the hypocrisy and perfidy of the English character. He is, of course,
entirely wrong. A real change has taken place in the moral sentiment of
this country; a change so real that when, in South Africa, the nation
entered upon a war which many regarded as aggressive and merely
acquisitive, there was a very widespread revolt. The cynic might
genially observe that it is not difficult to retire from evil-doing and
cultivate lofty principles when your fortune has been made, but it is
important to realise this change and understand its significance. There
is, no doubt, a sound human element in the cynic's observation. It _is_
easier to recognise moral principle when the period of temptation is
over. Every thoughtful and humane Englishman will make allowance for the
less fortunate position of Germany, and not foolishly pride himself on
his own superiority of character. The fact remains, however, that there
has been a real moral improvement in England and France, and it would
now be impossible for those nations to enter upon the aggressive and
nakedly ambitious wars which they were accustomed to undertake before
the nineteenth century. We have a genuine abhorrence of the "lust for
land" which has impelled Germany to plunge Europe into war. But until a
century or two ago that lust for land was considered a legitimate
appetite in Europe, and the clergy crowded with the people to greet the
warriors who came home with the news that they had added, by the sword,
one more province to our spreading Empire.
That this change of heart is not merely a feeling that we have no
further need of aggression, and would ourselves suffer by the aggression
of others, could easily be proved, if it were necessary. In the same
period of change we abolished the duel, and there was no material
advantage in discovering the immorality of the duel. We abolished
dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and other brutalising
spectacles. We undertook a reform of our industrial and penal systems
which, however imperfect it be, was very considerable in itself, and was
inspired solely by motives of humanity. There was a general and marked
improvement of public sentiment, and it is as part of this improvement
that we now find a universal condemnation of aggressive war and a
widespread demand for the entire abolition of war. The construction of
English history and English character on the lines of Mr. G. B. Shaw may
be entertaining, and may save considerable trouble of research, but it
does not conduce to sound judgment. The laments of social pessimists and
of certain religious controversialists are never supported by accurate
knowledge. Every social historian who gives evidence of knowing the
evils of the England of a century ago as well as the England of to-day
admits that there has been a great moral advance.
I will examine in the next chapter certain comments of religious writers
and speakers on this advance. Here I wish to determine the facts with
some clearness. It has not been necessary for me to discuss the medieval
and the early modern period with any fullness. There is no dispute about
the features of those periods. They were ages of violence, of incessant
and frankly aggressive war, of unrestrained ambition. The smallest
pretext sufficed for a monarch, if his forces and finances were in
order, to invade his neighbour's territory and annex as much of it as
he could hold by the sword. Frederic the Great and Napoleon did not
introduce new ideas into Europe; they attempted to revive medieval ideas
in a changing world. Austria in its annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Germany in its ambition to annex Belgium and the colonies
which other Powers have laboriously cultivated, are following their
example. They are not inventing new forms of criminality; they are not
returning to Pagan ideals: they are reverting merely to ideals which
were accepted throughout Europe for more than a thousand years. In the
more brutal features of war to which they have descended they are even
more emphatically reverting to the Middle Ages. The Romans did not
commit such outrages at the command of educated officers. Medieval
Christians did: the record of Papal warfare, down to the "Massacre of
Perugia" in 1859, is as deeply stained as any by these abominable
methods.
My further point, that the Christian Church or Churches made no serious
resistance to the prevailing brutality, is just as easy to establish. It
is a sheer travesty of argument to put forward the gentle exhortations
of a Francis of Assisi as characteristic of the Christian Church when
the Pope of the time, one of the most powerful and conscientious Popes
of all time, Innocent III, was threatening or directing the movements of
ferocious armies all over Europe. Most assuredly there were among the
numbers of fine characters who appeared in Christendom in the course of
a thousand years many who deeply resented the prevailing violence. But
when we speak of the Church, we speak of its official action and its
predominant sentiment. The official action of the Popes was, during all
that period, to make the same use as any terrestrial monarch of the
service of soldiers; they failed, from Gregory the Great to Pius X, to
recognise one of the supreme moral needs of Europe. The bishops of the
Church of England and the heads of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches
did not prove to have any sounder moral inspiration in this respect. It
was left to despised bodies like the Friends, who were hardly recognised
as Christians, and to rare individuals to protest against the system
which has brought such appalling evil on Europe.
In the nineteenth century the moral sentiment of Europe began to advance
more rapidly than it had previously done, and the idea of substituting
arbitration for war began to spread. The history of this reform has not
yet been written, as far as I can discover, but it is hardly likely that
any will be bold enough to suggest that the idea was due to
Christianity. After the Napoleonic wars, at least, Europe was ripe for
such a reform. I do not mean that public feeling in Europe was prepared
for the idea. It would have met with a very considerable degree of
resistance, and would have generally been conceived as the dream of an
amiable fanatic. Such resistance makes the duty of the moralist or the
reformer all the more pressing, and it is merely amazing to hear the
earlier Christian clergy exonerated on the ground that the world was not
prepared to receive a message of peace from them. They did not try the
experiment because it did not occur to them, or because they were too
closely dependent on the monarchs of the earth to question the wisdom of
their arrangements. Europe was, in point of fact, quite ripe for the
change in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and there would
assuredly be no war to-day if the Churches had had the moral inspiration
and the moral courage to insist on it. The frontiers of the nations were
(except in the case of Italy and Poland) defined with a fair show of
justice, and the time had come to disband armies and submit any future
quarrel to arbitration: to retain only a small standing army in each
country for the defence of its colonial frontiers against tribes which
do not respect arbitration, or for the enforcement of the decisions of
the central tribunal. The conditions were almost as favourable for such
a change in 1816 as they are to-day, or will be in 1916, and it is
another grave point in the indictment of Christianity that it had no
inspiration to demand that change. The bishops of England no less than
the bishops of Rome were deeply concerned about the rise of democracy
and the spread of unbelief, and they joined with the monarchs in
enforcing a system of violent repression. For the larger and more real
need of Europe they had no feeling whatever, and militarism entered upon
its last and most terrible phase: the stage of national armies and of
means of destruction prepared with all the fearful skill of modern
science.
As the nineteenth century proceeded, humanitarianism attained clearer
conceptions and more articulate speech. The scheme of substituting legal
procedure for military violence was definitely put before the world. It
is not necessary, and would be difficult, to trace the earliest
developments of this idea. On the one hand, I find no claim that it was
put forward by representatives of Christianity; on the other hand,
literary research among the records of the early Rationalist movements
in this country has shown me that the idea was familiar and welcome
amongst them. No doubt the aversion of the Friends from bloodshed had
some influence, and we find representatives of that noble-minded Society
active in more than one of the early reform-movements. But, as far as I
can discover, it was Robert Owen who first definitely advanced the idea
of substituting arbitration for war, and it was repeatedly discussed
among the "Rational Religion" Societies--which were not at all
religious--that he founded or inspired in various parts of the country.
The immense influence which he obtained in the thirties and forties
enabled him to direct public attention to the reform.
This early history is, however, as yet vague and unstudied, nor do we
need to enter into any ungenerous struggle about priority. It is enough
that the idealist scheme was well known in England long before the
middle of the nineteenth century. Did the Christian Churches adopt and
enforce it? Here, at least, no minute research is needed. The Christian
bodies failed lamentably and totally (apart from the heterodox Friends)
even to recognise the moral and humane greatness of the idea when it was
definitely presented to them. It is only in the last few years that a
Peace Sunday has--at the suggestion of lay associations--been adopted in
the churches and chapels of England. It is only in quite recent times
that bishops and ministers have stood on peace-platforms and advocated
the reform. And even to-day, when peace associations founded by laymen
have been endeavouring for decades to educate the country, no branch of
the Christian Church has officially and collectively decreed that
Christian principles enjoin the reform; no Pope or Archbishop or Church
Council has supported it with a stern and official injunction that
Christian and moral principle demands that all the members of the
particular Church shall subscribe to and work for the reform. Even at
this eleventh hour, when the issue of peace or war confronts the whole
of mankind, one notices hesitation, reserve, ambiguity. During the
fateful years between 1900 and 1914, when the nations were, in the eyes
of all, preparing the most appalling armaments ever known in history,
when men were speaking freely all over Europe of "the next war" and the
terrific dimensions which modern science and modern alliances would give
to it, the various branches of the Christian Church adhered to their
ancient and futile practice of preaching general principles (as far as
national conduct is concerned), and had little practical influence on
the development.
I am not unaware of the small movements among the clergy for cultivating
international clerical friendship, or of the extent to which individual
clergymen have co-operated in the various arbitration movements. That is
only a feeble discharge of a small part of their duty. Had Leo XIII or
Pius X issued a plain and explicit Encyclical on the subject, and
directed his vast international organisation of clergy to labour
wholeheartedly for its realisation, who can estimate what the result
would have been? Had the clergy of Germany issued a stern and collective
denunciation of the Pan-German and Imperialist literature which was
instilling poison into every village of the country, can we suppose that
it would have been without avail? Had the Archbishops and Bishops of
England, and the leaders of the Free Churches, definitely instructed
their people that the pacifist ideal was not merely in accord with
Christian principles, but was one of the most urgent and beneficent
reforms of our time, would the English people have passed as
inobservantly as it did through the five years of preparation for a
great war?
It is no part of my plan to analyse this deplorable failure of the
Churches as moral agencies. The explanation would be complex, and is now
superfluous. The clergy were, like the majority of their fellows,
obsessed by the military system and unable to realise the possibility of
a change. In part they were deluded by the catch-words of superficial
literature. They had an idea that we were asking England to lower its
armament while the rest of the world increased its armament. They
muttered that "the time was not ripe," not realising that it was their
business to make it ripe. They had been accustomed for ages to preaching
a purely individualist morality, and they felt ill at ease in the larger
social applications of moral principle which our age regards as more
important. They feared to offend military supporters, and did not
realise that one may entirely honour the soldier as long as the military
system lasts, yet resent the system. They felt that this new movement
was suspiciously hailed by Socialists, and that to denounce armies had
an air of politics about it. They were peculiarly wedded to tradition,
on account of the very nature they claimed for their traditions, and
they instinctively felt that to denounce war would be to attempt to
improve, not merely on their predecessors, but on the Old and the New
Testaments. They solaced themselves with the thought that unnecessary
violence was condemned in their general teaching, and that, if it
eventually transpired that war was unnecessary, they could point out
once more the all-embracing character of the Christian ethic. In fine,
they were for the greater part, like the greater part of their fellows,
mentally indolent and indisposed to think out or fight for a new idea.
Whatever the explanation, the fact remains. By the tenth century
Christianity was fully organised, and all the peoples of Europe were
Christian; by the thirteenth century the power of the Church was
enormous and the nations of Europe were settled and civilised. But
neither then nor at any later period did Christianity perceive the crime
and stupidity of the prevailing system. The perception is even now only
faint and partial. It is this long toleration of the military system,
the thousand-year silence on what is now acclaimed as one of the
greatest applications of Christian principle, that one finds it
difficult or impossible to forgive. The zeal of some of the modern
clergy is open to a certain not unnatural suspicion: in view of their
shrinking authority and the growing indifference of the world to dogma
and ritual, they have been forced to take up these new and larger ideas
of our time.
Even if one lays aside that suspicion, and in many cases it is quite
unjust, the clergy must realise that the indictment of Christianity is
grave, and is almost unatonable. Those thousand years of conflict,
during which they sanctioned every variety of war and initiated many
wars in their own interest, have given the military system such root in
the hearts of men that it will require a supreme and prolonged effort to
destroy it. The proverbial visitor from Mars would not be so much amazed
at any feature of our life as at this retention amid a great
civilisation of the barbaric method of settling international
differences. He would ask in astonishment how an intelligent and
generally humane race, a race which raises homes for stray cats and aged
horses, could cling to a system which, on infallible experience, plunges
one or more countries in the deepest suffering every few years. He would
learn that there has not been a war in Europe for a hundred years the
initial cause of which would not have been better appreciated and
adjudicated on by a body of impartial lawyers; and that, if the quarrels
had thus been submitted to arbitration, we should have saved (including
the annual military expenditure and the cost of the present war) some
three million lives and more than £15,000,000,000--since the end of the
Napoleonic wars. In answer to the amazement of this imaginary critic, we
could reply only that Europe has grown to regard the military system as
so permanent and unquestioned an institution of our civilisation that it
simply cannot imagine the abolition of that system.
For this incapacity, this widespread inertia, this blundering idea that
there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches
are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of
the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they
are to-day abandoning, the public mind would have awakened long ago.
There is no intrinsic difficulty in substituting arbitration for war.
There are technical difficulties which the great lawyers and statesmen
of the peace-movement have given ample promise of surmounting, but the
overwhelming obstacle is merely this--the peoples of Europe do not
insist on the reform. Of all the large problems which confront the
modern mind this is incomparably the simplest. We are hopelessly divided
as to the nature of the remedy for most of our social ills. Here the
remedy is acknowledged: the plan has been elaborated almost in entirety:
the international tribunal already exists, and awaits only its
executive, which the nations of Europe could supply to-morrow. It is the
will, the demand, that is wanting. For that lack we charge the utter
failure of the Churches during the ages of their power to enunciate a
plain moral lesson, and their positive encouragement of an evil system.
That is the real indictment. It affects the Christian Church in every
nation.
CHAPTER III
THE APOLOGIES OF THE CLERGY
Any person who cares to read the reports of the utterances of our clergy
in the current religious periodicals will recognise that they are
painfully conscious of the reproach which this war implies. One
constantly finds them repeating that in this year of tragedy
"Christianity has failed" and "the gospel has broken in our hands." It
had been their boast that Christianity had civilised Europe, and none of
them has the audacity or indecency to claim, as some writers have done,
that such a war is in harmony with the principles and ideals of
civilisation. They have preached brotherhood and peace, and the greater
part of Christendom is engaged in a strife of the most terrible nature.
It is not a struggle of Christian and infidel; it is a struggle of
Christian and Christian, and one or several of the Christian nations
involved are guilty of a crime greater in magnitude than all the murders
in Europe during a decade. Above all patriotism, above all immediate
anxiety, above all argumentation about responsibility, this grim fact
stands out and reproaches them: after fifteen hundred years of Christian
preaching Europe is locked in the bloodiest struggle of all time.
During the last fifty or hundred years the clergy have developed some
expertness in making apologies. They have lived in a world of anxious
questions and heated charges, and a special department called
Apologetics has been added to theology. They are, it is true, sorely
perplexed, divided in counsel, uneasy as to their procedure. Some would
ignore the pertinacious outsider and persuade their followers that he is
negligible; others would sustain an energetic campaign against him. Some
would openly and candidly meet the questions of their followers; others
would prefer not to unsettle the large number who never ask questions.
At the present juncture it is impossible to be wholly silent. Some of
the clergy, it seems--I learn this from the recorded words of eminent
preachers--wish to ignore the war and go on with their business as
usual. But the majority feel that such a procedure is dangerous. This
violent breach of Christian principles by Christian nations requires
some explanation. Where is the long-boasted moral influence of
Christianity? Where is the all-loving ruler of the universe? Let us
examine some of the apologies of the preachers.
Let me confess that, from a long experience of this apologetic branch of
theology, I am not surprised to find that not a single speaker or
writer--as far as my reading of their utterances goes--fairly meets the
main difficulty. Most of them, naturally, are content to plead that the
war has been forced on Europe by Germany, and that therefore no
responsibility lies on Christianity as a whole for the tragedy and the
moral failure it involves. A large number of them go even farther. They
point to the heroic sacrifices made in defence of an ideal by France,
Belgium, England, and Russia--the millions of men streaming to the
battle-field, the millions of women bravely enduring the suspense and
the loss, the millions who generously open their purses to every
philanthropic enterprise--and they acclaim this as a triumph of
Christian civilisation. As to the failure of Christianity in Germany to
stand the test, they either point superficially to the growth of
Rationalism, Biblical Criticism, and Socialism in that country, or they
take refuge in the confusions of the extreme pacifists and refuse to
assign responsibility at all, or they persuade themselves that a small
minority of men who were not Christians deluded the German people into
consenting to the war. In any case, they insist that Christianity as a
whole is not impeached. Assume that Austria was dragged into the war by
Germany, and you have four Christian nations--five, if one includes
Serbia--behaving with great gallantry and entire propriety, and only one
Christian nation misbehaving.
There is no doubt that this is the common religious attitude, but it
does not satisfy some of the more thoughtful and earnest preachers. This
optimism seems to them rebuked by the very fact that Christendom is in a
state of war to which Paganism can offer no parallel. They think of the
lands beyond the sea to which they have been sending the Christian
message of peace and brotherhood. They fancy they see China and Japan
smiling their faint but distressing smile at the situation in Christian
Europe. They have assured all these distant peoples that their faith has
built up a shining civilisation in Europe, and now there flash and
quiver through the nerves of the world the daily messages of horror, of
fierce hatred, of appalling carnage, of the wanton destruction by
Christians of Christian temples. The Gospel has, somehow, broken down in
Europe, they regretfully admit.
But they never go beyond this vague admission and boldly state the sin
of the Churches. One would imagine that, in spite of its obvious and
lamentable failure, they still thought that their predecessors had been
justified in preaching only the general terms of the Christian gospel
and never applying it to war. One would fancy that they are so
unacquainted with history as to suppose that during the long ages of the
past the Churches were really frowning on violence and warfare, instead
of blessing and employing it. They fear to draw out in its full
proportion the inefficacy (because of its vagueness) of the gospel and
the long perversion of its ministers. Yet we cannot evade this
fundamental fact of the situation, that this particular war is an
outcome of a general military system, and the Churches have a very grave
responsibility for the maintenance of that system until the twentieth
century. We all know how the technical moral theologian of recent times
has glossed the complacency of his Church. He has drawn a distinction
between offensive and defensive war, and, since the latter is obviously
just, he has maintained that armies are rightly raised to wage it when
necessary. On this petty fallacy the Churches have so long reconciled
themselves to militarism, and have, in fact, been amongst its closest
allies. The clergy did not, or would not, see that the retention of the
military system was in itself the surest provocation of offensive war;
that ambition or covetousness could almost always find a moral pretext
for aggression, and that there have been comparatively few priests in
the history of Europe who ever stood out and unmasked the hypocrisy of
such monarchs. As long as the military system lasted, it was certain
that wars would take place, yet they never denounced the system. The
great conception of substituting justice for violence, law for
lawlessness, did not enter the mind of Christianity. It was born of the
secular humanitarian spirit of modern times.
For any serious person this is the gravest charge which the clergy have
to meet, and they one and all evade it. The civilisation of Europe has a
unique greatness on its material side; in its applied science, its
engineering, its industries, its commerce. For that, assuredly, the
Churches are not in any degree responsible. Our civilisation is unique
also in its political power, its mastery over other peoples; and for
that again the Churches are not responsible. It is great on the
intellectual side, in its science and philosophy, its art and general
culture; and that greatness, too, has been won independently of, or in
defiance of, the clergy. On the moral side only it may plausibly be
connected with its established religion, and here precisely it fails and
approaches barbarism. I do not wonder that the Churches are troubled,
and do not wonder greatly that they are silent.
But while they are silent on the main issue, they have a vast amount to
say about minor issues and secondary aspects. They console and reconcile
their people in a hundred ways. Actually they seem, in a great measure,
to entertain the idea that the Churches are going to emerge from this
trial stronger than ever, and to witness at last that religious revival
which they had almost begun to despair of securing. Let me examine a few
of these clerical pronouncements. I do not choose the eccentric sermons
of ill-educated rural preachers, but the utterances of some of the more
distinguished preachers, reproduced with pride and honour in the leading
religious periodicals. Yet no person can coldly reflect on these
pronouncements and fail to realise that our generation acts not
unnaturally in passing by the open doors of the Churches; that the
clergy are, as usual, shirking the most serious questions of the modern
intelligence, and trusting mainly to profit by the heated and disordered
and confusing emotions of the hour.
One of the most extraordinary of these deliverances reaches me from
Australia, but as it comes from one of the leading prelates of the
Commonwealth and does assuredly express what multitudes of preachers are
saying everywhere, I do not hesitate to give it prominence. Archbishop
Carr, of Melbourne, set out in the middle of the war to enlighten his
followers, and his words are reported with great deference in the
Melbourne _Age_ (December 28th). The prelate observed that he had "very
strong ideas about the war" (I quote the words of the _Age_), and "did
not believe it had happened by accident, or by the chance action of some
king or emperor." He believed that "the great God who provided for all
human creatures, through the war was punishing sin that had prevailed
for a long time, particularly in the shape of infidelity." The
Archbishop proved from history and the Bible that war did come sometimes
as a punishment of sin, and he concluded, or the journal thus summarises
his conclusion:
"The reason that God was using the present war for the punishment
of the nations was that for a very considerable time there had been
not merely neglect of the worship and service of God, which had
always existed to a greater or less extent, but a regular upraising
of human light and human understanding and human will against the
existence of the providence of God. It was not so common among us
here [it is just as common], but there were countries in Europe in
which the spirit of infidelity and the absence of supernatural
faith had been increasing for many years. Men were coming to think
they were quite sufficient in themselves for the working out of
their own destinies, but the war had come, and it was humbling such
men."
Archbishop Carr is not adduced here as a representative type of clerical
culture. On what grounds the Roman Catholic authorities select men like
him and the late Cardinal Moran to preside over the destinies of their
Church in our great and promising Commonwealth is not clear. In the
course of this important sermon, in which he is delivering his very
personal and mature conclusions on the greatest issue of the hour, the
Archbishop observed that "the Roman Empire had been attacked by Attila"
and "Attila scourged the Romans for the crimes of which they had for a
long while been guilty." One is surprised that he did not add the pretty
legend of the awe-stricken Hun retreating before the majestic figure of
Pope Leo I. However, most of us are aware that, as a student in any
college of Australia ought to be able to inform the Archbishop, Attila
never reached within two hundred miles of Rome, and that the Pagan
Romans, whom the Archbishop obviously has in mind, had been extinguished
long before the monarch of the Huns was born. There is no greater
historical scholarship in the other proofs which the prelate brings in
support of his thesis that war is often deliberately sent as a
punishment.
But what are we to make of the moral standards of an eminent prelate of
the Roman Church who can hold and express so appalling a theory? It is
based on the moral standard of the Prussian officer, of the medieval
torturer. The majority of clergymen have at length come to realise,
tardily and reluctantly, that the man or woman who rejects the creeds
they offer may quite possibly not believe in them. The practice of
describing a refusal to assent to the doctrine of hell and heaven as a
wilful rebellion of passion against the restraining influences of
Christianity is going out of fashion. Christian people were meeting too
many heretics in the flesh, and did not recognise the thing described
from the pulpit. The sturdy Archbishop will have none of this pampering.
Unbelief is a matter of the will as well as the understanding. And he
actually believes that God guided the thoughts of William II in
engineering this war--believes it for a reason a hundred times worse
than the Kaiser's idea. He believes that God sent on Europe a war that
will cost £10,000,000,000, that is blasting the homes and embittering
the hearts of millions, that mingles the innocent and guilty in one
common and fearful desolation, that sends millions to a premature death
amidst circumstances which do not lend themselves to a devout
preparation, that is raising storms of hatred and perverting the souls
of millions, because a few other millions refuse to go to church. It
would be difficult to conceive a cruder and more barbarous idea. Attila
did not scourge the Romans, but he did scourge other peoples; and we
hold him up to execration for ever for it. But Archbishop Carr, and many
other preachers, think that an all-holy and all-intelligent God can do
infinitely worse than Attila. He is going to punish the unbelievers in
eternal fire when they die: meantime he will make a hell on earth for
the innocent as well as the supposed guilty, the child and the mother as
well as the free-thinking father. Of a truth, it is not surprising that
a reluctance to listen to sermons has spread to Melbourne, and that men
are wondering whether they had better not take in hand their own
destinies rather than entrust them to such spiritual guides as this.
Note, particularly, in passing the emphasis which the Archbishop puts on
the determination of our generation to control its own destinies. Until
the nineteenth century men entrusted their destinies, on the moral side,
to guides like Archbishop Carr. I have described the result. In the
nineteenth century there began this practice, which the Archbishop
thinks worthy of so inhuman a chastisement, of men attending to their
own moral interests. Of this also I have described the result. The moral
sentiment of Europe has greatly improved, and there is at least a
widespread revolt against warfare and a prospect of abolishing it. For
this God, the more than human, scorched Europe with the horrible flames
which Archbishop Carr thinks he keeps in his arsenal of
torture-implements. The Archbishop says that infidelity has not spread
so much in Australia. I should, if I were not well acquainted with the
Commonwealth, be disposed to see in that the reason why eminent prelates
can still utter such gross medieval nonsense in that country.
In England this particularly crude type of nonsense is not usually
uttered by preachers of distinction,[2] though it is common enough among
less responsible preachers; but there is a dangerous approach to it in
some of the sermons which the religious periodicals regard as
important. Looking over the current issues of the religious press, I
notice a sermon on the war by Professor Clow, in which the Allies are,
in harmony with his test, described as "the vultures of God." Germany,
it seems, is the prey, and Germany's sins are painted black. Professor
Clow, it is true, shrinks from the very natural implication of his
words, but he clearly intimates that he sees the action of God in the
military conduct of the Allies, and to that extent he is hardly less
revolting, in view of his culture, than the archbishop. Could the God of
Professor Clow find no other way of removing Germany's arrogance than to
sear and blast it with a world-war and involve millions of innocent
along with the guilty in his lakes of fire and blood?
More important, however, is a sermon delivered before the recent
National Free Church Council by one of the most esteemed Nonconformist
preachers, the Rev. J. H. Rushbrooke, and reproduced admiringly in the
Nonconformist journals. The cloud of war, naturally, brooded over this
gathering of ministers. Some of them heroically closed their eyes to it
and went on with their clerical business as usual. But most of the
speakers seem to have felt that all other issues were thrust aside in
the minds of their followers just now, and that a grave and soul-shaking
question possessed them. As a result we have, I suppose, the finest
efforts of Nonconformity to meet that question and save the prestige of
the Churches.
Mr. Rushbrooke frankly described the war as an overwhelming catastrophe,
gravely disturbing the religious mind. It bore witness, he said, to "the
failure of organised, or disorganised, Christianity." He conceived it as
"God's judgment upon the Church's failure seriously to devote herself
to the great cause of peace on earth and good-will among men." With all
their boasts of what Christianity had done in Europe, it now appeared
that that civilisation was raised upon "foundations of sand." The
preacher claimed that much was being done in modern times by the clergy
to promote international amity, but he seemed to feel that it was little
and was _very_ recent. The spectacle unfolded before us in Europe to-day
is a sufficient proof of its inadequacy. And, as Mr. Rushbrooke said, we
now see how little use it is to preach ideals at home and not apply them
to the common life of the world.
These words are the nearest to wisdom that I have found among a large
collection of pulpit-utterances and religious articles. The preacher
plainly sees, and with some measure of candour confesses, that long
remissness of Christian ministers in applying their principles to which
the war, and all wars, are fundamentally due. The record which he
carefully makes of recent efforts to redeem the failure is paltry in
comparison with the resources even of the Free Churches, and only serves
to bring out more clearly the awful neglect of Christian ministers
during the long ages when they had a mighty power in Europe. But Mr.
Rushbrooke makes one grave error. He feels that not merely the relation
of the war to Christianity, but its relation to God, is engaging public
attention, and he stumbles into the theory that God sent the war. It is
"God's judgment on the Church's failure." We must suppose that Mr.
Rushbrooke did not literally mean what he said. His words imply a theory
of the war more monstrous even than that of Archbishop Carr. To punish
Europe for the sins of unbelievers has at least a genuine medieval
plausibility about it; but to send this indescribable plague on the
nations of Europe because the clergy failed to do their duty.... One
must really assume that Mr. Rushbrooke did not mean what he said, and
leave the sentence unfinished. What he meant it is impossible to
conjecture. To the religious mind "God's judgment" means a chastisement
sent by God. But, whatever Mr. Rushbrooke meant, he had been wiser to
leave the idea of God out of his comments on this war, and to say
frankly that it would bring on them and on their predecessors, on the
whole of Christianity, the judgment of man and the judgment of history
for their neglect of their opportunities.
The Rev. A. T. Guttery addressed the Council in a more cheerful mood,
and his reflections are characteristic of a large group of the clergy.
He would not for a moment allow the failure of Christianity. The
Churches had, he said, been so successful in compelling the world to
recognise the evil of aggressive warfare that even the Germans were
eager to describe their action as purely defensive. "The Pagan glory of
war for its own sake was gone." And when we acknowledge the comparative
failure of religion in Germany, and restrict our attention to the sphere
of our own clergy, we find that they have created an entirely new
spirit. The lust for territory and for gold is felt no more in England.
Here there is no mafficking over victories, there are no hymns of hate.
The British nation has been sobered by the influence of Christianity. We
may regret that the German people has not proved equally susceptible,
and its pastors equally energetic, but we cannot bear their burden.
Their naughtiness alone has disturbed the moral progress which, even in
this department, Christianity was fostering.
This is, I think, a very usual attitude of the clergy, and I have
already appreciated the sound element of it. There is no comparison
between the behaviour of the two nations. Whether England deserves quite
all the compliments which Mr. Guttery showers upon it may be a matter of
opinion. We have as yet little cause for "mafficking," but there is very
little doubt that it will occur on a grandiose scale before the war is
over. We do not sing hymns of hate; but it might be hazardous to
speculate what we would do if some nation drew an iron ring round our
country and reduced us almost to a condition of starvation. We have no
lust for territory--I am not sure about the lust for gold--because we
have in our Empire territory enough for our population; and we may wait
to see if England does not annex any part of Germany's African or
Pacific possessions. Mr. Guttery's contrast is crude and superficial. He
ignores the economic and geographical conditions which give us a feeling
of content and Germany a profound feeling of discontent and a dangerous
ambition. The German character is not in itself inferior to ours, and it
were well for us to fancy ourselves in Germany's position and wonder if
we would have acted otherwise.
On the other hand, I have freely acknowledged, or claimed, that there
has been a great improvement in the moral temper of Europe, and that
this is especially seen in the odium that is now cast on aggressive or
offensive war. But to claim this improvement for the credit of religion
is, to say the least, audacious. The more simple-minded of Mr. Guttery's
hearers would imagine that the change set in with the fall of Paganism.
"The Pagan glory of war for its own sake is gone." When clerical writers
speak of Paganism they think that any evil deed ever done by a Pagan is
characteristic of the whole body; they ask us to apply a different
standard to their own body. Plato and Socrates were Pagans; Marcus
Aurelius and Antoninus Pius--to speak of warriors and statesmen--were
Pagans. The truth is that a glory in war for its own sake was no more
generally characteristic of Paganism than it was of Christian Europe
until a century ago: it was probably less. Most of the German Emperors
and of the Kings of England, France, and Spain would fairly come under
the description which Mr. Guttery calls Pagan. One hardly needs to know
much of history to perceive that this moral improvement in the
conception of war belongs to the last century and a half, and it is
somewhat bold to claim that a change which made no appearance during a
thousand years of profound Christian influence, and did begin to appear
and make progress as that faith waned, can be claimed for Christianity.
I do not forget that the theologian began long ago, in the seclusion of
his cell or study, to condemn offensive warfare. But there have been
hundreds of offensive wars waged by Christian monarchs since that date,
and we do not read of any instance in which the clergy failed to endorse
the thin casuistry by which the offensive was turned into a defensive or
a preventive war, or refused to sanction an entire neglect of the
principle.
Dr. Scott-Lidgett followed on somewhat similar lines. The whole trouble,
he protested, was due to an anti-Christian, illiberal, and inhuman
system. It seems that he was referring to Prussia, and it is regrettable
that he did not feel called to explain why that system prevails in the
year of the Lord 1915, or how it finds an instrument of its ambition in
a militarism that ought to have been denounced and abolished centuries
ago. Mr. Shakespeare, another distinguished Nonconformist, follows the
same facile course--casts all the responsibility on Germany--and equally
fails to explain how Germany came to find the machinery of destruction
at its hand in our age.
In fine, Dean Welldon, one of the most energetic spokesmen of the Church
of England, addressed this Free Church Council, and imparted an element
of originality. He used the inconclusive and dangerous argument of _tu
quoque_. If, he said, you claim that this war exhibits the failure of
Christianity, you must admit that it shows equally the failure of
science and civilisation. Nay, he says, growing bolder, if your
contention is true, Christianity has done no more than supply the
instrument of its own destruction, but science and civilisation have
brought us back to savagery.
It is, of course, difficult to follow a man's rounded thought in the
crabbed phrases of an abbreviating reporter, but it is plain that Dean
Welldon has here been guilty of a confusion which only betrays his
apologetic poverty in face of this great crisis. Science--and it is
especially science that the clergy conceive as the rival they have to
discredit--has no concern whatever with the war. Science, either as an
organised body of teachers or as a branch of culture, has never
discussed war, and never had the faintest duty or opportunity to do so.
Economic science may discuss particular aspects of war, but the
economist deals with things as they are, not as they ought to be. Moral
science even is not a preaching agency, desirous of dividing with the
clergy the ethical guidance of the people. When men pit science against
religion, they usually refer to its superior power of explaining
reality. And if it be objected that therefore no morally educative
agency would remain if religion were discarded, the answer is simple. A
system of moral idealism founded on science--it is absurd to call it
science--does exist, and might at any time be enlarged to the
proportions of a national or international educative agency. As yet it
is left to individual cultivation or crystallised in a few tiny
associations, such as Ethical and Secularist and, partly, Socialist
Societies; and I venture to say, from a large experience of these
bodies, that, apart from the professed peace societies, they have been
more assiduous than any religious associations in England, in proportion
to their work, in demanding the substitution of arbitration for war, and
that the overwhelming majority, almost the entirety, of their members
are pacifists. To speak of this small organised force, with its slender
influence, as equally discredited with the far mightier and
thousand-year-older influence of the Churches would be strangely
incongruous; and it is hardly less incongruous to drag science into the
comparison.
A somewhat similar distinction must be observed in regard to
civilisation. The antithesis of religion and civilisation is confused
and confusing. Christian ministers have claimed that _they_ are the
moral element of civilisation, and they have jealously combated every
effort to take from them or divide with them that function. They resist
every attempt to exclude their almost useless Bible-lessons from our
schools, and to substitute for them a direct and more practical moral
education of children. They have for fifteen hundred years claimed and
possessed the monopoly of ethical culture in European civilisation, and
we are a little puzzled when they turn round and say, with an air of
argument, that if Christianity has failed civilisation also has failed.
There is only one civilisation in Europe that has attempted to
substitute a humanitarian for a religious training of conduct; one
nation that is plainly and overwhelmingly non-Christian. That nation is
France. And France has one of the best moral records in modern Europe,
and has behaved nobly throughout this lamentable business. In fine, if
we take Dean Welldon's words in the most generous sense, if we assume
that he refers to the whole body of culture and sentiment which, in our
time, aspires to mould and direct the race apart from Christian
doctrine, the answer has already been given. Christianity is, as a power
in Europe, fourteen centuries old; this humanitarianism is hardly a
century old. But there has surely been more progress made during this
last century toward the destruction of the military system, and more
progress in the elimination of brutality from war, than in the whole
preceding thirteen centuries. Does Dean Welldon doubt that? Or does he
regard it as a mere coincidence?
Thus, whether we turn to Churchman or Nonconformist, to cleric or
layman, we find no satisfactory apology. I have before me a short
article by Mr. Max Pemberton on the question, "Will Christianity survive
the war?" He uses the most consecrated phrases of the Church, and leaves
no doubt whatever that he writes in defence of Christianity. But Mr.
Pemberton practically confines himself to a very emphatic personal
assurance that Christianity _will_ survive the war, and does not
honestly face a single one of the questions of "the Pagan" against whom
he is writing. He does make one serious point of a peculiar character.
There are, he says, "23,000 priests fighting for France in the
trenches." Mr. Pemberton seems to find it easy to accept the interested
statements of those Roman Catholic journalists who make sectarian use of
some of the London dailies. There are only about 30,000 priests in
France, and, since none of them are younger than twenty-three, to
suppose that seventy-five per cent. of them are of military age is to
take a remarkable view of the population of France. In any case, there
is no special ground for rhapsody. They are not volunteers; in France
every man must do his civic duty. We may appreciate their devotion to
their religion on the battle-field, but Mr. Pemberton must be
imperfectly acquainted with the French character if he supposes that the
thirty-four million unbelievers of France are going to return to the
Church because the younger _curés_ did not try to evade the military
service which the State imposed on them.
Another document I may quote is a manifesto issued by the "Hampstead
Evangelical Free Church Council," a joint declaration of the principal
Nonconformist ministers of that highly cultivated suburb. It does not
purport to vindicate the Churches, yet some of its observations in
connection with the war open out a new page of apologetics. These
clergymen invite all the citizens of their district, on the ground of
the war, to attend church, even if they have not been in the habit of
doing so. On what more precise ground? The able lawyer who received this
invitation, and forwarded it to me, thought it, not the most ingenious,
but the most curious, piece of pleading he had ever known. The citizens
of Hampstead were invited to go to church "to offer up to God a
sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for his goodness to us as a
nation"! At the very time the eminent preachers were writing this, the
darkened city still cowered under the threat of a horrible outrage; the
shattered homes and fresh graves of Scarborough and Whitby reminded us
faintly of the horrors beyond the sea; the maimed soldiers all over the
country, the sad figures of the bereaved, the anxious hearts of a
million of our people, were but a beginning of the evil that had fallen
on us. We had in fourteen years, since the last war, been obliged to
spend a thousand millions sterling in preparation for a war we did not
desire, and we were entering upon an expenditure of something more than
a thousand millions in a year. All this we had incurred through no fault
of ours. And these clergymen thought it a good opportunity to invite us
to go to church to thank God for "his goodness to us as a nation."
Another manifesto is signed by a body of archbishops and bishops of the
Anglican Church. It enjoined all the faithful to supplicate the Almighty
on January 3rd to stop the war. This was to be done "all round the
Empire." I will not indulge in any cheap sarcasm as to the result,
though one would probably be right in saying that, if the end be
deferred to the year 1917, they will still believe that their prayers
had effect. What it is more material to notice is that the prelates
think that "these are days of great spiritual opportunity." It seems
that "the shattering of so much that seemed established reveals the
vanity of human affairs," and that "anxiety, separation, and loss have
made many hearts sensible of the approach of Christ to the soul." It is,
perhaps, unkind to examine this emotional language from an intellectual
point of view, but one feels that there is a subtle element of apology
in it. These spiritual advantages may outweigh the secular pain; may
even justify God's share in the great catastrophe. I have examined, and
will discuss more fully in the next chapter, the theistic side of this
plea. Intellectually, it borders on monstrosity: it is the survival of
an ancient and barbaric conception. The notion that "the approach of
Christ to the soul" is felt especially in time of affliction is merely a
statement of a certain type of emotional experience, while the
revelation of "the vanity of human affairs" is sheer perversity. Human
affairs have for ages been so badly managed, in this respect, that we
cannot in a decade or a century rid ourselves of such a legacy. The real
moral is to discover who were responsible for that legacy of disorder
and violence, and to put our affairs on a new and sounder basis.
A considerable number of clerical writers proceed on the suggestion
discreetly advanced by these Anglican prelates. Let us wait, they ask,
until the clouds of war have rolled away, and then estimate the
spiritual gain to men from the trial through which they have passed, and
the closer association of the Churches which it may bring about. Now I
have no doubt that many who really believe the doctrines of
Christianity, yet have for years neglected the duties which their belief
imposes on them, will be induced by this awful experience to return to
allegiance. The number is limited, and an equal or greater number may
be, and probably will be, induced to surrender religion entirely, and
with good reason, by the reflections with which this war inspires them.
But to insinuate that this spiritual advantage, if it be an advantage,
of the few is justly purchased by the appalling suffering and disorder
brought about by the war is one of those religious affirmations which
seem to the outsider positively repulsive.
I do not speak merely of the deaths, the pain, the privation, the
outrages, the flood of tears and blood over half of Europe. This,
indeed, is of itself enough to make the theory repellent to any who do
not share the ascetic views taught in the Churches. The notion that an
evil is justified if good issue from it is akin to the notion that the
end justifies the means. But I would draw attention to an aspect of the
war which is almost ignored by these eloquent preachers. They eagerly
record every flash of heroism, every spark of charity and mercy, that
the war evokes. They refer sympathetically to the dead and the bereaved,
the outraged girls and women--whom, in the narrowest Puritanism, they
forbid to rid themselves of the awful burden laid on them by drunken
brutes--the shattered homes and monuments. But there is a side of war
which they must know, and it demands plain speaking. It relaxes the
control of moral restraints even where it was before operative. The
illegitimate-birth rate of England and France will faintly tell the
story before the year is out. Inquiry in any town where our soldiers are
lodged, or in the rear of the French and English (or any other)
trenches, will tell it more fully. I do not speak of crime and violence,
but of willing sexual intercourse where it was never known before. These
things, and the increased drunkenness and the stirring of old passions,
are regarded by the clergy as amongst the most evil things of life. Do
they seriously suggest that they have been brought in to secure, or are
justified by, the spiritual advantage of the refined and emotional few
whose religion is only deepened by affliction?
In short, I find not a single phrase of valid explanation or apology in
these and other prominent clerical pronouncements I have read. They are
superficial, contradictory, and vapid. Nothing is more common than for
religious writers to protest that the conception of reality which is
opposed to theirs is shallow. What depth, what sincere grip of reality,
does one find in any of these pulpit utterances? Yet I have taken the
pronouncements of official bodies or of distinguished preachers who may
be trusted to put the Christian feeling in its most persuasive form. One
thinks that God sent the war; another attributes it to German rebels
against God. One regards it as a spiritual agency devised for our good;
another says that it is an unmitigated calamity sent for our punishment.
One sees in it the failure of Christianity; others find in it precisely
a confirmation of Christian teaching. Some think it will draw men to
God; others that it will drive men from God. Unity, perhaps, we cannot
expect; but the empty rhetoric and utter sophistry of most of these
utterances reveal the complete lack of defence. On the main indictment
of the Christian Church, its failure to have condemned and removed
militarism long ago, all are silent; or the one preacher who notices it
can only dejectedly confess that it is true.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAR AND THEISM
In the leading Catholic periodical of this country there has been some
nervous discussion of the attitude of the Pope. A new man, a strong and
enlightened man, happens to have mounted the chair of Peter in the midst
of the war. For more than a century his predecessors have bemoaned the
increasing wickedness of the world: Pius VII, tossed like a helpless
cork on the waves of the Revolution; Leo XII and Pius VIII, the
associates of the Holy Alliance; Gregory XVI, eating sweetmeats or
mumbling his breviary while young Italy sweated blood; Pius IX, grasping
eagerly his tatters of sovereignty; Leo XIII, the unsuccessful
diplomatist; Pius X, the medieval monk. They saw their Church shrink
decade by decade, and they witnessed the prosperity of all that they
denounced. Benedict XV came to save the Church, and a great moral
opportunity awaited him. But, while claiming to be the moral arbitrator
of the world, he avoids his plain duty, and is content to repeat the
worn phrases about the iniquity of the modern spirit. His apologists say
that the war is politics, and that Popes must not interfere in politics.
I have earlier explained in what sense this war presents a political
aspect to Benedict XV, and given the reason for his reluctance. It is
typical of the whole failure of Christianity. A little over nineteen
centuries ago, it is said in the churches, a star shone over the cradle
of the Saviour, and choirs of angels announced his coming as a promise
of "peace on earth and good-will among men." I am not in this little
work examining the whole question of the influence of Christianity. But
it is well to recall that, according to its own records, its first and
greatest promise to the world was peace; and to that old Roman Empire,
and to Europe at any stage in its later history, no greater blessing
could have been brought. Has Christianity succeeded?
But the religious interest of the war is by no means exhausted when we
have concluded that it marks, in one of the most important departments
of human action, the complete failure of historical Christianity. My
purpose is to discuss this relation to the Churches, and it would not be
completed unless I considered the war in relation to their fundamental
doctrine, the moral government of the universe by a Supreme Being. In a
few months, we hope, the war will be over: the Allies will have
triumphed. We know, from experience and from history, what will follow
in the Churches. From end to end of Britain, from Dover to Penzance and
from Southampton to Aberdeen, there will rise a jubilant cry that God
has blessed our arms and awarded us the victory. Now that we are in the
midst of the horrors and burdens of the war God is little mentioned. One
would imagine that the great majority of the clergy conceived him as
standing aside, for some inscrutable reason, and letting wicked men
deploy their perverse forces. When the triumph comes, gilding the past
sacrifices or driving them from memory, God will be on every lip. The
whole nation will be implored to come and kneel before the altars.
Royalty and nobility and military, judges and stockbrokers and working
men--above all, a surging, thrilling, ecstatic mass of women--will
gather round the clergy, and will avow that they see the finger of God
in this glorious consummation. The relation of the war to God will then
become the supreme consideration for the Christian mind. It may be more
instructive to consider it now, before the last flood of emotion pours
over our judgments.
I have already discussed some of the clerical allusions to the share of
God in the war. They are so frankly repellent that one cannot be
surprised that the majority of the clergy prefer to be silent on that
point. They prefer to await the victory and build on its more genial and
indulgent emotions. The war is either a blessing or a curse. One would
think that there was not much room for choice, but we saw that some are
bold enough to hint that the spiritual good may outweigh the bodily
pain. They remind us of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi writing smugly of
the moral grandeur of war, the need to brace the slackness of human
nature periodically by war, the chivalry and devotion it calls out, and
so on.
Still worse is the theory of those who regard war frankly as a curse,
yet put it to the direct authorship of the Almighty. This theory is
natural enough in the minds of men and women who believe in hell. In
earlier ages men could not distinguish between the law of retaliation
and the need to deter criminals by using violence against them when they
transgressed. In many primitive systems of justice the law of
retaliation is expressly consecrated. It is even introduced,
inconsistently and as a survival of barbaric times, in the Babylonian
and the Judaic codes, side by side with saner views. It is, of course,
merely a systematisation of brute passion. In the beginning, if a man
knocked your tooth out, you knocked one of his teeth out. With the
growth of law and justice, the barbarous nature of the impulse was
recognised, and the community, by its representatives, inflicted a
"punishment" on the offender instead of allowing the offended to
retaliate. With the modern improvement of moral sentiments we have
realised that this is an imperfect advance on the barbaric idea. The
community has no more right to "punish" than the offended individual
had. We now impose hardship on an offender only for the purpose of
intimidating him from repeating the offence, or of deterring others from
offending. The idea is still somewhat crude, and a third stage will in
time be reached; but it is satisfactory that we now--not since the
advent of Christianity, but since the rise of modern humanism--all admit
that the only permissible procedure is deterrence, and not punishment as
such.
It may seem ungracious to be ever repeating that these improvements did
not take place during the period of Christian influence, but in the
recent period of its decay. There is, however, in this case a most
important and urgent reason for emphasising the fact. I say that we
_all_ admit the more humane conception of punishment, but this must be
qualified. In human affairs we do: Carlyle was, perhaps, the last
moralist to cling to the old conception. But in the religious world the
old idea has been flagrantly retained. The doctrine of eternal
punishment is clearly based on the barbaric old idea that a prince whose
dignity has been insulted may justly inflict the most barbarous
punishment on the offender. Theologians have, since the days of Thomas
Aquinas, wasted whole reams of parchment in defending the dogma of hell,
because they knew nothing whatever of comparative jurisprudence and the
evolution of moral ideas. To us the development of the doctrine is
clear. In the Christian doctrine of hell we have a flagrant survival of
the early barbaric theory of punishment. Modern divines--while
continuing to describe the non-religious view of life as "superficial"
and the Christian as "profound"--have actually yielded to the modern
sentiment, and in a very large measure rejected one of the fundamental
dogmas of the Christian tradition. In order to conceal the procedure as
far as possible, some of them are now contending brazenly that Christ
never taught the doctrine of eternal punishment, and are deluding their
uncultivated congregations with sophistical manipulations of Greek
words.
This does not mean that Christians have lower moral sentiments than
non-Christians, but that the rigidity of their traditions, which they
regard as sacred and unalterable, imposes restrictions on them. Hence
the fact that, while Protestants have so very largely rejected the
doctrine of hell, Roman Catholics, with their more rigid conservatism
and claim of infallibility, still cling to it, and offer the amazing
spectacle of a body claiming to possess the highest ideals in the world,
yet actually cherishing an entirely barbaric theory. There is probably
not a Catholic lawyer in the world who does not reject the old idea of
punishment as barbaric, yet he placidly believes that God retains it.
That is why we find a Catholic archbishop like Carr putting forth so
revolting an idea of the war, while Protestant preachers as a rule
shrink from mentioning God in connection with it. These things make it
impossible for one to understand how non-Christians can say, as they do
sometimes, that if they _were_ to accept a creed, it would be the Roman
creed.
Any theory of the war which proceeds on the lines of the hell-theory is
simply barbaric, and is beneath serious discussion. We know to-day that
both ethics and religion are in a state of constant evolution. We look
back over a stream of several thousand years of historically traceable
development; we follow that stream faintly through earlier tens of
thousands of years in the ideas of primitive peoples; and we see the
evolution going on plainly in the creeds and ethical codes of our own
time. But the practice of registering certain stages of this evolution
in sacred books or codes, which are then imposed on man for centuries or
millennia as something unalterable, has been and is a very serious
hindrance to development, both in ethics and religion. It is all the
worse because these codes and sacred books always contain certain
elements which belong to even earlier and less enlightened stages, and
whole regiments of philosophers or theologians are employed for ages in
putting glosses on ancient and barbaric ideas at which the world
eventually laughs. However, we need not linger here over these ancient
ways of regarding life. The man who keeps his God at a moral level which
we disdain ourselves rarely listens to argument. He protects his "faith"
by believing that it is a mortal sin (involving sentence of hell) to
read any book that would examine it critically. It is a most ingenious
arrangement by which the doctrine of a vindictive God protects itself
against moral progress.
Now any suggestion that God sent this war upon Europe--whether as a
judgment on the clergy, or a judgment on unbelievers, or a judgment on
the arrogance of the Germans, etc.--is part of this old barbarism, and
may be disregarded. It conceives that God is vindictive, and at the same
time assures us that Christianity sternly condemns vindictiveness. It
allows God to deal mighty blows at those who affront him, and tells men
to bear affront with patience and turn the other cheek to the smiter. It
is simply part of that mixture and confusion of old and new ideas which
a codified religion always exhibits. We pass it by, and turn to more
serious considerations. I pass by also eccentric ideas of Deity like
those of Sir Oliver Lodge or Mr. G. B. Shaw--two oracles who have been
singularly silent on the religious aspect of the war. Let us examine the
main religious problem as broadly and as honestly as we can.
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 is
amusing 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 is _only_ the 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
tuberculosis was 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 outsider it 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 what _proportion_ of 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 sense of 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 may ignore 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 to _us_, 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
I prefer 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 the _Titanic_
and 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 ask _where_ the 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 from _without_ the universe
(where no theologian had ever put him) and make him _immanent_ in 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 life of man. The
story of the world, _our_ world, 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 element of
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 his _Faust_, 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 really entitled
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 than the
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 his _Varieties 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. They realise 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,
of divine 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.
CHAPTER V
THE HUMAN ALTERNATIVE
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 not last 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 the clergy 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 religious times, 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, is due 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 (especially
_The 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 moral degeneration 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 consider here 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 order this 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 instinct of 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 his _Victorian 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 feels that 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 writhe under 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 the machinery
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
were brothers. 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 the _majority_
in 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 submit _all_ quarrels to arbitration, and reduce their armies
to the proportions of an international police, at the service of the
international tribunal and for 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, that obtuseness 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 be foolish 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 and libraries 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.
[Footnote 1: _The Service of Man_ (_6d._ edition), p. 16.]
[Footnote 2: As I write, the Press describes Canon Green of Burnley as
saying that "the war is a divine judgment on the world--England for the
last ten years has been God-forgetting, drunken, immoral."]
[Footnote 3: Let me again guard myself against misrepresentation. Were I
of military age, I should to-day be in the trenches. The men who, as
long as the military system is retained, expose their lives in our
defence have my entire respect and gratitude. It is the system I
impugn.]
Printed by Watts & Co., Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
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